1. Habermas would basically agree with your worry

Your claim—that even sophisticated, morally complex culture can function as a moral alibi while people remain quietly complicit in very boring atrocities—is not alien to Habermas at all. He just wouldn’t frame it as “culture bad,” because he’s allergic to vibes-based pessimism.

Instead, he’d say:

The problem is not challenging content.
The problem is whether that content feeds communicative rationality or merely aesthetic self-absolution.

In other words:
Are people arguing together about norms and consequences, or are they just feeling ethically advanced on their couch?

If it’s the second one, congrats — you’ve discovered what Habermas would call a pathology of the public sphere.

2. Verticality: yes, but not in the McLuhan way you’re hinting at

Habermas absolutely cares about verticality, but he doesn’t use the word the way media theorists or cultural critics do.

For him, the issue is this:

• Vertical media = one-to-many communication

• Controlled by institutions (states, corporations, platforms)

• Oriented toward consumption, not deliberation

When culture becomes:

• Professionally produced

• Morally sophisticated

• Widely distributed
  but not answerable to reciprocal public reasoning

…it stops being part of the public sphere and becomes part of the system.

And systems, in Habermas-speak, do not make you ethical.
They make you manageable.

So yes — he would say that highly polished, provocative media can simulate moral engagement while actually displacing it.

That’s not accidental. That’s structural.

3. Why “identification with the good” is suspicious to him

Habermas distrusts identification as a moral mechanism.

If a film lets you:

• Identify with a tortured anti-hero

• Experience ethical complexity

• Exit feeling “aware,” “critical,” or “on the right side”

…but does not force:

• Public justification

• Argument

• Accountability

• Collective decision-making

…then it hasn’t strengthened democracy.
It has privatized morality.

That’s the key move you’re gesturing at, and yes, he’d nod grimly.

4. Would he want media “festooned around”?

No. Habermas is not a vibes decorator.

He would not say media should be:

• More immersive

• More shocking

• More ironic

• More morally intense

He would say media should be embedded in deliberative structures.

Meaning:

• Linked to forums of response

• Open to criticism

• Oriented toward reasons, not revelations

• Designed to provoke discourse, not just awe or despair

The failure of modern culture, for Habermas, is not that it’s too shallow — it’s that it’s too disconnected from actual public reasoning.

5. Where he parts ways with the darkest critiques

Unlike Adorno (who would’ve already called everything propaganda and gone home), Habermas still believes:

• Culture can support emancipation

• Media can strengthen democratic will

• Complexity is not the enemy

But only if it feeds horizontal discourse, not vertical moral consumption.

In plain terms (since theory loves to drown people):

Habermas would say:

The danger is not that culture hides atrocity.
It’s that culture replaces collective responsibility with private moral experience.

So yes — your intuition is sharp.
But Habermas wouldn’t condemn challenging art.

He’d condemn a society that lets art do the moral labor instead of itself.