Adorno’s Years in California 313addition to film, he seems also to have been fascinated by the illustrated
episodes ‘from the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy radio programmes,
retold by Eleanor Packer’. Even so, he was critical of the underlying
pedagogic message whose sole credo was social conformity. He also
noted the way language was reduced to hackneyed phrases and catch-
words. ‘In the all-embracing system conversation becomes ventriloquism.
Everyone is his own Charlie McCarthy; hence his popularity. Speech
in its entirety is coming to resemble the formulae which used to be
reserved for greeting and leave-taking.’^189 Without his knowledge of the
internal workings of the film business and without his frequent visits to
the cinema and his reading of popular literature, Adorno would scarcely
have been able to write the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic
of Enlightenment. It follows that it was not true that every visit to the
cinema left him ‘stupider and worse’.^190 Quite the reverse. He was in a
position to form a precise picture of the dream factory and the laws
governing its productions. This expert knowledge, to which we may add
his experience as former director of the music research project, was
soon to bear fruit.
This was connected with the fact that Adorno and Hanns Eisler
were near neighbours and had had a close relationship since autumn
- Eisler, the composer and musician who was very friendly with
Brecht, lived a few streets away from Adorno, and it was his suggestion
that they should write a book jointly about film music. He approached
Adorno in December 1942 with this idea because, as a former lecturer
at the New School for Social Research, he had received a grant from
the Rockefeller Foundation for a project analysing film music. How-
ever, he was uncertain how to proceed and hoped to profit from the
experience Adorno had acquired in the radio research project. Adorno
was very ready to take part in a project that sounded interesting for
the very good reason that it was envisaged not as a research project but
as an artistic experiment. So he and Eisler set to work. Some of the
great Hollywood film companies, Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount
among them, provided them with a selection of musical material. In
addition, scores were tried out that Eisler had specially composed
for the purpose of analysis and which could be deployed in different
contexts (scenes with children, nature scenes, feature films, newsreels).
What they focused on was the question of how to relate musical forms
meaningfully to visual scenes in such a way that something was added
to them. Although the two authors based their work on the premise
that film was not an art form in its own right, but had to be regarded
as a medium of distraction and enjoyment, they put in a plea for its
making use of avant-garde music. In particular, the moments of fear
which are so common in a traditional type of popular film could be
heightened by ‘the shocks of modern music’.^191 As an example, Adorno
pointed to King Kong, in which the musical accompaniment failed to
live up to the drama because the shock-effects of modern music had not