It’s difficult to know where to start with Adam Curtis’s latest film. At nearly three hours in length, HyperNormalisation contains a hyperabundance of images and ideas. There are montages of monster movies mixed with home video grabs and bits from BBC Breakfast. There are observations about the nature of reality, the limits of data and the dextrous nature of Jane Fonda’s career. It’s less a documentary than an experience.
Curtis knows where to start, of course. He always does. There’s always one moment, one telling event that will go on to assume central significance in an argument that encompasses the globe and decades of history. In HyperNormalisation, that inciting incident is a local government meeting in New York City in 1975. The meeting was called with the purpose of restructuring an enormous public debt. Except the creditors never turned up. Instead, they demanded the city authorities restructure themselves. And put the creditors in charge. From that, Curtis argues, came a new fiscal policy – “austerity” – and a sense that politics was no longer the art of the possible but the art of the deal. Soon Donald Trump was buying up substantial slices of Manhattan on terms that were laughably favourable to the real estate developer, sorry, president-elect.
From Manhattan, Curtis moves to Damascus, to Russia, to the Lebanon, to Libya, to cyberspace and back again. Along the way he constructs an argument that says, and I simplify wildly: a desire on the part of politicians to control events and their electorates led to a manipulation of reality which in turn fostered atomisation, cynicism and, ultimately, a loathing of the political class. Perhaps there have been some events this year that bore this theory out, I don’t know.
Just my little joke there. Curtis’s film features a recurring Trump alongside the director’s normal motley crew of jihadis and Washington insiders. Also within his sights are the “technological utopians” of Silicon Valley, the creators of our filter bubbles and pedlars of fake news. When watching HyperNormalisation you can feel, as with much of Curtis’s work, that someone is explaining the true nature of the world to you for the first time. Shortly after that feeling passes, you start furrowing your brow and wondering if it wasn’t all a bit too simple or too broad to be convincing. This process doesn’t invalidate the experience and Curtis knows this is the way people view his films. It is an argument he is making, after all.
Where else on television, or to be more accurate, in digital media do you get such provocation? I took 22 pages of notes watching the film again before I wrote this. Some of it was to place events in a linear order (he does jump about a bit – and perhaps a digression about LSD that suddenly leaps back 20 years isn’t entirely necessary) but mainly it was to record things I found interesting, shocking, touching or just odd. Like the Iranian fountains whose water ran blood red to commemorate a massacre. The “artificially intelligent” psychoanalyst that achieved wonderful results by repeating its patients’ remarks back to them. The way a hopeful Occupy Wall Street protester (himself a veteran of the Iraq war) resembled a naive young PLO soldier from the early 80s. A speech by Ronald Reagan that claimed “God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind” into America’s hands. David Frost rehabilitating Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.
Gaddafi will stay with me the most. Playing a major part in HyperNormalisation, Curtis argues he is a patsy Reagan’s America transforms into a global supervillain for their political messaging. Gaddafi is accused of atrocities he didn’t commit, bombed by way of punishment, subjected to sanctions and then, when the west needs someone to confess to holding weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, is quickly rehabilitated. And 10 years later an American drone launches the missile that leads to his death. But Gaddafi is more than just a pawn. He comes over in this film in his full complexity; a dupe and a tyrant, yes, but also a conflicted individual concerned about what he felt to be injustice in the world.
HyperNormalisation is not just provocation. It is a collection of insights into history and the human condition. Equally though, it is a piece of video art, each moment crafted to fit in a particular place among the run of images that precede and follow it. It has bravura moments, such as the captioning that suddenly dominates the screen during a tale of Trump to read: “But things didn’t go according to plan” (a knowing wink to Curtis’s penchant for grandiose declarations). It prompts you to think, not just about the argument being articulated, but of any number of apparently unrelated ideas and emotions brought into play through comparison and contrast. At the end of HyperNormalisation’s two hours and 45 minutes, the thing I felt most strongly was that I wanted to give Muammar Gaddafi a hug. I had not expected that.
