We Live in a Strange Time: The Films of Adam Curtis
By James Glisson
Since the 1990s, Adam Curtis’ documentaries have explored the persistent anxiety of contemporary life. His four-part series, Century of the Self, considered how the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who saw humans as beset with dangerous animalistic impulses, transformed not just the clinical practice of psychiatry, but advertising, consumer culture and politics. His more recent film, HyperNormalisation, continues to probe the 21st century psyche but takes a broader perspective. It looks at what he considers the fractious geopolitical situation and how that puts individuals in a permanent state of anxiety.
What are they—or more accurately, we—worried about? There is climate change, terrorism, faltering economies, diminishing privacy and ghoulish algorithms shaping our lives behind the scenes. All of these are excellent reasons to worry. The concept of hyper-normalization is more than that. It is a perceived chasm between what people experience and feel every day and the messages they receive from mass media and governments.
Early in the film, Curtis pinpoints the waning years of the Soviet Union under the premiership of Leonid Brezhnev as an early moment of hyper-normalization. With shortages of consumer goods and the failure of centralized planning, it was plain to see that the dream of a socialist paradise was over, but the Communist Party insisted otherwise. The science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky used near future science fiction to chronicle this crumbling society. These brothers are most famous for the short novel, Another Roadside Picnic (1972), which director Andrei Tarkovsky reworked into The Stalker (1979).
To depict these parallel worlds—one media-centric, the other lived—Curtis weaves together a breathtaking variety of stories: Donald Trump’s real estate investments, the Occupy Movement, New York City’s financial crisis in the 1970s, Syrian politics, terrorism, and the brief rehabilitation of Colonel Gaddafi by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the years before the Libyan Revolution.
There are, he concludes, no big visions for human progress or a better world. There are only those in power managing ineptly from crisis to crisis and no meaningful opposition.
What makes the film mesmerizing despite its dreary message is Curtis’ knack for locating extraordinary archival footage. In HyperNormalisation, we are treated to Soviet youngsters in something like a reform school talking about punk rock and video documentation of New York City’s failed 1975 auction for municipal bonds to finance its debt. (When bankers did not buy the debt, city officials appealed to Washington, but Gerald Ford refused to step in, leading to the infamous New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”)
Curtis has also unearthed a 1990s clip of an elementary school girl extolling Prozac for improving her self-worth. She play-acts the role of what she imagines is an anxiety free person. In another clip, a bemused flaneur—Patti Smith—wanders around the decaying infrastructure of Manhattan in the 1970s making disjointed observations about city life. Though filmed forty years ago, her performance feels like a narcissistic monolog delivered to a smart phone for social media.
Juxtaposing archival footage in the film’s montages, Curtis achieves a chilly and bleak irony. In one case, a Jane Fonda aerobics video is mixed with footage of the execution-by-firing squad of the brutal Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day, 1989. Soldiers manhandle the elderly couple who scream and try to push them away, and we jump to Jane Fonda leading her spandex-clad class as they stretch their arms high as if in religious praise. The elderly couple are in front of a wall and collapse instantly when bullets hit them; Curtis cuts to Fonda squatting to tighten her glutes; and back to Romania as their coffin is lowered into a snowy grave and cement poured. As captions explain, paraphrasing the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, “The old system was dying and a new system was about to be born.” Curtis’ scathing montage says that the dream is over.
Curtis uses Fonda’s transformation from activist to fitness instructor as a vivid foil for political movements in the United States that were co-opted by a culture of self-improvement. People retreated from outward social concerns to the inward world of exercise and self-actualization. If you can’t change the world, then change yourself. The social media echo-chamber has only amplified this trend.
But why this inward retreat? As the narrator explains at the beginning of the film, “We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them and no one has a vision for a different world.” Instead, they manage from crisis to crisis and try to maintain the equilibrium of the current economic system. Individuals wrap themselves in a cocoon fearful of the dark forces that could do them harm. Politicians manage and deflect these threats of economic collapse, civil unrest, climate change and terrorism without any pretense of resolving them. They act as managers who preserve the existing equilibrium but offer no alternative visions.
This state of perpetual—and reasonable—worry is only part of hyper-normalization. The other is the evaporation of facts into a cloud of misinformation, “fake news” and conspiracy theories. Curtis singles out Vladmir Putin’s longtime advisor, Vladislav Surkov, as the master theorist and practitioner of an amorphous brand of repression. Surkov undermines Russian opposition groups by secretly supporting them, thereby, impugning their credibility. No one can be sure whose side anyone else is on and no effective resistance can coalesce. Surkov studied avantgarde theater; he knew how to turn politics into a stage play full of untrustworthy characters and ambiguity.
While the film HyperNormalisation was made in 2016 before the election and well before the Covid-19 outbreak, its diagnosis of the UK and USA was prescient. As Curtis saw four years ago, journalists called out Trump’s lies, hyperbole and incoherence but didn’t realize he was playing a different game. Like Surkov’s machinations, Trump’s messaging sows doubt and waylays critics in a snowdrift of contradictions. It is easier to insinuate doubt than to prove a fact. Covid was a hoax, then not. The election is “rigged,” the “deep state” plots in dark rooms, and witch hunts abound. Journalists turn themselves in circles correcting outrageous and flimsy fabrications. Great theater manipulates emotions and great actors have us believe they really suffer. It was Aristotle who long ago saw the power of emotional release through catharsis, the cleansing effect that watching a tragic drama has. But what happens when the real world becomes a play watched on screens and anger is quelled by social media outrage? As Curtis reminds us, invisible power continues to operate behind a curtain and in between the cyclical emotional purging.
The film ends in a mash-up of Barbara Mandrell’s breakup song, “Standing Room Only,” and snippets of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair doing not much at all. They are bland, business-as-usual media appearances by polished professional politicians until Curtis cuts in clipped footage from the final scenes of Brian de Palma’s horror film Carrie (1976) based on the Stephen King thriller. After having pig blood dumped on her at the high school prom, the shy Carrie, who secretly possesses telekinetic powers, kills her tormentors and sets the prom on fire. Mandrell’s I’m-so-over-you song plays against a Hollywood fantasy of murderous revenge while politicians pose in front of cameras and do the day-to-day work of managing appearances oblivious to the strange times we live in.
This article was originally published in Lum’s Winter 2021 print magazine.
James Glisson is Curator of Contemporary Art at Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
