Devil's Doorway

Adorno and Horkheimer signed the first preface of Dialektik der Aufklarung in Los Angeles, May 1944, a book that is, of course, both a reflection on the dark, forgotten shadows that accompany that Western illumination from the outset, and an attempt to analyse the latest stage in the unfolding of that process – the advent of what they name the “culture industry”. Soon after, Guy Trosper (from Wyoming) began working on the screenplay for this downbeat, indeed tragic western about a member of the Shoshone who discovers the full meaning of the dialectic of enlightenment, embodied in two lawyers, one idealistic and the other conniving, culminating in a Branch Davidian Waco-type of siege. The ending explicitly, and somewhat astonishingly, leaves the audience with a question: whether, a century later, they can still hold the memory of the genocidal crime on which their civilisation was built, and if so, what difference that memory makes for how they conceive the future promise of that civilisation. In its earnest little fashion, this product of the Hollywood culture industry has serious business on its mind, concerning not just the west but the West.