The Big Whatsit

I’m afraid, and not from hiding behind the cushion over another showing of The Grudge (poor film, but it scares the bejesus out of me). Conspiracy theories get to me. They tap into my healthy sense of paranoia and heighten my senses. I start thinking that every shadow in the room contains a secret, and no one is as they seem. It’s not very often that documentaries can provoke such a response, but then Adam Curtis has waited nearly three years to submit another elegant series tapping into our most latent, underlying fears. The Power of Nightmares was a television classic in 2004, an exploration of the way governments have elevated the threat of terrorism into something far wider, darker and insidious than it apparently is. The Trap (What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?) goes perhaps one step further, suggesting new attempts to undermine our freedom that come entirely from within. It’s extremely paranoid, extraordinarily well made, and as before, good scary fun.

Curtis fans will recognise the style instantly. The Trap is filled with pop culture references, footage from movies spliced into the narrative and music from the world of pop and film. For this series, Curtis seems to have got his hands on a copy of the score from The Godfather, as it’s all over the show. There are also various clever bits of film worked in, such as the shot filmed from the back of a tube train disappearing into a tunnel, the light from the platform receding to a pinprick. All this is used to back up the programme’s points, to help provide the visual meaning to what is being said. I haven’t seen anything like it since Natural Born Killers, except here the images and noise are used in a much cleverer way. In The Power of Nightmares, Curtis featured a clip from The Evil Dead to illustrate terror closing in, and that remains my favourite of his references, but there’s plenty here for viewers to enjoy. Sometimes, the only problem is that images are worked in so briefly it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on, to take in the message whilst the cavalcade of visuals flies by. But that’s a minor complaint, and doesn’t detract from the fact that this is documentary making at its most breathlessly entertaining.

The Power of Nightmares didn’t fudge its issue, which concerned the perception of terrorism’s scale. Curtis made several claims in the series, all sensational and loaded to challenge the government’s line on current affairs. Quite simply, it asserted that ‘global terror’ was a myth, that the country wasn’t under threat to anything like the degree implied by governmental policy and legislation. Instead, it suited those in charge to up the stakes, to keep the public in line basically by scaring them, and thus uniting them against a common enemy. This harked back to an old theory advanced by American neo-Conservatives who believed that the country was festering in an environment of liberal freedom, and needed to be brought in line. Curtis duly traced this theory back to its origins, at the same time looking at the roots of radical Islam, itself brought about in reaction to freer societies in the Middle East. It concluded that 9/11 was the result of a desperate, small-scale attack, and not the work of a far-reaching Al-Qaeda network that could strike again at any moment, but that it gave America and Britain the opportunity to instil this neo-Conservative thinking on their nations. The result was a state of fear that handed authority back to those in power, yet one essentially based on fantasy and illusion.

Sadly, despite its high production values, consistent argument and unique style, The Power of Nightmares has never been released on DVD, and the situation is unlikely to change. According to Curtis, this is down to the sheer number of images and music used, which would lead to labyrinthine rights issues in the event of a DVD being produced. The same will no doubt be true for The Trap, which if anything uses an even more bewildering succession of stock footage from all manner of sources. In other words, the only place to see it is on the telly. Part two was on last night (Sunday), the final chapter following on Sunday, 25 March, on BBC2 at 9.00 pm. Otherwise, it’s a case of trawling the BBC4 schedules, where the series is liable to find a home, or check out the various streaming broadcasts on the web.

Believe me, it’s worth the effort. Even if you don’t agree with Curtis’s cynical view of the world, it’s impossible to walk away unimpressed. The Power of Nightmares didn’t for an instant cast doubt on 9/11 and its sources. Those crazy theories can be found on various presences on the web, no doubt in-depth productions that can uncover frightening fresh angles in every photograph and see beyond all the post-tragedy speeches. More assiduously, Curtis asks why something like 9/11 happened, who was responsible, who benefited, and what the consequences were. In The Trap, he digs at the very roots of our society, with quite startling results.

The series looks at personal liberty, or as it turns out, our lack thereof. Using the findings of mathematician John Nash as a starting point, Curtis explains how his theories have been adopted as a political model, with disastrous consequences for society. Nash (quite a different figure from A Beautiful Mind’s tortured hero, as it happens) argued that people are self-centred by nature, that they plot strategically against each other to achieve the best ends for themselves. This displayed itself on the political stage within the Cold War, where the USA and Russia escalated their levels of nuclear might in a complicated expression of deterrent i.e. if one side disarmed, could they trust the other to do the same, or would that power then order a nuclear strike? The only way to stop a global catastrophe was therefore in calling the other’s bluff all the time, and nobody would dare attack because of the terrifying retaliatory consequences.

That’s all well and good for the barely comprehensible world of global diplomacy, but what happens when this thinking is turned to that most intimate of social units, the family? A group of pscyhologists asserted that even in the home, allegedly that most comfortable and relaxed of places, strategies and mind games are taking place all the time. Perhaps this is true in Sir Alex Ferguson’s house, but the very prospect of exactly that taking place is enough to send a shudder down anyone’s spine. You mean mine wife doesn’t really love me, and that what she’s really doing is plotting against me and The Boy for her own net benefit? Scary stuff, and it’s this that forms the backbone of the series, as Curtis attempts to explain how this attitude towards human existence has manifested itself in government policy. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s regimes both devolved economic power to the market, the idea being that this is the only real forum for freedom, and thus a route to happiness. There may be something in that, but what does a market-driven society - where everyone fights for self-gain - say for social conscience? And what if the people who run the markets are themselves corrupt?

Curtis doesn’t stop there, moving into the easy pickings arena of a target-driven society where aims, objectives and results could be determined by the objective power of numbers. On the surface, using maths to determine outcomes - school league tables, hospital performance ratings, even how ‘normal’ you are as a person - comes across as sound thinking. There’s no human element to numbers, meaning that without the ‘corroding effect’ of human opinion and bias, they can coldly produce the goods time and time again. However, there are flaws, and these Curtis picks at constantly. During a time when mental health could be determined by a Q&A session that mathematically projected your susceptibility to a number of recently discovered conditions, millions of Americans were on medication in an attempt to become ‘normal’ once more, but who decides what normal is? What about outside factors, like home life, family and friends, work, etc? What effect do these have on one’s health? These are aspects the numbers couldn’t assess for themselves, leading to illusory results where people believed they weren’t well. Some of the number crunching was also open to corruption, such as the way hospitals would manipulate their figures to look better at progressing operations than they really were? A chilling example was West Lothian Police, who produced the biggest improvement in crime figures for years, until someone looked into their statistics and found a number of offences, such as assault, had been categorised as ’suspicious behaviour.’ There were even some comic instances of target-driven performance cited, such as the fact towns were graded on the quality of life they offered, one of the criteria being a score for the dawn birdsong.

There’s plenty to pick at here, leading to the conclusion that in giving away much of their power, politicans had created a society based on social inequality, one where class and money are everything. As with The Power of Nightmares, whether you agree with its findings are entirely your choice. Its movie equivalent can be found in Morpheus’s red pill from The Matrix, or the revelatory chat Kevin Costner has with ‘X’ in JFK. Both scenes open their protagonist’s eyes to a wider world, fresh angles and previously unexplored perspectives. Much of what is discussed in The Trap is controversial, open to argument and challenges opinions. That last aspect is what makes it such a blast. Ultimately, Curtis’s aim isn’t to indoctrinate us to his way of thinking, but simply to make us think for ourselves. In a recent interview, he stated he wants his audience to ‘question the received wisdom they are told by governments and the media,’ to spot the weaknesses and flaws in official rhetoric. That, he maintains, is ‘proper public service broadcasting,’ and on those terms, The Trap is a programme of the highest quality.

Visit The Trap’s homepage at bbc.co.uk.