Adam Curtis's Massive Attack on Park Avenue

Adam Curtis and Massive Attack made us dance to the invasion of Iraq. Not all of us, mind you. Some of us just gyrated or maybe swayed. Some of us, who were there the other night at the Park Avenue Armory of all places, during a six night run of "Adam Curtis V Massive Attack," did this while staring slack-jawed at the giant projection screens surrounding us in a giant semicircle in the dark, which swirled with grim but hypnotic news and amateur video clips from the "late capitalist" BBC archives, as Massive Attack carried the pulsating, beguiling soundtrack, their shadowy outlines behind the center scrim.

The band did their hit song, "Karmacoma," but fixated mainly on covers of Suicide, the Archies, Bauhaus, the Russian punk band Grob, and the Leadbelly and Kurt Cobain versions of "In the Pines." Lights and smoke surrounded us, though it may have actually been the smoke was just the fog of war as seen on TV (explosions over Baghdad and explosions in middle America) that seemed to be leaking out of the video screens. Did they ever have costume balls in front of Bosch paintings?

And, right after we were told things like we were living inside in a world that had been managed into a terrible fake kind of mechanism governed by a nearly infinite feedback loop—that capitalism was doing to the West what Communism had done to the Soviet Union—some people actually let out hoots, the way you do at a rock concert. This was, after all, bizarrely, also a rock concert.

The implied satirization of the spectacle of rock concerts fits right into "Everything Is Going According to Plan," which is Curtis's newest film essay. And if you've seen his other films—even if those films weren't made with a rock band, to be shown in the round—you get it. (In 2009, he launched "It Felt Like a Kiss" in a Manchester warehouse with Damon Albarn and Kronos Quartet and the theater company Punchdrunk.) You get why an immersive theatrical experience this was the next step for the man who turned BBC archives into fodder for public access-style early 90-stule's music video art. You get that technology is changing art in general and that documentaries are evolving quickly too. You get that there's no single way to tell a story, especially not anymore, no matter how influential CNN or the BBC are.

Curtis has worked at the BBC for decades, which is where he's shaken up the form with epic, twisty docs about mass psychology and big data and the political uses of fear, a new one emerging every two years or so. (You can find many of them here.) His slanted insights about the progress or regression of human culture come with large intertitles superimposed onto the images in all caps Helvetica ("IF YOU LIKE THAT YOU'LL LOVE THIS" is the central idea here) like political slogans in an advertisement. The effect can be intoxicating, as if Curtis were making propaganda films, and in many ways he is. These are meta propaganda films, however, inverse propaganda films that gleefully borrow and manipulate the form (and, often, actual clips from propaganda films) if for no other reason than, as he shows time and time again, propaganda really works.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin described the evils of fascism and capitalism as relying in different ways on the "aestheticization of politics," by which the powers that be turn life into a kind of spectacle, thereby minimizing the individual to a solitary, atomized receiver, or simply erasing the individual altogether. Though despairing in the face of European fascism, Benjamin himself saw a way out, an emancipatory hope for the individual in what he called the "politicization of aesthetics." There is a difference. Benjamin's inverse tactic involved not playing up the good or bad emotions that spring from politics, but finding the revolutionary potential in art and nudging it to social ends. One way he liked to do this was by reading the artifacts of politics and daily life 'in reverse,' in a way that highlights their absurdities and hypocrisies. Curtis described something similar to Alex Miller in July, starting with a tacit attack on the media industries, the ones on which he and Massive Attack often rely:

This modern world is enchanting, but maybe it’s an enchanting prison. A sort of sarcophagus of images of a two-dimensional world. So what we decided to do was actually pull what we do together, music and images, and build a three-dimensional world which we will take you into and reveal to you the two-dimensional cocoon half of us live in. It’s going to get a bit tough towards the end because it’s about time people began to realize there’s something beyond that unsubstantial two-dimensional cocoon. It’s very nice and it’s lovely to be in, but if that’s all there is it plays into the hands of those who want to keep us where we are.

The hope implicit in Curtis's documentaries, if there is any, is perhaps that by turning propaganda against itself, politics, and those of us in its thrall, might snap out of that feedback loop and come up with something else, something empowering. Benjamin would commit suicide while fleeing Germany in 1940, when he learned the Nazis were closing in on him, while he was in the midst of his Arcades' Project. A few years earlier he described his work to a friend: "I am busy pointing my telescope through the bloody mist at a mirage of the nineteenth century, which I am trying to reproduce based on the characteristics that it will manifest in a future state of the world, liberated from magic. Of course, I first have to build myself this telescope."

Maybe Curtis is doing something with art and politics like Benjamin imagined, here in the middle of Park Avenue, the wealthiest neighborhood in urban America. It's also totally possible that he and company are also only stuck in that strange loop of false consciousness, further inscribing the alienation he laments.

When he offers a word of encouragement—"YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD" the screen blares near the end—you'd be forgiven for laughing at this point, especially if you can hear the reprise of the song by '70s Siberian punk poetess Yanka Dyagileva in the background:

Nobody knows how fucking bad I am / And the television dangles from the ceiling / And how fucking bad I am nobody knows / That`s all so fucked-up / That I want to start again / My verse is sad / I'm repeating this again : how fucking bad I am.

One possible lesson of Curtis's ironic tallies of recent history, where risk management has ironed out individualism and idealism, is that in a way it's always going to be hard to tell the difference between real and fake. (He doesn't touch on government surveillance here, but the thought of him doing so is nearly frightening.) The tyranny of fakeness runs deep in modern society. It extends from the Wall St. bankers who bet on collateralized debt obligations, who cut up and concealed debts in order to also profit from them, to the data wranglers, who purported to portend the future with algorithms, to the media makers, who make the films and produce the documentaries. After an aside about how Wall Street's computer formulas devastated America, and as images of code and Ted Turner and Jane Fonda proliferate on the screens, "the computers also cut up images," Curtis says, "and these images also became meaningless, detached from their context in reality." The fakeness of the world extends perilously close to what Curtis himself is doing too, just as it extends into us and everything else.

So what is the takeaway for those of us in his dazzled audience (and these are likely liberal audiences, though there must be a more conservative Adam Curtis out there, waiting in the wings)? It could be argued that by applying the spectacle filter to political and social narratives, Curtis provokes a younger, more distracted, more disenchanted audience to engage with and challenge those narratives. (Of course, with his slanted take on history, Curtis is also creating his own new narrative.) A less charitable response would be that Curtis's ironic approach simply repackages the tragic-comic political situation into even more of a spectacle, albeit one with a much better soundtrack.

The meta point of the Curtis style is worth contemplating on its own: dig in the stacks for rare BBC archival video, edit it with a biting sense of humor and pathos, soundtrack it by a DJ with an encyclopedic knowledge of both the classics and the oddities, and narrate it with a cool, lightly acerbic commentator (Curtis does all of these things), and you have the power to render the documentary as a kind of beautiful slow-motion car wreck. It's the sort of thing that's hard to watch and hard to take your eyes away from, and in some cases hard to not also dance to.

On the way out, I tried to say something amusing to my date for the evening, my colleague Brian, about the sounds of people behind us during the show, hooting callously, I felt, during scenes of utter devastation. Brian looked surprised and thought about it for a second and said, "I'm not sure those were actually people. I thought they were just voices coming from the speakers."

@pasternack

Other things we've seen at the Armory:

How To Sell an Animated GIF

Steven Sebring Photographs the Fourth Dimension

Motherboard TV: Spaced Out: Making Mars with Tom Sachs

Can Man Ultimately Take on 'The Machine' in Chess, or Anywhere?

Food for Haute: Future Tastings at the Ultimate Free Sample Festival

Ryoji Ikeda's "the transfinite" Is a Ghoulish, Epileptic Dive Into Information