On March 20, the first public hearing on Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections was held in the House of Representatives. James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, provided official confirmation that the “Russian story” is the most serious legal scandal to confront a sitting President in decades (If proven, only Nixon’s Watergate Scandal comes close in terms of severity of charges.). That’s not all. Comey revealed Donald Trump’s campaign has been under investigation from July!
Even if you’ve been reared on a healthy dose of Hollywood films that routinely paint the Russians as the bad guys, the instinctive reaction to such news must be one of disbelief. Not only is it discomforting to think of the world in a dystopian mess, it reeks rather strongly of conspiracy theory.
Similarly, Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation destroys the illusion of comfort we’re cocooned in. It offers a radical, but not entirely unbelievable, hypothesis: sometime in the mid-70s, the world became too complex to understand, and politicians felt unable to change the world. Subsequently, they ceded power to powerful financiers and to intelligent, networked computer systems that conspired to create a simpler version of reality. As a result, they relied on this nexus of borrowed power and on public relations to spin narratives—of artificially constructed heroes and villains—that would eventually return to haunt them.
‘Hypernormalisation’ is a term originally coined by the anthropologist Anton Yurchak to describe the fading years of the Soviet Union, when both government and people agreed to jointly pretend that the decaying Communist system was functioning normally. The film employs this definition to combine a mind-boggling range of ideas, and historical events, into the service of a singular idea: that we are shielded from the real nature of the world by the many lies and complex systems that have been established to ensure that the world retains a semblance of stability.
Curtis, a long-time BBC employee, is a cult hero in the documentary world. Last year, after watching Curtis’s Bitter Lake , an investigation of the West’s role in Afghanistan, the American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, tweeted: “I want to be Adam Curtis when I grow up.” In that film, Curtis, renowned for uncovering fascinating historical connections between seemingly unrelated events, sets the meeting between U.S. president Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, in 1945, as the flashpoint for the rise of Wahhabism, and future trouble in Afghanistan. A deal was struck on the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal: the U.S. would support the newly-formed state of Saudi Arabia; the Saudis would ensure the supply of oil to the West.
In HyperNormalisation , two major historical events in the 70s form the canvas for Curtis to explain recent political shocks. Donald Trump, Brexit, the war in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks—all of these find themselves at the end of a complex chain of events that was set off 40 years ago.
In 1975, two uncontrollable forces were unleashed upon the world. First, in New York City, the city’s politicians, driven to the point of bankruptcy, ceded control of the city to financiers and bankers. As a result, rich real-estate developers such as Donald Trump were given tax breaks in millions of dollars to convert derelict buildings into luxury hotels. Having handed over the future of the city to those devoted to ensuring returns on their investments, the politicians retreated from the difficult task of social change.
The same year, Henry Kissinger undermined Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad’s vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict by playing double-games with the Egypt government. Angered, the Syrian president warned that America’s treachery would release demons in the Arab world. Sure enough, during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon conflict, Assad, with the help of Iran, unleashed suicide bombers upon the world for the first time. Suicide bombers (initially Shiite) would soon be embraced by the Sunnis in future conflicts. In 30 years, they’d mutate into a force to tear Syria, and much of the Arab world, apart.
Curtis reportedly spends vast amounts of time tucked away in the BBC’s archives, at a secret location somewhere in West London. The footage he unearths, deliberately raw, imperfectly cut, can often be curiously affecting. Even the “villains” often appear as vulnerable, imperfect humans. The most affecting footage, probably, is that of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a surprising star of the documentary—a man who was framed by America, and who brought great grief upon himself and his country through his obstinate desire to popularise his “third universal theory” of world order.
Since HyperNormalisation is a film about the contradictions in the world around us, it can therefore itself barely escape those contradictions. For instance, Curtis devotes long portions of the film to intelligent computer networks and artificial intelligence. He explains how much of the world—for instance, our credit histories and various life decisions—is influenced by a network of computer systems that is quietly gathering information about us. The role of these systems is to create a fake technological utopia to maintain stability, and to predict and counter risks before they happen. A part of this same network is also enabling Curtis to produce his Internet-only documentaries. Which can easily lead viewers into asking: which reality is real?
In Curtis’s celebrated documentary The Century of the Self (2002), he details how Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, helped invent modern public relations, and perhaps modern society itself. The concept was simple: sell the idea of the self to people. For instance, according to Bernays, you didn’t buy a new car because the old one had burnt out; you bought a more modern one to increase your “self” esteem. Similarly, you didn’t vote for a political party out of duty, or because you believed it had the best policies to advance the common good; you did so because of a secret feeling that it offered you the most likely opportunity to promote and express your “self”.
It is useful to refer to that film while absorbing the revelations of HyperNormalisation . While certain historical events might certainly have conspired to create the chaos of today, it goes only as far as the actions of people, not their motivations. If we consider the nation as a giant self (Curtis might call it Hyper Self), it certainly becomes easy to understand why America, the birthplace of the modern notion of “self”, appears at the root, and in the midst, of major global conflicts.
Despite radical notions bordering on conspiracy theory, HyperNormalisation finds it easy to be convincing. Recent headlines have been rife with reports of inscrutable, maddening, destructive actions by politicians the world over. The Chilcot Report, for instance, reveals Tony Blair’s lies and concocted reasons to invade Iraq. In the Philippines, thousands have been killed extra-judicially since July in President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drugs. Edward Snowden’s extraordinary revelations of snooping by the National Security Agency in the U.S. have made him a villain, instead of a hero. Closer home, State-sponsored propaganda has been successfully disseminated through WhatsApp groups and influenced elections.
If you’re reading this, and the world still appears normal and stable, perhaps it’s time to break the spell by watching this film.
The writer is photographer and founder of The Indiestani Project, a poetography collaboration.