Today’s popular culture would flatten any genuinely subversive source material

Evidence

Yet it would be absurd to assume that today’s popular culture would allow the equivalent of a Tom Jones. This may illustrate the contention of the ‘rigidity’ of today’s popular culture. A crucial experiment would be to make an attempt to base a movie on a novel such as Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. It is almost certain that the script would be rewritten and edited so often that nothing remotely similar to the idea of the original would be left. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 325

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• SEED: Adorno’s ‘crucial experiment’ design — adapting a transgressive novel and watching the script get flattened — is a directly runnable test for the reader’s stated goal of testing Adorno on post-1969 culture (e.g., watch what happens to a tonally unstable source text in a modern adaptation).