Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilization represses barbarity by attempting to embody its negation. However, savage brutality does not disappear. They explain this as a process of “progress…reverting to regression. That [industries] are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments” (Horkheimer and Adorno xviii). This attempt to elucidate the dynamics of contradictory forces in modern industrial societies, – that is, culture represses ritual which resurfaces in barbarity – seems particularly relevant to LeRoy’s dichotomized expression of modern industry and penal savagery in Chain Gang.

Thus, the film can be read as at once enacting and promoting alternative readings of modernity’s relationship to tradition. Lichtenstein’s depiction of chain gangs as trapped between old and new systems (although, he argues, closer to the latter, while occupying a space in the public imagination – thanks largely to Burns’s and LeRoy’s efforts – which links them primarily with the former) reflects Horkheimer and Adorno’s modernity paradigm. Might, then, the film’s repression of cultural-historical complexity signify its participation in generating the very conditions which facilitated and prolonged the existence of unjust systems like the chain gang?

Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of “the culture industry” also confirms arguments that any text produced by Hollywood participates in stifling potential political resistance to capitalism. They assert that “under the dictate of effectiveness, technique is becoming psychotechnique, a procedure for manipulating human beings … everything is directed at overpowering a customer conceived as distracted or resistant” (133). In effect, Chain Gang’s purportedly subversive message can be interpreted as co-opting mounting politically-resistant energies in 1932 American culture.

I will also attempt to analyze Horkheimer and Adorno’s scathing criticisms of Hollywood and American capitalism dialogically with arguments promoted by the very systems the Dialectic of Enlightenment decries. If anything, Chain Gang’s example has instructed me to appreciate the nuanced difficulties posed by classifying any one economy, culture, or form of government as either purely repressive or uniquely revolutionary.