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yeah, watched this now. i think the first thing to say is that he's a genius at compiling and presenting footage. the documentary presents a post-war image of afghanistan that's totally compelling. mainly the film adheres to a structure where there's chronological post-war footage+narrative in the Curtis style, and contemporary-ish Afghanistan footage without narrative, tho that structure is confusingly not always adhered to, which gives the film an almost impressionistic feel.
there are all sorts of remarkable bits - ones that stick in my mind are an electrifying Afghan village speech about how they are not Taliban but Afghan's and how they will kill the British and if they British kill them their ghosts will rise from the sands of Afghanistan, valerie singleton with an afghan hound waving to the Saudi King, an english art school teacher explaining conceptual art and Marcelle Duchamp and urinals to an understandably completely bemused room of Kabul women, the Texan socialite describing her meeting with the mujahideen, all interspersed with brutal gunfights and the textured images of artillery sites and night vision. there's a dancing leitmotiv. i don't know what that's about but it kind of works as a sort of abstract thread of continuity (he possibly links it to the fluttering bird trying to escape through the window).
but then there's a narrative thread and that's where he's complicated - or rather the authoritarian smoothness of his delivery means you have to be constantly vigilant for complications and possibly hidden ideology underneath.
The opening lines are classic Curtis - at almost every line your brain's screaming HANG ON HANG ON:
increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense
what's this increasingly? typical curtis ahistoricism, with added unfalsifiability. abuse of thought grammar too - can you have 'increasingly' where you also have 'nothing'? It's a form of high Gallic style. and you have to be rock solid that the patterns of your prose map somewhere on to the patterns of your facts. With Curtis that relation is a continuous three-card trick of misdirection between statement and fact.
events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain
us! we! no-one! his communal identifications are weird and unhelpful. 'they' is usually politicians and the 'establishment' and often the media, though that's a difficult area for him. we is... I don't know, a less 'informed' version of him? This is deliberate though. What it looks like to me is that this is part of his desire for 'new stories', and by that he doesn't mean journalistic stories, that make sense of detail and expose news stories, but a new set of binaries (we, them) that can be used as a new form of political rhetoric. there's a good, if intemperate and not always otm critique here. right-wing trash in a left-wing guise is his contention, via associating Curtis with post-Marxist libertarianism of Frank Furedi (in fact i think i read this about the time of the Brixton Mao Zedong Memorial 'slavery' story). His question about who you are co-opting when you say 'we', and then looking at Curtis's fellow travellers, is fairly persuasive. Though sometimes I think the piece sometimes confuses Curtis's fascination for approval.
It is a theory that goes a long way to explain Curtis's shameful underanalysis and simplification of the '70s and '80s economic situation in Britain - a place where you would have thought his ideas of political stories being sold to a populace would have an awful lot of weight. Again, the shift of power from manufacturing to finance isn't wrong, but it's misleadingly glib. (Another dreadful bit of glibness in the documentary is where he basically goes 'some left wing students came back from the states to Afghanistan and, by mixing their ideas with Soviet ideology, started a revolution'.)
those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality
i'll just about allow that? i mean this is not how the relationship between government and 'the people' is traditionally represented, but certainly they have an interest in creating a rhetorical world where their world view and actions are seen to be justified and in fact the right course of action. it's not really a maieutic relationship though is it? and i'm not sure anyone really sees it as such. this is more about what Curtis thinks his stories, or future stories should be doing.
That said, the first chapter of Daniel T Rodgers' The Age of Fracture is a close analysis of presidential speeches since WWII, and there's a couple of things in there.
There had not always been so many words. Surrounding public figures with a nearly endless sea of rhetoric is an invention of the twentieth century. Presidents, in particular, once talked in public far less often than they do now. Thomas Jefferson's rule that presidents should communicate to Congress only in writing remained the norm until Woodrow WIlson broke it in 1913. ... Jeffrey Tulis counted a total of about a thousand presidential speeches delivered over the course of the nineteenth century, almost the number that Jimmy Carter gave in his four years in office. Even in the twentieth century, the stream of words that presidents have issued has grown dramatically. Franklin Roosevelt gave less than three hundred speeches of all sorts during the New Deal's first term – vastly more than Lincoln (who gave seventy-eight) but far below the thousand-speeches-a-term rate that Reagan, GWH Bush, and Clinton all chalked up.
The point here I guess is that there is some sense that a suffusion of national political rhetoric, defining identity, has increased, and has become more easily transmitted to everyone via the media. If you add neo-con Irving Kristol's dictum into the mix -
"What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived,"
and
In the generation after 1945, the assumptions that saturated the public talk of presidents were the terms of the Cold War. In language and setting, a sense of historically clashing structures dominated the presidential style. Urgency and obligation were its hallmarks. The Cold War political style clothed the events of the moment in high seriousness; it bound them into a drama of global struggle; it drew leaders and nation into tight and urgent relationships. It formed a way of articulating public life in which society, power, and history pressed down on individual lives as inescapably dense and weighty presences.
then you get something not too far from what Adam Curtis is saying. In fact the chapter goes on to chart a decline in Cold War rhetoric with Reagan in the '80s. for those that raise an eyebrow at that, the argument is that he moved away from metaphors of crisis, to fairly consistent national ones of 'unbounded dreams' that avoided specific reference to foreign policy.
The bit in the documentary where the text on the screen says "At the end of the 20th century, faced with a complex world, politicians retreated into simple stories of right and wrong, moral fables of good versus evil... so they did what President Reagan had done - they ruthlessly simplified the complex struggles around the world'
is just self-contradictory and ignores too much that's been similar throughout history for it to hold any water.
but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow
I *think* what he's implying here is how Cold War manichæan rhetoric can't make sense of middle-east/oil alliances. he does create his own complications with his focus on 'rhetoric' though - the complication of the middle east alliances based round oil is far more easily understood in terms of material requirements than rhetoric. Here the confusions he talks about, the lack of sense, are created by his own insistence on stories as his model of interpretation.
this is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense
and how that led us in the west to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.
Yeah, i'll just about allow it. it's more about why binary oppositions of 'good' and 'bad' were terribly misguided when it came to afghanistan on a military/tactical level, and compromised because of the Saudi oil alliance on the political level. Curtis elides political rhetoric with military tactics (that's part of his 'we'/'they' thing - this was 'their' story, this is why it went wrong. I don't think James Meek's article Worse Than a Defeat says any different *really*, but the detail of his argument is crucial, which is that UK military eagerness to justify themselves and spending led them to go along with misguided political aims - that's the link between political rhetoric and military tactical error. And there were people who knew it at the time, as Meek says:
The most clear-eyed and honest assessment of what was going on came from the NCOs, the corporals and sergeants ... They understood quickly, and weren’t embarrassed to say, that the people attacking them were local, not outsiders; and that all the British army’s efforts were being drawn into self-protection.
And that really is one of the main assertions of Curtis's film - troops, UK troops especially, made a mistake about who was attacking them, because. blinded by an oversimple analysis of the 'Taliban' and democratic good versus terrorist evil, they couldn't see they were attacking locals. But that's a detailed argument that Curtis turns into a grand political statement of stories increasingly ceasing to make sense and becoming destructive on a global level. (Incidentally, the source of the evidence for this argument for both Meek and Curtis is Mike Martin, who features in both article and film). Meek's article is more detailed and interesting, but they are basically aligned.
David Kilcullen's book Out of the Mountains puts that tactical failure at another level as well:
For various institutional reasons, governments, military forces, law enforcement agencies, and even (perhaps especially) university faculties tend to prefer theories of conflict framed around a single threat—insurgency, terrorism, piracy, narcotics, gangs, organized crime, and so on. This approach—which results in well-known concepts like counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-piracy and so on—might be fine in a binary environment, where one government confronts one threat at a time, but in the real world—the world of complex, adaptive social systems such as cities, trading networks, and licit or illicit economies—there never has been, and never will be, a single-threat environment like this.
These are stories that make sense! Institutional slowness to adapt, hidebound former experts relying on old models, the slowness of published theory and education to catch up with fast changing global warfare. It's a paradox of ISIS that their tactics more like WWII blitzkrieg than the guerilla warfare - Western tactical approaches are more suited to that sort of warfare, still often based in WWII expertise, than Afghanistan.
Good communications, good mobility, and good propaganda – not far from a definition of blitzkrieg as practiced, especially if you read Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France.
That said, the late cold war airpower infrastructure of the Western powers was basically built to identify mechanised columns and operational-level command structures, and kill them with precision strike. here, and generally full of interesting logistics about Afghanistan and ISIS.
I watched the Wipe EOY review again just now - because like xyzzzz__ my impression had been that it was pure horseshit and that in fact, in its compressed way it's a better representation of what Curtis is trying to say in Bitter Lake than Bitter Lake is. In fact it's not *that* bad - the Vladimir Surkov stuff is fairly well documented (possibly paywalled, sorry), for instance, but then there's a big bait and switch where he says MAYBE the politicians in the west are doing the same thing. Define your terms! Either the west are using techniques of conceptual art and funding all sides at an attempt to create confusion and then in order to discredit the reported reality or... they're not. I'm going for the latter here. Maybe I'm naive, but i think they're probably confused and incompetent. It then fairly quickly shuffles to George Osborne, who is equated with Surkov. No, he just looks like any other chancellor trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear - it's a claim tenuous to the point of meaninglessness, a phrase that might apply to an awful lot of Curtis's grand political stuff. It then moves on to Quantitative Easing, and it's here, as in the Bitter Lake documentary that the ship really starts to rock. He's really shit at economics. But in a sense he's also *not wrong*. It's been in plain reported sight that the money that went into the economy via the banks wasn't then passed on to businesses in the way it was supposed to be and in a sense that *does* represent a transferal - well not strictly a transferal, but a creation - of wealth for the richest. But it's not a heist, it's not a secret and it's not confusing - it happens all the time.
It's also a story - infectious! - about the lack of media (as journalism) scrutiny, odd in a person so immersed in media (as form). If we're confused by politicians' stories, is it because no one - the campaigning journalism. that's probably as much about the decline of printed newspapers as the source of information as anything else. The last big campaign was, what, the Mail with Steven Lawrence? The big media event last year tellingly was the wikileaks and snowden stuff in the Guardian, but that was not a campaign of course, just an outflow of information none of which as far as I can tell was picked up and run with - the main outcome being scrutiny on surveillance and information gathering, without any meaningful outcome. I mean I did pick up on King Abdullah's viagra habit recently thanks to documented wikileaks, but Watergate it ain't.
A far more obvious statement about the problems of interpretation than Curtis's 'we need new stories' is Rory Stewart's now fairly famous quote:
In a way, he says, ordinary Afghans are far more powerful than British citizens, because at least they feel they can have a role in one of the country’s 20,000 villages. “But in our situation we’re all powerless. I mean, we pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” Some commentators, he says, think we’re run by an oligarchy. “But we’re not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don’t have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don’t have any. None of them have any power.
it's the inability to locate responsibility such that we can hold it to account. the closest we get is to be able to hold the government to account to hold the others to account.
so for me an appraisal of Adam Curtis's heavily political stuff boils down to these questions:
1) Description - did what he says happen really happen - usually yes I think - and did it really happen in the way he says it happened - a wary 'not proven, kind of feel uneasy about saying it did though, and sometimes definitively 'no''.
2) Methodology - is he right about the mechanics of how things happen? Answer: no, way too glib, massive distorting focus on 'stories' and media representation, there's a load of interesting material detail there that explains far better why things happened, and will also lead you to a more informed ability to create a master narrative if you wish.
3) Recommendations - are his solutions correct, or rather, what ideology do they imply? see above. really really weak - the whole we/us/them/nothing/no one/increasingly/ piece used to push a need for 'new stories'. Think the Pandora's docs essay makes a good case for saying this way lies fascism or totalitarianism.
2+3 are seriously tainted by each other, 1 is still useful I think, in forcing questions about grand political narratives.
Where the documentary is most successful I think, is in a central section, which binds Solaris, some references to mujahideen ghosts, and a theory of reciprocal cultural influence together. But this section's success isn't explanatory, it's more poetic, and perhaps better fits a film which purports to be explanatory, but is probably most successful aesthetically.
he's still great when he does goalkeeper crabs though.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 1 February 2015 13:33 (nine years ago) link