EDIT MY ESSAY by rewriting the body paragraph to relate to the Night of TV show
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Voss-Hoynes
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Kurt Voss-Hoynes
English 106
Dr. Kurt Voss-Hoynes
4 November 2016
The Culture Created by The Night Of
Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry is a product of the market that does not permit
or facilitate any form of escape from that very same market. Indeed, it fosters an environment
that eliminates all possibility of avoiding the machine that it creates. Even when one sits down to
watch a film, he or she is doing nothing more than becoming inculcated in ways of the culture
industry and its machine. As such, the individual stops being imaginative, stops thinking, and
stops developing mentally. The culture industry, then, creates automatons that accept their own
defeat. Ultimately, this creates market-driven cultural cycles that prevent the individual from
ever organizing and from ever resisting oppression.
The Night Of can and, in some instances for some people, does fall into this trap. If one is
to accept the notion that the system itself is unfair, then that individual is forced to witness that
which he or she know happens. If, however, one is unaware of how the system is unfair, then he
or she is forced to confront the fact that these things happen and are forced to try to reconcile his
or her worldview with that of the show. In each instance, the way that the culture industry
presents itself is different. In the first example, we become acutely aware of the issue and may,
theoretically, begin to think about ways to foster resistance. In the second, we have to make a
decision between calling the show fiction and disregarding its critique of our culture or accepting
that our worldview is skewed and try to begin to change. Both possibilities and the outcomes that
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they produce articulate the power of the culture industry by exposing how it facilitates the
creation of cultural products that directly impact the way that society perceives reality.
Though the show does illustrate how the culture industry is all encompassing, there are
moments where it does push back on Horkheimer and Adorno’s ideas. For example, the
outcomes that come out of thinking about how the generic expectations that one has about a
crime drama/law procedural foster a critique of the way that viewers respond to such shows. In
so doing, the show tests the limits of the idea of the culture industry. Both supporting previously
held personal convictions and forcing an individual to both recognize and change a skewed
worldview, forces a reevaluation of genre and questions whether Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea
extends to things that explicitly critique modern culture. If a product of the culture industry uses
realism address an issue in modern culture, then reality is never suspended. As a result, viewers
always-already consider the artifact in conversation with “real life,” meaning that this artifact
does not need to work to extend its reality into reality outside of the “theatre.”
The Night Of and the importance of narrative that it creates exposes the problematic
reliance of stereotypes in our cultural moment. More specifically, by being set in a post-
September 11 New York City and by focusing on a first-generation Pakistani-American, the
show demonstrates how preconceived attitudes about cultures and people, directly alter how
individuals interact in their daily lives. For example, because Naz is a minority, Detective Dennis
Box automatically assumes that Naz is guilty, fails to pursue other leads, and ultimately destroys
a young man’s life. The Night Of, then, forces a reevaluation of worldviews, preconceived
notions, and how one engages with other individuals.