Hypernormalisation

 Have you ever heard of Vladislav Surkov?  According to the British documentarian, Adam Curtis, Surkov, an advisor to Vladimir Putin, is a former proponent of avant garde theater who developed an approach to politics based on chaos -- the government, in Surkov's practice, might support democracy in the morning, fascism in the afternoon, and be mildly liberal and progressive by nightfall; the idea was to foment confusion by supporting all possible ideological enterprises to create a society so wholly divided and contentious that a single man (in Surkov's case, Vladimir Putin) could control all organs of power so long as the baffling internecine conflict between factions endured.  By Curtis' model, Trump is a Surkovian President -- thus, the Donald's baffling allegiance to Putin.  Whether you are willing to believe that Surkov's political nihilism has something to do with American electoral politics is, perhaps, a litmus test for whether you are willing to suspend your disbelief as to the assertions advanced by Curtis in his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation.  (A cursory review of the Internet shows that Curtis' characterization of Surkov is radically simplified and partially incorrect -- if you believe Wikipedia; however, there is enough overlap between Wikipedia's description of Surkov and the thumbnail sketch in Hypernormalisation to give one pause for thought.)

Hypernormalisation is close to three hours long, a paranoid epic that purports to provide the secret history of the world between 1980 and the date of the film's release in 2016.  By turns infuriating, baffling, and brilliant, the movie presents densely argued history of personal feuds and conspiracies in collusion with rogue computer savants that is claimed to have produced our current dilemma.  If only a third of what Curtis argues is true, we are truly and decisively fucked.  Watching the movie is like immersion in a nightmare from which you aren't able to wake-up -- not coincidentally, the way that Joyce's Stephen Daedalus characterizes history in Ulysses.  The picture's paranoid style is swift and brazenly declaratory -- the movie proclaims one alarming thesis after another without providing much in the way of evidence for its assertions; it moves at such an accelerated pace that the audience doesn't have time to think, let alone consider whether what is declared as truth is plausible.  Briefly stated, the movie's thesis is that around 1980, political elites discovered that the world was too interrelated, complex, and resistant to anyone's theory to be effectively controlled -- in other words, that it was futile to attempt to manipulate or shape real events in history.  Therefore, these elites set about constructing a simulacrum of reality, a fictive politics and history, that could be effectively manipulated -- although this manipulation was for the public eye and the media and, really, had nothing to do with what was really going on.  Curtis stops short of claiming that there is some master manipulator who is secretly controlling "real life" as opposed to the fictional constructs in which we find ourselves now immersed.  As far as he is concerned, actual reality is chaos that can't really be known, at least, presently -- in Kantian terms, the real world is a Ding-an-sich that is, apparently, beyond anyone's understanding.  The elites invent problems to solve them -- but none of this has any relevancy to "reality" whatever that might be.

There are several objections to this thesis.  First, I doubt that political ideology has ever been closely rooted in empirical reality whatever the epoch.  Was the ideology of medieval Catholic Europe with its saints and witches and religious crusades somehow more "realistic" than the way our modern world is constructed?  What about the Aztecs who embraced an ideology of human sacrifice in order to control large urban populations, alleging that without human blood as lubrication, natural forces would grind to a halt?  Were these constructs more rational and true to reality than late Capitalism or Marxism or what have you?  Further, Curtis' blithely stated assertion that the elites lost interest in "politics" as a solution to human problems and preferred to operate in an invented world founders on the absence of any definition of what might constitute "politics".  In the middle of the film, Curtis lets drop the veil briefly and claims that politics is the endeavor to improve the world by helping those who are powerless or disenfranchised.  When has this ever been a reasonable definition for political activity?

The film's grandiose claims can't be really assessed without understanding Curtis' "shadow history", the secret "lipstick traces" that offer access to what has really happened in the years since 1980.  So, here goes nothing:  In the late 1970's New York City defaulted on its loan and bond obligations and, so, the City survived only by selling itself to the bankers.  This event became the paradigm for how capitalist polities survived the various economic and fiscal crises of the last fifty years -- the financiers took over and ran the world for their profit.  Meanwhile, Patti Smith declared herself without ideology and, in some perky interview footage, identifies as radically non-ideological -- an esthetic hedonist, again a model for the way Western youth came of age in a world in which they couldn't exercise any real power.  The film devises a tale of two cities:  NYC and Damascus, Syria.  NYC is dominated by Donald Trump, one of the movie's arch confabulators.  Assad in Syria wants to unite the Arab world against Western domination.  He flirts with the evil Henry Kissinger who plays Realpolitik  with his aspirations.  Kissinger stabs Assad in the back engendering a violent split in the Arab world between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.  Assad retreats into isolation, scheming revenge and building an ominous-looking giant palace on the mountains overlooking Damascus, one of the film's visual leit motifs. Assad makes a Mephistofilean-deal with Hezbollah.  Shiite clerics relax the Koran's prohibition on suicide to level the playing field by using the "human bomb" -- that is, suicide bombers -- to drive the U. S. out of the Middle East.  (The "human bomb" is one of Curtis' themes and it will return with a vengeance on 9-11.)  Since the US government can't control the chaos in Syria (Iraq and Lebanon as well), the government nominates Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to play the role of super-villain since he can be effectively bombed and attacked without fear of much retaliation -- Gaddafi,  is after all, just a convenient, picturesque-looking idiot.  But the real trouble in the Arab world is fomented by Assad, whom we proclaim to be our ally.  The Utopian dreams of the 60's have soured into nightmares.  But the old Acid-freaks, particularly a Grateful Dead follower named Barlow, have migrated to Silicon Valley where they are configuring an alternative reality.  The skies throng UFO's but these are secret anti-Soviet weapons.  (The government encourages people to believe in aliens piloting the UFOs to hide the truth.)  When the Soviet Union collapses, politics in that unhappy empire dissolves completely.  The new Russia is just a series of pageants conducted in an atmosphere of chaotically clashing, but meaningless, political parties.  A German named Ulrich Beck argues that no one can control reality -- there are too many unintended consequences. The whole purpose of politics, Beck says, is to stabilize and shore up collapsing economic systems.  No one can control events, but with massively enhanced computing power, catastrophes can be predicted if not averted.  People turn to computers for solace.  The government is spying on everyone but most of what is disseminated on-line is dick pics and pornography.  AI simply creates feedback loops, counseling people by repeating back to them their concerns in an empathetic tone.  When Israel puts Hamas fighters onto a mountain in Syria (to destabilize Assad), the Hamas movement gets infected with Shiite "human bomb" ideology which, then, leaks back into Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.  Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs are now using suicide bombs.  Again, the West blames this terrorism on Gaddafi who has nothing to do with any of this -- but who finds it thrilling to be the designated public enemy number 1 of the West.  Computers warn everyone that the future is bleak or, even, more or less, nonexistent.  This leads to a spectacular montage of skyscrapers blown to pieces in NYC, all from Michael Bay blockbuster movies that turn out to exactly anticipate the attacks on 9-11.  The CIA learns that Hussein is storing biological agents in glass bulbs and convinces the military and the politicians to launch an attack on Iraq.  But, it turns out that the details as to these nerve agents all come from a movie by Michael Bay called The Rock and there's no truth to it at all -- but by this time no one cares about the truth.  The media and elites manufacture straw-man villains who we then attack while the real bad guys are somewhere else -- apparently, in Assad's fortress of solitude looming over Damascus.  Old man Assad dies and his son, Bashar, carries on the vendetta against the USA -- he dispatches armies of terrorist suicide bombers into the Iraqi insurgency again humiliating the American forces.  But the suicide bombers can't be controlled and the situation in Iraq devolves into a bloody Sunni v. Shiite civil war.  After blaming Gaddafi for the Lockerbie bombing, with whom the Colonel had nothing to do, Bush and his Brit counterpart, Tony Blair, decide that they need to elevate Gaddafi into a hero and he is widely lionized in the West for abandoning a non-existent nuclear program (while Iran meanwhile continues to develop its nukes.)  Gaddafi is invited to speak at the United Nations where he makes a looney-tunes address and sleeps at night in a luxury tent on property leased to him by Donald Trump.  (There's a bizarre tour of problems at Trump's Atlantic City casinos involving dueling masterminds, a Japanese gambler named Kashiwagi who has broken the code and is siphoning millions off Trump's gaming enterprises versus a guy named Jess Marcum who is Trump's factotum -- in any event, Kashiwagi is supposed to return to Trump his ill-gotten gambling profits, but the Yakuza butcher Kashiwagi and Trump doesn't get his money back.  This, in turn, forces Trump into bankruptcy and, without profit-making endeavors, he has to make a fateful turn toward TV and celebrity status.  Because of the lies and corruption exposed by the debacle involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, all young people embark on an "inner emigration" and simply flee into cyberspace.  (Here, Davis uses a repeated shot from Tron of the digital hero crossing a threshold.)  The Internet and Facebook spawn picturesque but ineffective revolutions -- Occupy Wall Street in Trump's NYC and the Arab Spring.  The Arab Spring leads to an uprising in Libya and Gaddafi, abandoned by his erstwhile allies in the West, reverts to being a pathetic embattled master-villain -- he gets beaten to death.  (Gaddafi is finally run to earth when a CIA drone operated by remote control out of Oklahoma bombs his convoy escaping across the desert.)  Trump runs for president.  He's reviled by all liberals but, by this time, communication networks have become systems of self-fulfilling algorithms -- no one gets any news that they are not predisposed to like due to the Artificial Intelligence managing dissemination of information over the internet.  The liberals can denounce Trump to their heart's content but they are only denouncing him to people like themselves.

There's a lot more stuff in Hypernormalisation. There are dozens of names of shadowy figures said to pulling the strings -- most of them are people that I had never heard of.  For instance, I wasn't aware that Jed Pearl, who got beheaded by Arab terrorists, was the son of Judea Pearl, a prominent early AI exponent -- that is, one of the people complicit in developing the fictional world on which political elites purport to have influence.  I didn't know that East Wenatchee, Washington is the home of some sort of monster computer that knows everything about every aspect of the future -- in fact, until I saw this movie, I had never heard of East Wenatchee at all.  Curtis scores his sinister non-stop revelations to ominous music and, about every ten minutes, this phrase occurs:  "But, then, a strange thing happened...", a formula that denotes that attempts to manipulate reality always have unintended and completely bizarre consequences.  For instance, Kissinger's manipulation of Syria to eliminate pan-Arab alliances ends up with the Twin Towers being destroyed in NYC.  

I have long criticized Ken Burns for developing his films are two parallel tracks -- there is an elaborate narration and an equally elaborate pictorial system of images, but, for the most part, the two don't intersect.  That is, the pictures have nothing to do with the narrative except to provide a sort of atmospheric wall-paper for the spoken word. Curtis takes this technique to its logical extreme.  The imagery that he shows, often very dramatic, has nothing to do with his narration -- at least in most cases.  In fact, Curtis often uses his elaborate montages to undercut or subvert what he is saying.  There are notable exceptions, for instance, the disaster-film montage before the 9-11 attacks, but, by and large, it's very hard to construe how the spectacular pictures correlate to the argument imposed on the viewer.  We see helicopters lit by laser pointers over Tahrir Square so that they look like hovering clouds of data, innumerable ominous drone and helicopter shots -- East Wenatchee is made to look like something out of The X-Files, although Wikipedia shows it to be a pleasant-looking suburb nestled in mountains.  Strange orbs and lights roam around darkened woods; the air is full of UFOs floating here and there or zipping along at high-speed.  Complicated highway interchanges model flows of information.  In the Middle East, we see fountains dyed red to simulate blood and mangled corpses under tarps still leaking smoke into the air.  Lenin's rosy embalmed corpse sits in a column of amber light.  Kissinger is always evasive, looking away from the camera furtively and scratching his nose.  Reagan and his wife hold hands as they plot perfidiously.  At about the film's midpoint, the weirdness reaches a kind of horrific crescendo -- we see thugs beating up Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian autocrat, and his wife, intercut with Jane Fonda exercise videos, elaborately choreographed spectacles in which Jane looks deranged and fanatical (the point is that she has withdrawn from politics, no longer Hanoi Jane but Exercise Fanatic Jane).  I don't know what exactly this is supposed to mean but the bizarre montage is certainly weirdly effective.  The fact is that most of Curtis' argument relies on secret events, things, by definition, hidden from view and, so, the film has to rely on evocative, if obscure, footage to suggest ominous actions that have been concealed from us.  (The movie reminds viewers of Donald Trump's early appeal -- he prowls through his casinos with a kind of magnetic feral savagery that is intensely charismatic; it's all contrived and the film sometimes shows his marital problems, but, when he was in his thirties, Trump was very handsome and there was a certain brusque poetry to the way that he spoke.)

The curious thing about Curtis' film is that it falls prey to the very malaise that it condemns.  A collage of half-truths and paranoid surmise, the film is hermetic in the sense that it seems curiously sealed off from real life.  The picture is kin to certain highly cerebral documentaries such as Chris Marker's masterpiece Sans Soleil and Barrison and Ross' The Ister.  But those films seem radically more "open".  Curtis poses questions only to immediately answer them.  In effect, he's creating an alternative reality, like the "alternative facts" to which Trump's factotum, Kellyanne Conway, alluded.  Like the technocrats in Curtis' Hypernormalisation, the film posits a history that can be readily understood, assimilated to certain political positions, and manipulated.  The enterprise is questionable but the picture is fascinating -- it's like watching a spectacular and protracted train wreck.