I genuinely like Curtis' work, and Bitter Lake is peppered with interesting stuff and fantastic stock footage. But the dialogue in his recent films has been predictable:
*But the old systems had never gone away.
And then one person realised there was a vacuum at the heart of it all.
But they had forgotten to program the computers with the one thing that really mattered.
And then...." etc.
I honestly can't tell if it's meta-parody. And that's why I'll keep watching.
> I honestly can't tell if it's meta-parody. And that's why I'll keep watching.
I'm kinda in the same boat. But I think one of the things I like about Curtis is that he's made me read more about things I didn't know about.
For example I'd never given much thought about Afghanistan (other than Afghan coats) until the Soviet Union invaded. I was an early teenager (I'm in my mid 50s now), but reasonably interested in world politics, and even back then, and the Afghan war seemed like another cold war proxy conflict, and same old same old.
There were many events like that for me, and then I bumped into Curtis in 1992 and his Pandora's box series and I was sort of wowed at his take on the world. These wee snippets of, often obscure, history made tantalisingly accessible and fascinating by the way he assembles his final cuts, so much so that I went off and bought books on history rather than be informed by the opinion pieces in the Times (London), The Guardian etc. I will caveat that I realise history books are not free of bias.
Whatever he's doing I think it's a good thing. Sure he often reaches no conclusions but he throws many ideas at us to make us think. Maybe proper historians rue the day he got the cart blanch from the BBC to make these films and series and don't find them "academic" enough. And maybe his work is just a form of meta-parody art, but there's always something in these films to tickle your grey matter.
Finally, if anyone's interested in a docu-fictional story about the British Empire's comeuppance in Afghanistan the I'd recommend the first book in George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" series:
It was very weird to go the other way around and have read Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More before HyperNormalisation came out.
I love Bitter Lake and The Power of Nightmares, but cannot stand HyperNormalisation for having almost nothing to do with the book's concepts, regardless of whether it stands on its own.
That’s a great parody, and Adam Curtis himself agrees:
> [Brooker] I’m guessing you’ve seen the parodies, things like the Adam Curtis Bingo Card, where people are – I think affectionately – listing some of your stylistic quirks. How do you feel about those?
> [Curtis] I really like the parodies when they are good. That one called The Loving Trap I loved, because it was so sharp. It spotted that really it was the voice. It was just really well done.
Yes, his work often does sound like a parody similar to SNL doing the stereotypical long-haired California 20-ish dude who's too much into psychedelics: "Hey maaaaan, listen maaaan, it's all connected, maaaan, you gotta wake up, maaaan! The people running the show have never changed, maaan!"
That's what it is, basically, just dressed up in a faux academic presentation. Also it's not too far removed from the "Jews are running the world from the shadows" narrative of the far right.
Not everything is wrong in his movies, but he only ever scratches a very very thin layer off the surface because he knows if he went deep into a certain topic his movies would be far less compelling and much more boring.
*But the old systems had never gone away.
And then one person realised there was a vacuum at the heart of it all.
But they had forgotten to program the computers with the one thing that really mattered.
And then...." etc.
I honestly can't tell if it's meta-parody. And that's why I'll keep watching.