Lensing question

How does Macdonald’s claim that the mass men are all identical reflected in the movie Hairspray?

In Dwight Macdonald’s essay “A Theory of Mass Culture”, he asserts that mass culture was the expression of the masses who, as individuals, were unrelated to each other except for being in favour of something abstract. Macdonald claims that the mass man is “a solitary atom” who was a uniform part of the crowd that merely echoes what the public wants to hear, therefore does not make up what he saw a true community should be.

Both of Macdonald’s claims could be seen in Hairspray. In the film, when Tracy got onto the Corny Collins show, many began to adopt her fashionable hairstyle that was once criticised by her high school teacher. Such a move could be seen as part of the new generation which Tracy embodied, and the hairdo was representative of adherence to that new culture. As such, the film implied that there was a group of people distinct from the older generation, as perhaps represented by Penny’s mother and Tracy’s teacher.

However, the audience never really got to see the ‘story’ of each individual in adopting the hairstyle. Instead, we see snippets of a diverse range of people taking on the hairdo with much excitement – white girls on the show, black girls, Tracy’s mother. Congruent with Macdonald’s claim, these people have had little to no relation with each other and yet in the film, were represented as a new group of fashionable women who were part of ‘60s culture, even coming together in song and dance. Mass culture and the mass man seen in Hairspray therefore also embodied the same qualities of the mass culture which Macdonald referred to – another undifferentiated person whose identity was being part of the same culture which the masses adopted, but of which he had no personal relationship with at all.