Adam Curtis is an amazing documentarian and this is his best work yet.
HyperNormalisation focuses on the culture in the USSR at the end. Curtis describes the meaning behind the title, “…everyone knew that the system in place wasn’t working and that the politicians didn’t believe it any longer. Yet at the same time, because they didn’t have any alternative, everyone just accepted it as normal even though they knew it was abnormal.”
There are so many parallels to America today, and he explores them in depth. This came out before Trump became president, but interestingly it largely follows his bizarre life and career as a hypernormalisationist.
Trump is a special example, “over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring. Even those who thought they were attacking the system – the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counterculture – actually became part of the trickery, because they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes.”
Through this lens, the theatrical insanity of Trump makes a lot more sense. He is a constant geyser spewing out the kind of world he wants. Nobody knows how to react to him because it breaks the metaphor of our hypernormalised world.