How Adorno and Horkheimer use *Blondie* to illustrate the class-reinforcing and anti-revolutionary function of the culture industry

Written as an assignment for Intro to Media Studies with Prof. Oscar Moralde at Pomona College

On page 60, Adorno and Horkheimer name "the minor employee Dagwood" as an example of popular media reinforcing class division and stifling revolutionary behavior. In the popular 1930s comic strip *Blondie*, Dagwood, the heir to his family's industrial fortune, is the love interest of the titular Blondie, a flapper whom Dagwood's family views as unworthy of Dagwood. Ultimately, Dagwood is disowned by his family when he marries Blondie and they form a middle-class suburban household. Through Dagwood and Blondie, the comic highlights the irreperable separation of the industrial upper class and everyday people. Rather than making this separation vulnerable to critique, Blondie and Dagwood's marriage was a celebratory cultural event when it happened in the comic, causing consumers to embrace class division and stifle opposition beneath surface-level entertainment. The comic functions to "subdue revolutionary instincts", Adorno and Horkheimer write, providing consumers with "a general satiety as a motive for abandoning themselves to the collective power of which they are sated." (62) On my first read of "The Culture Industry", I was a bit taken aback by Adorno and Horkheimer's strong claims centering capitalist class oppression as the key driver and purpose of culture. Looking into the *Blondie* reference made their abstract ideas much more concrete and understandable. Though I had to look up Blondie, it was a very popular comic through the 1950s (also adopted into film and radio series), so Adorno and Horkheimer's refernece likely lent contemporary readers the same clarity I was able to find.