If news is the sense-making apparatus of modernity, then the BBC should count as one of its citadels, but beyond the thousands of hours of footage that it uses, there lies more unused footage in its archives. And, for well over three decades, one filmmaker (though he prefers calling himself a journalist), Adam Curtis, has patiently foraged the BBC archives to produce a startling set of films that explore the underbelly of this sense-making machine.
If the BBC broadcasts attempt to bring a intelligible coherence to world affairs, Curtis’ films, by contrast, begin at the opposite end, all starting with variations of one sentence and one question — “we increasingly live in a world where nothing makes any sense” and “how did we get here.”
His latest film, HyperNormalisation, is no exception and it bears his signature montage style — remixing rare political footage with cheesy music, juxtaposing events that seemingly have little to do with each other and connecting everything to everything else — to produce what Jonathan Lethem describes as the ‘secret history of everything’.
The word ‘secret’ is indeed the operative word in his works and if one had to characterise the peculiar hypnotic pleasure of watching a Curtis film, it boils down to its masterful poetics of secrecy and conspiracy.
In the age of conspiracies
Don DeLillo in his 1978 novel, Running Dog, presciently declared this to be the age of conspiracies. Every age evolves cultural forms whose expressive capacities are adequate to that age. It is not surprising that the post-truth era would also produce our own auteur of the unbelievable. It is difficult while watching a Curtis film not to catch yourself gasping and thinking, “No, this surely can’t be possible.”
In the 2011 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, he establishes links between Ayn Rand (the author of so many of our own fascist teen fantasies) and global financial crisis.
While we may intuit a link between those inclined towards Howard Roark as a role model and impeding disaster, nothing quite prepares us for powerful politicians, investment bankers and Silicon Valley CEOs eulogising Ayn Rand, naming products, buildings and even companies after her works and characters. And if that were not scary enough, consider the fact that Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was a lifelong fan of Rand.
If it were not for the voice-over in his films, one could easily be mistaken into believing we were watching an MTV film with its rapid succession of disconnected images and sound.
What Curtis seems to be striving for is more than just a way of telling a believable story from unbelievable sources, rather it is to evolve a visual equivalent of what Kafka achieves in his work — where nightmares dissolve into scarier realities when you wake up. It is not surprising that his most well-known film is indeed called The Power of Nightmares.
More sinister real
Curtis’ cinematic world is fashioned in equal part from inexplicable mystery and the utterly banal, and like Kafka before him, the fantastic unfolds to an even more sinister real.
In HyperNormalisation, there are two intertwining threads that Curtis weaves — the invention of West Asia as a zone of political conflict and violence in need of intervention, and the invention of cyberspace as a product of counter-culture’s retreat from politics. While the former invents figures like Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad as the straw men of terror, the latter, he argues, sets the stage for the emergence of Donald Trump.
The Gaddafi story in particular serves as a Cassandra-like parable for the post-truth era — a leader of little prominence is given a larger-than-life status as the embodiment of evil, who in turns adopts this fiction to posture as a revolutionary leader of the non-Western world to rave against the West, which then becomes the pretext to bolster the war against West Asia.
The UFO phenomenon
If this were the sum total of the film it would not be very different from what Noam Chomsky has been telling us for decades.
What distinguishes a Curtis film though is the insertion into this narrative of the American obsession with UFOs through the ’80s and ’90s and the subsequent revelation that UFOs were indeed the greatest conspiracy hatched by American intelligence to distract from the spotting of experiments in hi-tech weaponry.
If UFO theories were fuelled by fake leaks from the intelligence department, they in turn propelled conspiracy theories about the untrustworthiness of the government.
In juxtaposing imaginary flying objects and the cottage industries of paranoia and desire they engendered with the large-scale industry of terror manufactured in the name of fighting terror, Curtis shows us how fictional figures like Gaddafi could only have become believable through the aid of real phenomena like UFOs.
If Curtis has the advantage of access to BBC’s entire archive, one wonders in the era of mobile phones, YouTube and social media, what new forms can take shape locally, where there is still a division of labour between documentary practices grounded in realism, investigative journalism uncovering the hidden agendas of the real, and news that produces its unhinged ideas of reality. Let the conspiracy begin.
The author started watching films in theatres. Then video came and shocked him. Now, he tries to figure out even smaller screens and the future of image cultures.