I was excited to go and see the new show Massive Attack v Adam Curtis commissioned by Manchester International Festival. The show is staged in a disused train depot, moments from Manchester’s bustling Piccadilly Station, where the audience gathers in a cavernous derelict warehouse before being ushered into a separately curtained space. Giant screens surround and envelop the audience on 3 sides. Massive Attack perform behind one end screen, cast mainly in shadow, & like some form of modern wayang kulit, they are occasionally projected onto the screen themselves with stark looming presence. The event is built around Adam Curtis’ cut up and paste film essay Everything is Going According to Plan, and the Massive Attack soundtrack includes little of their own material, with Karmacoma the only familiar song. Rather, it is a patchwork of cover songs, some nostalgic and haunting, others unsettling reinterpretations, evoking a dark dystopia and pinning the audience with an occasional wall of sound. Vocal contributions from long time collaborators Elizabeth Fraser and Horace Andy were real highlights. I have a big love for Massive Attack and the match here is beautifully dark and creates an uneasy journey with music punctuating & accentuating the film. However, it is the film’s dark and sometimes not entirely coherent narrative that drives the overall experience. Various stories are woven and intertwined connections made between seemingly unrelated events from Siberian punks to the US from Jane Fonda, to Ceausescu to Goldman Sachs. Personal stories meet and contrast with global events.
Underpinning Massive Attack vs Adam Curtis is a narrative around how calculations based on past information and data are used to try predict the future, minimise risk and control the world around us. Fear of the future looms large in Curtis’ piece, compounded by 24 hour access to global news and media images creating what he calls a ‘sarcophagus of data’ around us. We become entranced by its spell, and in turn we are offered what we want. “If you liked that, then you will love this’ conveys more than an itunes, amazon selling ploy predicting consumer tastes, but indicates an insidious culture of anticipating and controlling the present and future through its regurgitation of the past.
I felt lucky to have seen a talk that Curtis participated in earlier in the day – ‘Are we Powerless?’, a debate hosted by Evan Davis, exploring people power, capitalism, banking and finance. The question of whether people believe they can make significant change in politics, in the world at large was the platform for discussion. Across the panel it was generally agreed that what stops people from feeling empowered able to make change, rise up against current capitalist situation, is the lack of an alternative vision or narrative, and little or no sense of what we replace capitalism with. Owen Jones has sited the faliure of the left in its vision. Dr Judith Shapiro, transitional economics expert who specialised in post communist Russia , highlighted how the downfall of communsim left a huge lack of sense for people ‘of what we are for’. Adam Curtis suggested ‘we need a good fracking’ a shake up where the nostalgia of the past does not inhibit our vision of the future. The Freudian age, he says encouraged the obsession of self, mirrored the rise of individualism, the triumph of individual want against collective need. The lack of an alternative narrative blocks forward vision and coupled with the obsession with nostalgia, stifles the sense of what could be. Yet, in spite of this he came across as an optimist, someone who believed in change . He certainly wasn’t tripping down the path of doom mongering.
Reviews of the Curtis v Attack show have been mixed. I think this is a result of the overwhelming bleakness, utilising the very sentiment and fear it seems to wish to transcend. The piece seems to climax and finish on a fatalistic note. Lights off, film sputters out. I am overawed, but overwhelmed. Then abruptly it flickers back to life, with a BUT…For a few minutes we are challenged in our notion that we are powerless, offered a brief glimpse of a hope that we can re-imagine a future. We’ve already suffocated under the weight of it, and hope comes too late. The last gasp for air is not enough to fill our lungs.
When I was younger, I loved a good conspiracy theory. I read Vague, grappled the situationist ideas of ‘Society of the Spectacle’, found resonance in the idea that society had moved from people being, to having, to appearing to have, reflecting an obsession with commodities, and its resulting social alienation. The trouble is with conspiracy theories is that generally they inculcate a sense of fear, of powerlessness, rather than engagement. Action channelled through ‘sticking it to the man’ doesn’t offer sophisticated enough alternatives. I tried to stick it to the man on numerous occasions, but ultimately failed to be more than a nuisance, and as time rides on it seemed to get harder to have much sense of significant change ,except in more small ‘personal is political’ endeavours. I’ve been thinking about capitalism, consumerism and struggling with a sense of inequality most of my adult life, and I feel no nearer to any sense of resolution. It’s all too easy to slip into an arm chair critic passivity, and it’s hard to imagine a new offering.
Where is that big vision we were hoping for? How will such a vision emerge to articulate collective feeling and transformation. Many of us have been going on about it for quite some time now, haven’t we? In the meantime we have to keep a sense of making change in small yet significant ways, and have hope and belief that change doesn’t just happen in seismic shifts but in the buoyancy of the everyday.
joel mills 