ABSTRACT
Representations of social institutions and practices constitute the culture of a society. As such, they both mirror and affect other aspects of the society and they can serve to disguise some of its realities. In this realization, classical Marxists were far more sophisticated than today's cultural theorists in their examination of social life. In an attempt to understand the representations produced by films, the authors studied both the changing structure of the film industry and the personalities and world views of a sample of key moviemakers. Capitalism and democracy emerged together in Europe. David Gutmann argues that the essential differences between the traditional and the modern psyche stem from the development of a powerful superego. Television probably played a more important role in these shifts than any other single factor, both because of the nature of television as a medium of communication and because of the values of those elites who controlled the production of news and entertainment.
