The Trap - What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom
David - 26.03.2007 17:03
De nieuwe 3 delige serie van de maker van The Power of Nightmares. Zeer inspirerende televisie die de afgelopen 3 weken op de BBC te zien was! Over hoe individuele vrijheid sinds de jaren 50 door diverse theorieen beknot is.
De hele serie is te zien op YouTube en Google video. Hier worden ook nog andere links gegeven:  http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?p=569755&sid=c40797c2c82e558497ba7f6f9c4ee0ba
Een leuke recensie van de Guardian zegt het allemaal.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/03/the_weekends_tv_the_trap.html
Sam Wollaston
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
It was my birthday the other day - it's not important which one - and my girlfriend gave me a small non-stick saucepan and a manual milk frother for making cappuccinos at home, and in the evening she took me out to a restaurant for dinner.
Nice, you may be thinking. But you'd be quite wrong. Nice is irrelevant and doesn't even come in to the equation - and it is an equation. There was no emotion involved; she had calculated what would be to her advantage (future cappuccinos, made by me for her, I imagine) in a system driven and defined by numbers. You see, my girlfriend is an individual information processor, motivated solely by self-interest. As am I. We continually watch and strategise against each other, both of us seeking only our own personal gain. Our relationship, like the world outside it, is based on mistrust and the delicate equilibrium of terror.
Well, that's how the politicians - on both left and right - have come to see us: self-seeking robots. The narrow and limited kind of freedom we enjoy is born out of a different, paranoid time - the cold war. Back then it was an alternative to communist tyranny. Now it's a dangerous trap. The Trap - What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (BBC2, Sunday) in fact.
It's a strange kind of liberty that sees people being locked up, Minority Report-style, before any crime has been committed; that sees "freedom" enforced by brute military force across the world; and that sees the collapse of social mobility. (The restaurant my girlfriend took me to is the same one her mum used to take her dad to, and her grandma . . . you get the idea, we know our place, and we're stuck there, but the Little Chef does a brilliant gammon and pineapple platter for £7.50, if you're interested.)
In the final part of Adam Curtis's sweeping three-hour headfrig, he reminds us of Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of freedom, and how "positive liberty" by force from tyranny, as seen in countless revolutions, leads only to horror, more tyranny and the opposite of freedom. Whereas "negative liberty" of individuals to do what they want in a society without ideals leads to stability and order.
But then Curtis shows us how negative liberty became corrupted, how positive liberty was reborn, and how a new monster mongrel mutant of the two liberties was created. We go to Algeria and Cambodia; we see the US's new militant freedom, in Chile, the Philippines and Nicaragua. We witness the birth of a so-called moral foreign policy. Then we end up - exhausted and spinning, and inevitably - in Iraq. And in Blair's Britain. And trapped in the Little Chef, enjoying gammon and pineapple and a peculiar kind of freedom.
At least I think we do. Because it is quite easy to get lost along the way. Curtis has joined the dots, and got his picture at the end, but I'm buggered if I know if it's the right picture, or even if the dots should have been joined in the first place. I don't know if what Curtis is saying is the truth or a loopy paranoid conspiracy theory; I suspect it's somewhere between the two.
But in a way it doesn't really matter. Because The Trap is bold, big-idea, brainy TV, a rare thing right now. It's also bold of the BBC to allow this man free rein to go off and do this stuff. And to fund him.
What Adam Curtis has shown - in The Trap, and previously, in The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self - is that as well as having the ideas, he also understands what makes good television. Between the interviews, he seduces us with imagery from the archives - beautiful, terrible and comical - of bombs and wars, dancing, a couple waterskiing side by side, a heron with a goldfish in its beak. He wraps us in a big, warm brain-blanket. And he understands the power of music too, to cement, and complement, and juxtapose with humour - Sibelius, New Order, whatever feels right, or so wrong it's right in a different way. The result, whether true, a bit true, or a lot of bunkum, is not just something to think about, it's something beautiful too. Even if you don't get it all, it still doesn't feel like homework.
Right, I'm off out, to start a revolution - against the wrong kind of freedom. Oh, and by the way, I lied: we didn't really go to the Little Chef. We went to a really posh restaurant, way posher than any restaurant our parents have ever been to. So maybe it is all nonsense after all.
|
E-Mail: 
Website: