HyperNormalisation

This is a documentary that people need to watch. It's informative in a way I have never seen on TV before and will help people of all political divides to make their minds up as to weather their political beliefs are accurate.

From other reviews you will gather that it is about politics, money, power, The West, the Middle East, and how politicians are trying to re-establish some form of control by lying to you.

My review is to encourage you to watch this because of the future of the internet. INFORMATION IS POWER.

Today questions are being put forward in parliament about how to control the internet - this documentary will both inform you about how important this is and possibly scare you about who might be setting the controls.

With a £30k budget and an amazing flair for story-telling, the director takes us on a journey through post-WW2 history and the circumstances as to why we are in this disillusioned state so many political agendas seem to be supporting.

This is great viewing and really gets you to think hard about the issues that matter: nothing can truly be explained by a 140-character tweet and that's exactly the problem: the world is too interlinked and complex to be understood via superficial analysis nor poetic slogans.

We need to collectively understand the deeper issues at hand, and find the solution that deals at source - building walls, imperial slogans, bigotry and racist knee-jerk responses are not the way

Peace

This is a very long film so I recommend breaking it up into two or more chunks and leaving some time for digestion in between. It has lots of interesting ideas and I guarantee even the best-read will learn something and have a couple of "Hmmmm" moments, if not an "Aha!" one.

Curtis has a way of imposing a narrative upon your active perception using images, music and sounds in ways you would expect from, ahem, a film maker. He even casts himself as a journalist, rather than a storyteller. As a result, you are always aware that you are being manipulated, just like the manufactured reality discussed/presented in the film. You are the audience of the audience.

Proceeding in this spirit, though many people have found Hypernormalisation depressing and frightening, it should not take you anywhere you haven't been before (if you are over 50 anyway). Barbarism in the pursuit of power is not peculiar to the 20th and 21st centuries, it is just a lot bigger and it's online. Hypernormalisation is not for the squeamish, but when you become aware that you have developed a level of immunity to these myriad images of horror, you get to understand what normalisation means. Neither is it for the faint hearted; the target audience may be those who are already deeply cynical.

But Curtis is a clever film maker, let him entertain you.

At the core of this film is a message which I think we can all appreciate; that the world is complex and filled with diversity but at the same time we are encouraged by our media, hobbies, and politicians, to believe it is much more black/white, and not to expose ourselves to views that contrast with our own. This is not new unfortunately – the politics of the right/wrong is everywhere, and the echo chambers of Twitter, CNN, Fox, and many other "people who liked this also liked these" type tools – it is pretty clear where we are. How we got here is more interesting, and there are worse ways to explore it than to allow Adam Curtis to have a run at explaining it.

The way he does it here is as compelling and confusing and frustrating and flawed as one would imagine; it really succeeds in making some of his other work look like the tightest factual presentation ever. In almost three hours we explore the story by touching on Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, the internet, politics, Donald Trump, 1970's Russian sci-fi; the Arab spring; perception management, drugs, Brexit, UFO conspiracies, Twitter, and so on. Often the links are tenuous, but Curtis structures it really cleverly – we are given chunks of facts in a presentation that makes sense, and as a result we accept the links even as they jump countries and decades.

The downside is that many will be turned off because this is polemic incorrectly presented as a documentary. It is not the latter but as the former it works very well. Although it runs to almost 3 hours, I did not find it boring, but rather found it quite compelling in its message and the manner in which it is presented. The strength of the film to me was not that it convinces in every word, or that I agreed with it wholly but rather that it gave me plenty to think about. It helps that I am old enough to remember many of these events – to have seen the shifting political allegiances, to experience the moments, and to feel like they were not organic in all cases.

HyperNormalization is a niche film – it did not even make it not a BBC channel but rather was put on the streaming service directly. It is not as smart as it wants to, but it is engaging and interesting whether you agree with all of its assertions or not.

I don't know what Curtis plays for fun in between film productions, but surely he is losing his marbles. And it takes a particular type of person to like what Curtis does.

So Stage 1. New York City. The city is run by incompetents. Erase that. The incompetents are in serious debt. Keep that. The incompetents want to raise the bar and bring in some more debt, when they are unable to pay even the first part. Flash a light over this fact. Nobody wants to make business with the incompetents. Film that. So the incompetents are fired and brought to court to recoup some of the incurred debt. No way, that would be common sense! So the incompetents beg the creditors to forward some more money. The creditors, surprisingly, want to have some of the money back, unlike the taxpayer. So the creditors ask for an overview of the spending. Boom-boom! Conspiracy alert! And can you imagine? For the first time the financial committee has 8 bankers out of 9 people. Who has ever heard of anything like that done by the state? Accountancy should be done by pharmacists and highway construction should be left to the midwives like any good state syndicate would do. Now, if you replace banker with Jew Curtis' discourse is precisely the centuries old Christian propaganda.

Stage 2. Patty Smith. She somehow decides to fit in the tableau instead of "changing the system." What? Right! Like the 16th century theater owners who were fighting the system by brown nosing to the king and aristocrats, like the poets who were writing poems for a bowl of soup, like painters satirizing their patron's religious beliefs. Oh! What days of decadence Mr. Curtis has lived.

And so on, for almost three hours. Nice story. So the voters should give more power to the... power?

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch