The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

i hope they found some happiness.

I went through a period of being a bit obsessed with the cultural revolution and started this book called The Killing Wind which concentrated on it on a more localised level and concentrated on a massacre in one specific region. And it was so unremittingly violent and grim I couldn't finish it. When you get away from from all the flashy disturbing imagery of mass rallies and struggle sessions and people with placards around their necks and factory bosses getting thrown of bridges etc you start moving into much more relatable and disturbing territory. As in in meetings in smoky working men's clubs where groups of *normal* people are deciding who they fancy murdering today of course under the pretext that they are politically bad. I'm not even sure what point I'm making here - just an idiot typing!

My wife's grandfather (in a small town in Hubei) was targeted as a "capitalist roader" - he had to wear a sign in the street, etc. His own daughter was a red guard, pretty typical I think. She is now the most well-to-do of the three sisters, if the small town has an upper-middle-class then she's in it for sure, but she still goes to the local park to sing "red songs" with her friends. Think my mother-in-law might be doing this now as well, she certainly feels nostalgic about the cultural revolution too.

i know v little about the cultural revolution (which this series has brought home) - the killing wind sounds really interesting. more generally adam curtis tends to focus on ideological tribes and probably underdetermines on that more local violence. i think it's fair enough, in that local drama probably has too high a level of salience in modern culture (people's personal relationships with each other), compared to ideas.

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watched e01 last nite. entertaining but his the narration often makes insane logical leaps that annoyed me. i try to watch it as entertainment (as a sequence of music videos set to archival videos it’s fantastic) but knowing the way some friends of mine respond to his films (‘you gotta watch it man—they’re controlling our minds!’) makes me sad

curtis’ faith in the power of a single person to control the minds of an entire society feels paranoid to me, and finding instances where that seems to have been the case isn’t as dispositive as he thinks. sure, you can take something like the illuminati conspiracy theory and unravel it backwards to find that two ayn rand fanboys accidentally started it by writing letters to playboy magazine. but attributing the rise of the conspiracy theory to “two chums went bowling one night and talked about philosophy” is the wrong counterfactual—obviously in their absence a very similar conspiracy theory would have taken root with slightly different details

i'm not sure that's what he's saying? he was saying those two were trying to undermine conspiracy theory (which had already been established). can understand your response to your friends, but he's standing at a distance from the 'they're controlling our minds' people? i think this series is a lot better than the last two long films, where i could understand that reaction a bit more.

but also he's looking at the arcs of people like michael x and jiang qing - what happens to people at the edges of implementing ideas of power.

also i want to know where that incredible aerial video shot of the chinese city towards the end of episode three comes from.

I don’t think he really sees it in terms of the power of individual influence though; the personalities are just there because you can build a visual narrative more compellingly if you pick people to represent the … forces at play.

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i think the delusion or paradox flopson is talking about (i am controlling my world vs i am an agent of forces) is one of the themes in this one so it's possible you'll become less exasperated as you go.

along these lines: when oswald popped up (in a nicely executed and-that-man's-name-was bit from AC) i paused the video in great excitement and, lol, recited out loud and alone my Theory Of Oswald, presumably to create a memory of my own voice speaking it so that if adam curtis turned out to have exactly the same theory i would later be protected from the suspicion that it was his. then i unpaused and he changed the subject almost immediately. this was a relief, but also a disappointment, because the paradox of historical agency is exactly what oswald is about for me:

i am infatuated w a read of him where he considers himself always the protagonist... for me the beautiful idea is that I'M A PATSY is a moment of real-time realization not (or not just) that he has been set up by [santo trafficante/e howard hunt/fidel castro/allan dulles/lyndon johnson/marx's ghost] but more spookily that here on the other side of a finally achieved ambition to become an immortal mover of history he has suddenly realized he cannot stop also being something's agent...

since the context of oswald's appearance was that, previously unbeknownst to me, there was a chaos wizard in his marine outfit who later succumbed to a paranoid delusion that oswald was his psychically linked agent-golem, i was sure this was exactly what was coming!

yes, i don't think they're seen to be powerful in and of themselves as such. they're operating in a place that illustrates the forces that curtis wants to illustrate. xpost

'the paradox of historical agency' is surely a main theme here. it's a good phrase.

the workers scraping off the mao mottos from the secret police headquarters is fantastic footage.

the argument i made lol 13 yrs ago (linked upthread) abt the living dead (made lol lol lol 26 yrs ago), is that AC absolutely plays with the notion that what drives society is the beliefs and concepts and will of a few key actors ("Curtis seems rigorously to present himself as the last of the old-school philosophical idealists; that’s to say, that it’s not tribal or class interest that drives society, but what’s in elite heads—Thatcher’s or Cameron’s or Goering’s"), and that there's a sly and seductive naughtiness to him doing this -- he absolutely knows this isn't how we shd think abt history -- BUT ALSO (across and against this) that the way he works with film and music undercuts it as explanation, because it's constantly handled to be funny and absurd, or to be uncanny and alarming, and to get across that actually we're all just ridiculous puppets trapped within forces we have no command over… there's always a kind of anti-gravitas at work (in the living dead anyway)

reiterating that TLD is the last sequence of docs that he made that i watched closely and critically (i have seen other bits and pieces, inc.definitely all of the mayfair set, but not with a notebook in hand)

incidentally i think curtis' dancing motiv is totally legit fwiw.

Jiang was a right typical melt, whilst banning all western culture, movies and fashion from mainstream Chinese society she'd go back to her plush villa in the south to secretly indulge her love for Greta Garbo movies and drinking top class champagne!

same tbf

I don't think there is any footage that particularly captures the anarchy of the red guard factional wars playing out, turning whole cities in battlegrounds. They had gone to PLA military bases and helped themselves to tons of heavy weaponry whilst the army stood off under Mao's orders. It got so insane you'd think it was a work of fiction! Whenever Beijing sent them orders to calm it the fuck down and sort out their factional differences they ignored them because only the Chairman had any real control and authority over them.

there were 10 million of these young Red Guards exiled to rural China without the chance to ever get an education or legally return to the cities they came from again. I always think that must have been a real pisser - going from being immortal above the law godz to plods doing backbreaking agricultural work and being told to stfu and crack on by old farmers for the rest of their lives!

the pisser of historical agency!

the workers scraping off the mao mottos from the secret police headquarters is fantastic footage.

this was my own "in reality" lol because he says something like "it was called the department of tranquility... but in reality it was the secret police headquarters" and like, if you pointed to a building and said "look there's the department of tranquility!" the secret police headquarters is exactly what i'd assume it was

I get a bit giddy thinking about a real street in China that was re-named Struggle Against Revisionism Street!

a thing that's hard to get yr head round in terms of the meaning of events (unless i guess yr from or in china) is how big it is, so that the sub-class of a layer of a tendency instead of being 100 malcontents that you can scatter and ignore is like a million ppl, which is a fvck of a lot of ppl in its own right. though of course the interesting thing abt there being a reported 180,000 "mass incidents" in 2010 isn't that it "rocked the country" (as the WSJ claimed) but that it apparently didn't. assuminng it's even accurate it can be huge and also (within a popn of a billion plus ) small potatoes.

mods can you rename this street

A street I happened upon in Guangzhou:

https://i.imgur.com/LDqHqMz.jpg

"Resist The British Street"

two thumbs up

Post first two EPs I really like how he pushes his own version of a conspiracy theory in these strands, while discussing conspiracies of all kinds. He has always done a form of this, it's part of the appeal while a high-wire act to actually not sound too nuts.

Can't say I liked the montage sequences with that kind of BBC Radio 6 soundtrack in the first EP. Elsewhere I did lol at how often he used Aphex Twin, that it hasn't been killed by overuse shows how good a record it is.

Where this film really stands out on is the stuff on China but also the women in it. I don't know whether he has centred women quite in this way before?

Surprised to hear Cigarettes After Sex at the end of ep 3. I know some people on here really took against them, who can say why. It’s only by hearing them and The Raveonettes in back to back episodes that I realised how similar they sound.

Raveonettes was a real "uh huh, ILX is not going to be happy with this one" moment for me

Having watched the first ep I thought it seemed almost a rapprochement with the forces of individualism - all these case studies he brings up, some of whom are obviously not in line with his politics, are portrayed not as the harbringers of a deadly individualism to come but as arguments against our current incapacity for change. Like he's less interested in what Xing or crazy objectivist dude meant politically and more in their faith that the world can, and should, be changed.

But of course I'm behind everyone on watching these and the discourse has moved on, alas, alas.

no i'm right there with you :) i finished the first one last night.

Watched the first one this weekend — my first experience with his work — and was kinda disappointed; reviews had led me to expect something a little more Parallax Corporation. I'm intrigued enough by some of the stories he's telling that I'll watch at least one more, though.

daniel_rf otm, more than any of his other stuff i think this successfully portrays a figure/ground relationship between “individualism”/“collectivism”, or “control”/“surrender”, that is more promising than a story about (let alone argument for) one opposed set or the other.

agreed. and also to daniel’s point about “current inability to change” - i think ensuring the “paralysis” element is used to distnguish the age we live in, brought into meangiful context by climate change, helps here as well.

https://www.tomscott.com/infinite-adam-curtis/

Yay "Where Were You" by the Mekons

Baader-Meinhoff are such a bummer.

yeah B-M were a hideous bunch of arseholes

It's terrifying to think of now, but my mum's take is that at the time she and lots of young ppl in Germany were pretty sympathetic towards B-M because the people they were fighting were The Establishment and a good percentage of them had indeed been in roles of power and leadership during the Third Reich. The trauma of what that group set in motion set radical politics in Germany back decades.

I think even Curtis himself has few insights into ppl like them or Michael X beyond "oh no".

i grew up in a small village in the middle of the english countryside and the first graffiti i can ever remember seeing was at the bottom of our road where the building that housed a neighbours pigeons had 'FREE ASTRID PROLL' in huge white letters painted on the side of it. i asked my mum who astrid proll was and she claimed not to know. v weird.

You suspect your mum did it?

no. i am surprised that anyone in my village would sympathise with leftist terrorists, or if they did that the graffiti would be left up for years.

one thing I'll say about AC's use of music is that I can never get enough Stars Of The Lid

I'm only on ep 3.
Did people in America in the 50s/60s really go to their doctors with feelings of anxiety and fear? It feels like it's quite a modern thing to see your physician about your feelings/mental health (but I am not in America)?

the stereotype in my head is that when they did it was male authority figures sending women to the doctor to get “medicated” in order to curb whatever behaviour was deemed insufficiently obeisant but that type of thing may have opened up a space for legit and useful therapy idk someone should probably post who actually knows lol

I haven’t got that far yet but didn’t people used to get prescribed ‘mother’s little helper’, ie Valium, for just that, aka their ‘nerves’?

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Yeah this was in the bit about Valium being invented. I guess I'm wondering which came first, the drugs or "recognising" it as a medical problem. I think it's just the choice of wording he used that sounded a bit, errr, simplistic. "Doctors were telling him about people from the suburbs coming to them with vague feelings of anxiety and fear - something the doctors didn't know how to deal with".

Oh wow Adam Curtis is on Cameo now pic.twitter.com/Z8HvewFeyx

— John Tucker (@johntuckerart) February 16, 2021

two episodes and finding this good watching

One episode in and I concur with the general mood, great watching despite the sweeping generalisations (which i take as a kind of authorial tic rather than a sincere statement of belief) and other handwaving. Two things from ep 1: it wasn't an 'extraordinary coincidence' that Kerry Thornley met Lee Harvey Oswald; and 'people thought the bavarian illuminati wanted to undermine democracy but in fact they were utopians trying to replace religion with reason' - these two goals are not at all contradictory.

Haven't seen any of this but sounds like a couple of bones / nits I'd also have picked. For Thornley presumably what it was was cosmically hilarious when Oswald gained such um.. notoriety.

Delightful detail on the cover of the Playboy magazine shown in ep 1: 'Vladimir Nabokov's sexiest new work since Lolita'

and 'people thought the bavarian illuminati wanted to undermine democracy but in fact they were utopians trying to replace religion with reason' - these two goals are not at all contradictory. - sure but one doesn't automatically imply the other, so distinction still useful?

picking up on an earlier thread, oscar, Astrid Proll actually spent some time on the lam in the UK if you didn't know, so that could have been written by someone who'd met her! Or, who knows, the woman herself, in a fit of self-irony?

and 'people thought the bavarian illuminati wanted to undermine democracy but in fact they were utopians trying to replace religion with reason' - these two goals are not at all contradictory. sure but one doesn't automatically imply the other, so distinction still useful?

The "but" sounds like it implies the latter aim necessarily precludes having the former.