What Is Hypernormalization?
adbusters.org
adbusters.org
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhVN0UpyH4
//[a story of how] governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex real world and instead established a simpler fake world for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. The film was released on 16 October 2016//
Curtis' signature style is to propose a thesis and develop it entirely via BBC News video archive segments arranged as an impressionistic, editorial montage. The news segments are bound together by V.O. (or text) narrative, and punctuated by a soundtrack of esoteric pop music to impose a personal perspective and stimulate a gestalt critique.
Curtis' impressionistic style follows an approach popularized by H. Marshall McLuhan that McLuhan termed "probes" and gestalt, which combines the classically Greek intellectual features of the trivium with the tactile sensitivities of an artist to find a whole out of parts.
The probe approach allows an interlocutor to transcend rational (Aristotelian) thought without abdicating the powerful tools of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The intellectual gesture utilized is Hegelian "aufheben": the transcendence of contradictions (thesis vs. antithesis) through a lifting-up into a higher order that accounts for the conflict and places the antagonistic precepts into a position of reconciliation (synthesis).
Gestalt is the human capacity to perform aufheben over the entire range of our sensorium and thus perceive a whole that is at once made of parts and greater than the parts.
Cutis applies a probe / gestalt approach with the BBC news archive to develop a thesis that although subject to the tribal zeitgeist of 20th century electronic media, lifts the news artifacts into a synthesis of a theory of corporate political power. His quandary is democratic. He states this in the form of a quote from David Graeber: "The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently"
Curtis' is sometimes derided or dismissed as manipulative for his artistic approach, under an observation that propaganda works on the same probe and gestalt principles, but this isn't a serious criticism because the sociological pathos being examined (in this case a question begged by the thesis of hypernormalization) is ideological by nature, and if a more rigorous linear comprehensioned had generated the sociological features under examination, there should have been be no pathos to examine.
Curtis is aware that the creation of (fake) reality is both the social malaise and its cure.
For example, the fact that Newton's celestial mechanics are incomplete according to relativistic and quantum features doesn't preclude a manned moon mission organized according to Newton's laws. But did Artemis really get to the moon?!
The late social critic Mark Fisher, who coined the term "capitalist realism", applied critical theory and post-modernist philosophy to create influential analysis adjacent to Curtis. Fisher also nodded to esoteric TV and pop music to amplify points about corporate ideology and lifestyles, and routinely evoked personal anecdotes about his own work life as probes.
See:
Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia - Jonas Čeika (11m)