The Cult of Distraction

In his essay, The Cult of Distraction, Siegfried Kracauer delves into how the new, extravagant movie palaces in Berlin and the films shown in them relate to the growing mass audience in Berlin. He describes the buildings as such, "The large picture house in Berlin are palaces of distraction; to call them movie theaters would be disrespectful." (323). That is how he opens the essay. Clearly he is interested in the opposition between what the presence of a simple movie theater says about a society and what an over-the-top palace theater says. He writes about how seeing a movie has become an event (similar to what happened in America right before the rise of classical Hollywood) which was an all out attack on the sense of the viewer. He then gets into how these distractions are working and how he feels they should be working. He says, rather fascinatingly, "Distraction-which is meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world-is festooned with drapery and forced back into a unity that no longer exists. Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration that such shows ought to represent, the movie theaters glue the pieces back together after the fact and present them as organic creations." (327-328). The seemingly obvious subtext here is that Kracauer is calling the entire mode of operation for these distractions completely fake. The palaces, the lights, the marquees, the films; they are all simply, "surface splendor." (323). Which, again, screams superficiality. Kracauer finishes the essay by seemingly understanding that the objective of movies and the theaters they are shown in is to make money, as opposed to, "refining applied art." (328). So I wonder what he is saying here about film in a modern world. Is this essay an attack on the cult of distraction, or an admittance of defeat to it?