All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC Television Reviewed by lan Parker Maintaining his track record for making his work freely available Adam Curtis' recent series of BBC programmes is now available online. The Century of the Self was an absorbing study of the way psychoanalysis became an integral part of the advertising industry in the United States which then degenerated into a banal form of pop psychology in focus-group politics under Clinton and Blair. The Power of Nightmares explored the interrelation between the US neoconservatives and the construction of an Islamic threat after 9/11. The Trap was about the lure of freedom, the incitement to be 'free' that meshes people all the more strongly in systems of power. You will gather so far that there is a is motif of paranoia running through the programmes and, more importantly, an interrogation of how paranoia is produced and used to keep us guessing about who pulls the strings while paralysing our ability to do anything about it. Type 'Adam Curtis' and "Paranoia' into a search engine and you will get a nice little clip which pretty well sums up the line he takes. Now we get it spun through a full-length argument in the new series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. It is about the role of the internet in opening spaces for communication', all the more effectively to keep us under control. One only has to remember Julian Assange's point that every activist network on Facebook is giving the US authorities a detailed picture of who knows who for free, one undreamt of if every phone was tapped and recorded and transcribed by an army of spies. Facebook works on a 'prosumer' principle which serves the US State Department so that every time you make a friend you effectively shop them to the Feds. The form of the Curtis argument is actually more important than the content of the programmes. Stepping back for a moment to work out why they work so well, might help us understand why we often come away from them unable to transmit the argument to anyone who has not actually seen them. We are, instead, left with anxiety about what is being done to us by 'them'. Our only consolation is to marvel with fellow viewers about the mysteries that have been unveiled without being able to pin down exactly what they are. First, speed. At some points in the programme a string of images zips past so fast that it is difficult to keep track of what they are or what the connection between them might be. Then, at other moments, the clips of enemies conferring with each other or Simply gazing backwards and forwards in a sinister way is enough to produce a sense that something is wrong. There is a repetitive time for glancing which is glued directly onto a set of quite tendentious conclusions, with no time for the viewer to comprehend what is happening in between. Second, sound. The haunting 'drone' background noise that drives incidental music buffs up the wall is very much evident in Curtis documentaries. It accompanies many of the gloomy descriptions and
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* Reviews effectively sends a shadow over all that is to come. Bad characters are shown with some kind of sinister throbbing in the background, and sometimes you know they are going to appear because the sound is there to cue you in. Clinketty-clonk funny music also underlines how quirky and unreliable key players are, and somehow also underscores how even they do not realise how far they are part of a game they cannot possibly fully understand. Third, attribution. The issue here is not so much that there is a shadowy figure behind the scenes (which in the case of "Loving Machines' manifests itself as the ghostly presence of Ayn Rand as source of the internet illusion of individual freedom), but that there are those who 'believed' this or that, but perhaps did not even 'realise' that this or that would come to pass. In this, Curtis's style is of a piece with the BBC News political editor Nick Robinson (a past president of Oxford University Conservative Association) who specialises in turning every event into what a politician 'thinks' or wants' or "intends' to happen. And the cumulative effect is passivity, with each option for resistance hedged in, boxed off. How we navigate Facebook and Twitter, for example, as sites of mobilisation (that had some importance in the Arab Spring), is not his concern, and the net effect of watching his documentaries is that we are rendered into exactly the kind of subjects who feel that there is no alternative to being all watched over with no way of escape. The programmes are bewitching and enjoyable, but Curtis himself has warned us in interviews that he is not a man of the left. We need to take heed and remember that.