Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Adam Curtis Interviewed by The Register on The Century of the Self

Adam Curtis: The TV elite has lost the plot
The stupidity of crowds
Beeb Week Adam Curtis is one of the jewels in the BBC's crown - as well as one of its fiercest critics.
His documentaries are rich, complex histories of ideas that have surprised BBC executives with their popularity amongst younger viewers: his montage technique and visual jokes reward repeated viewings.
The Century of the Self told the story of how Freud's nephew invented modern public relations [pt3 [1]]. The Power Of Nightmares [video [2]] described how the myth of the al-Qaeda "network" had to be invented so a terror trial could be heard under America's RICO laws. The Trap [pts1&2 [3]] describes how reductionist and paranoid logic of game theory influenced psychology, biology and eventually social policy.
(Curtis is also an advisor to Popbitch)
Over two interviews with us, Curtis lays into a TV class that has lost its confidence, run out of ideas, and fallen back on "user generated content" as a salvation.
He explains how bloggers are bullies, warns of the snake oil salesmen of the internet's "new democracy", and suggests how to repair a BBC in crisis.
[There's a short excerpt from the first interview in MP3 format here, and we'll air a follow-up later in the week. This one isn't broadcast quality, but it's such a fine rant, it's too good not share.]
·                                 Adam Curtis - Part One: Click the player or Download MP3
 [4]
Implicit behind a lot of this stuff, like being asked to do blogging, is that we're getting a more representative view of the public.
That's a great paradox. It's a wider thing than the internet, but the internet sums it up. It's that on the surface it says that "the internet is a new form of democracy". So what you're seeing is a new pluralism, a new collage, a new mosaic of all sorts of different ideas that's genuinely representative.
But if you analyse what happens, it simplifies things.
First of all, the people who do blogging, for example, are self-selecting. Quite frankly it's quite clear that what bloggers are is bullies. The internet has removed a lot of constraints on them. You know what they're like: they're deeply emotional, they're bullies, and they often don't get out enough. And they are parasitic upon already existing sources of information - they do little research of their own.
What then happens is this idea of the 'hive mind', instead of leading to a new plurality or a new richness, leads to a growing simplicity.
The bloggers from one side act to try to force mainstream media one way, the others try to force it the other way. So what the mainstream media ends up doing is it nervously tries to steer a course between these polarised extremes.
The Century Of The Self (2002)
So you end up with a rigid, simplified view of the world, which is negotiated by mainstream media in response to the bullying extremities.
Far from being "the wisdom of crowds", it's the stupidity of crowds. Collectively what we are doing is creating a more simplified world.
So it's more homogeneous?
Yes, it is.
I've talked to news editors in America. What they are most frightened of is an assault by the bloggers. They come from the left and the right. They're terrified if they stray one way they'll get monstered by bloggers on the right, if they stray the other way they'll get monstered by bloggers from the left. So they nervously try and creep along, like a big animal in Toy Story - hoping not to disturb the demons that are out there.
It leads to a sort of nervousness. The moment a media system becomes infected by nervousness it starts to decline.
Isn't that a specifically American problem? I remember the first time I walked into a newspaper office there, I saw all these desks are creaking under their trophies. Each journalist has about twenty awards on his or her desk - that's just armour plating for their egos.
Well, there are two things you are dealing with here.
What it reflects is a much wider insecurity amongst the media class. The media class grew up during a period of certainty which was the Cold War. All those famous reporters bestrode the world and told us what because everything was simple. We knew who was wrong and who was right.
But now they don't know anything. They know nothing!

It started with the Berlin Wall. None of those guys predicted the Berlin Wall would come down. Ever since then it's been quite clear that most mainstream news journalism has absolutely no idea about what's really going on. It reports the "factlets" really well, but when it tries to join up the dots, it often leads you into a strange either fantasy world, or simplified world.
But above all they know that they don't really know. And what that leads to is a terrible sense of insecurity.
So what happens? The internet comes along, and the utopians of the internet portray this as a new form of populist democracy. And those media barons who know they don't know what's going on, see in this a wonderful salvation. Because they can then say, "Ah, we'll let the people tell you what's going on".
I see it in my own organisation [BBC Current Affairs]. Those people who run the current affairs organisation embrace this with a, "Ah... oh my god, at last, we're off the hook! User generated content!"
And suddenly you get the world reported in even more fragmented terms - and people have no idea what's going on.
“Far from being ‘the wisdom of crowds’, it’s the stupidity of crowds.”
In a way you can understand why it's happening. It's a loss of confidence in a class that was once supreme, and it's a terrible cocktail. They were brought up to believe they were strong and powerful - but now no one cares, it leads to this terrible arrogance and nervousness. They see User Generated Content as the way out.
But these people are paid a large amount of money, actually, to be clever and to tell us about the world - and they're failing. It's not their fault, but they are failing at it.
What I noticed about blogging was that it was full of people who'd missed out on the dot com bubble the first time round - and a lot of them were advertising or marketing consultants.
What blogging lacks is an enthusiasm about finding out about the world.
It's more about therapy, getting something off your chest. There's no curiosity.
There's no curiosity. What it actually has is the desire to bully, and to shape the world to do things you want it to do.
“The media class don’t know anything. And they know they don’t know…”
And it atomises the consensus...
That phrase of yours is quite right, it is Balkanisation. It gives people security. So over here is the part of the internet - and therefore of the world - where there are people who think the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. Over are people who think it's all about stopping Muslim hordes taking over our culture. And over here, it's the neo-conservative lot who think it's all about ideas.
Do you remember that book about intelligent buildings, how buildings work out how to stand up? That's what's happening now. They're working out how to hold each other up. So you get a Balkanisation where there is no movement forward - everyone just publishes their position, stands up, and that's it. Everything is so static.
But wouldn't you say society is always competing groups, people are always jostling for power?
Yes, but they have an idea of where the world is going to, and they have an optimistic idea.
What marks out all these groups is that they're fundamentally negative - they're looking for something to criticise. They don't have a political ideal - and they don't know what's going on. So they retreat into a simplified and often very dated view of the world.
Which is fine, because actually you're right, most people throughout history have a simplified view of the world. What a journalist's job is to try and do, is go a tiny bit further than that, and actually try and open people's minds up, and ask, "Have you thought of looking at it this way?" That's its job.
What's happening on the internet is that people are retreating into their citadels where they will not have that. And if you try and do it, they don't like it. Because you're joining up the dots in a way that isn't the way they joined up the dots.
What really happens now, is that they're so entrenched in their self-referential groups, anyone who joins up the dots any other way is a bad person.

I've noticed in the reaction to The Trap - the attacks specifically avoid the ideas you're raising. Were you expecting that?
No, I was expecting more people to argue with me. To say "you're wrong" - to raise an argument. What you get is - anyone who joins up the dots in a way that doesn't fit with the received wisdom of particular groups is accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
If you look at The Trap, there is no conspiracy - the word doesn't enter into it. It's a straight history of ideas which have shaped psychology, politics, culture and science over the past 30 or 40 years. It fits them together. These ideas have been out there - they influenced Mrs Thatcher, they influenced Richard Dawkins, and many of them can be traced to the Cold War.
Now someone would argue this is a new form of censorship. Systems that purport to be open and free - systems of political management, and the internet - are becoming ways of shutting debate down. Of simplifying - not of controlling, that's the thing - a new simplified sense of order.
The Trap (2007)
In an age where people don't know what's what, we sort of agree with that. We look for order and want that. And our politicians can't give it to us - our media elites can't give it to us because they don't know what's what anymore. So far from creating a new richness and openness, we all work together to create a new system of agreed order, because we want it.
It's not that we're not bad people, that's what happens in an age of populism, a populist democracy.
The elites have given up, so no one's telling you what's what any more, we don't want that any longer - so we're beginning to work together sooner and actually, that's exactly what I was being accused of.
So what we're living through is a period of intense conformity. It is the great paradox of the age.
This was pointed out to me once by a man who ran a focus group, and it's the reason I made The Trap.
He said, "Everyone out there" - and we're looking through the mirror - "thinks they are an individual. But actually more and more people are exactly the same. Not only in how they dress, but how they feel about themselves and about each other." They talk in the same language.
“We should be saying to people ‘I’m going to take you out of yourself and show you something you haven’t thought of, which is either awesome, or incredible, or will inspire you’”
And I researched it, and it's true - he's completely right. We live in an age where we think we're completely individualistic, but actually, we're more conformist than we have been since the 1960s.
And the media has a big part to play in this...
Yes but no.
We have a big part to play in this. In an age where there are no leaders that inspire us, or take us beyond ourselves, we seek that order. It's a nice, happy, contented world. But actually it's a static world, because it doesn't lead anywhere. And that was the feeling I was trying to tap into in The Trap. Which is, yes, it's a sort of system of order - but actually, it's got stuck. And I think people are beginning to feel that...
But you won't move out of that until someone comes along and says, "Have you thought of it this way?" - and that's what we should be doing in television.

The glory of TV
We should be saying to people "I'm going to take you out of yourself and show you something you haven't thought of, which is either awesome, or incredible, or will inspire you". But we don't. We've instead an equivalent of a Victorian book of etiquette. We've simply reinforced those simple definitions of what is ordered and disordered.
We say, "Your child is too fat, and this is the order". Or, "You feel that way, well that's disordered, I would do this".
And it's not imposed - we all want it - but it leads to a static world. That's what I was trying to say.
It's interesting how people are responding to this infinite abundance of information, and they seem to respond by going to what's familiar and what looks ordered. And the groupthink you get on the internet that you see in these 'blogrolls' is a very seductive world. All the reference points you need are there, people are familiar and known, and people fall into this rabbit hole. I guess it's not surprising - when there are suddenly a million routes home, you choose the one most familiar to you. It's an off-the-shelf belief system.
At a time when there isn't anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the "empire of the self" - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.
And that's exactly what the internet is about - "If you like this book, others before you have bought these books..." And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, "If you played this, other people have played this..."
The Trap (2007)
On the internet, you're constantly monitoring other people's choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, "OK I'll do that to be like that". And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.
And it's what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.
Where does this rhetoric come from - that we're being empowered, or there's some kind of revolution taking place, where real power is being destroyed or inverted?
I think that genuinely came from a utopian ideal at the beginning of the internet - that this really could be the people's channel. And once something gets enmeshed in the currents of power it never turns out the way you expect. So it's interesting to chart how that happens, and that's exactly what has happened with the internet.
The utopian idealists have kept the rhetoric, but it is actually rapidly becoming something else - which is a simplifying system of social order. Not control, order. That is what it is all about.
Groups of people seek those who are like themselves, work together to actively make that ideal. And those grouplets then work together themselves to create a stable and harmonious system. You could argue that's a utopian ideal - it suits the particular economic system, it suits the idea of us as producers not consumers - and this technology is helping shape it.
But it's a very static world and I sense people are frustrated by that - it's so unprogressive. So... unpopulistic.
It's very bland as well - who on earth wants to be a node in the hive mind?
OK, I agree with that. But if you accept you do want to be a part of the hive mind - then hives in the past have done incredible things. They went to the moon! Groups have done incredible things. What's strange about this is that we have a group system here, but it's doing anything. It's not changing the world. It's not taking the place of old views. It's stopped.
We have a simulation - a simulation of a "group".
We have the equivalent of a collective mind... and it worries about whether we have a compulsive disorder. Or which percentage of them are theoretically obese!
I mean, cry me a river about those poor people with obsessive compulsive disorders! That is such a low horizon of what human beings can achieve.
And above all, what I ache for is a world where people really dream of incredible things, and above people who are in charge of the media, people who paid a lot of money, actually use their imagination and intelligence to take me places and tell me things I don't know.

People just want something good to watch, and be stimulated by. Not talked down to.
Quite!
But the idea as well that intrigues me is that we're being "oppressed by gatekeepers"! Give me a break - it's almost autistic. One good example is the BBC's Digital Assassin Day last summer. They tried to get all the bloggers to tell them what they thought they should be doing, it was all about a new democracy and "user generated content". But in the end, four times as many BBC people were involved in staging this than members of the public who eventually showed up. That tells me people at the BBC are far more neurotic about this than they need to be. Why do they think they need to do that?
No, but you see the reason for that is it isn't their fault. They have come into a world where they don't know what's going on. It's lack of confidence.
Our political leaders and our media elite - I know the BBC very well - simply lack confidence.
They're very nice, and they're very intelligent people. But they lack confidence about what is really going on in the world. It's collapsed. In the face of that they are easily seduced by another idea of democracy that they can "serve the people" by doing this.
Pandora's Box (1992)
Because their remit is Public Service Broadcasting. That is the problem - in an age where there is no elite, how do you do Public Service Broadcasting?
What they need to do is take the internet, and instead of portraying it as some sort of platform in which they just show people's dogs falling down stairs, they should use this and find a way of imaginatively constructing new things out of it. It'll be complicated, because the internet is quite anti-narrative, it goes all over the shop, but I know full well someone somewhere will take that and turn it into something like a Dickens novel, and use it to take people out of themselves. And I tell you, there's no one at the BBC thinking like that. And it's about time they did. Because all they do is go on and on and on about "Platforms" and "Delivery" - as if it's just process.
It's a time of great technical invention but it's a time of [artistic] stagnation. We need to take this [innovation] and create something imaginative out of it. These people are paid a lot, they have a lot of influence, and they could do wonderful things. It's time they got on with it.
They lack the sort of 'oomph' to say, "No, our job - as you said - is not to talk down to the people but to construct something that is just awesome, that makes them look at the world in a different way".
What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves - in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do that we will carry on declining.
The BBC should realise that. I have an idealistic view, but if the BBC could do that, taking people beyond their own selves, it will renew itself in a way that jumps over the competition. The competition is obsessed by serving people in their little selves. And in a way, actually, Murdoch for all his power, is trapped by the self. That's his job, to feed the self.
In the BBC, it's the next step forward. It doesn't mean we go back to the 1950s and tell people how to dress, what we do is say "we can free you from yourself" - and people would love it.

But technology feeds the self - you choose what you watch, and when you watch it, and you plug those iPod buds in and blot out the world.
It's not the technology - it's the idea of the technology - that this technology is for you. What the BBC should be doing is that, it's an awesome new construct, let's find a way of taking advantage of it.
What I'm good at is collage - all I can see is in that new system there must be a new way of collaging. In a way that when cinema came along you didn't really get. When cinema came along people sat in front of a screen watching a train coming into a station. Literally, hundreds of thousands of people came to see that. Within ten years people like DW Griffiths were doing extraordinary things with editing. Now I love watching stupid stuff on YouTube, but it really is the equivalent of watching a train come into a station.
Hah. Who can get bored with your cat falling down the stairs?
People should create an imaginative world which I would want to get into. When Dickens started doing multipart novels in the 1860s, people loved it - every month there was another world to go into. What is sitting there potentially is a vast world that will take people out of themselves.
That requires the decision-makers to get over this loss of confidence. Watching George Best or a great artist they're transcended...
It's sublime. Yes, we're in the midst of a Romantic age - our obsession with nature is part of a Romantic ideal. That's the BBC's job to create a transport into the sublime. All it takes is some clever boss to let some people thought because they always exist.
It will happen because there is a sense of ennui about the internet. It's all about - oh. Is that it? Plugging the latest thing into your ear is not enough.
Media still sees itself as a comforter to the nation. The 2000 election was a huge event and it was a deep psychic disruption for Americans. The law is final and the Supreme Court - the wise men - don't cheat and bundle their guy over the line. But in that case, they did. We don't have an equivalent of that - not even regicide! Now the papers at the time - and I think Gore Vidal expressed it that the New York Times and the networks were saying - is that the nation was traumatised and needed "immediate closure". They would rather be therapists than do the basics of what they should be doing, and figuring out who got the most votes.
TV now tells you what to feel.
It doesn't tell you what to think anymore. From EastEnders to reality format shows, you're on the emotional journey of people - and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. "Hugs and Kisses", I call it.
I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it's a system of guidance - it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a "hugs and kisses" moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.
Morality has been replaced by feeling.
That's what all the disorders are about. They are a way of oppressing and measuring whether what you're feeling is the correct feeling. Intellect and morality are intimately related but feeling is now predominant.
The "feeling" provides all the moral guidance they need?
It's very difficult to take people out of themselves.
Because what you're doing is reinforcing the priority of their own feelings about themselves. The thing about our age is that everyone monitors themselves. It's really fascinating. I did this with the psychological disorders in The Trap. They've become a way of policing yourself.
"Am I the right shape? Am I the right emotional construct?"
So you edge back to the right emotional shape, or the right physical shape.
And vanity in our time - is about pleasing yourself. It's about making yourself feel better about yourself. We live within our selves. We should find a way of escaping it, but the program makers don't have the imagination or the confidence.
“Cry me a river about those poor people with obsessive compulsive disorders! That is such a low horizon of what human beings can achieve.”
I think what you're good at is finding two groups of people and rooting their relationship in these different contexts. One group is people who are reductionist, and just want a simple pattern or machine view, or a diagram that explains the world: Freudians, or the sociobiologists for example. The other is people who are Hobbesian who think human nature is base, post-Fall, nasty and brutish. And you find times where the two people find a common cause.
That's a great analysis. I grew up at the time of the failure of the optimistic view of changing people. That's what marked out the 20th century - what drove it all was this idea that people can be made better, and fundamentally we can engineer it. That failed.
We now have a mirror image of that. There are people who are quite engineer-like - they're almost value-neutral. Every now and again that group meets another group who have a pessimistic view of human nature. But that group, the geeks, think "With that view, we can make the world safe".
They're almost engineers of the human soul - we can engineer a better world through pessimistic views of human nature.
I think that was true of marketers who saw in Freud's ideas a way of saying, "Look, we can shape how people fulfil their desires". That was also true of the neo-conservatives. They have a dark and pessimistic view of human beings, but they also have an optimistic view of a vision of the world which is that if we create a world that's grand enough, it will contain those dark desires and make them better. A lot of them are ex-Marxists, so it's not surprising.
Well, when you talk to the computer utopians and ask them, "Why are you so evangelical?" - to figure out what they really believe in - there's nothing there. What it really boils down to is a faith in inevitability, just like a Marxist view of history. It's technology, so don't fight it!
If you look at the Soviet Union the 1980s under Brezhnev were called the years of stagnation. I would argue that we are living through our own years of stagnation
And we just don't know it...
We just don't see it. And what I was trying to say in The Trap was very simple.
What we think of as us - as human beings, and the way society is ordered - isn't a natural order.
“My job is to describe the world, not fantasise about it.”
I'm not trying to say that it's terrible or it's wonderful. But pull back, and you'll see that just as in the Soviet Union, where you had Soviet Man, we are the equivalent of that simplified view of what humans are. It's an ideological construct. In Pandora's Box I made a program about the Soviet Union and that idea of The Plan. The Plan became mired in the technical processes, so managing that idea ended in absurdity.
I would argue that we're mired in the same thing. That, by taking an optimistic idea that takes a pessimistic view of human nature through managing it, has increasingly trapped us into a technical process where you manage the feelings of the individual. It's not bad, it's not a conspiracy - it's just an attempt to manage a system. But because it's based on a limited view of human beings, it doesn't quite work.
The behaviour of people in the NHS [in response to targets] is a very good example.
There is nothing new now. There is a new technology but we're not doing anything with it. So we're inventing new platforms with no purpose or meaning.
It will change and something new and optimistic... But you're right - it's the years of stagnation. There's opportunities but no one's grabbing them. It's an extraordinary time of relative peace and relative prosperity, but we are all terrified, anxious, nervous, and we're not making any use of this openness. And it will close down again.
A friend of mine saw the final part of The Trap and found it really depressing.
And I'm supposed to make people happy?
People look at the world and make their own minds up. Yes, it's a limited world we're living in and that's why it's called The Trap. My job is not to try and change the world but describe it.
Not as some of our journalists do, to fantasise about it. ®

Post your feedback here [5].
Links
© Copyright 1998–2011

Errol Morris, Academy Award winning director of The Fog of War, interviews Adam Curtis, director of “The Power of Nightmares”

Morris

Conversation

The Believer
Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris
On October 31, 2005, Errol Morris, Academy Award winning director of The Fog of War, interviewed Adam Curtis, director of “The Power of Nightmares”, the documentary film which asks the question “Did Johnny Mercer bring down the World Trade Center?” Originally broadcast on the BBC, a film version was shown at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where it was widely praised.  Drawing extensively on archival footage from the BBC Library, the film has encountered difficulties in finding distribution in the U.S.
Morris and Curtis discuss conspiracy theories, unintended consequences, and notional moles. 
I. ONE MAINE
EM:  The Power of Nightmares uses a substantial quantity of archival material and stock-footage.  I call it re-processed media.  Perhaps a better expression would be re-purposed media.  It’s different from the traditional use of found footage in news documentaries. Here stock-footage becomes expressionistic – never literal – an excursion into a dream – or, if you prefer – nightmare.  I tried at various times in the last six months to find out why The Power of Nightmares is not being shown in the United States.  The archival material from the BBC library has been cleared for use in the UK but not worldwide. 
AC:  It’s not physical censorship, although none of the TV networks want to show it.  Something I always wanted to ask you, was McNamara happy with the way you cut him?
EM:  No, he was not happy.  But I'm not sure that anything would’ve made him happy.  He never said this to me directly, but he did tell Craig, his son, that he liked the movie.
AC:  I thought you treated him just fine.  You were ambiguous.  It was difficult to know what you thought about him.

EM:  I still don’t know what I think.  The New York Times, today on the front page, had an article about new evidence concerning incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.  The incidents – which are discussed in The Fog of War – have been disputed for over forty years.  There are those that believe that they were part of a conspiracy to escalate the Vietnam War.   Here’s a question: Are they right?  And, in an even more general sense, is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other?  Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another? 
AC:  It’s the latter.  Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to.  History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.   For example, you could say the Gulf of Tonkin was a conspiratorial action to accelerate entry into war, yes?
EM:  Here’s the conspiracy argument.  The Johnson administration wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam.  But they needed a pretext.  And so they provoked these two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to get Congressional approval for escalation.  The claim is: they had a grand plan.  And the plan was war.  I’ve never had much of an appetite for conspiracy theories.  Here's my argument in a nutshell.  People are too much at cross purposes with each other, too stupid, too self absorbed to ever effectively conspire to do anything.
AC:  “Just too self-absorbed” is the key element. To make a conspiracy work, you have to see it from all different angles to make sure the plan works.  They don’t.   Every time you ever read transcripts or detailed descriptions of what goes on at high level policy decisions - I'm sure it’s true of the Kennedy administration, I'm sure it’s true today in the Bush administration - The arguments, the self-absorption, the disagreements and the narcissism are incredible.  And I'm sure the Gulf of Tonkin thing probably emerged as a compromise between lots of different people arguing as much as from a single, clear principle.
EM:  Here’s something that has puzzled me about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents.  If you wanted to create a pretext to go to war, why go to the trouble of creating two pretexts?
AC:  When you just need one?
EM:  There weren’t two Maines.  We needed only one Maine in order to go to war with Spain.
AC:  That’s a good question, why did they need two incidents?
EM:  Conspiracies imply that someone, somewhere, is in control of what’s going on.  But history is the product of people out of control.  What interests me in your work is your obsession with ideas and their unforeseen consequences.
AC:  Once an idea gets legs, it has its own internal logic that tends to take over. Yeah.  I'm a great believer in unintended consequences.  I'm part of that generation that’s actually against the grand plans of McNamara’s generation…  I mean, they genuinely believed that they could plan things, didn't they?
EM:  Yes.
AC:  That idea was born out of an incredible optimism.  But I was brought up in the 70’s during a period of economic crisis – a result of all those attempts in Britain and America and the Soviet Union to plan things.  So I never shared that optimism.  How could you believe that you could mathematically work out how to pacify a village?  They genuinely believed that there was a sort of rational way of doing this.  That rationality can be applied to create rational solutions.   It’s the idea that you can apply a sort of technocratic rationality to a physical situation, believing you’re neutral.  What's fascinating about someone like McNamara is that he believed he was neutral.  He didn't really seem to think of himself as a political being.  He was a manager.  But the approach toward Iraq is different.  The Bush Administration are moralists, whereas McNamara didn't see himself that way.  He saw himself as solving a technical problem.  Oddly enough, the person I have the most sympathy with in the face of all this is Henry Kissinger.  When people say to me, “Oh yeah, The Power of Nightmares a left wing film,” I argue, “Well, how can this be a left wing film when I make Henry Kissinger one of the heroes?”  Kissinger had this completely amoral attitude.  He did what was necessary in order to make the geopolitics of the world work.  But that was a very interesting reaction to the chaos of the ‘70s.  You just do what's necessary.  But of course that didn't help him when he went and bombed Cambodia.  Have you thought about filming Kissinger?
EM:  No, not really.  I like tortured characters, and I don't know how tortured Kissinger really is.
AC:  I suspect you would never find out.
EM:  McNamara is a more puzzling figure.  It’s one of the things that makes him interesting.  He’s difficult to dismiss as an out and out monster, even though undeniably many of the things he did were monstrous. 
AC:  That's the traditional liberal way of dismissing bad people.  He doesn't think of himself as a monster, does he?
EM:  No.
AC:  And that’s actually what's interesting.  He knows that in some ways what he did could be considered monstrous, but he doesn’t think of himself as a monster.  And that's presumably the root of his torture and puzzlement about it.  But no one thinks of themselves as really bad, do they?
EM:  People prefer to be the hero of their life story rather than the villain.
AC:  Quite.   
EM:  It’s that internal space, what people imagine themselves as doing.
AC:  Yes, as opposed to what really is happening.
EM:  I think that’s at the heart of what I really like about The Power of Nightmares.
II. NOTIONAL MOLES
EM:  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sheer perversity of The Power of Nightmares
AC: Perverse?
EM: I’ll give you an example of a perverse argument – that Johnny Mercer brought down the World Trade Center.  [The Power of Nightmares traces the odd career trajectory of Qutb, a founder of Islamic fundamentalism, to a high-school in Denver, Colorado and a senior prom where the students danced to Mercer’s Baby It’s Cold Outside. ]
AC:  The person I love best in the whole world is a sociologist from the late 19th century named Max Weber who believed that ideas have consequences.  People have experiences out of which they form ideas.  And those ideas have an effect on the world.  It is true that a man listening to music back in 1949 had an experience that became one of the rivulets that ran into his formation of an idea.  And that idea, in a very strange way, led people to do destroy the World Trade Center.  Now, of course, that's the construction and maybe people prefer to believe that history is much more complicated. Which, of course, it is.  But the construction has a truth to it.  It shows dramatically how particular experiences form particular ideas with particular consequences.  Even though it doesn’t actually ever work out the way the person who had the idea intended.  It’s perverse, but it’s also a way of dramatizing to people how ideas work, how history works - in a different way from all those boring history programs on American television that try to explain the world to you.  They just make it dull. 
EM:  It’s not just dullness.  There’s a received idea about how to do history.
AC:  Well, what would you describe that as being?
EM:  The balanced viewpoint.  I’ve heard so many arguments about it.  The Fog of War doesn’t provide a new generation – a generation born after the 60’s and 70’s – with a context.  It doesn’t tell us what to think.  But it allows you to get a glimpse of what this person was thinking. Even if it’s colored by a desire to make himself look better or to skew what he’d done or create some revisionist interpretation of the past, whatever, he’s still in that process of engaging his past – what he thought then and what he thinks now.
AC:  Yes.  And also, you judge him, like you judge anyone you listen to.  I'm very suspicious of this idea of a balanced version of history,   All history is a construction – often by the powerful.  What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have you thought of this?”  Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at the world in a new way.  Because I think that so much of this interpretation of events is a deadening repetition agreed upon by certain people, a sort of collectivity of news reports.  And often it’s completely wrong.  But somehow, they all agree on it.  People criticized my film by saying things like, “Why aren’t you balanced?  What aren’t you putting in the other views?”  And my response was, “What if the other view is wrong?”  That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what's called ‘perceived wisdom.’  What if perceived wisdom’s wrong?  What if – when you go and look at the evidence for sleeper cells in America –  there doesn’t appear to be anything there?  You know, that's the difficult area.  And so it becomes up to you to judge whether to go against perceived wisdom or not.
EM:  And what if the people who deeply believe in something that isn’t there – like sleeper cells - They really believe it, for whatever reason? Ron Rosenbaum, a friend of mine, has written a number of articles on James Jesus Angleton and the CIA. [Angleton was the head of counter-intelligence during the height of the Cold War.]
AC:  Oh, yes.
EM:  He talked about “notional moles” in the article.  And the notional mole – according to Rosenbaum – is that you make the other side believe that you’ve planted a mole in their midst without ever having actually planted a mole.  This is very much an Adam Curtis idea.  You drive them insane.
AC:  Because they're looking for something that doesn’t actually exist.
EM:  Exactly. 
AC:  Well, that's what I was trying to do.  What I’m trying to say to people is: “Look, you do face a terrorist threat, as is obvious from the attacks on America and more recently on my country.  But you're looking in the wrong place.  You’ve created this sort of phantom enemy, which is a disorganized network.  When in fact what you're actually facing is an idea that springs up all over the place.”  You've created a notional enemy that’s driving you mad looking for it, when in fact, it’s something else entirely.  And that's when I went back and tried to explain the ideas.  I thought that was much more important for people to understand.  Because when something that doesn’t exist becomes perceived wisdom, people tend to go slightly bonkers.  That's sort of the mood of our times.  I like the idea of a notional mole, it’s good.  Because no one ever found one, did they?
EM:  No.  And they still don’t know to this day whether—
AC:  There really was a real mole?
EM:  Whether the mole was notional or real.
AC:  Because, of course, that might be another trick as well.  You release a piece of information through the real mole to say—Well, we think it’s a notional mole.
EM:  But in The Power of Nightmares, it’s not a notional mole planted by the enemy.
AC:  No, we created it ourselves.
EM:  Yes.  It’s a form of self-fertilization, parthenogenesis. 
AC:  To be honest, the neoconservatives are their own worst enemy.  They’ve created something out of their own fevered imagination, which was borne out of the Cold War.  That's one of the great unexamined areas – how recently the Cold War ended and how so many of our institutions and our mindset and everything is still trapped in that.  And that's also true of a lot of journalists who are—I mean, I’m not so sure in America, but in my country, a lot of the senior journalists had a very good Cold War and still have that mentality as well.  They hang on to it.  You know, that's why they kept on thinking there were hidden things out there in Iraq.  I don’t think they made it up, I think they genuinely believed it in Iraq.  Because that's what the Soviets were like.  They hid these things.
EM:  It’s far more frightening than the idea that they were knowingly peddling lies.  The more frightening version is they truly believed in all of it.
AC:  I think that's true.  And it was after that sort of self-created fantasy that they could then go to war.  I mean, that's weird, isn’t it?
EM:  They had to go to war, because if their fantasies are true, it would be horribly irresponsible not to go to war.  Munich all over again.
AC:  You get trapped by this.  Trapped by a false idea.  That's what I was trying to describe in The Power of Nightmares.  Once you get trapped by your imagination, you think the worst and therefore you have to plan for the worst.  It becomes a self-fulfilling thing.
III. MUNICH
EM:  Take historical analogies.  I believe that historical analogies are always wrong.  This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions.  LeMay called JFK’s recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”.  Would nuclear war have been a better alternative?  But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy’s policies.  And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war.  Was LeMay right?  I don’t think so.  But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq.  Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler.  The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures.  History is like the weather.  Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way.  And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations.  In the end, they explain nothing.
AC:  That's right.  Last night on television someone who was pro-the Iraq war was saying that the alliance between the insurgents in Iraq and the foreign fighters is the equivalent of the Nazi-Soviet pact and that that's what we’re really fighting against.  It’s all so weird.  That the men who sit in neon-lit rooms with very nicely done tables and who question you and tell you things, are actually weird. 
EM:  Yeah.  Well, as we all know, the banal and the weird are not incompatible.
AC:  That's the whole point - that's what's so fascinating about our time.  The banal and the weird are one and the same thing.
EM:  Yes.  They hold hands.

CinemaScopes Robert Koehler interviews Adam Curtis on "The Power of Nightmares"

Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths:
Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares

By Robert Koehler

The possibility that Donald Rumsfeld and Al Qaeda’s one-man think tank, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could share a lot in common sounds unlikely enough that it could be true, although when I first heard about this assertion in Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, while standing in the midst of a noisy anti-war demonstration during the Santa Barbara film festival, it also sounded deliriously ironic. But there’s power in Nightmares, and its startling and paradigm-shifting thesis—that American neo-conservatives and radical Islamists are two sides of the same agenda intent on waging war on Western liberalism while upholding fundamentalist religion—is generated by Curtis’ methodical history of the movements, his dispassionate description of extremism, and his refinement of the art of the essay film through the filter of visually biting wit.
Those who see Curtis’ new film with or without the benefit of his previous four-part BBC series, The Century of the Self (2002), will be impressed by his sprawling narrative perspective, which begins with how Freud’s study of the irrational mind indirectly but profoundly provides American corporate interests with the propaganda tools (euphemistically known as “public relations”) to appeal to and assuage people’s selfish desires. But it gets better: This commodifying of the self prepares the soil for the politics of self fostered by everything from depoliticized post-Lefties to Reaganite Randians, which in turn, in The Power of Nightmares, provides both neo-conservatives and Islamist thinkers like Sayed Kotb material for their case that there’s nothing scarier than a fat, happy, and soulless West that lives for a trip to the mall.
Consciously going against the tradition of journalism that assumes that political power resides in Congresses and Parliaments, Curtis’ analysis approaches subjects that hide in plain sight. Just as Century of the Self finally convinces you that Edward Bernays, the curiously obscure creator of PR, is one of the 20th century’s key figures, Nightmares persuades that the key to understanding radical Islamism is not Osama bin Laden, but Kotb and his call for a popular religious revolution that erases the perceived evils of secular anomie. The ideas spill out of Curtis’ head—and from his hypnotic voice—like an essay turned into a thrill ride, reinforced by an inventive assembly of film and news clips, accompanied by music from Eno, John Carpenter, Morricone, Shostakovich, Ives, and John Barry, that produces constantly jarring but pleasing effects, as though the theme from Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (1970) were just the thing to accompany a trip into the menacing universe of Richard Perle.
Somewhat wary of Curtis’ provocative report, the BBC originally broadcast the three-part, three-hour series last October without much promotion. But the resulting wave of generally positive response across most of the British political spectrum surprised the network, which then supported Curtis to update the program after a December decision by UK ’s Law Lords that ruled detention of terror suspects without trial was illegal. After the series’ first North American appearance in Santa Barbara , no American network showed the courage to air it—in contrast to Canada , where the series ran on CBC’s The Passionate Eye on April 24. An invitation from Cannes prompted Curtis to trim the series to a two-hour-and-37-minute film, mostly excising the TV version’s necessarily repetitive bits and pieces, which in his view, “helped hone the message.” The film of The Power of Nightmares can now be set alongside Cannes’ last foray in newspaper cinema, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which also attacked the current political and media culture of fear. But where Moore casually ignored any facts that didn’t serve his purpose, while engaging in a sloppy form of histrionic, drive-by journalism, Curtis firmly rejects this. His is a dispassionate historiography of movements driven by ideological ideas, which then examines the very exploitation of fears that Moore instinctively seems to understand, yet imitates. Perhaps even more than a disorganized but lethal terror threat, Curtis is troubled by an emotionalized culture in the West that has allowed itself to become vulnerable to the spins and unfounded claims of ideologues in search of new enemies.

CINEMA SCOPE: A theme that you introduce in The Century of the Self and continue in The Power of Nightmares is how intellectual cadres assert that elites are essential for managing society even as they try to conceal their elitism from the outside world.
ADAM CURTIS: I was extremely aware of the connections. My working title for The Power of Nightmares was The Elements of the Self. Ever since the French Revolution, elites have been terrified of the masses and their so-called irrational forces. The Century of the Self was about how Freud’s ideas, which explained this irrationality, were taken by various elites and used to try to manage those forces and also exploit them. The argument goes that people are irrational, that irrationality can be dangerous, and the best way to handle it is to keep it happy and fed. Out of that came the modern consumer society, which is based on catering to people’s needs. The neo-conservatives and Sayed Kotb’s Islamists worried that what was going to emerge were self-seeking individuals who cared only about the satisfaction of their own desires, and who then corrode the bonds that hold society together. What needed to be re-established was a set of moral guidelines. What linked the Islamists to the neo-cons is that they were enemies of this new self that had emerged partly out of Freud’s ideas of the irrational self-seeking individual.
SCOPE: Was it hard to make sense of how secular neo-conservatives ally with fundamentalist Christians, and as the former neo-con Michael Lind points out in the film, that this was basically a Leninist tactic?
CURTIS: It’s one of the strangest political alliances in modern political history: On one hand, an elite, mostly Jewish, mainly secular group of political idealists who believe that society needed to be reconfigured to save it from itself, and the mass of fundamentalist Christians in America’s heartland who believe that Israel, during the second coming, will be engulfed in a conflagration. The leading neo-conservative thinkers, like Irving Kristol, would argue that that sort of revealed religion is necessary for the masses, since it lays down moral laws. To be blunt, the older neo-conservatives who came out of the old left would see American fundamentalist Christians as, in Lenin’s term, useful idiots. What’s happened, though, as Lind and others said to me, is that these neo-conservatives have come to believe their own myths. Both critics and those who’ve been involved in the neo-conservative movement argue that a shift happened. At home, they wanted religion; abroad, they wanted this idea of America as an exceptional country destined to bring democracy to the world. They saw that originally as a way of holding the nation together.
SCOPE: Didn’t this shift occur when the neo-conservatives attained real political power?
CURTIS: Power is very seductive, and it can make you believe your myths. I think that if you believe your own myths, it’s very easy to find the evidence to prove them. It’s human nature. We all construct reality out of fragments of evidence, you and I do it day in and day out. That’s what they did with the USSR in the 70s, and that’s what they did with Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. They took fragments and knitted them together and they did it with such force because they believed it was important.
SCOPE: You address this contradiction within the American conservative movement that’s embodied in Reagan. In The Century of the Self, Reagan is presented as the natural politician of the self-interested consumerist politics. Then, in The Power of Nightmares, Reagan is the perfect politician for the neo-conservatives. Of course, these two movements on the right are at loggerheads with each other, along with the Randian libertarians whose politics is all about the self.
CURTIS: When I started out with this series, I was going to put a third string in, and I planned to interview people about Ayn Rand. I think the really interesting political battles and discussions of our time are not between left and right, they are within the right. Between, say, neo-conservatives’ elitism and Ayn Rand libertarians who believe in maximum individual freedom. In the UK , Thatcher managed to hold these factions together throughout the 80s, as did Reagan. They then broke apart, and what’s really interesting is that when Bush Sr. lost his re-election in 1992, it was precisely because of the battle between these factions.
SCOPE: These neo-conservatives have frequently brought up a phrase that was the title of a US history textbook that I had in school—The Last Best Hope. It precisely describes the notion of American exceptionalism, and it’s at least as old as James K. Polk.
CURTIS: Exactly. They’ve reached backwards to drag out one of the great myths of America as a way of rejuvenating the country. The argument goes like this: Domestically, you reach back in the past and you reawaken the power of religion to give meaning and purpose to people’s lives. In foreign policy, you reach back and drag out the myth of American exceptionalism to give meaning and purpose not just to America but to the world. A critical analysis would say that this is a simplifying vision indulging in fantasy.
SCOPE: Did you ask Kristol if his movement, now that it’s in power, has now encountered its own Vietnam and Watergate all at once?
CURTIS: You can’t ask Kristol this question because he doesn’t see himself as part of the inside group. He really sees himself as a revolutionary. I think it’s a really good question about that lot: Have they become corrupted by the very forces that they set out to get rid of? And does that then corrupt their decision-making? If you talk to neo-conservatives, they still believe that theirs is an awesome revolutionary force that may well bring democracy to the world. And that there may be stumbles along the way, as in Iraq ; Trotsky would say that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It’s very interesting to consider that their writings used to argue that the liberal project failed because it had unintended consequences and opposite results. I think the same criticism can be levelled at the neo-conservatives.
SCOPE: When evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links between Al Qaeda and Saddam doesn’t exist, it’s fascinating to see somebody like Richard Perle insist that they do.
CURTIS: You can hear it in my voice when Perle sticks to his claim of an Al Qaeda/Saddam link, and I ask, “Really?” I didn’t expect him to do that. From my sense sitting with him in that room, he really does believe it. In a way, whether you agree with them or disagree, you have to admire this conviction. The thing I’ve come away with from making this film, is if the left really wants to change the world, then they need to set up lots of little organizations like Kristol and Perle and other neo-cons did, and work at it hard. Any time the media comes forward, friendly or not, use them as a vehicle to put forward your ideas. Until the left realizes this, it’s not going anywhere.
SCOPE: We’re at an interesting point in history, since their theories are being put into practice. Is George W. Bush the first neo-conservative President?
CURTIS: Yes, and he became so from the emotional effect of September 11. What was so powerful in the wake of that terrible tragedy and the apocalyptic mood that took over the country was that the neo-conservatives offered an explanation for why this had happened and what should be done about it. If everyone around you is frozen with fear and you can explain to people why something terrible has happened and you can offer what looks like a solution, you have an immense amount of power.
SCOPE: When you describe a world in which a liberal project has created a mass of people without core beliefs, that’s where you draw this fascinating link with radical Islamists. Where did you come across this?
CURTIS: By approaching this project from an odd angle. My original aim was to do a series of films about conservative political philosophy and this debate among conservatives over allowing complete freedom or allowing an elite to manage things. And in my wide reading about conservative political thought I came across the writings of Sayed Kotb. What’s fascinating is that the radical Islamists rose to power and influence at the very same time as the neo-conservatives. In the 70s, Nasser ’s great optimistic vision of a technocratic society, of pan-Arab sovereignty with a secular government, fell apart. And that’s when Islamism turned to the ideas of Kotb and began to rise in response to this collapse. Because I came to it from this point of view, I saw that we’re not dealing with an alien force in Islamism, but with the same theme. Kotb was an educated man who had read Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He was examining the same worries shared by many critics of modern individualism. It’s a criticism that somehow consumerist individualism has led to a banal empty society, where nobody really believes in anything any longer and the real feeling at the heart of it is: Is that all there is? Kotb was a literary critic, not some mad mullah in a beard. He understood Western culture and was working within that same pessimistic tradition as the neo-cons. The parallels are in their philosophical roots. I make it clear that what they then set out to do was very different, but I do think that it’s more valuable to look at them as two sides of this same pessimistic conservatism about modern industrial culture.
SCOPE: One of the shocks in The Power of Nightmares is seeing how various radical Islamist factions in Algeria failed in their revolution in the 90s, and proceeded to kill themselves off.
CURTIS: Algeria is incredibly important in this history, and few fully understand this, especially in America . The frustration felt by the Islamist movement was so incredibly raw when they were denied what they saw as the prize of having a Sunni revolution in Algeria along with the Shiite revolution in Iran . You can trace that failure as one of the forces that fed into Zawahiri’s new theories he developed in 1998.
SCOPE: One of the film’s central but most contrarian ideas is that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist as an organization. Is this the most difficult concept for audiences to comprehend?
CURTIS: There are two things here. One is a side issue. As far as we know, Osama bin Laden did not use the term “Al Qaeda” to identify his group before September 11. The main issue is whether there’s the organized network that most of our politicians and journalists have been stating exists. What I’m saying in this film is that our politicians and journalists are fighting the last war. They’re giving us a picture of the Soviet Union in the Cold War that misses the reality of radical Islamism. If you look at radical Islamist history, its great moments come in 1979 with Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, and then in 1989, with what they perceived as the defeat of the USSR . The story of the 90s is of a movement that’s stopped politically, and then when it turns to armed uprising with the hope that the masses will rise up, they don’t. If you talk to Islamists and read their writing—Zawahiri’s writings are very articulate—they believe that they had failed. There’s this massive debate within the movement, with most saying that they should keep on trying in places like Uzbekistan , and try to Islamize the Palestinian conflict. It’s only a small part of it, around bin Laden, which argues you must kill the head of the snake. Many of Zawahiri’s own group left him because of this. The more you look into it, the more it becomes a disorganized mess. It’s very illuminating when you see the movement as one that failed to persuade the masses. If you talk to anyone who’s done proper research in Afghanistan , they’ll tell you that the camps there were very diffuse and disorganized. I also looked for evidence of “sleeper cells,” and although you can find evidence of horrible, nasty individuals, and groups who want to carry out techniques of mass terror, there’s no evidence of a coherent organized network with a man sitting in an Afghani cave stroking a cat and sending out his orders.
SCOPE: This Cold War attitude is visually captured with filmic and TV iconography, with Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. It seemed to me that Cold War movies also inform the rhetoric. It’s summed up when you include this stunning Meet the Press clip of host Tim Russert interviewing Rumsfeld and holding up this outlandish illustration of an elaborate Al Qaeda cave complex that’s directly out of Goldfinger (1964).
CURTIS: Yes, this is part of the reason why we misunderstand the reality of the actual threat. It’s a modern thing, an idea that inspires groups and individuals around the world who don’t have any necessary connection with each other. Our problem is that our governments have conceptualized it in a completely different way, using vast military force to try and find the heart of the network and then destroy it. It’s missing the point. Indeed, the research shows that this fragment of radical Islamism may be weaker than politicians think it is. What astonished me when I did the research for The Power of Nightmares is that no one in television in Britain , or in the US so far as I know, had done a proper history of Islamism as a political movement. It was portrayed in the media as if it had come out of the blue like a terrifying force.
SCOPE: What you say is breathtaking. Isn’t that a condemnation itself of the way information is being imparted to the public?
CURTIS: Something very strange happened to the US media in the wake of September 11. It became deeply emotionalized for entirely understandable reasons, but out of this came an inability to discuss all of this except in emotional terms. People on US television adopt positions on the left or right, and shout at each other. I find this reaction to the new terror threat astonishing, because in the 80s we in London lived with IRA bombings all the time. That was a frightening time, and we took it calmly and boldly. Now, if an Islamist attack went off on a similar scale to an IRA bombing, there would be mass panic. What’s so fascinating is why we’ve become so emotionalized.
I’m putting forward two things—a history that hopefully illuminates, and then an argument about why all this has happened. My aim is to open up debate. And I think this is what’s necessary in America at this time: to debate all of this. I’m astonished that no one has done a history of this in the US . Whatever you think of Sayed Kotb—evil man, visionary revolutionary—he’s the most important ideologist of the Islamist movement. His ideas directly inspired the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center . So why has your television not told you about this for three years? It’s astonishing.
SCOPE: The phrase “the power of nightmares” describes fear. And the media, even more than politicians, is talented at refuelling that fear. Does this concern you?
CURTIS: One cannot underestimate how the attacks of September 11 felt apocalyptic in America , a country that had grown up to wealth and power during a frozen time, during the Cold War, when everything was quite certain. Now, emotion is beginning to settle. People are beginning to question if it’s quite as simple as the picture of the world painted by neo-conservatives. That raises questions about to what extent this has been a cartoon-like fiction. And that really now we’re going to have face up to a more complex reality, and possibly be a bit braver about it.
SCOPE: What was the audience response when the show ran in Britain , and what did your critics have to say?
CURTIS: We were surprised how seriously people took it. The BBC was very worried that we were going to be accused of being irresponsible. I think because the first two-thirds of the work tell a factual history, when you come to the conclusions, they have weight. If you are telling people a history of Islamism, and you tell them that actually in the 90s, the radical Islamist movement almost failed because no one in the masses would rise up and follow them, then people are prepared to take more seriously your arguments of it being a complex, fractured movement, because you’ve actually shown why. Since we did a relatively straight history of these two movements, the telling gained a great deal of power. So it was taken very seriously. Only two serious commentators took issue with it, one because I didn’t deal with the Palestinian question—which is a reasonable criticism—and the other because they were a neo-conservative sympathizer. The BBC was quietly astonished.
SCOPE: Any response from the Blair government?
CURTIS: None. They kept quiet. What their motive for silence was, I can only guess. But they shut up and ignored it. The film gave articulation to a growing mood of questioning the way politics is being practiced. People began discussing the politics of fear in the wake of the program. There is now a healthy debate.
SCOPE: But if Blair were to respond to you, wouldn’t he argue that political leaders need to assume the worst, while hoping for the best?
CURTIS: Political leaders can assume all sorts of things. But what I argue is if you imagine the worst that’s going to happen, then anything can happen. Then you have to anticipate everything, and you get trapped in this world of your own imagination and dominated by those with the darkest scenarios. And you can do so while ignoring all sorts of other realities. We’re still faced with a real threat of nuclear weapons that could annihilate your country in matter of seconds. This is a much greater threat than anything that’s called “Al Qaeda,” yet everyone seems to have forgotten about that. Good politics is balancing a sensible anticipation from evidence of what might happen and balancing that against the costs of what you want to do.
SCOPE: What’s striking at the end of The Power of Nightmares is your certainty that the nightmares will end, forcing politicians with no ideas to confront the fantasies they’ve created. But we’re left thinking, “Okay, but when?”
CURTIS: To be blunt, that’s not my job. I’m critically analyzing and arguing a theory. The reason I state this with certainty is that people aren’t as frightened as politicians think they are. Fear is the last redoubt of the lack of vision. And I don’t think politics can go on without any substance to it. I’m optimistic, but I also might be wrong. A cynical journalist said to me, “I think you might be right, but all the terrorists need is a bomb every 18 months.”
SCOPE: What’s been rarely noted about The Power of Nightmares is its cinematic qualities and your witty use of music and found film. What about this use of filmic wit, which is even more sophisticated than in The Century of the Self?
CURTIS: I use wit since one of the things I’m trying to illustrate is that we’re living in a cartoon-like version of reality. Humour undercuts the mix of fact and fiction used by the politics of fear-mongering. And if you’re trying to illustrate complex arguments, images and music can help. They just make it easier. It’s a way of engaging people by telling a story rather than talking in general terms. It just comes naturally to me.
SCOPE: What I noticed that’s different here from The Century of the Self is that while there’s still highly dense archival work, there’s now ironic use of image and sound, like the juxtaposition of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with a celebratory Islamic dance.
CURTIS: Well, it’s funny for one thing, and it’s designed to undercut this completely unreasoned fear of Islamism. The idea that you can place a pop song over Islamist dancing makes it all the less threatening. And it’s not offensive in the Arab world. There’s a great tradition in Arab culture of taking the piss out of the elites. It’s perfectly permissible in the Sunni and Shiite worlds to make fun of the mullahs, who tend to be full of themselves. The film critic from Cairo ’s biggest daily, Al-Ahram, came up to me and said “You’re the first Westerner to get it right.” I was terribly pleased with this because I had judged the tone also for the Arab world as much as for my own.
SCOPE: Why do you recycle some of the archived images from The Century of the Self, while using it in a completely different way?
CURTIS: The posh word is that I sample my own material. I like those pictures. The truth about cinema is that images can mean very different things depending on the context they’re put in. The Kuleshov Effect. I don’t see why you can’t play with pictures when you’re being serious. That’s my main aim. Because then you get a sense of someone enjoying themselves, and when you get that, then people listen to what you’re doing. I would argue that people watch Fox News because they’re really enjoying what they’re doing. When I tell this to liberals, I get this complete silence in the room. But I say, look, until liberal media has as much fun and as clear an idea of what it wants to say as Fox, it’s not going to get any influence back.