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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The most important political documentary of the decade suggests that the "war on terrorism" is a dark delusion -- and there's no such thing as al-Qaida.
Dec 8, 2005 | At some point in the weeks after 9/11, I was on the phone with my mother, who lives in California. Like most other New Yorkers, I had been through a literally life-changing experience of shock and mourning, but my level of cynicism about our beloved country and its leadership (along with pretty much everything else) was gradually returning to normal. Even so, my mother surprised me. She's a former left-wing labor organizer and onetime member of the Communist Party USA, admittedly, but these days she's more like a liberal Democrat (if they still exist) than anything else. The phrase "war on terrorism" came up in our conversation, and she snorted. "Yeah," she said, dripping derision. "What war? And what terrorism?"
Well, I thought she was speaking much too broadly at the time, but I'm less sure about that now. After seeing Adam Curtis' explosive three-part BBC film debunking the entire post-2001 terrorism scare, "The Power of Nightmares," in fact, I'm not too sure about anything. Curtis' headline-grabbing claims are certainly explosive -- he suggests that political power in the so-called Western democracies now depends on promulgating dark fantasies completely unsupported by reality, and that there is pretty much no such thing as al-Qaida. I don't entirely agree with his apparent political position, and wherever you stand on the continuum, you probably won't either. But it strikes me that "The Power of Nightmares" is the most important political documentary of this decade, and perhaps of my lifetime.
There are holes you can poke in pieces of Curtis' argument, and in the end his film may become the very thing it's dissecting, that is, a totalizing critique of the collapse of Western civilization. But this is the movie (or should be) that will make both Michael Moore and Judy Miller sit bolt upright, clap themselves on the forehead and proclaim, "Now I get it!" As one letter-writer to the BBC's Web site has put it, Curtis is like Morpheus, offering us the little red pill that will set us free from the lies, half-truths and distortions of the last five (or 50) years.
But as those twist-tie red-white-and-blue bumper stickers remind us, freedom isn't free. "The Power of Nightmares" is an important film, but it's going to take some hard work and diligent consumer activism before anyone outside New York gets to see it. DVD release may happen eventually, although Curtis uses so much archival footage and period music that the legal clearances will be a nightmare, ha ha. And as for broadcast on American television, I'm told that will happen, let's see, approximately 5,000 years after pigs first begin to fly across the frozen wastelands of hell. It's probably illegal not just to watch, but also to read about or think about. You and I are both committing treason right now.
Now that we're free, what else do we do? I know -- let's watch some intense and gut-wrenching motion pictures! The kind of stuff our friends think we're weird for liking! We'll also learn this week why you should never bring a vampire cannibal girl from H.P. Lovecraft's universe home to your Tokyo apartment, and explore how, for one veteran of Peru's civil war trying to return to civilian life, the fighting never stops.
