Uneasy Pleasing: Film as Mass Art Gertrud Koch In the fragments collected at the end of Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is a text on “stupidity.” A thesis put forward by the psychoanalyst Karl Landauer in the 1930s is taken up in the text. According to this thesis, the dullness and numbness of stupidity emerge as the scar tissue that remains when learning impulses and curiosity have been violently rejected. Stupidity is a partial hard- ening, a no longer wanting, where once a will to knowledge had been articu- lated. This kind of stupidity leads to harsh rejections of modern art. “The ter- ror,” Theodor W. Adorno writes, “comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood.” 1 But what kind of comprehension is this, which is rejected when confronting art? Adorno assumed that modern art is rejected not because of its inacces- sibility and cognitive complexity but because knowledge must be defended. Therefore it is less about training and education in art appreciation and much more about the defense of art’s possible self-recognition. Like the “stupidity” that, according to Landauer, emerges as the scars of a thwarted thirst for knowl- edge, this rejection is a scared and angry repudiation of the insights related to the horror of self-observation and recognition. So, in the denied experience of the work of art, not only is the self-reflexivity of art denied, but the experience on the other side of the work is denied as well, the spectator’s experience of self. New German Critique 108, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-011 © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc. 73 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938; hereafter cited as “Fetish-Character”), in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader , ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen, 1978), 298.