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Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

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Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#31

Post by max_ »

raidicy wrote: post #18

I really do not like it at in episode 1, of his latest doc series, Curtis did not show the very questionable results from MK Ultra and chose only to cherry-pick the only woman coming forward to say that it wiped her memory and cut it so that it looked very credible. And then went on further to say that it only wiped patients memories which from my understanding all it did was create a bunch of people with PTSD or Not…

Cutis's point was that MK Ultra was a failure in terms of its political objectives

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#32

Post by sgt101 »

mhh__ wrote: post #24

Curtis should really scratch a certain part of me, the part that listens to numbers stations and stays up at night reading old declassified cold war papers etc., But I just can't believe anything he says. The ratio of confidence to lack of citations is just alarming. I enjoyed and somewhat agreed with the main thesis of hypernormalisation but it just seemed impossible to verify. It doesn't help that a lot of his work…

The different elements can all be verified, the narratives aren't there because he doesn't push them. The fundamental that I took from hypernormalisation was that there are co-incidences everywhere if you look hard enough but that co-incidences don't prove anything.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#33

Post by sgt101 »

mhh__ wrote: post #28
vizzier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take it as a piece of entertainment, more of a historical clip show with some connected narrative they can be enjoyable to watch even without trusting the information entirely. Curtis has a gift of picking out obscure and interesting clips many of which were filmed before many of his audience (including myself) were even born. His British slant (and the fact that they come from the BBC archives) may make their…

The clips are why I bothered to finish watching it. Its interesting it just isn't true... I am British so no complaints about archival footage

Which bits aren't true?

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#35

Post by mhh__ »

sgt101 wrote: post #33
mhh__ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clips are why I bothered to finish watching it. Its interesting it just isn't true... I am British so no complaints about archival footage

Which bits aren't true?

I was being hyperbolic. The whole narrative with Syria for example is vaguely plausible but I really struggled to find sources to back up this grand conspiracy he very directly alleges.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#36

Post by mhh__ »

sgt101 wrote: post #32
mhh__ wrote: post #24

Curtis should really scratch a certain part of me, the part that listens to numbers stations and stays up at night reading old declassified cold war papers etc., But I just can't believe anything he says. The ratio of confidence to lack of citations is just alarming. I enjoyed and somewhat agreed with the main thesis of hypernormalisation but it just seemed impossible to verify. It doesn't help that a lot of his work…

The different elements can all be verified, the narratives aren't there because he doesn't push them. The fundamental that I took from hypernormalisation was that there are co-incidences everywhere if you look hard enough but that co-incidences don't prove anything.

Pushing narratives is all he does. He carefully writes as though he isn't, but he is absolutely pushing a narrative. The whole section about Gaddafi is a narrative just one that he presents carefully

The elements can be verified but does that mean his central thesis is emergent or the result of people's will?

Is Curtis himself a hypernormalizer? I am tempted to say yes.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#37

Post by aguasfrias »

pan69 wrote: post #2

> Curtis draws a conclusion without a narrative trajectory; he leaves multifarious discordant happenings to interplay... 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. I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world and how difficult…

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.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#38

Post by rusk »

renjimen wrote: post #10
pan69 wrote: post #2

> Curtis draws a conclusion without a narrative trajectory; he leaves multifarious discordant happenings to interplay... 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. I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world and how difficult…

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.

> 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.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#39

Post by rbanffy »

pan69 wrote: post #2

> Curtis draws a conclusion without a narrative trajectory; he leaves multifarious discordant happenings to interplay... 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. I think Curtis is trying to show the viewer the complexity of the world and how difficult…

> 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.

Re: Adam Curtis’ “Bitter Lake”: A Review

#40

Post by bog_alchemist »

Playing over the BBC archived footage is Scubaz's 'The Vanishing American Family', a title card in Arial font with something ominous and foreboding like 'The Last Panopticon' or 'The Mesmerising Autarch' appears on screen before a publicly educated Southern begins his voiceover: But life wasn’t always as it seemed. In far away Angola, Marshal Dos Santos took the same lessons that the bankers and power brokers of New York learnt but instead of applying it to the teamsters and unions, he would apply it on a systematic scale to his people. It was the worlds first information war and it was being jointly sponsored by both the Soviets and Americans.
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