CinemaScopes Robert Koehler interviews Adam Curtis on "The Power of Nightmares"

Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths:
Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares

By Robert Koehler

The possibility that Donald Rumsfeld and Al Qaeda’s one-man think tank, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could share a lot in common sounds unlikely enough that it could be true, although when I first heard about this assertion in Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, while standing in the midst of a noisy anti-war demonstration during the Santa Barbara film festival, it also sounded deliriously ironic. But there’s power in Nightmares, and its startling and paradigm-shifting thesis—that American neo-conservatives and radical Islamists are two sides of the same agenda intent on waging war on Western liberalism while upholding fundamentalist religion—is generated by Curtis’ methodical history of the movements, his dispassionate description of extremism, and his refinement of the art of the essay film through the filter of visually biting wit.

Those who see Curtis’ new film with or without the benefit of his previous four-part BBC series, The Century of the Self (2002), will be impressed by his sprawling narrative perspective, which begins with how Freud’s study of the irrational mind indirectly but profoundly provides American corporate interests with the propaganda tools (euphemistically known as “public relations”) to appeal to and assuage people’s selfish desires. But it gets better: This commodifying of the self prepares the soil for the politics of self fostered by everything from depoliticized post-Lefties to Reaganite Randians, which in turn, in The Power of Nightmares, provides both neo-conservatives and Islamist thinkers like Sayed Kotb material for their case that there’s nothing scarier than a fat, happy, and soulless West that lives for a trip to the mall.

Consciously going against the tradition of journalism that assumes that political power resides in Congresses and Parliaments, Curtis’ analysis approaches subjects that hide in plain sight. Just as Century of the Self finally convinces you that Edward Bernays, the curiously obscure creator of PR, is one of the 20th century’s key figures, Nightmares persuades that the key to understanding radical Islamism is not Osama bin Laden, but Kotb and his call for a popular religious revolution that erases the perceived evils of secular anomie. The ideas spill out of Curtis’ head—and from his hypnotic voice—like an essay turned into a thrill ride, reinforced by an inventive assembly of film and news clips, accompanied by music from Eno, John Carpenter, Morricone, Shostakovich, Ives, and John Barry, that produces constantly jarring but pleasing effects, as though the theme from Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (1970) were just the thing to accompany a trip into the menacing universe of Richard Perle.

Somewhat wary of Curtis’ provocative report, the BBC originally broadcast the three-part, three-hour series last October without much promotion. But the resulting wave of generally positive response across most of the British political spectrum surprised the network, which then supported Curtis to update the program after a December decision by UK ’s Law Lords that ruled detention of terror suspects without trial was illegal. After the series’ first North American appearance in Santa Barbara , no American network showed the courage to air it—in contrast to Canada , where the series ran on CBC’s The Passionate Eye on April 24. An invitation from Cannes prompted Curtis to trim the series to a two-hour-and-37-minute film, mostly excising the TV version’s necessarily repetitive bits and pieces, which in his view, “helped hone the message.” The film of The Power of Nightmares can now be set alongside Cannes’ last foray in newspaper cinema, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which also attacked the current political and media culture of fear. But where Moore casually ignored any facts that didn’t serve his purpose, while engaging in a sloppy form of histrionic, drive-by journalism, Curtis firmly rejects this. His is a dispassionate historiography of movements driven by ideological ideas, which then examines the very exploitation of fears that Moore instinctively seems to understand, yet imitates. Perhaps even more than a disorganized but lethal terror threat, Curtis is troubled by an emotionalized culture in the West that has allowed itself to become vulnerable to the spins and unfounded claims of ideologues in search of new enemies.

CINEMA SCOPE: A theme that you introduce in The Century of the Self and continue in The Power of Nightmares is how intellectual cadres assert that elites are essential for managing society even as they try to conceal their elitism from the outside world.

ADAM CURTIS: I was extremely aware of the connections. My working title for The Power of Nightmares was The Elements of the Self. Ever since the French Revolution, elites have been terrified of the masses and their so-called irrational forces. The Century of the Self was about how Freud’s ideas, which explained this irrationality, were taken by various elites and used to try to manage those forces and also exploit them. The argument goes that people are irrational, that irrationality can be dangerous, and the best way to handle it is to keep it happy and fed. Out of that came the modern consumer society, which is based on catering to people’s needs. The neo-conservatives and Sayed Kotb’s Islamists worried that what was going to emerge were self-seeking individuals who cared only about the satisfaction of their own desires, and who then corrode the bonds that hold society together. What needed to be re-established was a set of moral guidelines. What linked the Islamists to the neo-cons is that they were enemies of this new self that had emerged partly out of Freud’s ideas of the irrational self-seeking individual.

SCOPE: Was it hard to make sense of how secular neo-conservatives ally with fundamentalist Christians, and as the former neo-con Michael Lind points out in the film, that this was basically a Leninist tactic?

CURTIS: It’s one of the strangest political alliances in modern political history: On one hand, an elite, mostly Jewish, mainly secular group of political idealists who believe that society needed to be reconfigured to save it from itself, and the mass of fundamentalist Christians in America’s heartland who believe that Israel, during the second coming, will be engulfed in a conflagration. The leading neo-conservative thinkers, like Irving Kristol, would argue that that sort of revealed religion is necessary for the masses, since it lays down moral laws. To be blunt, the older neo-conservatives who came out of the old left would see American fundamentalist Christians as, in Lenin’s term, useful idiots. What’s happened, though, as Lind and others said to me, is that these neo-conservatives have come to believe their own myths. Both critics and those who’ve been involved in the neo-conservative movement argue that a shift happened. At home, they wanted religion; abroad, they wanted this idea of America as an exceptional country destined to bring democracy to the world. They saw that originally as a way of holding the nation together.

SCOPE: Didn’t this shift occur when the neo-conservatives attained real political power?

CURTIS: Power is very seductive, and it can make you believe your myths. I think that if you believe your own myths, it’s very easy to find the evidence to prove them. It’s human nature. We all construct reality out of fragments of evidence, you and I do it day in and day out. That’s what they did with the USSR in the 70s, and that’s what they did with Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. They took fragments and knitted them together and they did it with such force because they believed it was important.

SCOPE: You address this contradiction within the American conservative movement that’s embodied in Reagan. In The Century of the Self, Reagan is presented as the natural politician of the self-interested consumerist politics. Then, in The Power of Nightmares, Reagan is the perfect politician for the neo-conservatives. Of course, these two movements on the right are at loggerheads with each other, along with the Randian libertarians whose politics is all about the self.

CURTIS: When I started out with this series, I was going to put a third string in, and I planned to interview people about Ayn Rand. I think the really interesting political battles and discussions of our time are not between left and right, they are within the right. Between, say, neo-conservatives’ elitism and Ayn Rand libertarians who believe in maximum individual freedom. In the UK , Thatcher managed to hold these factions together throughout the 80s, as did Reagan. They then broke apart, and what’s really interesting is that when Bush Sr. lost his re-election in 1992, it was precisely because of the battle between these factions.

SCOPE: These neo-conservatives have frequently brought up a phrase that was the title of a US history textbook that I had in school—The Last Best Hope. It precisely describes the notion of American exceptionalism, and it’s at least as old as James K. Polk.

CURTIS: Exactly. They’ve reached backwards to drag out one of the great myths of America as a way of rejuvenating the country. The argument goes like this: Domestically, you reach back in the past and you reawaken the power of religion to give meaning and purpose to people’s lives. In foreign policy, you reach back and drag out the myth of American exceptionalism to give meaning and purpose not just to America but to the world. A critical analysis would say that this is a simplifying vision indulging in fantasy.

SCOPE: Did you ask Kristol if his movement, now that it’s in power, has now encountered its own Vietnam and Watergate all at once?

CURTIS: You can’t ask Kristol this question because he doesn’t see himself as part of the inside group. He really sees himself as a revolutionary. I think it’s a really good question about that lot: Have they become corrupted by the very forces that they set out to get rid of? And does that then corrupt their decision-making? If you talk to neo-conservatives, they still believe that theirs is an awesome revolutionary force that may well bring democracy to the world. And that there may be stumbles along the way, as in Iraq ; Trotsky would say that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It’s very interesting to consider that their writings used to argue that the liberal project failed because it had unintended consequences and opposite results. I think the same criticism can be levelled at the neo-conservatives.

SCOPE: When evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links between Al Qaeda and Saddam doesn’t exist, it’s fascinating to see somebody like Richard Perle insist that they do.

CURTIS: You can hear it in my voice when Perle sticks to his claim of an Al Qaeda/Saddam link, and I ask, “Really?” I didn’t expect him to do that. From my sense sitting with him in that room, he really does believe it. In a way, whether you agree with them or disagree, you have to admire this conviction. The thing I’ve come away with from making this film, is if the left really wants to change the world, then they need to set up lots of little organizations like Kristol and Perle and other neo-cons did, and work at it hard. Any time the media comes forward, friendly or not, use them as a vehicle to put forward your ideas. Until the left realizes this, it’s not going anywhere.

SCOPE: We’re at an interesting point in history, since their theories are being put into practice. Is George W. Bush the first neo-conservative President?

CURTIS: Yes, and he became so from the emotional effect of September 11. What was so powerful in the wake of that terrible tragedy and the apocalyptic mood that took over the country was that the neo-conservatives offered an explanation for why this had happened and what should be done about it. If everyone around you is frozen with fear and you can explain to people why something terrible has happened and you can offer what looks like a solution, you have an immense amount of power.

SCOPE: When you describe a world in which a liberal project has created a mass of people without core beliefs, that’s where you draw this fascinating link with radical Islamists. Where did you come across this?

CURTIS: By approaching this project from an odd angle. My original aim was to do a series of films about conservative political philosophy and this debate among conservatives over allowing complete freedom or allowing an elite to manage things. And in my wide reading about conservative political thought I came across the writings of Sayed Kotb. What’s fascinating is that the radical Islamists rose to power and influence at the very same time as the neo-conservatives. In the 70s, Nasser ’s great optimistic vision of a technocratic society, of pan-Arab sovereignty with a secular government, fell apart. And that’s when Islamism turned to the ideas of Kotb and began to rise in response to this collapse. Because I came to it from this point of view, I saw that we’re not dealing with an alien force in Islamism, but with the same theme. Kotb was an educated man who had read Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He was examining the same worries shared by many critics of modern individualism. It’s a criticism that somehow consumerist individualism has led to a banal empty society, where nobody really believes in anything any longer and the real feeling at the heart of it is: Is that all there is? Kotb was a literary critic, not some mad mullah in a beard. He understood Western culture and was working within that same pessimistic tradition as the neo-cons. The parallels are in their philosophical roots. I make it clear that what they then set out to do was very different, but I do think that it’s more valuable to look at them as two sides of this same pessimistic conservatism about modern industrial culture.

SCOPE: One of the shocks in The Power of Nightmares is seeing how various radical Islamist factions in Algeria failed in their revolution in the 90s, and proceeded to kill themselves off.

CURTIS: Algeria is incredibly important in this history, and few fully understand this, especially in America . The frustration felt by the Islamist movement was so incredibly raw when they were denied what they saw as the prize of having a Sunni revolution in Algeria along with the Shiite revolution in Iran . You can trace that failure as one of the forces that fed into Zawahiri’s new theories he developed in 1998.

SCOPE: One of the film’s central but most contrarian ideas is that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist as an organization. Is this the most difficult concept for audiences to comprehend?

CURTIS: There are two things here. One is a side issue. As far as we know, Osama bin Laden did not use the term “Al Qaeda” to identify his group before September 11. The main issue is whether there’s the organized network that most of our politicians and journalists have been stating exists. What I’m saying in this film is that our politicians and journalists are fighting the last war. They’re giving us a picture of the Soviet Union in the Cold War that misses the reality of radical Islamism. If you look at radical Islamist history, its great moments come in 1979 with Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, and then in 1989, with what they perceived as the defeat of the USSR . The story of the 90s is of a movement that’s stopped politically, and then when it turns to armed uprising with the hope that the masses will rise up, they don’t. If you talk to Islamists and read their writing—Zawahiri’s writings are very articulate—they believe that they had failed. There’s this massive debate within the movement, with most saying that they should keep on trying in places like Uzbekistan , and try to Islamize the Palestinian conflict. It’s only a small part of it, around bin Laden, which argues you must kill the head of the snake. Many of Zawahiri’s own group left him because of this. The more you look into it, the more it becomes a disorganized mess. It’s very illuminating when you see the movement as one that failed to persuade the masses. If you talk to anyone who’s done proper research in Afghanistan , they’ll tell you that the camps there were very diffuse and disorganized. I also looked for evidence of “sleeper cells,” and although you can find evidence of horrible, nasty individuals, and groups who want to carry out techniques of mass terror, there’s no evidence of a coherent organized network with a man sitting in an Afghani cave stroking a cat and sending out his orders.

SCOPE: This Cold War attitude is visually captured with filmic and TV iconography, with Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. It seemed to me that Cold War movies also inform the rhetoric. It’s summed up when you include this stunning Meet the Press clip of host Tim Russert interviewing Rumsfeld and holding up this outlandish illustration of an elaborate Al Qaeda cave complex that’s directly out of Goldfinger (1964).

CURTIS: Yes, this is part of the reason why we misunderstand the reality of the actual threat. It’s a modern thing, an idea that inspires groups and individuals around the world who don’t have any necessary connection with each other. Our problem is that our governments have conceptualized it in a completely different way, using vast military force to try and find the heart of the network and then destroy it. It’s missing the point. Indeed, the research shows that this fragment of radical Islamism may be weaker than politicians think it is. What astonished me when I did the research for The Power of Nightmares is that no one in television in Britain , or in the US so far as I know, had done a proper history of Islamism as a political movement. It was portrayed in the media as if it had come out of the blue like a terrifying force.

SCOPE: What you say is breathtaking. Isn’t that a condemnation itself of the way information is being imparted to the public?

CURTIS: Something very strange happened to the US media in the wake of September 11. It became deeply emotionalized for entirely understandable reasons, but out of this came an inability to discuss all of this except in emotional terms. People on US television adopt positions on the left or right, and shout at each other. I find this reaction to the new terror threat astonishing, because in the 80s we in London lived with IRA bombings all the time. That was a frightening time, and we took it calmly and boldly. Now, if an Islamist attack went off on a similar scale to an IRA bombing, there would be mass panic. What’s so fascinating is why we’ve become so emotionalized.

I’m putting forward two things—a history that hopefully illuminates, and then an argument about why all this has happened. My aim is to open up debate. And I think this is what’s necessary in America at this time: to debate all of this. I’m astonished that no one has done a history of this in the US . Whatever you think of Sayed Kotb—evil man, visionary revolutionary—he’s the most important ideologist of the Islamist movement. His ideas directly inspired the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center . So why has your television not told you about this for three years? It’s astonishing.

SCOPE: The phrase “the power of nightmares” describes fear. And the media, even more than politicians, is talented at refuelling that fear. Does this concern you?

CURTIS: One cannot underestimate how the attacks of September 11 felt apocalyptic in America , a country that had grown up to wealth and power during a frozen time, during the Cold War, when everything was quite certain. Now, emotion is beginning to settle. People are beginning to question if it’s quite as simple as the picture of the world painted by neo-conservatives. That raises questions about to what extent this has been a cartoon-like fiction. And that really now we’re going to have face up to a more complex reality, and possibly be a bit braver about it.

SCOPE: What was the audience response when the show ran in Britain , and what did your critics have to say?

CURTIS: We were surprised how seriously people took it. The BBC was very worried that we were going to be accused of being irresponsible. I think because the first two-thirds of the work tell a factual history, when you come to the conclusions, they have weight. If you are telling people a history of Islamism, and you tell them that actually in the 90s, the radical Islamist movement almost failed because no one in the masses would rise up and follow them, then people are prepared to take more seriously your arguments of it being a complex, fractured movement, because you’ve actually shown why. Since we did a relatively straight history of these two movements, the telling gained a great deal of power. So it was taken very seriously. Only two serious commentators took issue with it, one because I didn’t deal with the Palestinian question—which is a reasonable criticism—and the other because they were a neo-conservative sympathizer. The BBC was quietly astonished.

SCOPE: Any response from the Blair government?

CURTIS: None. They kept quiet. What their motive for silence was, I can only guess. But they shut up and ignored it. The film gave articulation to a growing mood of questioning the way politics is being practiced. People began discussing the politics of fear in the wake of the program. There is now a healthy debate.

SCOPE: But if Blair were to respond to you, wouldn’t he argue that political leaders need to assume the worst, while hoping for the best?

CURTIS: Political leaders can assume all sorts of things. But what I argue is if you imagine the worst that’s going to happen, then anything can happen. Then you have to anticipate everything, and you get trapped in this world of your own imagination and dominated by those with the darkest scenarios. And you can do so while ignoring all sorts of other realities. We’re still faced with a real threat of nuclear weapons that could annihilate your country in matter of seconds. This is a much greater threat than anything that’s called “Al Qaeda,” yet everyone seems to have forgotten about that. Good politics is balancing a sensible anticipation from evidence of what might happen and balancing that against the costs of what you want to do.

SCOPE: What’s striking at the end of The Power of Nightmares is your certainty that the nightmares will end, forcing politicians with no ideas to confront the fantasies they’ve created. But we’re left thinking, “Okay, but when?”

CURTIS: To be blunt, that’s not my job. I’m critically analyzing and arguing a theory. The reason I state this with certainty is that people aren’t as frightened as politicians think they are. Fear is the last redoubt of the lack of vision. And I don’t think politics can go on without any substance to it. I’m optimistic, but I also might be wrong. A cynical journalist said to me, “I think you might be right, but all the terrorists need is a bomb every 18 months.”

SCOPE: What’s been rarely noted about The Power of Nightmares is its cinematic qualities and your witty use of music and found film. What about this use of filmic wit, which is even more sophisticated than in The Century of the Self?

CURTIS: I use wit since one of the things I’m trying to illustrate is that we’re living in a cartoon-like version of reality. Humour undercuts the mix of fact and fiction used by the politics of fear-mongering. And if you’re trying to illustrate complex arguments, images and music can help. They just make it easier. It’s a way of engaging people by telling a story rather than talking in general terms. It just comes naturally to me.

SCOPE: What I noticed that’s different here from The Century of the Self is that while there’s still highly dense archival work, there’s now ironic use of image and sound, like the juxtaposition of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with a celebratory Islamic dance.

CURTIS: Well, it’s funny for one thing, and it’s designed to undercut this completely unreasoned fear of Islamism. The idea that you can place a pop song over Islamist dancing makes it all the less threatening. And it’s not offensive in the Arab world. There’s a great tradition in Arab culture of taking the piss out of the elites. It’s perfectly permissible in the Sunni and Shiite worlds to make fun of the mullahs, who tend to be full of themselves. The film critic from Cairo ’s biggest daily, Al-Ahram, came up to me and said “You’re the first Westerner to get it right.” I was terribly pleased with this because I had judged the tone also for the Arab world as much as for my own.

SCOPE: Why do you recycle some of the archived images from The Century of the Self, while using it in a completely different way?

CURTIS: The posh word is that I sample my own material. I like those pictures. The truth about cinema is that images can mean very different things depending on the context they’re put in. The Kuleshov Effect. I don’t see why you can’t play with pictures when you’re being serious. That’s my main aim. Because then you get a sense of someone enjoying themselves, and when you get that, then people listen to what you’re doing. I would argue that people watch Fox News because they’re really enjoying what they’re doing. When I tell this to liberals, I get this complete silence in the room. But I say, look, until liberal media has as much fun and as clear an idea of what it wants to say as Fox, it’s not going to get any influence back.