MASSIVE ATTACK vs. ADAM CURTIS: ABANDONING ALL GLORY IN A BLAZE OF HOPE
A Review of — and attempt to explain — a mixed media event at the Park Avenue Armory, 3 October 2013
Even in the age of hypermedia, the live mixed media transmission “Massive Attack vs. Adam Curtis” has defied description. The New York Times review described it as “a concert and a film.” Consequence of Sound has described it as “a multimedia onslaught.” When I went to experience it myself, I found that while the medium does tend to hit you over the head, the message was somewhat more subtle.
I’m a fairly recent convert to the cult of Adam Curtis and his uniquely docupolemic brand of film. He uses found footage to document the unintended consequences of big ideas: plans made mainly with the best of intentions for shaping society into something better and safer, but which have instead made humanity into something less free and more impuissant. Instead of conspiracies, his stories revolve around coincidences, and his villains are more often than not tragic heroes.
Curtis has told these stories in a number of long form multi-part programs for the BBC, including Pandora’s Box (covering the dangers of managed technocracy, including Communism, Nuclear Deterrence, and Monetarism), The Century of the Self (how Freudian theory, propaganda, and public relations have led to cultural dysfunction based upon fostering an insular, ersatz form of individuality in order to protect public order), The Trap (how these movements, combined with the rise of public policy based upon statistics, have led to increased inequality and conflict due to how they further confused popular concepts of liberty), and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (how the belief that computers and connectivity could finally reconcile social stability and personal freedom has instead led to social stagnation and mass infantilism).
The filmic part of this joint spectacle is a two-hour-long piece by Curtis titled Everything is Going According to Plan, a more experimental work along the lines of It Felt Like a Kiss and other short films he has done for BBC programs like Newswipe. There is less narration and faster pacing, and this is where the musical talents of Massive Attack (Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall), along with Elizabeth Fraser (late of Cocteau Twins), and Reggae legend Horace Andy, come in. It all comes together in a cavernous space that surrounds you with giant movie screens and some intermittently doled out stage magic.
The musicians clearly were not there simply to provide a soundtrack to the film, but instead to serve as a sort of emotional Greek chorus. No new compositions were performed, but instead covers of iconic songs from the times and places shown on screen, which range in period and mood from the Shirelles to Bauhaus, along with some incidental strains reminiscent of the cloying nostalgia of Angelo Badalamenti. At points it turns quickly from strawberry banana smoothie into quicksand, first drawing the audience in, then turning on it and smothering it into panic. Standing apart from the more atmospheric songs were a performance of Massive’s “Karmacoma” as a sort of familar warning, and faithful renditions of music by Siberian Punk artists GrOb and Yanka Dhalglieva, whose stories are featured in the film.
The Siberian Punk story frames one of a number of personal tragedies included in Curtis’ narrative. During the Brezhnev years, the massive machine that was the old Soviet Union started to rust and congeal into the Years of Stagnation. Successive economic Plans yielded to folkways of failure and corruption. People were increasingly worse off and knew it, but had no idea what to do about it. The coda of this downfall were the invasion of Afghanistan and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, where lives and heroism of common folk were thrown into abottoirs born of elite indifference.
It is in this milieu that Siberian Punk is born, and Yegor Letov, lead singer of GrOb, and his lover Yanka Dhalglieva were drawn into it. They represented a new kind of cultural expression that was neither servile to the dying Soviet establishment nor did it pay tribute to Western Pop music. While influenced by Punk Rock, it moved creatively in a different direction, rejecting the West as well as the Soviet world, and became hugely popular and influential, though ignored by official media.
But when the Soviet Union finally fell, and was replaced by “Shock Therapy” economics and the rise of the Oligarchs, the Siberian Punks suddenly lost their reason for existence. Members of the movement were cast adrift, and some did not survive; among these was Yanka Dhalglieva.
Meanwhile, in the West, the slow creep of anomie accellerated into a numbing deluge. Pauline Boty, a British pop artist of tremendous potential, is struck with cancer while pregnant and at the height of her creativity. To save her unborn child she refuses treatment and dies. Her daughter Boty Goodwin tries to relive her mother’s life in America but is emotionally destroyed by her father’s death at the hands of institutional indifference, as well as by the deafening emptiness and self-absorbtion of the culture. She succumbs to Heroin.
Here the Boty Goodwin story is an allegory for what is happening in America near the end of the Cold War. Americans are swathed in sea of self-indulgence and paranoia, and their Golden Couple are Ted Turner and Jane Fonda:
American (and therefore Western) media audiences are deluged with images exhalting them to express themselves individually as unknowing conformists, and to restrict any decisions they make or desires they might have to their own personal space and no further. They are constantly reminded that they can “improve” themselves, but that any attempts to improve society are futile.
It is here, on both sides of the world, that we see the rise of various forms of the Managerial Society.
In the West, much of the managing has to do with consumerism, providing a regular cycle of bread and circuses for an increasingly insular public.
Meanwhile, the scope of virtually all people’s lives are circumscribed based upon metrics of past performance.
Meanwhile in Russia, the managing has more to do with attenuating the emotional appeal of ideas. And this is where the survivors of Siberian Punk come in: Yegor Letov becomes a founding member of the National Bolshevik Party, an attempt at raising outrage among the Russian public through provocative (and ironic) displays using the symbols and rhetoric of old authoritarian ideologies. The problem is most people failed to see the irony, and it’s quite possible that Letov and his comrades have forgotten it as well, so now the National Bolsheviks are seen mainly as an irrelevant freak show. Meanwhile, fellow Punk alumnus Vladislav Surkov went into public relations, and eventually became an architect of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power through the use of manipulated oppositional politics.
But the real problem with the Managerial Society is that it is so myopic and risk averse that there is no more room left in society for change — even when it’s necessary to survive. By instilling fear of the outside world, the West has ended up helping to create new enemies for itself, for which they are tragically unprepared. One example of this that Curtis provides is the implosion of Donald Trump’s real estate and casino empire when faced with his bank being broken by a high stakes gambler — when he enlisted the help of a nuclear scientist to rig the game back in his favor, he still lost out, as gangsters ended up killing the high roller before he could pay. But the biggest example is the one everyone knows about now, and perhaps we knew it was coming all along:
Thomas Theorem Redux? Which leads us back to all that writing on the walls (or screens): Is this all there is? Is there a way out?
At the end of the performance we are given a small glimmer of hope, and then sent off to escape with it, with an orchestrated exit reminiscent of being freed from some concentration camp. At earlier performances, there were even guard dogs, but they were absent from the show I attended.
Curtis certainly seems to think that there is a way out. He may not know what it is, or he may prefer all of us to find out for ourselves. We can, however, extend him and Massive Attack some credit for making people aware of the necessity of finding it in such an effective — and affecting — manner.
