Compare film theorists Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their understanding of the way film addresses the spectator.

In their study
The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), particularly in the chapter
"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", Adorno and Horkheimer, German
Jewish exiles in Hollywood, integrated their critique of mass culture within their pessimistic
thesis about the failure of the enlightenment to effectively make humankind free. Yes, they
conceded, the enlightenment had rendered people free from superstition and old traditions. Yet,
these had been substituted by the cult of scientific rationality, which coupled with a
capitalist economy, had become a strong form of domination. The mass-culture films produced in
Hollywood were therefore instrumental in replicating and passing off as natural and valid the
social relations typical of a capitalist society. By...