Turning the air blue: Avatar and Iris both offend, but only one could be hauled up in court for it.
During his miserable 1940s exile in Los Angeles, the irredeemably cranky German philosopher Theodor Adorno revolted against what he called “the culture industry.” His regular visits to the cinema had convinced him that art was now manufactured in much the same way as toothpaste or airplanes. Films, as well as music and literature, had degenerated, he claimed, into a series of “ready-made clichés” designed to lull society into a state of brain-dead submission, stifling all potential for aesthetic and political renewal. Corporate power thus secured itself by eliminating dissent from the cultural sphere.
However, there isn’t much space in this analysis for, say, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick or Easy Rider. Nor does it seem to account for the anomaly of the stridently anti-corporate blockbuster. For example, in 1981, at the height of Reaganism, Warren Beatty scored an improbable hit with Reds, his lavish and defiantly affectionate portrayal of the October Revolution. United Artists and Paramount had less luck with Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 – an occasionally brilliant, spectacularly self-indulgent, and overtly Marxist take on 20th-century Italian history which went millions over budget and finally clocked in at almost six hours in length. More recently, Michael Moore’s various manipulative jeremiads have raked in hundreds of millions for Comrade Weinstein and co.
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