HyperNormalisation

Adam Curtis guides the film as its narrator, using old news clips, interviews, music, and strange images to tell a long story about power. The story begins in New York and Damascus in 1975, then moves through the Soviet Union, Lebanon, Libya, America, Russia, Egypt, Syria, and the internet age. Curtis argues that politicians, banks, technology companies, and rulers stopped trying to solve hard problems and built simple stories that people accepted as real. The tone is dark, tense, and often dreamlike, with Trump, Putin, Assad, Gaddafi, Henry Kissinger, and Patti Smith appearing in the larger story.

The film’s main woke signal is repeated Western institutional / cultural critique of banks, finance, corporate power, Western foreign policy, media, and social media systems. It treats the loss of collective politics and the failure of left-wing movements, Occupy, and the Arab Spring as major parts of the story, while often questioning those movements instead of praising them. A short section mentions oppressed people, black Americans, and white America while describing Gaddafi’s propaganda, but that point is not the film’s main subject. The film’s identity material is brief compared with its larger argument about power, money, technology, and public fear.