Page 205 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEPHEN HINERMAN

Frankfurt School theorists early last century to the rants and raves of some neo-
conservative guardians of culture at the onset of the new millennium, the rise
of the cult of celebrity has been blamed for destroying core values and for
eradicating individual and local differences.
Is this an accurate representation of the role of stardom in modern and
postmodern culture? Certainly Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno thought so. Writing during the Second World War,
they attempted on one level to explain the rise of Adolf Hitler, whom they
considered to be a celebrity-like figure foisted upon a vulnerable public by
the power of propaganda and the then new electronic media. They later
became concerned about the power of entertainment and stardom in general.
In a landmark study, ‘The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception’,
Horkheimer and Adorno argue that modern entertainment and media cor-
porations use stardom and celebrity to pacify the masses. Essentially, they
believe that the culture industries use stars as vehicles mainly to create false
hopes of upward social mobility and meaningful social change among audience
members:

Those [stars] discovered by the talent scouts and then publicized on a
vast scale by the studio are ideal types of the new dependent average.
Of course, the starlet is meant to symbolize the typist in such a way that
the splendid evening dress seems meant for the actress as distinct from
the real girl. The girls in the audience not only feel that they could be
on the screen, but realize that great gulf separating them from it . . .
Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naively to iden-
tify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can escape from himself
anymore.
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 145)

For Horkheimer and Adorno, film and other media initially use stars to entice
identification among audience members. But, they argue, audience members
simultaneously realize that the chances of living the life they see on screen are
staggeringly slim. This makes stardom ‘part of a system of false promise in the
system of capital, which offers the reward of stardom to a random few in order
to perpetuate the myth of potential universal success. The masses are by their
very nature psychologically immature and thus are drawn to these [stars] . . . in
the same way children identify with and implicitly trust their parents’ (Marshall
1997: 9). The result is that the audience indirectly learns ‘obedience to the
social hierarchy’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 131). People learn not to
challenge power but to accept it, and to remain passive in the face of corporate
authority.
To be fair, Horkheimer and Adorno did not lump all popular culture stars
into the same class. They took great pains to distance more ‘artistic’ global
celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo from others of the 1940s. Yet,

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