The culture industry promotes mass deception by producing media that target the viewer’s preferences. By using a framework that is tailored to their desires or fantasized hopes, production companies filter content through a specific lens to optimize the positive feedback they receive. In this way, the culture and movie industries are able to control the information being produced, as well as how accessible it is to the target audience. These concepts draw upon the work of Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, where they describe the industries as infecting “everything with sameness” through a specific lens (Adorno et Horkheimer, 41). The focus on sameness allows for film production to be monitored, providing viewers with messages they preemptively intend for the audience to interpret. In this way, producers manipulate a film’s meaning to entertain rather than spread truth, in order to maximize profits and popularity. The production of knowledge in the movie industry can perpetuate falsehoods about a reality that can impact how a person views their own life.
In the Disney Princess movies, the concept of sameness is implemented repeatedly. Due to the outstanding success of these movies, the producers utilize the same framework for many of the older films.
As demonstrated in the video clip above, the production of Disney movies focuses heavily on the same movements, dances, and types of music used in their films. In the princess movies specifically, the recycled framework focuses on producing content where the females begin the stories cleaning or doing stereotypical household chores, as they await their knight in shining armor. Once the damsels in distress meet their prince charming, the princesses are shown as dancing, singing, kissing, and finally live happily ever after. By targeting young girls who all want to grow up to be a princess, the Disney franchise creates a false reality that girls will always be saved by a prince or male figure. Since these movies have always been very popular, Disney has continued to reproduce the same storyline with different characters which are filtered through this framework intentionally created by producers to entertain younger audiences while also perpetuating a false narrative of reality. The repetition of simple movements and animations, which appeal to the imagination, creates a fantasized world which young girls expect to be involved in when they grow older. As a result, this framework targets the young and undeveloped minds of children to produce popular movies without considering the repercussions.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. “The culture industry: Enlightenment as Mass deception,” pp. 94–136 in Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002.
