Depicting individuals as monstrous obscures the system that makes them functionaries

Evidence

Even a radical film director who wished to portray crucially important social developments like the merger of two industrial concerns could only do so by showing us the dominant figures in the office, at the conference table or in their mansions. Even if they were thereby revealed as monstrous characters, their monstrousness would still be sanctioned as a quality of individual human beings in a way that would tend to obscure the monstrousness of the system whose servile functionaries they are. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 111

Categorization

• SEED: A precise test case for post-Adorno systemic-critique films: does portraiture of villainous executives obscure the system?
• XREF: connects to: Purposive appraising of people shrinks all others to usable or obstructive functions; A character’s deformed body can make an invisible economic relation physically legible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 138