Thursday, October 27, 2016

Adam Curtis: Cyber Age Seer or False Prophet?

Please don't call the UK's Adam Curtis a documentary film maker. He is a journalist, he argues, who happens to use the medium of film to investigate and share his stories. About a week or two ago I wouldn't have called him anything, because I'd never heard of Adam Curtis before a buddy of mine posted the trailer to his new BBC documentary, HyperNormalisation, to his Facebook page. 

It's an engrossing five minutes, where Curtis proposes that we are living in a political and economic system that isn't real, and everybody knows it. The politicians aren't really in control of events nor do they really have a handle on the economy. The masses are trapped in a social media loop that, because of the power of algorithms, only feeds us content that we already agree with. We go along for the ride because we can't think of any alternative. He references the last years of the Soviet Union, when the term hypernormalisation was coined, not, as he says in an interview, to make a direct comparison between the situations, but rather to simply give an example of the phenomenon. 

What makes the ideas that Curtis proposes so engrossing isn't simply the ideas themselves but their presentation. While he demurrers from being thought of as a documentarian, he uses contemporary news accounts, interviews - both historical and current, archival stock footage of material both related and unrelated - at least directly so - to the topic, music and, movie clips that harmonize thematically to create a video and sound montage that draws the viewer in. Over this phantasmagoric basic track he overlays his own rather canny, classically BBC style narration of his own composition, which ties all the seemingly disparate parts together. 

After seeing the trailer I was eager to catch the entire program. It was released officially on one of the BBC's web platforms last week, but unfortunately was blocked in the US market. I contented myself by binge watching several of his previous films on YouTube. Then, over the weekend, I saw that HyperNormalisation had been surreptitiously uploaded by several YouTubers. After seeing and being intrigued by Curtis' Everyday is Like Sunday (2011), The Mayfair Set (1999) and The Living Dead (1995) I was ready for his latest offering. And, sadly was left very disappointed. 

While coming from a left wing family background, Curtis claims to be a-political. If pushed he'd say he would be open to some form of "lefty libertarianism." In spite of his rather amorphous political self-identification, his work reveals him as a man of the Left who is disappointed that it all didn't seem to work out. 

A theme which seems to cut across much of Curtis' work is that there are no longer big ideas that guide political and economic policy. The failure of both the political Left and Right (though he focuses in a more detailed way on the Right's shortcomings) to successfully shape a lasting and stable social progress has put them effectively in retreat. 

The days of social reformers, who sought to change society for the better, and often accomplished their goals in spite of popular resistance, are gone. Many of these nineteenth and twentieth century reformers in Great Britain were members of the elite aristocracy who saw it as their responsibility, their birth right even, to use their positions for the good of the people. They were going to drive ahead with establishing a progressive program because they knew what was best for the masses more than the masses did. But neither these elites, the technocrats, the politicos, the communists nor the capitalists who followed were able to successfully read, analyze and adjust to the historical, economic and social forces swirling about them. They may of had a vision, a guiding idea, but too often these were overly simplistic and, or ridged.  In the realm of economics the modern West has never been able, either through central planning or free markets, to fashion a stable and prosperous economy, impervious to the great swings of boom and bust, and so we've given up even trying. What Curtis laments is that with the loss of idealism and a clear intellectual program that guides the ruling class we are left with governments that are simply trying to manage outcomes as opposed to offering true social development and economic change. 

Into this he mixes the effect social media has had on how political movements organize and quickly dissipate since they lack both ideas and a clear leadership structure. Contemporary society has placed the emphasis on the all encompassing self, and self identity, in a way unlike previous generations. Because we are radically individual, and the expression of this essential individuality is central to how we organize our lives, we have lost a true sense of community and collective action. To put it in the argot of Catholic social thought, people have lost a sense that there is a common good that needs to be promoted. 

Instead of connecting us, social media has made us atomized units fed exactly what we want to see and hear based on the all powerful algorithms. We are only fed the ideas we are in agreement with. In the end we can see no real alternative to the world as it is. Even supposedly radical movements like Occupy Wall Street are only looking for a new way of managing the system, not really changing it. The Arab Spring may have been spurred on by spontaneous demonstrations, whose participants were "organized" by way of Facebook and Twitter, but once the initial enthusiasm wore off the whole thing fizzed out. In Egypt, for instance, there were no leaders to guid the protesters, no real ideas or a concrete program to rally around. Into this void rushed the Muslim Brotherhood who had ideas and a program. Now there is a military government and one wonders, for all the upheaval, what really changed after all?

This is a very rough outline of where Curtis is coming from. His work is sometimes criticized as placing style over substance, but I don't know that I agree with that. I see him as following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, who was accused of being somewhat obscure - not always connecting the intellectual dots - leaving it to the viewer or reader to make the inferences. Critics read this as there being less to McLuhan than met the eye. But both men are preceptive, trying to stand aloof from the scene to give objective social critiques others are too ideological to make. Both men have a point of view, for sure, even if they shroud them a bit. McLuhan was dismayed by post modernity and wanted to understand how the machine worked so he could turn it off. Curtis laments that the 1960's dream of social transformation never really succeeded the way it was intended and wants to find out how the machine broke down so it can get up and running again. To paraphrase McLuhan, in Curtis' films the style is the substance, and the consumer of his work must look beyond what is explicitly presented to grasp the meaning. 

As I wrote, I was left disappointed by HyperNormalisation, because Curtis, in spite of his attempts at dispassion, can't help but reveal his biases. He highlights the failures of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations to make his points throughout the film. Nothing wrong with going after Reagan and Bush the Younger, but then he never mentions the names of Bill Clinton or, more problematically, Barack Obama. He posits that Republican administrations created overly simplified and downright false narratives of how the world works to push their Middle East agendas, both of which failed miserably. But previous and subsequent US policies under Democratic administrations are never identified as such, as if the lead up to 9/11 and the last eight years were products of some nameless faceless bureaucracy, disconnected from an administration policy. 

He spins a compelling yarn, connecting Syrian president Hafez al-Assad's then novel use of suicide bombers to expel the US military from Beirut in the '80s with their use now against his son Bashar in that country's ongoing civil war. He laments the missed opportunity of the Arab Spring, and the West's cynical use of Muammar Gaddafi over the decades. The Libyan strong man was portrayed alternately as a hero or a villain depending on how the West was benefitted. Gaddafi seemed content to go along with the charade, even to the point of being blamed for terrorist attacks he was innocent of, because it gave him a sense of importance that in reality he never had. These events were guided by the fog and mirror perceptions created by those in power for whom the truth was too complex for them to grasp, let along communicate to the people they ruled over. They were victims of events they thought that they could control, but couldn't. 

This would be a brave, prophetic work, if Curtis had told the whole story. While he goes after the Right in a calm, non-polemical way, assuming their sincerity while pointing out their folly, he is loath to point out the folly of the Left, beyond that their failures represent lost opportunities as opposed to simply being wrong. He treats the Occupy Movement as a well intentioned grass roots campaign that would have succeeded but for the lack of leadership and fresh ideas (damn you internet!), but he ignores charges that globalists like billionaire George Soros may have had a hand in funding their activities. While the blame for the present disfunction in the Middle East can be laid at the door of W, he hasn't been in office since January of 2009. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, and pretending that the sitting president of the United States, and the woman who wants to succeed him, his former secretary of state, had nothing to do with how events have unfolded since is disingenuous.

Before you think I'm not recommending HyperNormalisation, let me say very clearly that it should be seen and discussed. It's just not as good as the other documentaries of his that I've seen so far (I just started watching 2002's The Century of the Self). That I disagree with aspects of his presentation is balanced by the fact that he makes many keen observations of culture and society that ring true. It's just that I would connect some of his dots in a different way. But then again, I have my biases too, which is OK. 

One of Curtis' main points, that I've inferred, is the need to break out of the dictatorship of the algorithms so that fresh ideas, new approaches to our political and economic problems can be found and, true social progress can happen. We may be people who lean Left or Right, but to be doctrinaire closes us off from seeing the world as it is, and not simply as we want it to look, or worse yet, believing that it looks just like us. 

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