First of all I found a link to a copy of "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" written by Adorno and Horkheimer, which I think is really a must read. It's located here.
Second, here's the excerpt from Adorno in Minima Moralia which uses the example of film cliche. Then after that I'll stop banging Adornianonandonandonandon.
"In general, subjective class membership roday shows a mobility that allows the rigidity of the economic order itself to be forgotten: rigid things can always be moved about. Even the individual's powerlessness to calculate his economic fate in advance makes its own contribution to this comforting mobility. Downfall is decided not by incompetence but by an opaque hierarchical structure in which no-one, scarcely even those at the very top, can feel secure: an egalitarian threat. When, in the most successful film of the year, the heroic squadron leader returns to be harrassed by petty-bourgeois caricatures as a drug-store jerk, he not only gives the spectators an occasion for unconscious gloating but in addition strengthens them in their consciousness that all men are really brothers. Extreme injustice becomes a deceptive facsimile of justice, disqualification of equality. Sociologists, however, ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat?" From fragment 124. Puzzle-picture in Minima Moralia.
Ed
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