4 ms·

> Curtis draws a conclusion without a narrative trajectory; he leaves multifarious discordant happenings to interplay... I think Curtis does this on purpose. W

• neighbour 5y ago
  Agreed on nearly all points except the following. >there are no good guys and bad guys I don't think that's what he is implying. He is leaving it up to our interpretation but the absence of a position does not mean he is saying that there are no good or bad guys. From what I gathered, he's not saying anything at all. Big fan of his work regardless.
  • sgt101 5y ago
    Well, I think he's definitely saying that we've been tricked and that the narratives that are pushed supporting our lifestyle and societal choices are lies told to enrich and empower others.
• renjimen 5y ago
  Agreed. It's a point he makes over and over again: the world is complex and any alleged narrative is just a simplification we make to help ourselves understand the complexity or influence others. "Good guys" and "bad guys" are just a part of this narrative we create. People are a product of their past, which is also complex, but good and bad are powerful models we are programmed since childhood to apply to the world.
  • rusk 5y ago
    > we create I think one of the core ideas that is smeared across Curtis’ work is that these narratives are created and fed to us as an explanation of the world that we rarely question.
• ayngg 5y ago
  I think it is like what you said, most of his work seems to fundamentally revolve around how incomprehensibly complex systems in society have become, and the consequences of attempts to control many of those systems (either by necessity or arrogance). Most of this stories are just myths, strings interwoven in the much larger fabric of interlinking events meant to show how many of these discrete simplifications of reality interact and often clash with each other.
  • mc32 5y ago
    Not just the modern world. Any connected civilization which needs to contend with factions, differing interests, foes, allies, and "intersectionality". If you lived in an isolated island a half dozen centuries ago or more, then it would be simpler till a voyager tribe, society or civilization landed.
• aguasfrias 5y ago
  He is not saying there are no good guys or bad guys. He is saying that when we're told of good guys or bad guys, they are usually characters in a narrative. But he does not go so far as to say good guys and bad guys don't exist. Merely that we have not done the necessary work to make sense of it. In fact, he seems to rebuke moral relativism, if HyperNormalisation is any indicator.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  > I think Curtis does this on purpose. He is trying to give perspective rather than telling a story. Yet, by selecting the elements he uses to base the perspective, he’s kind of telling the skeleton of a story.
• dash2 5y ago
  > I think Curtis does this on purpose. Whenever I watch a Curtis doco, I feel I'm being told a compelling story. However, if you ask me afterwards what it was about, I will stumble to explain what it was about. Agreed. > I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world An alternative, more reasonable take is that Adam Curtis is a bullshitter, whose documentaries give the illusion of understanding complicated subjects without any actual understanding.
  • beckman466 5y ago
    > Adam Curtis is a bullshitter, whose documentaries give the illusion of understanding complicated subjects without any actual understanding Only God knows the whole truth! /sarcasm Both can be true imo. The problem is that the media which we consume is made ephemeral by way of omission. Media is turned into 'intellectual property' by our outdated copyright/IP system, which makes (now)digital media artificially scarce. Someone like Adam Curtis is merely lucky because he has both the time and the access to this material, and the BBC is paying the 'licensing fees' for the footage he uses. The average working class person in the US is constantly bombarded with media, yet our collective memory (in the form of archival video/media) is often lacking universal access. So the means to reflect and make connections and conclusions is artificially scarce, which means we jump from newsworthy 'event' to 'event' (without seeing and understanding their interconnectedness): "To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught." - Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord [1] or Wikipedia summary: "Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution." [2] In other words, the schizophrenic capitalist-owned media isn't followable without serious mental health implications as it's an overwhelming never-ending assault that captures the working class' imagination. The confusion and alienation it creates solely benefits the propertied class. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.ht... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle