Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer- The Culture Industry as Mass Deception
Using this as a theoretical text, I'm forced to look at The Invisibles two ways: first as a work of art which is part and parcel of the Industry described by Adorno/Horkheimer, and second as a work which directly interrogates ideas put forward by A/H. I'm going to focus mostly on the second one here; the first is over at the other blog.
Here is The Invisibles page 1.16.12. Click to enlarge.
Over on the other blog I talked about how Adorno/Horkheimer feel about cliches: here we see one common to Sci-fi/conspiracy stuff, which is alien abduction. They aren't real aliens, though; that's just the form they've chosen to come to him in, being that their objective was to create some kind of catharsis within Dane. So the cliche has already been engaged on one level: the "aliens," and the work, are relying on Dane understanding and being able to parse the "usual" phenomena involved in the trope. So the work acknowledges the existence of the cliche and manipulates it, thus interrogating A/H's theory.
On a higher tier of textual operation, the line "this is just like a film, except it's in 3-d" is evidence of more interrogation. Dane is behaving exactly as A/H believed he would: because he has been conditioned by the Culture Industry to continually accept these common formal signifiers of mass-produced art, he is unable to codify or structure events in his life without resorting to those same signifiers. What he is experiencing is obviously not a film, but he chooses to employ that language nonetheless.
Ironically, what WE are experiencing as viewers is not only NOT like a film at all, but also two-dimensional. Thus, the line can also function as an explicit invitation to the viewer to examine the issue at hand within the framework of the Culture Industry.
Here is The Invisibles page 2.1.3. Click to enlarge.
I pulled this page because it best exemplifies the lack of subtlety with which Morrison was initially able to address his publisher's desire for more action within the second volume of the Invisibles. Due to lackluster sales of the original volume, Morrison was encouraged to devote more pages to this sort of thing, which doesn't have all that much to do with the story in general. Despite Morrison's best efforts to the contrary the pull of the Culture Industry still has a large amount of sway over his work. The tonal shift between the first volume and the beginning of the second, before Morrison got better at balancing action and exposition, is something I'll be looking at in greater detail as we go on.
