Adam Curtis Explains It All

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/adam-curtis-explains-it-all

by clydethefrog • 5 years ago

132 77 5 years ago

neonate• 5 years ago

js2• 5 years ago

This article is a review of a six-part series by filmmaker Adam Curtis that will air on BBC starting Feb 11th. Synopsis:

This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.
The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well. It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.

https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2021/cgyoomh

bmitc8• 5 years ago

I really enjoy Adam Curtis’ documentaries. He hits the nail on the head and is great viewing for anyone that likes systems level thinking. I’m looking forward to his new film and have seen most of his prior films.

One curious thing is that after watching his documentaries, I do find myself a bit confused about what it all means. His theories weave sometimes complex narratives, and it’s a lot to take in. I think the hardest thing to reconcile is the intent of the people behind or at least catalyze the phenomena that arise. Is the world essentially driven by emergent incompetence and narcissism or is there something more sinister and intentional about it all?

rapsey• 5 years ago

One thing you should keep in mind is never to trust a narrative explanation of events and history. Human brains are hard wired to believe and think in narratives. Reality however is not some grand story arc.

everybodyknows• 5 years ago

For a good read on selecting evidence to fit the desired narrative, try Richard Feynman’s critique of the Challenger investigation. In one of his as-told-to autobiographies:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-393-01...

adamcstephens• 5 years ago

While I haven’t obviously seen this new series yet, this article portrays it to be about how our lack of collective narrative is holding us back. Perhaps we need to be open to new narratives, which will never be perfect, but can help us move toward a better future.

From what I’ve learned, narratives are not the only sources to withhold trust from. Information presented as fact or truth from seemingly reputable sources also should receive the same critical thought.

bmitc8• 5 years ago

I keep that in mind, as already alluded to, but I disagree because sometimes there is an actual narrative. That’s the difficulty I was mentioning.

AndrewBissell3• 5 years ago

Some threads to follow if you are interested in pursuing the "intentional" angle:

- Michael Aquino and PSYOP/MindWar

- Project MKULTRA and its connections to certain mass phenomena such as widespread distribution of LSD in counterculture circles in the 1960s, or even to domestic television programming: https://twitter.com/paulkleinfancam/status/13011978908876021...

- Iran/Contra and the War on Drugs as a stark example of "playing both sides," i.e. trafficking drugs into the U.S. and whipping up public panic and domestic military crackdown in response. I find this to be a particularly case where intentionality is hard to dismiss in favor of incompetence because so many of the players are present on both "sides" of the operation

- Brian Hayden's examination of the role of secret societies in indigenous civilizations, where it has been observed that an occulted elite of "aggrandizers" would use various means of terror and ritual to control the mass of people to direct wealth and power to themselves (article here: https://www.templeton.org/grant/the-role-of-religion-in-soci... podcast here: https://auticulture.com/the-liminalist-223-the-arrival-of-th...)

currymj3• 5 years ago

I’ve watched a couple of Adam Curtis’s films. He is a very skilled artist and they are entertaining, but I find them frustrating.

They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images.

I think this is a very corrosive style of thinking, and a big problem for society. Adam Curtis makes good movies but it seems bad to get more people practicing this kind of reasoning.

If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.

thewarrior3• 5 years ago

I’d say it’s only partly true as a criticism. His documentary on the emergence of Islamic terrorism for eg is quite eye opening. It takes people through how some of the ideological progenitors were tortured in jails by US backed dictatorships. How they were armed and funded indirectly by the CIA and US backed regimes. And how the existence of these radicals was then used by the neocons to wage two destructive wars that are partly responsible for America’s stagnation.

The problem is the length. If he cut the length by 50 % the problem would be solved.

I think his documentaries show how complex the causes of some things are.

genericacct• 5 years ago

He's aware of the length issue i believe; he's also aware of the fact that more episodes equal more pay.

xkeysc0re• 5 years ago

but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.

Okay I'll give it a go for the films of his I've seen.

Century of the Self - Cohesive social structures in the West that once helped produce progressive movements have been hollowed out and decayed due to post-WW2 consumerism and an endless emphasis on the "individual" over the community to the benefit of financial elites. Curtis frames this development by following the rise of psychoanalysis and personalized advertising.

Hypernormalization - Media and governmental forces have become so intertwined with the rise of social media and big tech that there is a crisis of faith in Western democratic societies in which suspicion and cynicism have filled the gap. This leads to sham democracies and consolidation of power by technocrats who play people's fears and anxieties against one another, much like Vladislav Surkov did in Russia in the late 2000s to help secure Putin's position.

mcphilip2• 5 years ago

The Power of Nightmares - Curtis traces back the history of leaders abandoning the approach of holding on to power through a shared vision of a better tomorrow that people can rally around. Curtis using the rise of suicide bombing as an example of a powerful nightmare that leaders can use to gain and keep power by convincing the people that their leadership is the only thing holding back the abyss.

currymj3• 5 years ago

I guess the thing with these movies is the high level narrative is interesting, and at the low level, all the individual historical events discussed are interesting.

But the stuff in the middle just isn't there. It strongly feels like he's explaining how one point follows from the next, but he isn't.

For instance: in Hypernormalization he tries to make the point that there's some kind of relationship between Western algorithmic social media and terrorism. A lot of people would agree this is plausible.

But he doesn't actually explore this point. Instead he just observes that Judea Pearl is a machine learning researcher, and his son Daniel Pearl was beheaded by al-Qaeda members, with the videos uploaded to YouTube, which also uses machine learning (never mind that it's not the kind Judea Pearl worked on).

It's just a bunch of correspondences without any actual relationship.

rawTruthHurts• 5 years ago

I have a hard time understanding the "Adam curtis => conspiracy theories" trope. Everything he talks about is fairly well documented and easy to find in the open.

mopsi• 5 years ago

It's his presentation style, which is difficult to tell apart from conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories also throw a series of images and narration at you and expect you to make certain logical connections, which may or may not be valid.

I think his early style was far less unique, but much stronger in making an argument, see "The Great British Housing Disaster" (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4

zpeti• 5 years ago

You clearly don't follow enough left wing media that has been calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory and making readers/viewers completely paranoid about them.

Also - believe it or not you can actually be entertained by people like Alex Jones without believing what he says. He's incredibly entertaining. IMO in the same way as the Tiger king is entertaining. I hate that these clever intellectuals think that somehow I can't think or read up about things and decide for myself.

mcphilip2• 5 years ago

My enjoyment of his films comes from appreciating his attempt to thread a narrative through a complex series of events and images. The linked New Yorker article makes it clear that he’s well versed in the postmodern rejection of grand narratives, but it doesn’t stop him from trying.

I find his films thought provoking, but I look to them for truth with the same skepticism I have for reading some Nietzsche — I never look for one source to get everything right, I just hope to learn something in the process.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

But isn't a narrative that both the producer and the consumer know is fake guaranteed to be a waste of time? If there's going to be a narrative there should be a real one.

atoav• 5 years ago

Curtis would probably argue that seeing no connections where there are connections is equally dangerous.

blululu• 5 years ago

False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple equivalence outside of the context. Sometimes not seeing a connection is much more dangerous, than finding a spurious connection. It is a question of whether erroneous action is better than erroneous inaction as well as the relative likely hood of these two. Many times erroneous inaction is better than erroneous inaction since it is easier to fix later - though the likelihood matters.

In many systems with hysteresis there is also often risk that a false positive implies a greater risk of a false negative elsewhere (if the system erroneously switches into scanning for 'X' mode, this effectively raises a risk of false negatives scanning for 'Y'). In such cases a false positive would carry greater weight than a false negative.

nabla9• 5 years ago

but just try to explain in plain English what you learned

Maybe the point is not to learn but to think? It's food for thought.

If you make something for audience that consumes information actively (thinks), you can make a very deep, complex and narrow opinionated argument. The viewpoint is not fully developed. Audience neither accept or rejects it (hopefully).

(does not apply to specialized fields, like scientific writing with their own standards)

Bakary• 5 years ago

Wouldn't an audience self-identifying as consuming information "actively" inevitably fool themselves into adopting narratives and consider them to be the product of thought?

erentz• 5 years ago

I don’t remember his stuff being conspiracy theory. More that he is telling of these emergent phenomena he sees and the various forces he sees that created them. Usually forces that aren’t organized, and that take place over long slow timelines. They weren’t unified and coordinated with intent to end up at the final picture he paints.

frombody• 5 years ago

This is the only logical conclusion to draw from his films, IMHO.

EVdotIO• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

currymj3• 5 years ago

this is a little too mean, but still very funny and gets at the point quite clearly.

sn41• 5 years ago

I was about to post this. The parody is so brilliant that I never took any Curtis documentary seriously after this.

adolph• 5 years ago

Adam Curtis believed that two hundred thousand Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy, in fact he had created the televising equivalent of a drunken midnight Wikipedia binge with the <something Brit accented> narrative coherence

mushbino• 5 years ago

Honestly, I think they're perfect just the way they are. I've seen every one of his documentaries at least a few times and I don't know of anyone who uses his material as a foundation for any of their beliefs. If you're viewing his documentaries as a source of actual news, you're missing the entire purpose. They're a mixture of documentary, social commentary, thought experiment, and art.

viburnum• 5 years ago

The funny thing is his blog posts are really solid and well-argued. I think his movies are cool but I’ve never actually made it to the end of one, all the drama is too much for me.

herewegoagain2• 5 years ago

That sounds like almost everything on TV. I can't stand any of it anymore.

I think there is not enough awareness of how manipulative moving images really are. It's probably really difficult to make a movie or documentary that is not highly manipulative, intentionally or not.

bparsons• 5 years ago

That is sort of the point of his recent films.

The underlying thesis for his works is that the modern era has divorced us from any sort of narrative about why anything is happening. Instead of understanding personal and global events through the lens of political ideology or some cultural/religious understanding, people just observe these things as fragmented, random events.

Most Curtis movies attempt (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to string together some context about the underlying political and intellectual forces driving these events.

It is cultural analysis, so it should not be understood as a straight reporting of facts. You see more of this type of thinking in literary publications than you do in film, but he has proven that the mode of thought transfers well to the medium.

nr2x• 5 years ago

The article spends a lot of time talking about how the style is dreamlike (with quotes from Adam Moore). For me it’s more like abstract Impressionism than “documentary”. I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions, but it makes me questions my own assumptions using a different frame and method.

Likewise the problem with dismissing things as “conspiracy theories” out of hand is it ignores the fact that yes, the world does have actual conspiracies, and some of them are hidden, while others exist in plain sight. The visible ones are hardest to see.

Fricken• 5 years ago

The whole meta narrative of an Adam curtis doc is to bring you to awareness of when and where you are being manipulated, presumably to help you become aware of manipulations from less compassionate sources.

bmitc8• 5 years ago

I get it to a degree, but it's a very dangerous line of thinking to write off systems level thinking as conspiracies. Stafford Beer points out, as an analogy in Designing Freedom, that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom, and yet gravity is an accepted idea today, where it wasn't at the start. Making connections between wide ranging events, people, and ideas doesn't make a conspiracy.

Adam Curtis' documentaries warn us against systemic effects, and they are warnings that what we're presented with isn't always the truth. It's basically what Chomsky has warned about for most of his career.

maxerickson• 5 years ago

that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom

I think if these other theories had explanations as well crystallized as the action of gravity, the other poster would not object to presenting them. It's not an interesting analogy, it's a trick to legitimize hand waving about other things.

(we may not fully understand the mechanisms by which gravity acts, but we understand the effect it has quite well, to the point where we can GPS for instance, because we can precisely account for the very small differences in the way time passes in orbit)

aaron695• 5 years ago

You are right, except Adam Curtis doesn't get systems.

For instance he calls public servants 'devious' when they 'game' the system. This is not what happens at a personal level, the system is 'devious' if anything. It also doesn't address if overall people in the system are better off -

https://youtu.be/l1So7lNUD0E?t=2387

(Rewind 60 seconds for when they are measuring bird calls across Great Britain for quality of life, that's actually pretty cool)

"The Trap" was early internet, pre the popularisation of shoving ideas at people for the dopamine rush without an actual understanding.

I am interested to see if he adapts to the newer world where ideas are more common place, understanding is still lacking.

solipsism• 5 years ago

"finding patterns where there are none" is"systems level thinking" now?

the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom, and yet gravity is an accepted idea today, where it wasn't at the start

And yet it turns out that gravity is not a force at all. Gravity is just the shape of space.

coldtea• 5 years ago

They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images.

Thinking for yourself requires being able to make claims without having mapped an exact cause and effect - even without having evidence at hand.

It's about understanding connections and patterns and who benefits.

As for the "actual proof" sometimes those who you depend to provide it (and only hold it) are either your open enemies or are supposedly friendly (e.g. your government or Big Tech) but profit from hiding it.

People who can't connect the dots for themselves are taken advantage of (by governments, "experts" with conflicts of interests, media pundits, etc.) and are gullible.

People who over-connect the dots are conspiracy theorists (and might be gullible to different things).

One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy).

mistermann2• 5 years ago

One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy).

I think this is about right.

I think of it as: "conspiracy theorists" (those who actually match the silly strawman characterization) and "anti-conspiracy-theorists" both suffer from the very same problems:

- loose epistemology...an undisciplined, over-eagerness to form illogical conclusions without sufficient evidence to substantiate them

- not being mindful of the fact that there is a very real (and very important) distinction between one's perception of reality and reality itself

pan69• 5 years ago

If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.

I think this is exactly what Curtis is trying to instill on his viewers. The sense that the world we live in is a complex world. It made sense when you were watching it but afterwards you have difficulty explaining what you actually saw. Just like the real world.

apple_innocent• 5 years ago

"In "Can't Get You Out of My Head," Curtis plays a long montage of talking heads on U.S. cable news repeating the phrase "the walls are closing in," during the final days of the Mueller investigation. He accuses media organizations, including the Times and magazines like this one, of profiting from the frenzy and uncertainty of the past four years, obsessing over Trump's personal corruption and mendacity rather than the alienation and anger that brought about his Presidency in the first place."

The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage.

Ideas like the above about MSM are the easy, obvious ones. It may reinforce what we already feel we know.

But his films are also filled with deeper reflections that are less obvious, which he can illustrate with obscure, memorable visuals.

If his films did not touch on the obvious ideas they might be too alienating, more like avant-garde art film.

If they only addressed obvious ideas the films might be too boring, more like documentaries on Netflix.

He somehow finds the right balance.

But I think these overarching general theories tying all these disparate clips together that he presents via voiceover... the "leaps" as this article describes them... these are what make his films worth the watch.

He has a true talent for that. He stretches but is careful not to go too far. That is what make his films unique, IMO.

His "general theories" are similar in effect to conspiracy theories perhaps. They can be very appealing to certain receptive audiences.

The big difference is the former seem to be designed to make you think while the latter (along with political correctness) seem to be designed to relieve you of thinking and appeal straight to emotion. His films always seem to suggest we cannot remove ourselves as factors in any outcome. We have to take some amount of responsibility. We cannot view ourselves as pure victims nor others as sole culprits.

As for this article, he reveals no overt objection to populism.

The title of this film is an homage to the author of "Bullshit Jobs", a self-described anarchist.

polytely• 5 years ago

The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage.

You should read the article then, as it is discussed in there. He has access to the complete BBC archives and just scrolls through material on fast forwards until he stumbles onto interesting threads that he saves and then later finds patterns in.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

I think everyone thinks of Curtis this way yet they're still interesting.

cambalache• 5 years ago

I admit I just recently learned about Curtis (I am not a native English speaker) but the ideas of his documentaries seem fascinating, so I am planing to watch some of them. Now, my question is, What books would you consider in the same style? By that I mean content not form.

bmitc8• 5 years ago

Others that cover these sort of system connections that I can think of are David Graeber and Noam Chomsky.

rusk• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl...

jazzyjackson• 5 years ago

I'm not 100% sure of the overlap except for the cynicism, but I'm a fan of Franco "Bifo" Berardi and his book "Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility'

He takes a broad look at the change in motivation, the pyschological effects of believing we have no power over what happens in the future, a kind of answer to Curtis's "Hypernormalization" that explores how we thought we were in power, that we could rationalize outcomes, but in fact the world will always throw a wrench in your plans, and maybe there's no way to keep the world under control

Franco doesn't see this as a reason to be nihilistic, but outlines how nihilism became a common response to the global financial and political trends.

This one isn't a book but a written piece by Curtis in 2014, detailing one way the automated financial markets are an effort to keep things stable:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

fortran77• 5 years ago

Here's a great observation:

“Can’t Get You Out of My Head” grew out of Curtis’s response to the populist insurgencies of 2016. Curtis was struck by the fury of mainstream liberals and their simultaneous lack of a meaningful vision of the future that might counter the visceral appeal of nationalism and xenophobia. “Those who were against all that didn’t really seem to have an alternative,” he said.

maxthegeek1• 5 years ago

I tried watching HyperNormalisation but I kept noticing inaccuracies, I got frustrated and had to stop.

moner0• 5 years ago

What sort of inaccuracies? I found a lot of interesting omissions, and some rather unsupported claims, but I would be interested to learn about concrete inaccuracies.

twic• 5 years ago

Boone directed readers instead to a short online spoof of Curtis’s films by Ben Woodhams called “The Loving Trap,” which describes his work as the “televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge.”

I'm glad this was mentioned, because i think it's hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

Adam Curtis Explains It All

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