ABSTRACT
Sequels are the movies Americans love to hate. Even as they gripe about yet another Avengers or Star Wars installment, audiences flock to such films in record-breaking numbers. While it’s easy to blame this on a profit-driven media industry, the demand side of sameness can’t be ignored. Anxious societies always have found comfort in familiarity, with Aristotle writing about the human hunger for stories with predictable endings. The art world began noting this in the 1980s, with postmodernism zeroing in on the end of fresh ideas—or even originality itself. Reception theory tempered this pessimism in suggesting that not all viewers interpreted art and media in the same way. But this didn’t stop critics from condemning mass culture for pushing bad values on consumers, hence setting off debates about the negative “effects” of certain creative works. Beginning with early critiques of the culture industry by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer, this chapter traces the issue through writings by Louis Althusser, Ben Bagdikian, Jacques Derrida, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Laura Mulvey, Elaine Showalter, and Carole Vance.
