The image of the culture industry as a production line of mindless diversions, a pliant tool at the hands of deft upper-class manipulators to pacify audiences and fence them in the great rooster coop of class society, has always been a one-dimensional portrayal of contemporary mass culture. “To be entertained,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “is to be in agreement.” Elsewhere, Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin that “the laughter of the cinema audience,” in a way which allows for no distinctions between different kinds of laughter, movies, or audiences, “is full of the worst bourgeois sadism.” These characterizations discounted the elements of dis-agreement, disobedience, indignation, anger, and criticism which have always been an integral element of mass culture.

An arguably subtler and more reliable account was ventured at roughly the same time during the 1940s and 50s by another major far-left cultural critic, the Trinidad-born Marxist maverick intellectual C. L. R. James. In striking (and, unfortunately, largely neglected) theses, James took measure of the groundbreaking achievements of culture. In American Civilization, James did not dispute the blatant profit motivation underlying American mass culture — in that respect, he started from assumptions fairly close to those underlying the Frankfurt School’s caustic critiques. Yet for him, this commercialism was precisely the precondition for infusing a healthy measure of authenticity into mass art, turning it into a formidable, if by no means straightforward or unlimited, vehicle for expressing popular sentiments:

Gangsters get what they want, trying it for a while, then are killed. In the end “crime does not pay” but for an hour and a half highly skilled actors and a huge organization of production and distribution, have given to many millions a sense of active living, and in the bloodshed, the violence, the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play, they have released the bitterness, hate, fear, and sadism which simmer just below the surface.