Does anybody understand what his documentaries are actually saying?
He seems to grab random things from history and make up a clever sounding narrative that "explains" them. It's just documentary porn with nice video clips and music.
Each says different things, they've been getting progressively more artsy over time, but the running theme is very consistent:
We are stuck in an ideological rut and we need to get out of it.
You can then sort of run through them:
Pandora's Box - here's a bunch of old instances of ideological fuckups where people believed in things, but things didn't happen in the way they believed they would.
The Living Dead - let's watch Thatcher use the past to put together the present.
The Mayfair Set - ibid, but with less war and more commerce.
The Century of the Self - Advertising is pure evil. Blairites use it to sell you bollocks.
The Power of Nightmares - The war on terror is bollocks. Neocons and Shamanismists have a surprising amount in common, meanwhile the only reason Blairites have hopped on this is because they've got nothing hopeful to sell us - so they want to scare us into leaving them in power.
The Trap - What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom - Thatcherite types got us all hooked on a stupid idea of "freedom from" out of fear that "freedom to" leads to totalitarianism, we should re-embrace "freedom to" despite that risk because "freedom from" is shit. In parallel to this, we embraced models of human behaviour that are inaccurate, and which have ironically lead to soviet style surrealism in government and society. ("Rural community vibrancy" is actually measured numerically!)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - The idea that computers would automatically stabilize the economy was bollocks. The idea that computers would set us free was bollocks.
Bitter Lake - Our alliance with Saudi Arabia was a mistake and Svalbard is where dreams go to die. Also, our society is trapped in the same Malaise as the late USSR: We know everything is bollocks, but we can't break out of it.
HyperNormalisation - I really mean it, our society is trapped in the same Malaise as the late USSR. Everything is bollocks, but we can't imagine an alternative. The USSR at least had Western Capitalism to turn to. We do not have that luxury. The idea that computers would set us free is still bollocks.
Can't Get You Out of My Head - Haven't finished it. I assume it will say that actually, lots of people have wonderful and exciting new ideas about how to structure society in a way that nobody's ever thought of before.
But of course, I could just be projecting my own worldview onto his films and taking away from them what they want to hear.
Give or take some details (e.g. the ideological fuckups in Pandora's Box often being tied to misapplications of scientific, or plain old pseudoscientific, ideas), I'd say you're on the mark with your general impression of his films.
In his documentaries he basically explicitly states his views, and his reasons for including specific historical events and figures, in the narration. Admittedly there are some more abstract and artsy parts, but they're usually interspersed with tight, direct declarative statements on what his beliefs are. Maybe his style just isn't to your liking, OP.
Exactly, you don't really get it until you know that and watch it as an ironic satire where everyone else who thinks they get it except you is actually the target of mockery.
>>442331 This isn't really a hidden aspect of Lee's performance or in anyway anything like what Curtis does. I don't really understand why people overthink Stewart Lee so much, he's just doing jokes. In Content Provider he's got bits about how he thinks Game of Thrones is stupid and then his pants fall down. I see people getting angry at Lee's stand up online quite a lot and I don't really understand why.
>>442333 I've heard that before, but I'm not a horrible cunt so I don't call everyone I have a disagreement with an "autist" so hopefully otherlad will get back to me in due course, if not, whatever.
I don't think you can call it moving or post-ironic, but the bit where his pants fall down after talking about Game of Thrones is definitely taking the piss out of mainstream comics, and not just having his pants fall down after taking about Game of Thrones.
Are you the sort of people who thought Al Murray really was a pub landlord until you saw him talking all posh on a history documentary or what?
>>442327 >"Rural community vibrancy" is actually measured numerically!
There's absolutely nothing wrong with quantifying public goods and that includes social cost/benefit analysis on the intangible. Without it government wouldn't be able to make informed, unbiased, choices or derive how budgets can be used most effectively for returns on public goods investments (like say, air quality). Nor would it be able to conduct proper monitoring or evaluation for that matter. In these days of increasing recognition of the problem and costs of loneliness it is only right that benefits of new community points should be accounted for in planning.
>>442337 I know they didn't. But someone did suggest the person I originally disagreed with might be autistic, in a pejoritive manner, and I took issue with that.
>>442340 I am skeptical that one can measure the intangible in a fashion that allows for unbiased choices. It is, by definition, intangible.
Air quality is tangible, noise levels are tangible. "Vibrancy" is not tangible, and if one simply aggregates vibrancy from tangible factors then the resulting figure will be worthy of suspicion with some ropey assumptions about how to weight those factors.
I'm sure the Green Book is wonderful, I'm sure whatever the Soviet parallels I'd like to make, it's useful to slap a price on noise pollution that nobody ever pays, but I would ask you: did we see a gigantic expansion of the vibrancy of our rural communities under Blair?
Did we not already have a thread about the new Curtis with exactly the same pic in the OP?
Or am I just going mad, strong possibility.
Sage for everything being in it's right place is an autistic illusion and the ideological outlook that people should make threads on the right boards and check before posting new ones about the same shit actually only made things worse. Britfa, for all it's grand hopes and ideals was actually a chaotic storm in a teacup and no one knew how to get out of it.
>>442343 >if one simply aggregates vibrancy from tangible factors then the resulting figure will be worthy of suspicion with some ropey assumptions about how to weight those factors.
That's ultimately going to be shaped by policy of the day and the relative levels of oversight (including of course public transparency) but I'm sure you can see why a regional standard would be a broadly good thing. These days you really can't address knotty problems like loneliness or drug use using one or two metrics because effective solutions require coordinated government action across multiple factors and agencies that necessitate an overarching framework.
I suppose ARE ADAM would play some Brian Eno over this post and argue "approaching the world like a man left alone with a tape measure only creates a simulacrum" but I don't see how else you can try to solve complex problems or track returns on investment in public goods. We do have complex problems that have been solved very well in this context, the London Olympics being a good example where from start to finish its was simulacrum'ed to death to ensure the underground didn't break or we end up like Greece after their Olympics with no plan beyond the closing ceremony to deliver benefits.
>did we see a gigantic expansion of the vibrancy of our rural communities under Blair?
I don't know from personal experience as I was 9 when Major left office. It's difficult to find metrics on this because the public sector has only really just started on doing end-of-life policy assessment and over the period there are much more sexy topics for academics to study like militant daft woggery prevention strategies.
