Narrative conflict resolution trains audiences to accept false reconciliation
Evidence
The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives. In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 148
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: The mechanism — characters enter trouble only to be rescued into ‘empty harmony’ — is a template diagnosis that could invert into a story where the rescue itself is the horror.
- XREF: This reading of formulaic rescue parallels the ‘we want redemption not interruption’ shape of modern storytelling in the fiction being read. — connects to: Narrative repair of wounds mirrors neural repair and sustains it. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 3893; Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 200; Emotion-based reconciliation frameworks ignore power asymmetries and can entrench injustice. — Johanna Ray Vollhardt and Michelle Sinayobye Twali, Emotion-Based Reconciliation Requires…, 70 (+1 more)