The cultural industry serves as a filter through which the entire world is put.

The producer is
now guided by the traditional movie-going experience, in which the viewer perceives the
outside world as an extension of the film he has just left. The illusion that the outer world is a
simple continuation of what is shown on the screen is now easier to sustain the more
intensively and flawlessly his techniques replicate empirical items.

Real life is growing more and more like a movie. Every sound film and every broadcast
program can be used to infer a societal effect that isn't unique to anyone but is experienced by
everyone. Men have been shaped into a type that is consistently replicated in every product by
the culture business as a whole. From the producer to the women's clubs, every participant in
this process takes great care to ensure that the straightforward replication of this mental state
is neither enhanced or prolonged in any manner.

To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already
has the schematization, categorization, and classification processes in place that place culture
under the purview of administration. And it is the industrialized subsumption, which
followed, that perfectly fits with this notion of culture.

The cultural sector continuously defrauds its customers of the things it continuously offers.
The promissory note that it creates through its storylines and staging is constantly drawn out;
the promise, which is really all there is to the spectacle, is illusory; all it reinforces is that the
diner must be content with the menu because the true point will never be made. The
representation of fulfillment as a broken promise in artistic sublimation is its key element. The
culture industry represses rather than sublimates.

The individual is an illusion in the cultural industry for more reasons than just the
standardization of the production process. He is only accepted as long as there is no dispute
about his total identification with the generality. Pseudo individuality is everywhere, from the
formulaic jazz solo to the brilliant movie diva who curls her hair over her eye to show off her
originality.

Societal monopoly dictates the peculiarities of the ego, which are misrepresented as being
natural. It is nothing more than a moustache, a French accent, the deep voice of the world's
women, or the Lubitsch touch—fingerprints on identity cards that are otherwise identical and
into which the force of the generality infuses the lives and faces of every single person.
Pseudo individuality is necessary to understand tragedy and remove its poison because only
after individuals have stopped being who they once were and have become merely the points
at which the general tendencies converge can they be accepted back, full and entire, into the
generality. By revealing the fake nature of the "individual" in the bourgeois epoch in this way,
popular culture is just being unfair in its boasting about this gloomy harmony of the general
and the particular. Only because individualism has always reproduced society's fragility can
the culture industry deal with it so well. The popularity of the hero models stems in part from
a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has at last been replaced by the
effort to imitate, which is admittedly more breathless. On the faces of private individuals and
movie heroes assembled according to the patterns on magazine covers vanishes a pretense in
which no one now believes. Physiognomies created artificially demonstrate that modern
society has already lost all understanding of what human life is.