One of the most unique documentarians working today, the BBC journalist Adam Curtis has for decades produced films which are compelling commentaries on modern civilisation, a body of work which provides insights into the forces that have shaped the post-war era. His controversial documentary The Power Of Nightmares (2004), in which he attacked Western politicians and the media for exaggerating the dangers of terrorism, was described by a critic as “a Noam Chomsky lecture channelled by Monty Python”, and by an admirer as “taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix”.

“My job description,” says Curtis, “is to make people aware of power. To let them see the forces around them. The things they don’t see.” Curtis' latest film, the 166-minute HyperNormalisation, showcases his talent for doing this by making connections between cultural trends and political events that most observers would not notice. As his opening narration states:

“We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world: suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place. It is about how over the past 40 years politicians, financiers, and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring. Even those who thought they were attacking the system ─ the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counter-culture ─actually became part of the trickery. Because they too had retreated into the make-believe world. Which is why their opposition has no effect, and nothing ever changes."

The documentary then breezes through a wide variety of subjects which serve to enunciate Curtis' theses, if sometimes only tangentially: the rise of suicide bombing under the auspices of Ayatollah Khomeini and its subsequent use by Hamas, the conflict between Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger due to the latter's “constructive ambiguity”, technological utopians such as John Perry Barlow and their dream of online freedom, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its use by software companies to monitor and influence people's online habits, former radicals such as Patti Smith and Jane Fonda who abandoned revolution for a cool detachment, the Occupy Movement, and the Arab Spring.

Recurring throughout the film is the relationship between Colonel Gaddafi and the West, which is used as an example of how the United States, “paralysed by the complexity” of the situation in the Middle East, constructed a more manageable “super-villain” in order to explain events which had intractable roots. Gaddafi did nothing to discourage this, thus helping to create a fake world in which both sides tacitly accepted lies as truth. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gaddafi became a friend and fake hero when he promised to dismantle weapons of mass destruction he didn't possess, and then a few years later was branded again as a villain when the Arab Spring arose.

Similarly, a segment of the film titled “The Truth Is Out There” (tagline of the famous television show The X-Files), suggests that the widespread belief in UFOs as signifying alien visitations was the result of a disinformation campaign by the US government in order to shift focus away from their experimental weapons development.

The result of all of this “perception management”, according to Curtis, is a general disbelief in the narratives spun out by politicians, leading to the rise of political technologists such as Vladislav Surkov in Russia and Donald Trump in the US, both of whom deliberately act in a bewilderingly self-contradictory matter.

In a 2011 article for the London Review of Books by Peter Pomerantsev titled Putin's Rasputin(quoted in HyperNormalisation), Surkov is described as being at the centre of a fusion of despotism and postmodernism, “sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.”

Curtis makes a connection between this approach by Surkov and the language of Trump, which at turns bears resemblance to both the Occupy Movement and the far right. In the 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal appears the following confession by the President-elect: “I play to people’s fantasies….People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration ─ and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”

Aptly, The Art of the Deal was ghost-written, and its author Tony Schwartz, in a mea culpa expressed in The New Yorker, stated that, “‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?'” Unsurprisingly, Trump, according to Schwartz, loved the phrase, and Trump biographer Timothy L. O'Brien described the book as a “nonfiction work of fiction.”

“Welcome to the post-truth world,” declares the trailer for HyperNormalisation.But Curtis does not place the blame for this predicament solely with politicians. HyperNormalisation also discusses how the withdrawal by radicals into self-centredness, coupled with the rise of an insular Internet culture reinforced by the intelligent algorithms of various websites, corporations, and networks, has led to a world where people are detached from political reality and obsessed with the frivolous.

As one astute online observer ─ Carmen Hermosillo ─ noted as early as 1994: “Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality, and then represents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion, and we are getting lost in the spectacle.”

This technologically-driven insulation may explain the footage in HyperNormalisation of the tearful Britisher dazed by Brexit, and the wider shock at the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It also explains why the armchair philosophers and Facebook warriors who poured out on to the streets for the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring were unable to produce lasting structural changes.

One revealing moment in HyperNormalisation revolves around an interview with one of the Facebook organisers of the Arab Spring in Egypt. At first the young man declares that there were no leaders of the protest and claims that all of the protesters were heroes; shortly thereafter he becomes overwhelmed by emotion and tearfully denies that any deaths were the responsibility of the organisers. He then abruptly leaves the studio set.

This unheroic denial of responsibility for either good or bad exemplifies Curtis' belief that a leaderless “revolution” brought about via “democratic” means such as Facebook is unlikely to substantially alter economic and political structures. The rise of the Internet has provided greater access to information, but this does not automatically translate to an increase in knowledge and power.

Many people will find HyperNormalisation to be uncomfortable viewing, for few documentaries explicitly challenge the viewer. A reviewer for the Scottish newspaper The National, despairingly recognising herself as one of the “perplexed sheep”, wrote, “I felt depressed after watching this, as I don’t know what to do. If you can’t trust politicians, elites, rebels or activists then who can you look to?” Curtis does not provide an answer, but one suspects that those with an extensive and philosophical knowledge of history and the world not largely derived from social media, would have had a better understanding of power, and would not have been surprised by Brexit, Trump, or even Curtis himself.

Curtis has a talent for discovering telling archive footage, sometimes offered with no commentary, other times overlaid with an eclectic and often incongruous montage of music. A blood-spattered wall is accompanied by an angelic children’s chorus, a violent explosion by a country music song. Barlow’s recital of his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is attended by clips from the 1982 science-fiction film Tron. This jarring technique ─ reminiscent of the films of Stanley Kubrick such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) ─ performs two functions: it forces us to interpret the images in an unconventional way, and simultaneously brings to our attention the use of music in documentaries. These unorthodox juxtapositions, along with Curtis' at times deadpan narration, signal a streak of irony pervading his films.

In order to highlight the uniqueness of Curtis’ style, it is worthwhile to compare his work to other films with similar aims, such as maverick filmmaker Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States (2012). This 12-hour documentary series has similarly attracted controversy and criticism, is an atypical narrative about power politics, makes extensive use of archive footage, and often includes clips from fictional films to articulate a point.

But whereas Stone focuses on major events and the political giants who made them happen, Curtis is more interested in the ideas that shaped those events. So HyperNormalisation, while discussing important political figures such as Ronald Reagan, also discusses the influence of the Russian science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic and the dystopian writings of cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson.

This is not to say that Curtis is necessarily better than Stone — the films of both men are insightful in their own ways. But Curtis' methodology and perspective is a unique one, partly due to his influences stemming less from other filmmakers and more from works of literature such as John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. Curtis, after all, regards himself as more of a journalist or historian than a filmmaker.

Curtis is not without his critics, however. He has been accused of doing precisely what he criticises others of doing: providing style over substance, airing prejudiced and simplified narratives, and making tenuous connections between disparate events. Some of this criticism is undoubtedly valid. Curtis, perhaps unavoidably, omits much in his narratives, and a number of his statements are questionable. HyperNormalisation's claim that politicians no longer possess any ideological visions of the future, for instance, is belied by Bernie Sanders. But Curtis is entirely aware of the limitations of both himself and the medium he uses. “[…] I try not to compromise in what I’m saying,” he said in an interview with Wire. “[…] I simplify it, but I don’t degrade it.”

And alongside this dislike of oversimplified narratives is a contempt for those who do the opposite and are deliberately obscure (Curtis cites French philosopher Michel Foucault as an example). “I think you can take anything, however complicated and make it simple and approachable, and emotional as well as intellectual.”

Curtis sees it as his job to stimulate thought, and despite his flaws he does this extremely well; even those well-versed in the events and trends discussed in his films are likely to encounter unfamiliar footage and ideas.The term 'hypernormalisation' was coined by the Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe the state of mind of Soviet Russia just before its collapse, a mindset in which the lies about society were commonplace to the point of acceptance. Implicit in Curtis' work is the assumption that Western civilisation has reached a similar point.

HyperNormalisation was released shortly before the US Presidential election; the subsequent results of that election make it all the more important to understand Curtis' argument, partial confirmation of which appeared in post-election reflections by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. David Remnick, in an article for The New Yorker, commented that “in an age of filter bubbles and social-media silos [...] the 'information' that reached people was increasingly shaped by what they wanted to be true.” Obama himself remarked that “Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter.” In Rolling Stone, Sanders criticised the media for “living in a bubble” and having “no sense of what is going on in the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.”

On Trump, Sanders stated: “He distorts, and the problem is he lies all the time. Media occasionally does its job and catches him lying. But people say, 'Yeah, he's right. I watch the media. I don't believe the media.' […] We have to understand that Trump, in a sense, revolutionized politics […] This man is totally unpredictable.”But both Obama and Sanders see the possibility, if not the probability, that Trump, by virtue of being an outsider with seemingly little tolerance for dissent, might be able to get things done. Will Trump turn out to be the revolutionary that the powerless “99%” only wish they could be?

Curtis is not hopeful. When before the election he was asked by The Guardian what a Trump electoral victory would mean, he said, “It means the pantomime has become reality and starts rampaging around. And then we are f***d.”

HyperNormalisation is best seen in the context of Curtis' other work, much of which is thematically related. Critiques of technological utopianism, hippie culture, and modern human individuality can be found in The Century of the Self (2002) and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011). The notion that politicians have lost both their vision and their believability is explored in The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007). The ineptitude of politicians and technocrats is detailed in Pandora's Box (1992), The Way of All Flesh (1997), and The Mayfair Set(1999).

But there is little duplication to be found in this work, with each film discussing the overall theme from a different context, and touching on countless other fascinating developments of the modern age, ranging from Edward Bernays and the rise of public relations to the apparently ideological underpinnings of the selfish-gene theory.

Curtis is sceptical about the power of television to change things. His blog, named The Medium and the Message, is a nod to communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. In 1985 one of McLuhan's ideological students, Neil Postman, wrote the book Amusing Ourselves to Death ─ Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, in which the medium of television was castigated as a major contributor to the development of a culture “overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.” But the films of Adam Curtis can be a persuasive incitement to viewers to investigate or re-evaluate history, science, politics, and, one hopes, themselves.

The author is an antiquarian and freelance writer

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine January 1st, 2017