This article, based on content analysis, analyzes the discussions about the concept of cultural industry coined and analyzed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and its unfolding in the book Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, especially cinema. The cultural industry or mass culture comprises the commercial character and industrial mode of production of cultural productions in capitalism, treated even as commodities and their consequences to the public, acting mainly as an instrument of ideological manipulation in the adornian view. However, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno advances the discussion and admits that despite the presence of ideology, the cultural industry could also develop an alternative space to mass productions. Later Frederic Jameson, inspired by Adorno’s work, draws a similar line in which he realizes that the products of the cultural industry would not only be ideological, and in addition to Adorno, he asserted that they could also be utopian, as mass culture attracts the public with collective and individual promises of a better future.
Ideology; Emancipation; Movie theater; Mass culture; Frankfurt School