The latest BBC series from the multi-award winning filmmaker Adam Curtis, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, concluded on Monday evening. To date his most famous documentary has been The Power of Nightmares in 2004, a visual essay upon Western politicians use of fear to control their populations and the remarkable parallels between the rise of neo-conservatism in the West and radical Islam in the Middle East.
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is even more ambitious in its scope, looking at worldwide human consciousness and how this and our view of the world are changing. The first two episodes examined how the development of computers has been followed by humans starting to believe that the systems by which these machines are run also apply to the human and natural world.
Economics and the Natural World
So, just as computers operate within a stable, self-regulating electronic system, human disciplines, such as economics, are somehow subject to the same artificial mechanisms and patterns. Alan Greenspan and his lesser ilk came to believe that the specific economic system as seen at the turn of the Millennium was as perfect, symmetrical and unchanging as a circuit board. Boom and bust no longer applied.
How far off the mark this was we all now know. But the same belief was also being applied to study of the natural world. Thousands of data samples were recorded and analyzed, in for example the feeding habits of animals in a prairie in North America, to try to prove that ecosystems also operated as if within a massive computer. This myth, just like that of economics was also eventually exposed.
Adam Curtis the Iconoclast
But Curtis has always done more than just debunk myths he destabilizes the dominant conceptions we have of ourselves. The Century of the Self in 2002 is a good example. Taking Freud’s theories, Curtis demonstrated that these analyzes of the human psyche, far from being the roots of eventual profound self-discovery and freedom had actually been harnessed by big business to help them appeal to our desires and so create a consumerist, desire over need society.
In All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace he does a similar thing with the hippie commune phenomenon. These are commonly perceived as being harmless manifestations of a new kind of community springing out of the social changes of the sixties. But in their attempts to completely break free from the failed and cynical methods of mainstream politics, and revert to their notion of a state of nature, the commune members failed to recognize that even in these new communities hierarchies existed.
Thus, as in the field of economics and politics where bankers and other powerful groups have been afforded forgiveness far greater than ever given to any other sector of society, the hippie communes were even more susceptible to abuse from those with the power than more traditional models of society.
African Tragedies
The third and final episode was centred on Africa. Why this continent? A good question. An explanation could be is that it is the scene of a great number of human tragedies caused primarily by the greed of the West. Fair enough. But these miseries have also been experienced in the Far East, South and Central America, the Middle East and even Australia, across the centuries.
No completely satisfactory explanation is ever forthcoming as the viewer is plunged into the war-torn Congo jungle of 2000 following the frantic travels of radical biologist Bill Hamilton as he searches for proof to substantiate his belief that AIDS was man-made by an over-ambitious medical profession.
And here there is a connection with earlier episodes because of Hamilton’s theories that all animals, including humans, main life force is to pass on their DNA. We are just vessels to carry then propagate the genes within us. These coded genes are our masters in a way, the machines, or computers, that control us and our behaviour.
But we are given no time to reflect on these connections before we are whisked across the border into Rwanda, where we get a brief history lesson on its colonial past. Its Belgian rulers had artificially divided the country by creating the myth that the Tutsis were a separate and superior race from the Hutus, and they had come from Egypt.
And we are treated to an array of fantastically bizarre and obscure archive material from the 1950s and earlier, accompanied by jolly colonial music. Curtis has employed these disorientating but arresting techniques many times before as he weaves the disparate threads into a startling pattern.
So our crisscrossing of Africa continues, including stops in the mountains with Diane Fossey and David Attenborough frolicking with gorillas, moments of relative lightness amidst the gloom of mass death and destruction across the continent.
To a Barry White-esque song we see footage of the brutal rise to power of another dictator in Zaire in the 1970s, and of a correspondent, Feargal Keane I believe, led through a compound full of decomposing victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
The horror becomes numbing, especially accompanied as it is by Curtis’ calm and detached narration. Still we stumble on through the continuing horror story of the West’s colonial past and its more recent attempts at redemption with both leading to more and more African bloodshed.
Bill Hamilton, George Price and Richard Dawkins
In parallel, Hamilton’s theories are developed by the ultra-rationalist George Price, a computer pioneer. He saw the similarity between computers and gene codes. He came to the conclusion that we are self-replicating machines and he had the equations to prove it. All of our behaviour, from altruistic to genocidal could be explained.
The famous figure of Richard Dawkins then enters the story with his seminal book, The Selfish Gene. He took Hamilton’s and Price’s work onward into this century, while the former died of a gut hemorrhage on his Congo trip and Price died a tramp’s suicide after his personal Christian rebellion against the unbreakable logic of his earlier theories.
Hamilton did not die alone. Four and a half million perished in Zaire as troops from all over Africa flooded in to get their hands on the minerals needed to fuel Western consumers rampant desire for new technology. The situation was made worse by aid agencies attracting Rwandan refugees across the border into camps where the Tutsis took their revenge on fleeing Hutus. Africa is indeed the place where everything Western man touches turns to death.
But none of this would matter to organic vessels genetically programmed to kill or otherwise disadvantage distant relatives in favour of direct relations. Those winning the battle will achieve a sort of immortality.
Free Will Versus Programmed Machines
Where where does Adam Curtis himself stand in all of this? We have to look at interviews of him over recent years to find out. Because in this series itself, his position is unclear. His superior, almost ironic narrative tone, coupled with the mix of whimsical music and horrific image, while arresting, lacks the thrust required to deal with such a serious subject. And to be ambivalent in untenable.
It even could be perceived that Curtis agrees with the logical conclusion of the geneticists argument, that we can do nothing about our actions because of our DNA programming. Because viewing scene after scene of the fatal consequences of free will and its supposed failure to change things for the better whittles away at one’s resistance.
But we can see his position in his earlier series, The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. In this Curtis attacks the ‘game theory’ of free-marketeers like Frederick Hayek, and the equally reductionist ideas of Dawkins. The ‘game theory’ of consumer behaviour was discredited by the discovery that only economists and psychopaths actually acted in the way suggested. Similarly with regards to the selfish gene concept, many believe that only our leaders in politics, business and the media actually behave in such a narrow, single-minded fashion.
Adam Curtis is on record then as decrying the fact that we have largely given up on changing the world for the better, excusing ourselves that it is because free will has failed so spectacularly. But his message would be stronger if self-contained in one documentary series instead of having to factor in previous work and interviews.
Nonetheless Curtis remains a compelling and wide-ranging documentary filmmaker with fascinating points to make, and one of the few challenging the status quo. With All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace he adds to his reputation.
Scott Graham - I've graduated twice from the University of Glasgow, both disciplines majoring in fiction, an MA in Politics and an MLitt in Creative ...
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