Even critically aware individual-focused films still serve ideology

Evidence

In so far as a film only recounts the fate of an individual, even if maintaining the most extreme critical awareness, it already succumbs to ideology. The case which is presented as one which is still worth recounting becomes for all its desperate nature an excuse for the world which has produced something so worthy of being related; while the real desperation expresses itself mutely in the fact there is nothing more to be recounted and that all we can do is recognize it for what it is. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 111

Categorization

• SEED: A ready-made test for the reader’s stated purpose: run this criterion on prestige biopics and ‘based on a true story’ dramas made after Adorno’s death.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s test of running Adorno on culture made after his death — a falsifiable check. — connects to: War and film are a single continuous technological event — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 194; Anti-capitalist films can end up affirming capital’s own fantasies — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 583