What is the status of the individual human within the industrial-production culture analyzed in the reading and film you chose, and what do the characters desire instead of that status?

Learning Goal: I’m working on a business report and need a sample draft to help me learn.

Requirements:

200 words minimum. Must involve at least one of the readings and one of the films listed below]

You have some fairly dense, sometimes long readings to choose from for this post:

1. Sidney Mintz, from Sweetness and Power

2. Karl Marx, from Capital

3. Horkheimer & Adorno, “The Culture Industry”

4. Jerry Muller, from the Tyranny of Metrics

The idea is that you have indeed been reading these each week as part of your class participation- whether you attend class to discuss them with me or not- and so you can be help responsible for having some basic sense of their contents without having left it all until the last minute to prepare to write reflectively about at least one of them. And be careful, as these excerpts are not going to be summarizable from online sources about the entire book from which they come, for example. You need to read at least one and then connect it coherently to at least one of the following films:

1. Soylent Green

2. They Live (excerpts viewed in class are fine, or you may view the entire film independently)

3. Joy

4. Norma Rae (independent viewing)

Now, of all of these materials, Joy is perhaps the least obviously connected because of its extremely positive impression of work and advertising/cultural production: the main character’s happy ending relates to business success and a marketing strategy + business politics. The others are very anti-management/anti-corporate manufacture, too. And they all share that ‘villain’ of bad corporate actors/agents. Joy is the only comedy to be found in these two weeks, fyi. You will see the obvious thematic connections between all of these readings and the films, if you have done the reading and the viewing.

For everyone, even if you have not completed all readings and viewings or heard a bit of my lecture/overview in class, here is a simple prompt to respond to after you have read one of these readings and viewed one of these films:

What is the status of the individual human within the industrial-production culture analyzed in the reading and film you chose, and what do the characters desire instead of that status? A big hint here is to at least read about commodity fetishism from the Marx to understand reification/objectification (“thingification,” maybe). If you wish to connect to more than one reading and/or film, that’s fine! Just try to be specific in some way to show the connection and so we can understand why those works were selected for your response.

Reading material and film material will be attached.