The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

OPERATION MINDFUCK!
https://imgur.com/a/k7pebfh

some more fun or at least frictive than usual form/content stuff going on in this one, like the way quite a bit of it seems to be saying "did you know there are people who believe that by making imaginative free-associative connections and organizing rapid streams of information along subliminal or emotional lines, you can affect their thoughts?" as sherlock holmes once said, yes i have heard something of the kind

audibly gasped tho at "you were willing to be quite ruthless weren't you?" "well, i-- i had to be ruthless, to be... f-free" like i wouldn't even have begrudged it if YOU HAVE TO BE RUTHLESS / TO BE FREE immediately appeared on the screen in colorful ariel

always nice to hear stars of the lid

resident jiang qing specialist is rolling her eyes at me rn

"an ongoing chaotic rush of biochemical data that flashes up and fades away... turned into stories that bear little relationship to the reality outside" you say?

think he consciously elides "but this was a fantasy" now even if he leaves innumerable opportunities for you to insert it yourself. on the other hand the dancing, "at the very same time", and "but in order to do this" are all absolutely out of control lol

(control being a fantasy)

Shouting “but this was a fantasy” while doing shots is how I’m going to watch ep2 of this tonight.

^^^ an extraordinary life

I know he will get the shit ripped out of him with all these shot playing games based around his his repetitively repeated deficiencies and amusing little peccadilloes etc, but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Agreed.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

If you can't manage a passable Adam Curtis then shoot for Geoffrey Palmer instead as it'll do in a pinch.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

lol

but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Which makes me hope that it's broadcast one day rather than just living on iPlayer. I'm not sure Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation ever were, but the episodic format of CGYOOMH means maybe this'll be different?

calzino otm and not limited to the bbc; all my posts itt are obv just sublimating that i watched this for five straight hours yesterday

just for the record I wasn't having a passive aggressive pop at anyone on this thread with my comment above!

<3

this show has multiple archival clips featuring fatuous plummy voices emanating from unseen figures sitting immediately behind the camera trying to impose their systems-of-control on whoever’s in front, which is another thing that feels strangely and pleasantly like autocritique

could just be a house style i guess

fave ariel so far: RECONSTRUCTING / THE SKELETON / OF THE TSAR

4 episodes in and loving it tbh. i'm not as well versed in history as the majority in this thread so lots and lots of stuff new to me in these. thought the person at the start of 'what is the people are stupid' was peter kay at first, turned out to be julia grant, and boy was her psychiatrist enraging.

the musical play out of that episode outstanding as well.

About two minutes into this my brain decided Curtis sounds fucking exactly like Kieth and I can’t make myself unhear it

it just feels like 5 hours listening to Kieth reading his focus-grouped shopping list with nothing on it or briefly apologising after fatally running you over with his tory cunt SUV.

I’m loving this so much. Thrilled to find out how quickly we can go from Ken Dodd to ISIS.

Yeah this is a blast

the Hong Kong material is powerful stuff, especially the children's choir singing a rod stewart song! but also the hypocrisy of a country that had run a colonial police state for over a century chatting shit about democracy during the handover and the shocking footage from '78 of Brit arsehole colonial thug cops giving some gentle treatment to the *natives*. On the BBC you still get lots of mealy mouthed bs reportage about HK and it wasn't that long ago some of the HK protesters were waving colonial flags.

I find Deng much more interesting than Jiang Qing, perhaps partly because I'm a sexist bastard! During the cultural revolution one of his sons was thrown from a window and seriously injured and left disabled, he was perhaps somewhat reluctantly given protection by Mao as a fellow long marcher, fellow early days revolutionary veteran etc despite becoming politically suspect, but that protection involved doing a mundane factory job and living in an obscure shithole for years. I'm not too sold on the importance of all that "unit of one" thing he has going on, but it's his show!

lol i’m into the individualism stuff tbh. actually suspect that content/thesiswise this is his best since at least TCOS (in which tho i could have sworn he claims psychologists “discovered” in the 20s and 30s what he claims this time they “discovered” in the 80s) (which is actually like, in shakespeare lol) tho i dunno if there’s as much eye candy as (the kinda muddled) bitter lake. looking forward to eps 5 and 6 as to a birthday party.

just been intensely moved by a bright eyes cue. may need to be taken out and shot

closing montage in e4 of iraqi militias / fictional klansmen / english pastoralism v good.

sorry, e5.

yes that was good, also farage + empire myths = oxycontin.

I can't remember which writer it was who suggested Jiang's power was very formidable but still somewhat exaggerated at her trial because the die was cast and the CCP had decided to deliver an Empress Dowager Cixi type figure to the people to cop for the murderous excesses of the cultural revolution and the mask fitted her perfectly. She might have been ruthless but not ruthless enough to win at the game of political factionalism.

The last episode is superb.

watched 1.5 episodes so far and have to say I am really enjoying it so far, being back in a full-length series and including more archive interviews seems to be the key here, everything he did in the 2010s seemed a bit too busy and unfocused, but this really seems to be a return to form

it's definitely been an improved experience on some of his weaker stuff in recent years. I think I'm going to watch it all again.

chris de burgh loving jihadist is the adam curtis content i crave

Not seen yet but good rev

arguably a bit spoily https://t.co/PLwHHZ8Ltx

— joolsd (@joolsd) February 12, 2021

best since the mayfair set is where i ended up too.

The new ones seem to be in YouTube now, not sure if they have the original music.

really good on britain+russia afaict. can't evaluate at all on china but sure liked looking at that big ceiling. some fuzzy claims i thought in some of the stuff about the domestic american experience of vietnam (seemed to nudge 70s economic crisis back into the 60s so as to explain antiwar unrest with it? which is funny cuz it's out of character) but the afeni/tupac stuff was terrific.

music cues v fun, "love" motif v effective, laughed in delight when end credits punched in.

i am on episode 3 and loving this

it just took me about 45 minutes to work out it was the track Corrin by Roly Porter from dubstep duo Vex'd that was making me go mad thinking I know what that is and also I don't know what the fuck it is when the intro kept resurfacing throughout.

Back in the Factsheet Five era of zine publishing I got a couple of Kerry Thornley’s zines/rants. Knew the story and it’s wild seeing it get the Adam Curtis treatment.

"What's Up?" house remix, you're a wily bastard, Curtis

one day i will maybe watch some adam c that isn't the living dead lol

today is not that day

just watched the first episode and though it was v good. i mean as a few people have said, Curtis is v good even when he's not very good, because there's almost no television that covers ideas. given the last ten years have seen major shifts in salient ideas, whether economic, technological or political, and the arguments about them (post GFC neoliberalism, the determinism of technology, the potency of social media, horseshoe politics, technocracy, centrism and populism, to name just a few that leap to the front of my mind), and that there are written expressions daily of these ideas on the left and right and from less politically defined groups, with new disciplines covering new thinking, it's quite incredible that television covers absolutely none of it with any degree of intelligence.

but this first episode was also good in itself. he's still vulnerable to ahistoricism ('we live in strange days,' 'societies have become split and polarised,' 'there is anger at inequality.' - show me the conditions where these haven't applied). But he does explicitly say that what he wants to analyse is the paralysis, and dynamic that some fear and some desire, of a 'return to normal.' That in itself is thrown into sharp relief, though he doesn't mention it, by climate change. So it's a reasonable question to be analysing, even if i don't agree with some of his terms.

His joint analysis of individualism across China, the States, Russia was really sophisticated I thought. And it was a good and interesting choice that one vector of his approach to expression of the individual against was the foregrounding of women, and their relationship to authority and men with Jiang Qing, Maya Plisetskaya, Edith Boole and Sandra Paul.

Still, it seems very hard to say that Jiang Qing was someone who helped usher in an age of individualism and the 'unit of one'. She may herself have been an expression of that but the society which she was according to his narrative helping to create was clearly not.

And there was something of a gasp at the very deep waters he was wading into with the statement that the internet has seen "patterns of suspicion moving into the data and multiplying endlessly across the system."

Still, he's set it up nicely, hitting definite areas of contention and relevance to the modern world, and i'm looking forward to watching the second episode possibly today.

Alan Whicker documentary was remarkable.

When Sandra Paul and Robin Douglas-Home from the Alan Whicker documentary came on, I thought "Hang on, this seems familiar" and I soon remembered that it was because I'd seen it via Adam Curtis before. He shared the full 40-minute film on his BBC blog a few years ago. It's a great watch.

And in checking that, I discovered that there are a whopping 500 or so films on the BBC's Adam Curtis archive page, mostly clips but sometimes full programmes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003tz2x/clips?page=1

i don't think i knew that existed, Alba, thanks!

the same!

interesting to see daniel kahneman make an appearance in the second one – he's clearly one of those people absolutely central to an awful lot of thinking in finance and behavioural policy and strategy, corporate and public. it's interesting that although his system 1 and 2 thinking still seems fairly standard, there are murmurings of replication crisis around social priming. Kahneman himself (of his populariser Thinking Fast and Slow):

What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. …I have changed my views about the size of behavioral priming effects – they cannot be as large and as robust as my chapter suggested.

Curtis' notorious 'but in reality' phrase is v odd considering his approach. He uses it twice in Ep 2. 'In reality Jiang Xing had lost control.' How is reality constituted in this example, and in Adam Curtis' universe generally? Is it purely when successful ideas fail? Does that mean that 'reality' has reasserted itself? Or merely the dominance of another idea? For such a central Curtis narrative beat, it's curious not to have any understanding of what he means by it.

the whole 'colonising of the interior and emotional world' theme is still tantalisingly unrealised and unexaminable, though the setting up – that the failure of external radicalism, maoism and anti-fascism led to a sense of internal responsibility for violence - is suggesting this will be returned to, and brought together with the question of algorithmic mental and emotional ontologies. one thing he's doing very well is show the mental spaces of the people existing at the pressure points he identifies. this is what he says he set out to do, so it's really powerful that he manages it so well tbh. less clear is how well he manages that with other omnipresent entity in his work which is 'us', 'people' 'you and i' 'normal people'. in theory his images and footage are mapping the fabric, context, subliminal imagery and spaces which that shadowy and ill-defined, passive yet powerful entity exists and transacts in. i'm not sure quite whether his BBC and wider archives can be said to provide that mapping. i don't know, the relative power of his approach to the ideas has paradoxically reinforced a question of how the images and script treatment of ideas relates (which wasn't so much a problem with the less good and more sweeping Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation). I don't think I've got an answer here, which ofc is part of the pleasure of his programmes.

i'm fascinated to see how he approaches the technology area. the question of how we generate an aesthetics of cloud and technology, and therefore how it can be visually represented and understood in terms of the imagination is still a live one i think. in fact you could argue there's been a regression from more speculative versions of technology envisioning in science fiction, to the relatively moribund attempts to represent a technology of information flows (i feel it hasn't moved much beyond cascading green glyphs on a screen in the matrix).

He seemed to be sketching a history of radicalism and authoritarianism and its relation to Israel, Palestine and anti-semitism without really following through in this episode. Daniel Kahneman himself developed a lot of his theories with the Israeli military iirc.

Although there's still necessarily very little substantiation in his programmes - that's not what he's doing, but it's still disconcerting - there is also not too much that is too 'Oh come on!' glib. Two bits did stick out. The first that 'Mao had been using Jiang Xing to create the violence to destroy his opposition'. His opposition was certainly destroyed, but... it implies she had a different motive? Which was an expression of her power? How was she being *used* exactly?

The second was on Horst Herold's plan to break radical terrorism: "His solution was to use a computer, because there was no law to stop that." :| I think you *have* to work harder there if you're Curtis, and at least provide an explanation, which presumably is 'the legal sanction in Germany against Federal law enforcement meant that he had to find a way round the process of a national approach and... computer surveillance wasn't covered by the law'??? i mean i don't know, that seems unlikely tbh and i haven't been able to find out for certain yet. It does sound like Horst Herold is as much a piece of work as implied in the programme though, which is kind of reassuring! RAF founding member and Stammheim inmate, Andreas Baader was “the only man who ever really understood me, and I’m the only man who really understood him”, [Herold] would tell an interviewer in 2013.

Anyway, maybe i'll watch one more before the end of the day. I'm not doing much else and it's quite nice to binge on Curtis world.

xp
Same! Thank you.
There's a bit of footage in one his old blog posts that's stayed with me - black and white, British, maybe 60s, just a random average working man talking about how life is just waiting for death, completely empty. Never bookmarked it and the blog archive is a pain to navigate - anyone know what I'm looking for?
(Only 1.5 episodes into this one. Enjoying more than the last few.)