301. Web-series Reviews – 134

 More documentary web-series reviews…

Can’t get you out of my head – Came out in 2021. 6 episodes of an hour each.  Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence and You. An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis.

A review from IMDB...

A hundred strange stories strung together

How come we live in a world where toxic nonsense like Q-Anon is so widely believed? To address this question, Adam Curtis has made his most ambitious documentary series yet, essentially a personal history of the modern world. His thesis appears to be that the answer lies in the loss of political ambition coupled with the ever growing power of the new technology (whose greatest power, he suggests, is to convince us that it can indeed control us). As usual, he shows a great aptitude for digging out extraordinary, obscure stories and moreover finding great footage to illustrate them. Also as usual, the narrative is sprawling and Curtis has a certain join-the-dots tendency of his own that might not seem completely alien to that of the conspiracy theorists that are his part of his subject matter. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this programme is that it takes as unquestioned that the story of just about every major country is one of decline and failure. Planet earth faces many major problems, not least global warming, but the world has never been perfect and to summarise recent history solely in terms of "things fall apart" while urging the populous to adopt (unspecified new forms of) societal optimism is frankly bizarre. Ultimately, Curtis' conclusions are of less value than the extraordinary journey he takes to reach them. He himself certainly does not lack ambition; there's a self-indulgence here, but also a hundred strange tales that make you think about the world.

My Take – Worth a watch!

 

The Century of the Self – Came out in 2002.  4 episodes of an hour each.  A documentary about the rise of psychoanalysis as a powerful means of persuasion for both governments and corporations.

A review from IMDB...

The Century of the Self contrasts whimsical film footage with an ominous narrative. It describes the way our ideas about human nature have changed and how the development of psychology has allowed social institutions to use these ideas to exert more and more control over people. This documentary focuses its attention on Sigmund Freud's family, especially his daughter and nephew, who exerted a surprising amount of influence on the way corporations and governments throughout the 20th century have thought about, and dealt with, people.

At the end of the 19th century, Freud had a remarkable insight into human behavior. He believed that people were, often, unaware of what motivated them and didn't really know how they felt about things. He called this part of the mind, the part that people couldn't recognize, the subconscious. Being the cynic he was, Freud decided that the unconscious was filled with irrational, destructive, emotions which posed a danger to society. This was, unsurprisingly, a very unpopular point of view when Freud first wrote about it. At the time, people knew that they were, actually, divinely rational beings who were in complete control of themselves.

But Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew, was a little more receptive to his uncle's ideas, not because he was concerned with whether or not people were naturally destructive, but because Freud's ideas about people having strong emotions might help him convince people to buy things they didn't really need, and make a lot of money for him and his clients in the process. As long as his uncle wasn't completely wrong, then all Bernays had to do was associate emotional ideas with pointless products, and then consumers just wouldn't be able to help themselves. He was right, and his remarkable successes created a new industry, called public relations, which relied, almost entirely, on playing emotional games with people's heads.

Worse, the terrifying events, fueled by Freudian propaganda, that began to occur in Germany during the depression convinced politicians that Freud had been even more right than they suspected. People's emotions were clearly dangerous and had to be controlled. Government agencies began using Bernays' PR techniques, and Himmler's propaganda methods, to convince people to suppress their emotions and conform to social norms. Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter, and one of his most influential evangelists, even decided that she would see to it that her British nephew and niece were raised this way, as an example.

However, one of Freud's students, Wilhelm Reich, eventually decided that Freud had been a little paranoid. Emotions weren't bad, people weren't evil, and the solution wasn't control and repression, but expression. Freud's daughter didn't like the sound of this, especially since her nephew and niece had since grown up to be severely troubled adults, providing an unnervingly good proof of his thesis. This Reich guy had struck a nerve, and so she ostracized him from the psychology movement. But Reich's ideas still caught on.

And this didn't make either industry or government any happier than Anna. Neither of them knew what to do with the individuals that self-expression created. They had mass-produced products and policies that they sold through massive public-relations campaigns. Then, they noticed that self-expression gurus were organizing "focus groups" where people met to work out how they felt about things. All these institutions had to do was ask these focus groups the right questions, and they'd tell them how to sell people more products and policies than they had ever imagined possible.

It turned out that all business and government really had to do was categorize people according to their emotional development and social attitudes and then play each category off of one other. Corporations could sell slight variations of the same mass-produced products to people, as long as they associated one variation with one group of people, and then convince them that this variation allowed them to express their true nature. And politicians no longer had to worry about sweeping social changes, they could just play off one segment of voters against another and then sit back and watch all the consumers obsessively buy things, oblivious to social problems.

Documentarian Adam Curtis' bewildering collage of film clips, pop-music snippets, and interviews helps portray the slightly absurd and surreal cynicism and manipulation practiced by the 20th-century's supposedly enlightened business and political leaders.

My Take – Worth a watch!

 

The Power of nightmares – Came out in 2004. 3 episodes of about 45 minutes each.

One of the reviews from IMDB…

Ever realized that American neo-Conservatism is founded on the principle of the Platonic noble lie? Half-remembered what Donald Rumsfeld was doing in 1976? Never quite believed the cold war propaganda about the "evil empire", or half-suspected that Al-Qaida does not exist? If so, 'The Power of Nightmares' is the program to confirm your fears. If not, it's even more essential viewing.

'The Power of Nightmares' is a brave piece of television that runs completely against the grain of most media representation of the state of our world. Yet it is not a lunatic argument either, and many of the talking heads on screen are those of the very people whose views it deconstructs. Rather, it simply refuses to assume that just because everyone in power is saying something, it must be true. In fact, the evidence that the most basic tenets of "the war on terror" are built on absurdity are almost self-evident; but as the evidence is also inconvenient, it is simply ignored and replaced by something else. In this series, we see the same tactic (employed by many of the same people) put to use in the 1970s, 1980s and now. It's quite chilling to see how much of the prism through which we view the world is a construct of frankly mad idealogues (and I don't just mean Osama, although the similarities of the origins of Muslim fundamentalism and neo-Conservatism are just one illuminating lesson to be drawn from this series).

Adam Curtis lets his interviewees provide his argument for him, but it's cleverly stitched together and his use of archive footage and music is perfect. Crucially, he never allows himself to fall into the trap of accepting cynicism, and there's a note of incredulity throughout the series that succeeds in not granting those in power a drop more credibility than they deserve. This series should have been essential viewing for every American before they voted. First rate stuff.

My Take – Worth a watch!

Cheers till next time😊!