Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review
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I think Curtis does this on purpose. Whenever I watch a Curtis doco, I feel I'm being told a compelling story. However, if you ask me afterwards what it was about, I will stumble to explain what it was about. I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world and how difficult it is to actually get a grasp on reality and that there are no good guys and bad guys and that we're all the good guys and bad guys and that most of what we "believe" to be true is a simplification (a caricature) of reality.
"Good guys" and "bad guys" are just a part of this narrative we create. People are a product of their past, which is also complex, but good and bad are powerful models we are programmed since childhood to apply to the world.
I think one of the core ideas that is smeared across Curtis’ work is that these narratives are created and fed to us as an explanation of the world that we rarely question.
In fact, he seems to rebuke moral relativism, if HyperNormalisation is any indicator.
>there are no good guys and bad guys
I don't think that's what he is implying. He is leaving it up to our interpretation but the absence of a position does not mean he is saying that there are no good or bad guys. From what I gathered, he's not saying anything at all.
Big fan of his work regardless.
Agreed.
> I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world
An alternative, more reasonable take is that Adam Curtis is a bullshitter, whose documentaries give the illusion of understanding complicated subjects without any actual understanding.
Only God knows the whole truth! /sarcasm
Both can be true imo.
The problem is that the media which we consume is made ephemeral by way of omission. Media is turned into 'intellectual property' by our outdated copyright/IP system, which makes (now)digital media artificially scarce. Someone like Adam Curtis is merely lucky because he has both the time and the access to this material, and the BBC is paying the 'licensing fees' for the footage he uses.
The average working class person in the US is constantly bombarded with media, yet our collective memory (in the form of archival video/media) is often lacking universal access. So the means to reflect and make connections and conclusions is artificially scarce, which means we jump from newsworthy 'event' to 'event' (without seeing and understanding their interconnectedness):
"To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."
- Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord [1]
or Wikipedia summary:
"Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution." [2]
In other words, the schizophrenic capitalist-owned media isn't followable without serious mental health implications as it's an overwhelming never-ending assault that captures the working class' imagination. The confusion and alienation it creates solely benefits the propertied class.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.ht...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
He is trying to give perspective rather than telling a story. Yet, by selecting the elements he uses to base the perspective, he’s kind of telling the skeleton of a story.
*But the old systems had never gone away.
And then one person realised there was a vacuum at the heart of it all.
But they had forgotten to program the computers with the one thing that really mattered.
And then...." etc.
I honestly can't tell if it's meta-parody. And that's why I'll keep watching.
I'm kinda in the same boat. But I think one of the things I like about Curtis is that he's made me read more about things I didn't know about.
For example I'd never given much thought about Afghanistan (other than Afghan coats) until the Soviet Union invaded. I was an early teenager (I'm in my mid 50s now), but reasonably interested in world politics, and even back then, and the Afghan war seemed like another cold war proxy conflict, and same old same old.
There were many events like that for me, and then I bumped into Curtis in 1992 and his Pandora's box series and I was sort of wowed at his take on the world. These wee snippets of, often obscure, history made tantalisingly accessible and fascinating by the way he assembles his final cuts, so much so that I went off and bought books on history rather than be informed by the opinion pieces in the Times (London), The Guardian etc. I will caveat that I realise history books are not free of bias.
Whatever he's doing I think it's a good thing. Sure he often reaches no conclusions but he throws many ideas at us to make us think. Maybe proper historians rue the day he got the cart blanch from the BBC to make these films and series and don't find them "academic" enough. And maybe his work is just a form of meta-parody art, but there's always something in these films to tickle your grey matter.
Finally, if anyone's interested in a docu-fictional story about the British Empire's comeuppance in Afghanistan the I'd recommend the first book in George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" series:
I love Bitter Lake and The Power of Nightmares, but cannot stand HyperNormalisation for having almost nothing to do with the book's concepts, regardless of whether it stands on its own.
It hits the nail on the head (but I still enjoy Curtis' work)
> [Brooker] I’m guessing you’ve seen the parodies, things like the Adam Curtis Bingo Card, where people are – I think affectionately – listing some of your stylistic quirks. How do you feel about those?
> [Curtis] I really like the parodies when they are good. That one called The Loving Trap I loved, because it was so sharp. It spotted that really it was the voice. It was just really well done.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-b...
> the audience didn't notice the chasm between argument and conclusion.
due to all the crap he throws up on the screen.
That's what it is, basically, just dressed up in a faux academic presentation. Also it's not too far removed from the "Jews are running the world from the shadows" narrative of the far right.
Not everything is wrong in his movies, but he only ever scratches a very very thin layer off the surface because he knows if he went deep into a certain topic his movies would be far less compelling and much more boring.
I enjoyed and somewhat agreed with the main thesis of hypernormalisation but it just seemed impossible to verify.
It doesn't help that a lot of his work is inspired by philosophers writing about society, which is usually completely unfalsifiable and comes with a certain smugness.
The elements can be verified but does that mean his central thesis is emergent or the result of people's will?
Is Curtis himself a hypernormalizer? I am tempted to say yes.
He is the only guy I believe when it comes to politics. He things as they can be seen (often backed up by video evidence) not narratives.
Its an accurate view of politics that actually explains a lot of what happens
Curtis has a gift of picking out obscure and interesting clips many of which were filmed before many of his audience (including myself) were even born. His British slant (and the fact that they come from the BBC archives) may make their relevance to those watching from outside of the UK particularly low however, depending on the overall film's subject matter.
I am British so no complaints about archival footage
FWIW I am deeply sceptical of fictional accounts of the human condition. What's the difference between (say) Lord of the flies and some white supremacist novel - ignoring the actual quality of the writing? They both purport to tell deep truths about the human condition, but does that mean they are right? Telling us something does not mean that thing is true; I think this is a real blight on our discourse (and probably will be forever).
The only time something like the lord of the flies ever actually happened in real life, the story was apparently very different
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
I found the film difficult to consume.
He mentions "wahaabism" very early on. Then he keeps linking the Taliban to wahaabism. Well, they're related, in that both are islamic revivalists. But from the start, the mention of "wahaabism" put me off, and led me to question his arguments. You see, there is nobody that refers to him/herself as a "wahaabist". The term is considered insulting. Saudi revivalists call themselves "salafists".
So that got my ears pricked-up looking for propaganda.
He then launches into a long chain of argument, claiming that the Taliban are the direct result of CIA interference in the Moslem world. I can't refute that claim, but I found many of the links in the chain rather tenuous; and his conclusions depend on all of those links.
There is a lot of footage I've not seen before, and a bunch of material that was pretty interesting. But the Taliban and AQ were not cut from the same cloth; the Taliban are Afghan Pashtuns, and they regard AQ as "foreigners".
I mean, it all seems fairly plausible; but I felt after watching it that I wasn't convinced. I guess what I need reading material, with links to sources.
I just found "The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom" on iPlayer. When it came out I only managed to see episode 1, which I liked a lot. So now I'm (re)watching the whole set of 3.
The Taliban are interested in Afghanistan. In fact I suspect they are primarily interested in "Pashtunistan", or Waziristan. They are interested in western Afghanistan only insofar as it is primarily Shia, and the Taliban are very much sectarian Sunnis. I don't think many Taliban are particularly interested in what happens in faraway Saudi Arabia.
AQ are interested in destroying the enemies of their kind of Sunni islam, especially in Saudi Arabia and the USA. So while the Taliban and AQ share a Sunni affiliation, the former want to run Afghanistan; the latter want to change the whole world.
My point was that the Taliban have limited geographical ambitions; even within Afghanistan, the regions on the border with Iran (like Jalalabad) are not Taliban-friendly. In the north, the tajiks, turkmen and so on are likely to oppose the Taliban. They face a lot of internal opposition, even without the West interfering.
It's never been clear to me as to why he would want to turn his audience away, but the only thing I can come up with is that it's generational, as many of these bad sound clips come from the 1960s and 1970s, and it's possible they sound different to his ear than they do to mine.
In other words, I have a weird susceptibility to loud music that hits certain notes. I suspect most people don't even notice how disturbing some of the music samples he uses can be to some people, so this is probably on me. It's likely Curtis isn't even aware of it.
I've had a strange reaction to certain sounds, colors, and textures all my life, so I'm probably projecting my preferences on to Curtis. I really enjoy the films by Curtis, but I have trouble watching them because the sound is so triggering to me.
Those samples he commonly uses, where it sounds like high pitched squeals (violin?) and overdriven metal on metal tones (synth or tube amp with reverb) drive me crazy. It's literally painful for me to listen to it.
Ironic that the episode is largely about paranoia,disinformation and persuading someone's thoughts based on narratives. Curtis asserts shaky if not outright wrong results about a once popular American Mythos, MK Ultra.
If my suspicions are true; in that which he has assembled a series of facts that he believes fits a certain narrative that he is weaving into this documentary, the irony would further solidify into an ingot. As this first episode is also about succumbing to false narratives via paranoia and the false idea that appearance of patterns alone are evidence enough of a phenomenon. While this episode attempts to dispel the notion that grand conspiracies and higher forces are driving the centuries narrative, his cuts and edits and how he presents the information may weave his own.
It's disappointing because I want to watch something like this that condenses and attempts to form some kind of understanding on how the state of the world is today.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...
> Senator SCHWEIKER. Subproject 54, MKULTRA, which involved examination of techniques to cause brain concussions and amnesia by using weapons or sound waves to strike individuals without giving and without leaving any clear physical marks. Someone dubbed it "perfect concussion" - maybe that was poetic license on the part of our staff rather than your poets over there. I wonder if you could just tell us what brain concussion experiments were about?
> Admiral TURNER. This project, No. 54, was canceled, and never carried out.
> Senator SCHWEIKER. Well, I do believe the first year of the project in 1955 was carried out by the Office of Naval Research, according to the information that you supplied us. The CIA seems to have been participating in some way at that point, because the records go on to say that the experimenter at ONR found out about CIA's role, discovered that it was a cover, and then the project was transferred to MKULTRA in 1956. Again, this is all from the backup material you have given us. So, it was canceled at some time. I am not disagreeing with that, but apparently for at least a year or two, somebody was investigating the production of brain concussions with special blackjacks, sound waves, and other methods as detailed in the backup material.
> Admiral TURNER. The data available to me is that this project was never funded by the CIA, but I will double-check that and furnish the information for the record for you as to whether there was ever any connection here and if so, what the nature of the work was.
Edit: The cited blog actually does cite a research poll, my mistake! https://www.unz.com/isteve/why-the-taliban-won-sharia-is-dem...
I think the better analogy is what a Fox News viewer thinks a word like "liberal", "BLM" or whatever buzzword or label represents and what the people who use it to describe themselves mean by it. That broadens and distorts further than the real difference between two people within a community or faith.
Dark hints that non-christians can't be civilized or something? Hard to argue with since it not stated but presented in a vague and poetic way, but seems obviously false if that is the claim.
I still recommend Century Of The Self as a great piece of documentary filmmaking.
It’s filled with rich material but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air.
That was the official story.
The unofficial story was than an emerging empire was flexing its muscles and extending its reach, as it had already done e.g. in the Phillipines, and its military and industry wanted wanted more of the global pie (though, for historical reasons, it would have to do it in a post-colonial world, and in a post-colonial manner - Banana Republics, proxy wars, and support for every dictatorship under the sun, all in the name of giving this "elixir of liberty").
https://letterboxd.com/gdw/film/bitter-lake-2015/
I was then able to go back and read the submitted link and it no longer seemed to be written in a foreign language.
Also FYI this mag is a project of the “dissident right”, formerly “alt”, broadly construed, (don’t intend any judgement just informing).
And yet, what he offers up is profoundly orthodox, explicit, postmodernism with a capital P: the music, visuals, world view, narrative style, overlapping narratives, the intertextuality.
My sense is that he is somehow simultaneously frustrated and altogether too pleased with the fact that this is the best story he can tell. That is, that everything is connected in a bewildering, unknowable number of ways and nobody has any real new understanding as to how best to move forward beyond the old paradigms that trap us.
He frequently criticises the left for not having any new ideas—with some merit. Ultimately, however, neither does he.
He basically said he makes films for an amoral media industry. But perhaps his art reveals this?
I love them, but I mostly agree with his world view already.