"A Growing Public Distrust": Adam Curtis By David D'Arcy May 12, 2005 - 5:15 AM PDT "How do you describe reality?" In the last US presidential election, the man who won was the candidate who best convinced voters that he could protect them from the fears that he and his handlers had conjured up. Harnessing the power of fear has been George W. Bush's shrewdest career move. He's far from the only one. The evidence is clear in The Power of Nightmares, a series of three one-hour television documentaries made for BBC television by Adam Curtis. As ideology recedes after the Cold War, fear is the world's political currency, Curtis argues, and he sustains that argument along two parallel lines. In the United States, the neoconservatives who run the defense department (and a lot more) persuaded religious Americans to fear the moral decay of creeping individualism all around them. Once the 9/11 attacks happened, they had an enemy outside the gates that, according to the conventional wisdom, coordinated a global network bent on annihilating America. In the Middle East, Asia, and parts of Europe, Muslim students disgusted by the West and their perception of its moral decay in the 1950s turned to Islamic politics. Persecution hardened them. US funds for anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s encouraged them. Islamic zealots who failed to take power anywhere besides Afghanistan turned to terror in some cases, but not in the organized way cited by the Bush team. Curtis's epic film takes on all of this - myths become truths, enemies become demons, fears become policies, and policies become wars. The vast scope ranges through three decades in Washington DC and Middle East politics. Curtis talks to the neoconservatives, now in Washington, who studied with Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and he interviews witnesses of the bloody Islamic insurgencies of Algeria and Egypt. But this is a film, not a research project, and The Power of Nightmares is compelling as a film because Curtis is so good at deploying archival images to examine decades of history. After all, aren't nightmares the images which were thought to be locked away, under control, the ones that remind us of our fears? The fears driving politics are remarkably effective - think of just about anything associated with Homeland Security. Curtis the journalist shows how inflated those fears actually are. He doesn't dismiss terrorism. He just debunks the idea that a refined central Al Qaeda is behind it - and that the survival of the US, or the UK, or Spain could be at risk. You'll be shocked by sections in The Power of Nightmares exposing faked US intelligence information (amazingly topical these days) and probing hyped indictments and charges against innocent defendants that are dropped quietly or dismissed later on. The abuses of power are shocking enough. Learning of them from a BBC documentary, rather than the newspaper, may be more troubling. Adam Curtis told a San Francisco International Film Festival audience that he doesn't believe in much - not politics, not ideology, and certainly not journalism. (At the BAFTA Awards, where The Power of Nightmares won the Factual Series award, Curtis faulted his own network for its credulity toward a recent trial of suspects, eventually acquitted of charges that they had plotted "to poison Britain." (Most of British media chose not to report Curtis's attack.) Yet Curtis's films are journalism at its most credible, that is, journalism given the time its subjects deserve and, surprisingly enough, actually put before a public. For all its controversy and seriousness (which American broadcasters dread more than sex), The Power of Nightmares drew a huge television audience in Britain when it aired in late 2004. So far, no one's planning to air it in the US (and no current plans to release on home video here, either), although, given its festival exposure at Tribeca, San Francisco, and now at Cannes, someone may have to. In the meantime, if you find a way to see Curtis's The Century of the Self (a history of Freudian theory applied to public relations) or The Mayfair Set (the rise of the power of the stock market), you'll want more. D'Arcy: Your documentary distills a vast visual archive and enhances a story with a palette of fear-media, yet you prefer to characterize yourself as a journalist rather than a filmmaker. The Power of Nightmares examines the manipulation of Americans with tales concocted to terrify - even a TV journalist's silly endorsement of a schematic drawing, now known to have been faked, of a refined Goldfinger-style Al Qaeda stronghold in the caves of Tora Bora - yet you say you're an admirer of Fox News, the American network that leads the pack in fear-mongering. And that message of fear that we hear so frequently on Murdoch-owned media is sounded by the neo-conservatives, whose ascent you follow in the film. Am I missing something here? Curtis: I'll tell you what I think about the neo-conservatives. In a way, I admire them for nostalgic reasons. They are the last revolutionaries - and some of them actually came out of a Trotskyite revolutionary tradition. They are making an awesome attempt to remake and reshape the world, much as Trotsky tried to do in the Russian Revolution, using military power. It's amazing. It has an epic-ness to it. I feel nostalgic for it, in the face of a managerial politics that just seem to want to tweak and adjust its policies to those of the focus groups and the soccer moms. next >>> Index "How do you describe reality?" "Their legacy is going to be the opposite of what they intended." back to past articles

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