Adam Curtis still manages to mesmerize me. I vividly remember watching his 2016’s Hypernormalisation just a few days upon its release. I was impressed, but nonetheless a bit disappointed due to what I believed was a fatal flaw in Curtis’s reasoning. He seemed to believe that the oversimplified world we were then inhabiting came to such an extreme that it could result in what at the time I thought was an absurdity: the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. I finished watching his movie with a bitter taste in my mouth – it felt manipulative and bordering on the conspiratorial. A few months later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I was stupefied.
Living in the right here and now, we seem to almost forget how much the idea of having a man like Donald Trump in the presidency of the most powerful and influential country in the world would be deemed by any sensible person as complete nonsense just a few years ago. In my own country, Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, democratically elected president, not long ago was a minor, albeit controversial, political figure, whose media appearances were either due to cheap polemics or humor at his expense. Just months before his election, he was portrayed by mainstream media as nothing but than a clown – albeit a bigot and, we can now attest, dangerous one.
Curtis new series of films does not pend to the prophetical tone of his last one. On the contrary, it sets to explain just the opposite: how did we get here, and why. It would be tempting to start discussing these films through their ideas, but I must put something out of my chest first. I am absolutely entranced by Curtis visual style. His command of the audiovisual mean is unequivocal and it is even more bewildering due to its disarming simplicity. His style is typical and consistent throughout most of his oeuvre: old footage collaged together with his narration conducting the experience, accompanied by engaging segments tracked by catchy pop and ambient music. This fabricated simplicity intensifies the already overwhelming power of the images as we are more and more drawn by Curtis narration. He is a magnificent storyteller and punctuates his narrative with raw and sometimes painful blows of realness. The images can be graphical at times and we get closer and closer to share his conclusions that there is something deeply flawed with how our culture and societies are structured today.