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Title: The Century of the Self |
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Release Date: 2002 |
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Running time: 243 Minutes |
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Director; Writer: Adam Curtis |
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Technical: HDCAM video, restored film footage |
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Review: Adam
Curtis prepared this four part documentary for Part 1 is called “Happiness Machines.” The story starts with the influence of Sigmund Freud on his nephew Edward Bernays, who would invent the modern career of public relations, and mass consumer persuasion, in the 1920s. Companies used to market to consumers on the basis of need but were transformed into manipulating desire during the 20s. The consumer could see ownership of goods as a kind of self-expression. The world would crash down with the 1929 crash and succeeding depression, and that would bring discredit on ideas like freedom, capitalism, and democracy. FDR would try to save things with the New Deal while Goebels and then Hitler would promote national socialism, the idea that the state should manipulate the individual according to a folkish aesthetic meritocracy. All of that would crash, of course, with the extremes of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The film pays little attention to communism and Stalin. Part 2 is called “The Engineering of Consent.” Immediately following WWII, our own government would try to save “democratic capitalism” by using psychology and the “mental health” field (starting with a Mental Health Act of 1946) to channel people into cultural conformity, especially with regard to family values. The mental health field (based on Freud) saw conformity as necessary to repress irrationality and emotional wildness. This would fit into the Cold War and McCarthysm, but it was also partly a reaction to what had caused the rise of Nazi Germany. Individuals, if left to their own devices, might truly become dangerous in pursuing their private aesthetic fantasies. Conformity was thought to socialize people into the family so that the needy could be cared for efficiently, so gradually government welfare programs might become less a burden on business. Conformity also meant, to put it bluntly, that you outgrow adolescence and prove yourself as an adult by raising a family before any other claims to fame. Of course, this did not work that way, as “family values” in the 50s tended to promote segregation and the transfer of unearned wealth. And doesn’t forced conformity defeat the whole idea of democracy? This movement provided the scenario for my expulsion from William and Mary and subsequent psychiatric confinement in a government hospital after telling the Dean of Men that I was a latent homosexual. Quite an irony. Part 3 is called “There Is a Policeman Inside All our Head: He Must Be Destroyed.” In the 1960s there were radical changes in psychotherapy, and one of the leading figures, William Reich (not to be confused with Theodore Reich who wrote a spirited book The Greening of America), turned against Freud and began to advocate the idea that individual self-expression is a good thing. Companies in time would catch on, and realize that marketing to self-promotion and vanity could make money. Ronald Reagan (to get government off our backs) as presented as promoting the libertarian brand of individualism, although many of us know of his receptive ties to the “Moral Majority” during the 1980s. The theory of polarity by Paul Rosenfels (see book reference below) fits into the idea that adult relationships should exist for a person’s happiness, not for social utility. Part
4 is called “Eight People Sipping Wine in So
all of this about the new Self leaves us wondering about morality. You can’t
take freedom for granted, and you can’t abuse the planet forever, or take
care of an increasing elderly population with working-age professionals who
feel a disincentive to reproduce. You can’t just drop the poor on the tracks
with a “rank and yank” meritocracy. Some of this explains the cheating
culture leading to our financial scandals, as well as the hatred of This gets painful. A bit of a nerd myself, I played the system during the Cold War, and again during the age of the Internet to promote myself. It seems like I could have been required to pay my dues more and prove that I could take care of others as a condition for self-promotion. The example such a paradigm sets would help take care of the poor or less able. But can you do this without corrupting the system as during the age of conformity? Well, the outsourcing phenomenon gives pause for thought: content-based jobs are more easily shipped overseas, and jobs that require you to be a convincing, persuasive person regardless of your “content” stay here. I have shown up short in this kind of market so far. Compare this to the CNN 1999 series “Millennium.” Revolution OS (2001, Seventh Art/Netflix/Wonderview, dir. J.T.S. Moore, 89 min, G) is a documentary about the "open source" revolution on the computer business and in the Internet. As a film, it is remarkable in that it is shot in 2.3 to1, full "Cinemascope", and unusual for a documentary that looks like it could have been intended for PBS. The specific subject is the Linux operating system, somewhat derived from Unix, but there is actually a rather complicate menage of concepts presented here. The film presents Bill Gates as an originator of the idea of proprietary software, when "Micro-Soft Homebrew" was the first operating system for "hobbyists". (In the early 80s, we had PC-DOS and MS-DOS). The reasoning in those days was that the work simply could not get done without paying people as professionals and giving them the benefit of copyright ownership as we normally understand intellectual property. Over time, a desire for free exploration took over the idea of financial incentives as we usually understand them. An early concept was the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto (Gnu's Not Unix) . Finnish programmer Linus Trovalds would invent Linux in 1991, and would refine the concept of Open Source, which was not the same thing as public domain, because persons who upgraded it and distributed it needed a kind of modified property rights. Open Source eventually would have certain principles: (1) free distribution (2) source code available (3) derived works (4) integrity of source (5) non-discrimination. (You could not withhold the software based on the politics or "morality" of the customer, for example, an abortion clinic -- a concept that moralists try to attack sometimes to protect "kids" or protect the public -- "know thy customer.") The extension of open source for software is, of course, open source content, which is represented by Wikipedia, or even in a sense by this site. This is always a question of competing ethical values, about integrity, credibility, and accountability to others. Welcome to Macintosh (2008, Red Envelope, dir. Robert Baca, 73 min). Documentary about Apple Computer morphing to Apple Inc. Blogger. We Live In Public (2006/2009, Indiepix, dir. Ondi Timoner, 90 min) is a biography of Josh Harris, his Internet innovations and his “synecdoche” experiment. Blogger. Julie & Julia (2009, Columbia, dir. Nora Ephron, based on book by Julie Powell and Julia Child, 123 min). First movie based on a blog, Julie’s about cooking; two lives in parallel. Blogger. Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars (2010, Walt Disney Pictures/CBC/Disney Channel/Picture 9, 90 min, PG) A student reports a scandal with one of her father’s actors in order to become class blogger at high school; the ethics of blogging are explored. Blogger. Bickford Schmeckler’s Cool Ideas (2006, Screen Meda/Vulcan, dir. Scott Lew, 75 min). A shy college student’s therapy scrapbook goes on the web via his frat brothers and gets published big. Blogger. Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril (2009, AMS/PBS, dir. Mike Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza, 80 min. Blogger.
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Related reviews: The Perfect Score ; Synecdoche, New York; Callahan’s The Cheating Culture, Lerner’s The Politics of Meaning Rosenfels Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process |
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