by Allan Fish
(UK 2004 180m) not on DVD
We will defeat what doesn’t exist
p/d/w Adam Curtis narrated by Adam Curtis
We live in an age of conspiracy theories, of shadows in light and evil lurking around the corner. On film we already have a skewerer in the shape of Michael Moore, and if his films are more cinematic than those of Adam Curtis, they are more heavily biased, more bombastic and self-dating. Will anyone watch Fahrenheit 9/11 twenty years from now? I don’t think so, but I think that Adam Curtis’ three part TV series (later edited down for film) will be seen and is far more intriguing as a piece of investigative journalism than Michael Moore’s. There’s nothing technically innovative about Curtis’ film, as formulaic in its making as any one of a hundred Panorama or 60 Minutes investigations. And yet the satirical wit and the sense of what could only be described as the ridiculous will I think prevent it from dating as much as it may otherwise have done.
The title essentially tells you the piece is about fear, a fabricated fear whose genesis in the aftermath of World War II has escalated to the point where, in the present day, it’s out of control. As Curtis says “today people have lost faith in ideologies…instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares.” It’s a purgatorial stalemate borne out of the ideas of Islamic extremism by Syed Qtub and the neo-conservative hardliners following the ideologies of Leo Strauss. The latter saw it as America’s role to fight evil throughout the world, even if they had to invent that evil to persuade the masses to follow. The Islamists, meanwhile, decided they were the only true Islamics and those refuting them were not real Muslims and, as such, were fair game for murder and genocide. Ideas that pile supposition upon supposition and make it up as they go along, like a form of joining the dots that, Chinese whispers-like, starts out perfectly innocuous and ends up spelling doom to all concerned.
As Curtis shows, the fears had first been developed around the Soviet Union, making that decaying giant out to be a roaring lion at the height of its powers rather than a pitiful dinosaur on the verge of extinction. We can’t find the evidence to back up our claims, but that just means the enemy is so much smarter still and introducing the very term Pre-emptive to the vocabulary. And while in Doctor Strangelove we laugh at the General Jack D.Ripper, dear old Sterling Hayden going on about contaminating our precious bodily fluids, that’s exactly the sort of man who has controlled the reins of power. For the red menace simply substitute The War Against Terror, with its wonderfully appropriate acronym and fanciful notions of threats everywhere.
The irony is that Curtis doesn’t really find evidence to back up his claims; by the very nature of the fantasy of world terror, you can no more prove it doesn’t exist than you can prove it does. But he does, with no little humour, show us the truly maniacal hysteria that is generated by such false threats. And while he himself doesn’t go so far, it’s interesting to think back to another individual, this time a very real threat, who believed that the entire world was controlled by a hidden conspiracy of Zionist Jews. We ask ourselves how the German people could have been taken in by such a monstrous lie, but we ourselves are just as culpable. Amongst the conspiracies, hypocrisy, lies and false reports, there’s a paradox, in that in removing the smokescreen what do we reveal behind it but absolutely nothing? By the end of the three hours, we’re wiser but even less fixed in our viewpoint. It’s a world state – and status quo – to even make Machiavelli take pause. In the end, there is and can be no answer, and were left like the reporters patrolling the warehouses of Xanadu (not for nothing does Curtis use Herrmann’s music for Citizen Kane sporadically through the piece, as well as Carpenter’s for Halloween) for meaning in Rosebud. For are we any closer to knowing the answer to that question, those three little words asked by Pilate; what is truth?
