Having watched the first three of Adam Curtis’s new films on iPlayer. They very much appear to be more of the same (Hypernormalisation, Bitter Lake), even down to the repeated snippets of Aphex Twin Ambient Works Vol. II. The archive footage is amazing, but the visual grammar is perhaps over familiar now.
Interesting as they are, however, there’s a defect at their heart. Curtis tries to seed a monolithic view of now in a series of interesting ideas and biographies that he has selected; he’s emplotting a narrative, deciding what to put in and what to leave out, and painting it as causal. It’s a kind of teleology with hindsight, doubly flawed. An attempt to put complexity in a box and tie it up with a bow.
And, while it exposes conspiracy theorists’ tricks, it uses them incessantly too. It slips unsupported assertions next to common knowledge, there’s the neverending hint that something sinister is going on, and it jumps around between ideas, never quite finishing them, leaving the viewer hanging with a feeling of disquiet rather than clarity.
Having watched the second three films I feel a bit softer towards them. Not only did they cover newer ground, I realised I had made an error of knowsys. I shouldn’t critique them as essays designed to communicate reasoned knowledge, but instead as art designed to communicate felt knowledge.
Looked at this way, the bewildering hopscotch through narratives, video offcuts and absurd interludes — and conclusions like bubbles that float just out of reach and pop if you ever catch them — all become an honest strength of the work, rather than an inherent weakness.
Of course the series had to finish on a note of optimism. After spending hours decrying the flaws of individualism, Curtis floats an impending operant conditioned social credit dystopia in which it will be squashed, before telling us its OK, we can shape our own world.
Bravo Adam, it takes a lot to get 500 minutes of this consumer’s addled attention.
