HyperNormalisation

The documentary draws a line from the seventies to the present: New York's bankruptcy and the city passing into the hands of the banks, policy on Syria and Libya, the emergence of the suicide bomb, the last Soviet years, the dream of cyberspace and the rise of Trump. Adam Curtis ties them to a single thesis. The film is not interested in events. It is interested in reality being abandoned: on Curtis's account, after the crises of the seventies politicians gave up governing a complex world and built a comprehensible fake one instead, which everyone maintained while knowing it was fake. The title comes from Alexei Yurchak's term for the Soviet Union: everyone knew the system had failed, and because nothing else could be imagined, everyone behaved as though it were normal. The form is Curtis's own: footage pulled from the BBC archive, the director's own voice as narrator, electronic music and cuts that appear unconnected. It runs 166 minutes. It was released on 16 October 2016 on BBC iPlayer only, with no cinema or television screening. Who it is for: viewers who like Curtis's method and attempts at grand narrative. Who it is not for: anyone who wants evidence. The film binds a great many events to one thesis, cites no sources, and some of its connections are pure association.