No Escape From Discordianism
I’ve just watched the Adam Curtis documentary series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head on the BBC. Six episodes in all, it comes in at just under eight hours long. Curtis is a BBC documentary filmmaker with a very distinctive style. His films are first-person lectures on a variety of subjects, held together by a collage of archive film and music.
The combination of historic footage with an often-emotional soundtrack gives a dream-like quality to the narrative. You could say that he uses this technique in order to smuggle radical ideas into the viewers’ heads, but I suspect it’s the other way around. He uses radical film techniques in order to smuggle entirely conventional ideas into the viewers’ head, while feigning a radical agenda.
He certainly likes to talk in revolutionary terms. One of the films is called Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing. The phrase comes from the Baader-Meinhof group when they were training with the Palestinians in the 1960s. The story goes that the Palestinians were offended at the sight of the German women sunbathing naked and asked them to put clothes on, to which Andreas Baader replied, “Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together. Fucking and shooting are the same thing.”
The whole episode is lifted from a 2008 German drama film directed by Uli Edel, called The Baader Meinhof Complex. This is typical of Curtis’ method. He likes to reference obscure material without necessarily acknowledging where it comes from. This particular episode also highlights another of his approaches. While talking about revolutionary politics Curtis will often pick marginal figures, which he then holds up as examples of the failure of the left. The Red Army Faction is one example. Another is Michael X, who also appears in this film.
Michael X—proper name Michael de Freitas—was a racketeer and enforcer of the slum landlord Peter Rachman who operated out of Notting Hill in the 1950s. He became a revolutionary and an icon of the left in the 60s, before murdering one of his followers in Trinidad. He was hanged in 1975. Of course Michael X took his name from Malcolm X. The story was that when Malcolm came to Britain a desk clerk mistook the two for brothers as they were travelling together. That may or may not be true, but what’s obvious is that the adoption of the surname lent kudos to Michael’s revolutionary persona. Malcolm X was a powerful and charismatic figure with a genuine radical agenda. Michael X was a gangster, a violent extortionist and a murderer. You wonder why Curtis takes him as his focus.
Read more here: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/no-escape-from-discordianism
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