Adam Curtis - 16 June 2012

AMERICA’S DANGEROUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH COUNTERINSURGENCY

At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists.

In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance - and he turned up in Kabul dressed like this.

And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror.

He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden.

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The BBC producer/director’s brilliant oeuvre is nothing less than astonishing.

BY MICHAEL ATKINSON

Some of the most radical and searching historical interrogations on film in the last few decades are being performed at the BBC, and chances are you’ve never seen them. The hair-raisingly provocative presence of producer/director Adam Curtis in the world’s most famous hyper-acculturated state media machine is nothing less than astonishing, particularly when you look at his work starting with 1992’s Pandora’s Box (and, since then, accumulating to about 24 solid hours of unnerving discourse). His new three-hour film, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, is typical Curtis, and you may find it randomly appearing in arthouses for short theatrical runs this year, and you can find it streaming online. You will not, however, see it on American television.

Curtis makes three- and four-hour documentary mini-series about modern history evolving from the early 20th century to today. They wear a calm and glossy BBC veneer, as though they are a mere set of history lessons slouching leftwardly, all about How We Got Here. But if you wade into Curtis’s worldview, there’s more at stake than that. You could be convinced, given a big enough dose of these tax-funded projects, that the human world is so close to ending you can smell the sulphur amid the toxic plumes, electronic heat and war-zone smoke. Curtis is no doomsayer, just a dry-eyed documentarian, and his exclusive subjects are the force vectors behind recent history that end in disaster.

Curtis’ brand of deep politics follows the cascade of sociopolitical dominoes, beginning with ideology and culminating in flat-out catastrophe, be it 9/11 or the world economic meltdown or merely the Reagan-era state of rampaging, consumerist narcissism. Formally, Curtis manufactures his flowcharts with the simplest means available: archival footage, talking heads, calm but ominous narration, associative montage.

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Part 1: Love and Power

Part 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

Part 3: The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey