HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) [video] | Hacker News Reader

HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) [video]

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85 pointskaivi45 comments

While trying to parse the 2016 election I watched Steve Bannon’s magnum opus Generation Zero[1] and was struck by how much certain parts of it felt like an Adam Curtis film, with its heavy use of stock footage for tone rather than exposition. My main problem with Adam Curtis is that he’s more of a political artist than a historian, but his fans treat him like the latter. I guess that’s the problem with Bannon too.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsqu9gh6xhk

I think of Adam Curtis as a journalist. You may disagree with his facts or interpretation of them, but he tells an interesting story with his investigations.

It’s a stretch to call what he does journalism, but I suppose it depends on where you draw the circle around “journalist”. He uses real world events and people as his raw materials, but the subjects of his films are his own perspectives even if he isn’t up front about that. I wouldn’t classify Erol Morris as a journalist either, but he is much more in that category than Curtis because he is more interested in making the unknown known than presenting his own philosophy.

While I don’t think that Adam Curtis can hold a candle to Chris Marker as an artist, or in terms of telling an interesting story or conducting an investigation, I would put his work in the same category of “film essay”.

Looking at this the other way around, I think people want to conceive of politics as an objective science when in reality it's much more of an art form. Steve Bannon realized earlier than most people that politics is all about narrative and has used that realization to forward his political goals. Curtis is similar, although I don't think he has as specific a political motivation as Bannon. I think he more just likes narrative for narrative's sake and happens to have chosen politics as the backdrop for that. Probably not fully understanding how people would respond to it.

High resolution here:

http://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/

More of Adam Curtis's filmography:

http://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/

wow thank you for the link, definitely downloading every last one of those films!!

the youtube version is higher res

I like Curtis, but his style of narration always makes me think of Professor Brian O'Blivion[1] in Cronenberg's Videodrome (which for all I know is intentional...).

1: https://youtu.be/xfUX9W5TJIQ

Brian O’Blivion was heavily based on Marshall McLuhan if you want to go further down the rabbit hole.

The Medium is the Message

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4

Vi Hart's incredible explanation of the modern medium (youtube) and how it affects the message, and the wise words (probably written by McLuhan) in Edmund Snow Carpenter's "They Became What They Beheld".

For a summary of the economic mechanisms creating our current hypernormal situation, I strongly recommend watching Mark Blyth's recent lecture[1]. (note that he is giving a summary to a general audience; see his actual publications and/or other lectures for details/references)

Adam Curtis talks about the need for the "big vision" for actual change to happen. Mark Blyth, at the end of the lecture, has a few very simple ideas for "big vision" goals that are actually realistic and achievable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGITb0W4A

In my opinion this is a bad documentary.

I see a lot of praise for it, but I see nothing but a disjointed, hard-to-follow argument, that feels like its backed by no (or irrelevant) facts. I leave the documentary feeling less enlightened, and more confused.

It almost feels like the narrative is written by a high-school student with no ability to focus, or refine an idea -- and linking random pieces of information together to push a narrative.

I think the Youtube video posted by user zajd in this thread perfectly lampoons Adam Curtis's style.

> disjointed, hard-to-follow argument, that feels like its backed by no (or irrelevant) facts

Respectfully, I have to disagree. I watched this documentary for the first time last night and came away feeling that the jarring tone was deliberate (the whole point was that our unease about the chaos of the world is being exploited for political means).

I'm curious if you were familiar with many of the events depicted in the documentary? I suspect it would have been harder to follow without some knowledge of these events.

Previous discussions:

- 10 months ago (112 points, 19 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603570

- And a year ago (301 points, 136 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603570

If you like this there are many other great documentaries by him - Century of the Self, Every day is Sunday, Bitter Lake, The Power of Nightmares (?) - watch them with a grain of salt, all of them, but definitely rewatch them, too..

(I know this is going to be a bit of a controversial statement for HN bc of politics and junk, but, to butcher and reconstitute a particuarly memorable Slavoj Zizek quote about Peter Sloterdijk, "Adam Curtis may be a conservative, but he's not an idiot!")

edit: if you dont have the 3 hrs to watch this documentary, you can get a great taste by watching this podcast clip set to some particularly moving imagery and music.. (hat tip to adam curtis editing style, perhaps? ;) )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW_R98EBO7s

edit2: transcript, because its worth it:

> WILL MENAKER: What would it look like to imagine a different world? Do you have a vision of it How would we know if we were beginning to imagine a different world? Even within this hyper-real one?

> ADAM CURTIS: You ask what real change might look like, and I think that’s a really interesting question for liberals and radicals, because there is a hunger for change, out there - millions of people who feel sort of insecure, uncertain about the future who DO want something to change. I think that change only comes though a big imaginative idea. A sort of picture of another kind of future which gives people - which connects with that fearfulness in the back of people’s minds. And offers them a release from it. That's the key thing. But I think the question for liberals and radicals is - they are always suspicious of big ideas. That's what lurks underneath the liberal mindset. And the reason is - and they are quite right in a way - is look what happened last time when millions of people got swept up in a big idea! Look up the last hundred years - what happened in Russia, and then in Germany. The point is , Is that Political change is frightening. It's scary — it's thrilling because it is dynamic and is doing something to change the world but it is scary because it can change things in ways where nothing to secure. Its like being in an earthquake. Even the solid ground beneath you begins to move. And things dissolve that you think are solid and real. And I think the question liberals are left have to face at the moment is a really sort of difficult question which is: “do you really want change? do you really want it?” Because if you do many of them might find themselves in a very uncertain world where they might lose all sorts of things. What we were talking about, in many cases, is people who are at the center of society at the moment, they are not out in the margins. They would have a lot to lose from real political change because it really would change things in the structure of power.

Or - and this is the brutal question: Do you just want things to change a little bit? Do you just want the banks to be a little bit nicer, or for people to be a little more respectful of each other's identities - All of which is good - but basically you carry on living in a nice world where you tinker with it.

That’s the key question. But you can't just sit there forever worrying about big ideas because there are millions of people out there who do you want Change. And the key thing is: they feel they’ve got nothing to lose. You might have lots to lose, but they feel they’ve got absolute nothing to lose. But at the moment they're being led by the Right. So things won't remain the same. But society may go off in ways you really don’t want.

SO in answer to your question, what you need is a powerful vision of the future. With all its dangers. But it is also quite thrilling. It will be an escape from the staticness of the world we have today. And to do that, you’ve got to engage with the giant forces of power that now run the world, at the moment. And the key thing is that in confronting those powers, and trying to transform the world you might lose a lot. This is a sort of forgotten idea. Is that actually you surrender yourself up to a big idea and in the the process you might lose something but you’d actually gain a bigger sense, because you change the world for the better. I know it sounds soppy, But this is the forgotten thing about politics. Is that you give up some of your individualism to something bigger than yourself. You surrender yourself - and it’s a lost idea. And I think really in answer to your question: You can spot real change happening when you see people from the liberal middle classes, beginning to give themselves up to something. Surrender themselves for something bigger. And at the moment, there is nothing like that in the liberal imagination.

Thanks, I've enjoyed it a lot, strange how I haven't heard about Adam Curtis earlier. When I watched it, I've had a similar feeling as that during the first semester of philosophy class - things I've noticed and ideas I've had before were not novel, and here is a whole movie made to organize these things in my head. Thought the narrative of isolated bubbles in social networks would resonate with HN crowd.

One of my favoirte movies.

Love Adam Curtis but this video more or less ruined his films for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

Little did you know, you were part of of an ever growing movement of young people who's experience of Adam Curtis was ruined by that Youtube video, and who would, in the span of only two short decades, come to redefine what humanity knew about Adam Curtis.

But this was a fantasy. In fact, Adam Curtis simply never existed, and neither did young people. At least, that's what we were led to believe by a series of internet comments while at the same time, the government undertook a series of seemingly unrelated actions.

It was an impressive aping of his style, and pretty funny (I really like the bit about the death valley footage: "And so viewers assumed that Death Valley would figure into the argument. But this was a fantasy.")

But as an actual critique it is pitiful. Basically boils down to "The pictures on screen aren't literal!" and "I disagree politically, so Curtis is wrong".

It feels like the creator has trouble following Curtis' arguments and loses the thread, which isn't hard to do with his work I suppose.

It sort of feels like "format policing", a la "tone policing". Like the mere way Curtis presents his ideas invalidates them somehow.

I don't know how many people recommended HyperNormalisation to me already, yet I've never been able to sit through the whole thing. I absolutely dislike his style, the image so dispatched from the narrative... So thank you for that video, it really fits my feelings about his work.

I on the other hand like the style for its own sake but enjoyed HyperNormalisation a lot less than Bitter Lake or The Power of Nightmares. But the style really does not help the credibility of the story or allows following the argument and spotting potential holes in it. In the end I am left with the feeling to either forget about it or having to fact check the whole thing. There are certainly interesting points in his films but they are almost impossible to evaluate without consulting other sources.

I also like the style. I get why people wouldn't, the argument is in the narrative and the video part is just flavour (and often a little bit of subtextual commentary/comedy).

I don't see how it effects credibility either way though. Do you just mean it would seem more credible with a full audio/video argument? I can buy that, it might feel more convincing while still having the same content.

I think he mixes hard facts, like descriptions of events that undeniably happened, a lot with interpretations or connections he draws and that he often presents as causations but then fails to substantiate them. It may be plausible that X did Y because of Z but that is not really supported by any facts and could as well just be a correlation. If you watch carefully enough you can spot those things but if you are watching more casually and enjoy the pictures and the music it becomes easy to miss such things. I think if the story was narrated in a dryer, more classical documentary style it would be more evident whether and where there are holes in the argument, after all the visuals and music certainly consume part of your attention.

I think you've nailed the problem for me as well: possibilities and opinions are presented in the same style as facts. This is more like what is done by news reporters than history documentarians.

I am not happy when opinions and possibilities are promoted as though they are facts, but I only tend to pay attention when I do not agree with the position. Adam Curtis does this a lot to link things together that seem otherwise unconnected and the position he takes tends to be rather inoffensive to me.

This is made worse by being combined with archive footage: we tend to believe our eyes in a way we don't our ears. I don't feel qualified enough to confirm that the archive footage is even about the events which are being discussed.

Thinking about it some more, I would be outright hostile towards his methods if the narrative were to move into a position that I did find offensive.

This was interesting to read. Especially the fantasy/thought-experiment about how I might feel if the narrative were to move to a position that I found offensive.

But then I switch on 60 Minutes. Or read the NYT. And I realize that they do not even have the courtesy to make it possible to distinguish fact from opinion and possibly (and in the case of the NYT outright fabrications planted by the military).

I do not take Adam Curtis as Truth. But his work has suggested that there are ways to stitch together narratives that suit different mindsets.

But ultimately I think that's a component of his overarching mindset. That sort of post modern 'there is no thing as objective fact', but instead a sea of conflicting opinions and intentions that a lot of times diverges from the popular viewpoint the more details you know.

> It may be plausible that X did Y because of Z but that is not really supported by any facts and could as well just be a correlation.

Any historical work at the abstract high level of societal forces and societal evolution has the same problems though. How on earth do you prove that X did Y because of Z with facts?

The fact that the format is less familiar seems to just be making it more apparent that history is interpreted.

How on earth do you prove that X did Y because of Z with facts?

[Auto]biographies, letters, interviews of friends, family members and companion, diaries, records about the books they lent from the library, intelligence records ... we know quite a lot about the motivations of well-researched important personalities. It would of course still not be a proof of mathematical rigor but such sources would definitely lend a lot of credibility if they are itself reliable.

I have this problem too. I have the problem that even though I admire the complexity and the hopping from location to location, to me it's the fact that it's spun into a narrative that makes me feel uncomfortable that some people will treat it like it's more than a hypothetical narrative.

I haven't found any events that were not real or were convincingly disputed in the Adam Curtis films I've seen. Some of the claims of causation and responsibility are a little more disputed -- the bit where it is claimed it was really Syria behind the attacks blamed on Libya ignores the fact that others claim it was Iran stands out for me.

I tend to view it like a history documentary. You can't really trust it because it will be a narrative account and so many of the events in history are dependent on the greater context for a deeper understanding. But it's probably fine for an idea of what you should look into.

In the case of most history documentaries they take the narrative they think is the easiest for the audience to understand as they go through things that happened. The narrative makes it more interesting at the expense of academic rigour.

In the case of Adam Curtis films I often feel that he is trying to find the most mind-bending narrative and choosing events to suit that. Other times I get the impression that he is choosing key bits of archive footage he likes and finding a narrative to fit that. Personally I'm fine with this because I have no expectation for him to cover events across a time span or even chronologically.

The truth is that events happen. Sometimes those events don't even happen for a reason. Other times they happen for a reason. Sometimes the reason that seems most obvious afterwards was never even entertained at the time. The real world isn't a narrative, it's much more complex than that.

I think this goes back philosophically to the theories of Marshall McLuhan, specifically The Medium is the Message.

Take for example, YouTube. And I do me YouTube, not video. YouTube isn't video. Video doesn't allow annotations (although those are thankfully going away), or referencing other videos, or references to the comments or description. Although some of these things exist on other video services, they're pretty much the defacto standard people think about in relation to YouTube. Their format has changed the way we interact with video.

It's almost the ultimate circle come-round from the concepts in Videodrome.

> the style really does not help the credibility of the story or allows following the argument

Yeah, I wish there was a supporting text document with citations.

Well, there are captions. That's cool, given that I'm using a VM with no audio, to avoid audio info leakage. But damn, almost three hours is quite the time commitment. Especially reading rapid-fire captions.

Edit: ... especially in the context of a HN topic. By the time I get around to watching it, the topic will be effectively dead.

The problem with Curtis is that he lacks a positive vision of the future.

Funny, that was exactly his criticism of American liberalism in his interview on Chapo: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future...

Quite interesting.

Many of the topics that Curtis mentions has shown up in his previous documentaries. Like that about Ayn Rand individualism, the mechanistic view of the world, or the fear of grand ideas.

This video someone made from that clip is particularly a enthralling audiovisual experience about visions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW_R98EBO7s

IDK, rarely does Curtis touch on the future. He seems to mainly view the past through a sort of interconnected lens that, sure, makes us look at the players as human and fallible.

IMO, that kind of critical view of the past is necessary for us to do better in the future.

There are many good critiques of Adam Curtis but this one is one of the less important ones to me imo?

Consider for example, the movie Koyaanisqatsi - I feel like you can make a similar critique on the linear/onedimensionality de facto property of an archival-footage-only movie. Though there is a big difference between music only and footage vs footage and narrative, I guess

> "...and thanks to Adam Curtis, Brian Eno never had to work again..."

It is good to be critical of things you like. This is actually pretty funny satire, and will hopefully make me think the next time I watch a Youtube video that's just unrelated stock footage to disguise a talking head.

...I still like Adam Curtis though.

There's always https://www.tomscott.com/infinite-adam-curtis/ too

Yeah I like his style but they really all seem like opinion pieces with no sources whatsoever.

I still enjoy them but they are barely technically documentaries.

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