Scholarios
11-20-2016, 03:48 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
One of the key scenes in Adam Curtis's monumental new documentary HyperNormalisation shows a woman engaging with ELIZA. ELIZA was a psychotherapy computer programme developed in 1966 that comforted the troubled minds of its users by simply re-phrasing their questions as self-reinforcing answers. Did it work? That depended on what the user was expecting. ELIZA performed a clever confidence trick that, for a limited period of time at least, gave the impression of control being regained and solutions being delivered. "What Eliza showed", suggests Curtis, "was that what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them."
This piece of archive footage feels like a brilliant metaphor for where we are in 2016. In an atomised world, we all have our own truths and maybe, for now, many of us have become content with that. Is this a sustainable way forward? It's hard to survey the wreckage of this bizarre year without feeling like that's a pretty stupid question. Perhaps a more interesting point to ponder is whether Curtis is part of the problem or part of the solution? Is he, to throw his take on ELIZA back from whence it came, also making his viewers feel secure by reflecting themselves back to them? Is a film like HyperNormalisation merely another safe bunker in our ongoing culture wars?
In 2016, the year of the EU Referendum, of Syria, of Putin and of Trump, HyperNormalisation feels almost jarringly perfect. In many ways, it's the film that Curtis' whole career has been building towards as many of the cultural, social and political undercurrents he's explored (mass manipulation, the surprisingly compatible goals of Islamic and neoliberal fundamentalism, the unintended consequences of developed world interventionism) seemingly begin to form an unstoppable tsunami. Its timing is uncanny.
One of the key scenes in Adam Curtis's monumental new documentary HyperNormalisation shows a woman engaging with ELIZA. ELIZA was a psychotherapy computer programme developed in 1966 that comforted the troubled minds of its users by simply re-phrasing their questions as self-reinforcing answers. Did it work? That depended on what the user was expecting. ELIZA performed a clever confidence trick that, for a limited period of time at least, gave the impression of control being regained and solutions being delivered. "What Eliza showed", suggests Curtis, "was that what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them."
This piece of archive footage feels like a brilliant metaphor for where we are in 2016. In an atomised world, we all have our own truths and maybe, for now, many of us have become content with that. Is this a sustainable way forward? It's hard to survey the wreckage of this bizarre year without feeling like that's a pretty stupid question. Perhaps a more interesting point to ponder is whether Curtis is part of the problem or part of the solution? Is he, to throw his take on ELIZA back from whence it came, also making his viewers feel secure by reflecting themselves back to them? Is a film like HyperNormalisation merely another safe bunker in our ongoing culture wars?
In 2016, the year of the EU Referendum, of Syria, of Putin and of Trump, HyperNormalisation feels almost jarringly perfect. In many ways, it's the film that Curtis' whole career has been building towards as many of the cultural, social and political undercurrents he's explored (mass manipulation, the surprisingly compatible goals of Islamic and neoliberal fundamentalism, the unintended consequences of developed world interventionism) seemingly begin to form an unstoppable tsunami. Its timing is uncanny.