HyperNormalisation
| HyperNormalisation | |
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| Directed by | Adam Curtis |
| Produced by | Sandra Gorel |
| Written by | Adam Curtis |
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166 mins (2h 46m) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £30,000 |
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and built a simple "fake world" that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians. The film was released on 16 October 2016 on the BBC iPlayer.
The term "hypernormalisation" is taken from Alexei Yurchak's 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed "hypernormalisation".
The film consists of nine chapters.
The fiscal crisis in New York City and the emergence of the idea that financial systems could run society; shuttle diplomacy between then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Middle Eastern leaders in the Arab-Israeli dispute and the subsequent retreat by Hafez al-Assad of Syria; and the onset of hypernormalisation in the Soviet Union.
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