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Comment by zajd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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