But in a more practical sense, because his documentaries are patchworks of the past. Not just because only the BBC would have given him the time, space and indulgence to assemble his remarkable portfolio of argumentative, tendentious, visionary and defiantly sprawling films (this one weighs in at a whopping two hours and 45 minutes). Adam Curtis could only work for the Beeb. Still at the heart of the UK's broadcasting culture but battered this way and that by mendacious media enemies and philistinic Culture Secretaries is that most stolidly centralising of institutions, the BBC. But here's where we encounter one of this film's many ironies. Institutional failure is a defining trope of our age then. The suspicion of sinister hidden hands on the tiller has been replaced by an even more disconcerting sense that no one is steering anymore because no one can now imagine a worthwhile possible destination. Worse still, the innovations are co-opted and become part of the problem. Every innovation - from pseudo-subversive pop culture to apparently emancipatory technological developments - feeds back to nothing. Fake folk devils and implausible solutions abound but have lost their potency. Authority figures, it posits, have run out of credible stories to tell their sceptical subjects. The narrative it weaves is at once, hellishly complex and deceptively simple. It passes through Patti Smith and Hafez al-Assad. And it will do its level best to offer an explanation of how America - and the world - came to this pass.Īs Curtis aficionados have come to expect, the route it takes through the last half century is thrillingly tangential. Its timing is uncanny - the film will arrive on the BBC iPlayer on October 16, just 23 days before Americans go to the polls and decide whether or not to submit to the leering rictus of mass insanity represented by Donald J Trump. In many ways, it's the film that Curtis' whole career has been building towards as many of the cultural, social and political undercurrents he's explored (mass manipulation, the surprisingly compatible goals of Islamic and neoliberal fundamentalism, the unintended consequences of developed world interventionism) seemingly begin to form an unstoppable tsunami. In 2016, the year of the EU Referendum, of Syria, of Putin and of Trump, HyperNormalisation feels almost jarringly perfect. Perhaps a more interesting point to ponder is whether Curtis is part of the problem or part of the solution? Is he, to throw his take on ELIZA back from whence it came, also making his viewers feel secure by reflecting themselves back to them? Is a film like HyperNormalisation merely another safe bunker in our ongoing culture wars? Is this a sustainable way forward? It's hard to survey the wreckage of this bizarre year without feeling like that's a pretty stupid question. In an atomised world, we all have our own truths and maybe, for now, many of us have become content with that. This piece of archive footage feels like a brilliant metaphor for where we are in 2016. "What Eliza showed", suggests Curtis, "was that what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them." ELIZA performed a clever confidence trick that, for a limited period of time at least, gave the impression of control being regained and solutions being delivered. Did it work? That depended on what the user was expecting. ELIZA was a psychotherapy computer programme developed in 1966 that comforted the troubled minds of its users by simply re-phrasing their questions as self-reinforcing answers. One of the key scenes in Adam Curtis's monumental new documentary HyperNormalisation shows a woman engaging with ELIZA.
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