The dirty tricks and shady tac­tics of Adam Curtis

The doc­u­men­tar­i­an and thinker Adam Cur­tis has, in cer­tain cir­cles, been ele­vat­ed to the sta­tus of lib­er­al sage. He comes across as a com­bi­na­tion of two things: a mav­er­ick edu­ca­tor like Indi­ana Jones who exploits his tenure to par­take in more exot­ic tra­vails; and a stone-faced doom­say­er sta­tioned at Speaker’s Cor­ner pro­claim­ing that the End is Nigh. The two halves just about bal­ance each oth­er out, result­ing in the sooth­ing impres­sion of bloke-down-the-gas­trop­ub normalcy.

Cur­tis is a big-pic­ture film­mak­er, dri­ven by grand ambi­tion. He embraces obscure intel­lec­tu­al con­cepts over banal sto­ry­telling. He likes to name the unnam­able. He search­es for pat­terns rather than con­ven­tion­al rev­e­la­tions. His films are con­struct­ed like Tetris walls, with mis­shapen blocks inel­e­gant­ly falling into place.

His lat­est work, Hyper­Nor­mal­i­sa­tion, is a hulk­ing beast, an angu­lar info­dump which pur­ports to pin­point a moment where glob­al soci­ety took an abrupt shift towards a moral abyss. It’s a con­stant­ly com­pelling rounde­lay of polit­i­cal tid­bits pre­sent­ed as frag­ments of a larg­er, vague­ly unfath­omable puz­zle. Yet with this new film, as with his pre­vi­ous one, Bit­ter Lake, Cur­tis has, self-con­scious­ly or oth­er­wise, fall­en foul to hubris. The pieces all (just about) fit togeth­er, but the image they pro­duce is blurred and indistinct.

For as long as he has been mak­ing films, Cur­tis has been inter­est­ed in obfus­ca­tion and dou­ble­s­peak. He exam­ines the ways in which pow­er bro­kers (and the peo­ple behind the pow­er bro­kers) manip­u­late real­i­ty, or present a rosy façade as a way to con­ceal nefar­i­ous activ­i­ty. Yet there’s the feel­ing while watch­ing Hyper­Nor­mal­i­sa­tion that Cur­tis is secret­ly get­ting high on his own sup­ply. He uses smoke and mir­rors to attack the smoke and mir­rors. He offers the impres­sion that he is report­ing from the oth­er side of the look­ing glass, a priv­i­leged posi­tion where the eccen­tric shifts of glob­al pow­er can be viewed with chill­ing clar­i­ty. Yet the way he presents his argu­ments sug­gests that he trades on the igno­rance of his audi­ence. He knows that as long as he frames him­self in a posi­tion of author­i­ty, he can say any­thing he likes and we’ll swal­low it whole.

But how does he do this? It’s a ques­tion of tone. Cur­tis believes that declaim­ing some­thing with con­vic­tion imbues it with the essence of truth. His work is the cin­e­mat­ic embod­i­ment of the Mil­gram exper­i­ment, in which sub­jects con­tin­ue to elec­tro­cute unseen vic­tims at the behest of a lab-coat­ed author­i­ty fig­ure. His wall-to-wall voiceover nar­ra­tion is rife with sweep­ing state­ments which act as the tee­ter­ing tent­poles of his thesis.

He sel­dom resorts to qual­i­fi­ca­tion – for him (or, per­haps, for the pur­pose of his films), his­to­ry is a finite con­tin­u­um where events either hap­pened or they didn’t. There is no dual per­spec­tive. Plus, it would be dra­mat­i­cal­ly coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to intro­duce qual­i­fi­ca­tion. He often talks about ​“the peo­ple” and ​“every­one” and ​“politi­cians” and ​“bankers”. He lumps demo­graph­ics togeth­er and gen­er­alis­es in exact­ly the same way as those he criticises.

Cur­tis’ unwill­ing­ness to engage with ambi­gu­i­ty, or to present his find­ings as the tall tales they appear to be, dam­ages the over­all cred­i­bil­i­ty of his films. Appar­ent­ly, the UK and US mil­i­tary incur­sions into Iraq were all based on a secret source who was fab­ri­cat­ing evi­dence based on the 1996 Michael Bay film, The Rock. There’s no maybe, no pos­si­bly, no ​‘that’s just one way of see­ing things’. This is what hap­pened. This all-see­ing, all-know­ing approach, where state­ments trump con­jec­ture (and, by exten­sion, mod­esty), is also a paragon of this hubris. In Cur­tis’ films, there is no room for deep­er ques­tion­ing. But maybe this hubris is affect­ed? Is it part of the Cur­tisian swagger?

With Hyper­Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Cur­tis appears to have reached the point of self par­o­dy, where his lim­it­ed reper­toire of for­mal ​“moves” and his yel­low­ing port­fo­lio of pet themes arrive with an almost list­less pre­ci­sion. Self-pla­gia­ris­ing abounds, from the sound­track selec­tions, to ran­dom name checks to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bri­an de Palma’s Car­rie. Indeed, so schemat­ic is his style now, that a team of expert par­o­dists have for­mu­lat­ed an Adam Cur­tis Bin­go card which con­tains all of his go-to tropes.

He once again rolls out the iron­ic snuff news footage, framed as lurid spec­ta­cle and often over­layed with mon­ged-out music. The film opens on a shot of a bombed out shack with a trail of blood stretch­ing out of the door, through the yard and out into the street. It’s an extreme­ly pow­er­ful image, but one deployed with a punk­ish sense of arch detach­ment. It acts as an inel­e­gant sign­post for Cur­tis’ mode of school­marmish high seriousness.

It also, once again, demon­strates con­tempt for an audi­ence who appar­ent­ly wouldn’t be able to grap­ple with the aus­tere ram­i­fi­ca­tions of geopo­lit­i­cal dis­cord with­out hav­ing their faces forced into some decon­tex­tu­alised gore. Sub­tly isn’t a word in the Cur­tis lex­i­con, a the­o­ry that gains fur­ther trac­tion as he once more rolls out the ⁹⁄₁₁ footage for shock effect.

The way he deploys imagery does sig­nal the same con­tempt for human­i­ty he claims to decry. Let’s use a recur­ring YouTube clip of three young girls danc­ing to a hip-hop track in their back yard as a case in point. It has no direct bear­ing on the film and what Cur­tis has to say. If it is sup­posed to sug­gest that the inter­net is a hot­house of van­i­ty and banal­i­ty, would this not under­cut the cen­tral notion of an ensu­ing dig­i­tal apoc­a­lypse? Also, this clip feels like it’s been includ­ed as some­thing to laugh at, a rather caus­tic and dis­agree­able attempt at com­e­dy rather than an hon­est depic­tion of human­i­ty at play.

He gives the impres­sion of objec­tiv­i­ty, that he’s as dis­ap­prov­ing of the war­mon­ger­ing tyrants of the extreme right as he is the effete, lily-liv­ered utopi­ans of the left. But then he’s left to wal­low on his own in a nihilis­tic cen­tre ground. Or maybe just lev­i­tat­ing, angel-like, above the scuf­fling rab­ble. He makes it seem that, as a thinker, he tran­scends polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. While it might be laud­able to aspire to such lev­els of intel­lec­tu­al puri­ty, it means that his films lack for a human aspect. In this film he talks of how Hen­ry Kissinger was unable to see the world as any­thing more than a cold sys­tem, and if peo­ple had to die for that sys­tem to work, then so be it. Cur­tis, too, favours the cool­ly dis­tanced, explain-all sound­bite over the messy human­ist approach.

This pos­tur­ing and dearth of com­pas­sion is what sep­a­rates Cur­tis from mas­ter film essay­ists like Patri­cio Guzmán, Mark Rap­pa­port and his key inspi­ra­tion, the late Chris Mark­er. In his 2004 film The Case of the Grin­ning Cat, Mark­er laid the post ⁹⁄₁₁ glob­al polit­i­cal cli­mate bare by focus­ing sole­ly on a surge in cat images being paint­ed on walls around Paris. He used this quaint phe­nom­e­non as a sound­ing board, as a way to draw a con­nec­tion between two things that appeared to have no con­nec­tion. It’s a film that is at once immac­u­late­ly pre­cise, thrilling­ly polit­i­cal and ter­ri­bly mov­ing. I’ll be there for what­ev­er Cur­tis has to offer up next. I’ll also be pray­ing for 30 pro­found­ly beau­ti­ful min­utes over anoth­er of his over-extend­ed and chaot­ic cogitations.

Hyper­Nor­mal­i­sa­tion is avail­able to stream on BBC iPlay­er now.