Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/19/hypernormalisation-takes-a-dee.html
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I masochistically enjoy his films.
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Not a very effective trailer. I saw a collage of images and I could identify a few. The bass line was nice, but if those images made a narrative I couldn’t see it. Something something Reagan panda?
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you lost me at “thought leaders”
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Sounds like the title to a youtube video that tells you that it won’t really help you in the long run to store phone numbers in a separate table from people…
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What the hell? That was like a Sweded version of Koyaanisqatsi.
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I think you mean: “Something something Reagan sneezing panda?”
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It is kind of bizarre that people could come up with “post-truth”. Post what? Post when? Cold war era? WW2 Era? Depression Era? WW1? Gay 90’s? Reconstruction? Civil War? Revolutionary War? Reformation? Feudal Era? Rome?
When is this Truth World as compared to the Post-Truth World? Who are these people who tell the Truth? Most people I know lie occasionally. I suspect everyone I know lies more than occasionally. Is the fact that the “thought leaders” are “people”, and “people” lie… is that telling in any way? Can we construe something logically from the connection?
People lie to their creditors, lie to the utilities, lie to their bosses about why they are late. Somehow we expect politicians to be any different? Do we imagine Caesar or the Habsbergs didn’t lie to the masses? The Popes? The Founding Fathers? What a load of complete, starry-eyed horse shit, frankly.
Should we give it a pass? No. Should we expect more? Of course. People evolve. There’s nothing new about murder but we impose the expectation of not murdering people. That said, we don’t gasp and pretend we are living in a “post-not-murdering-people” world. The idea we are somehow living in an era that is less honest than the past is no less insipid.
Whether it was the Crusades or the Great Depression or Separate But Equal, society has always been divided between those who believe the generally agreed upon narrative of the time and those who differ with it, and world history is driven by the conflict between those two sides. If anything, now, more people see through it, so perhaps it just seems like reality is more fake now.
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I sort of agree. But I guess the narrative effect they were going for was that there is no coherent narrative to anything that appears to be happening, that we’ve all lost the plot, and that the authors of this disastrous fiction are incapable of or uninterested in creating a new story-myth of unity and social cohesion. So it’s just a clowns’ parade of nonsense disguised as entertainment–even the mass shootings and the wars are now entertainment supported by advertisers pushing pain killers and allergy cures–and so we end up sitting in a state of mental paralysis called “normality” or “denial” or whatever the fashionable term for doing nothing is these days. I found the blandness of the trailer an interesting counterpoint to the slick and shiny hyper-glossed production values of the news-entertainment axis, but maybe the intern who put the clip together simply didn’t have sufficient time to do something more polished, which strangely kind of works in this instance.
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If only we could abandon the political propaganda of our modern world and go back to the honest days of George Washington, who admitted he chopped down his father’s favorite cherry tree because he could not tell a…
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I wasn’t complaining about the lack of polish, just the lack of anything making sense at all. They violated “show don’t tell” really badly, especially if the images don’t reinforce the title cards. If they’re just going for a collage of images, it’s going to be hard to beat Qoyaanisqaaatsi.
It seems pretty standard for Adam Curtis; he loves to weave together the detritus of pop culture as a means of providing texture to his points. He uses visual imagery the same way a person would score a film with music.
I am definitely looking forward to this next entry in his oeuvre.
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Wasn’t the clip at 2:22 anamorphically squeezed?
The actual movie is inocuous over-long center-left propaganda. Could’ve laid out its thesis in a quarter of its almost 3-hour run time. And that quarter would mostly be the last half hour.
Every transition made my “correlation does not imply causation” alarm go off.
A lot of that, only in the trailer!
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Don’t judge this by the trailer. A dark, well researched and eye-opening documentary indeed. The narrative is coherent.
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