At a Party congress somewhere in the long Brezhnev afternoon, a speaker finishes and the hall begins to applaud. No one dares be the first to stop, because to lower your hands first is to be seen lowering them, and so the clapping runs on past the point of any meaning, every person held in place not by belief but by the certainty that everyone around them is performing belief too. The image — told of Stalin's purge years and retold ever since — is the perfect emblem of a particular condition: a room full of people sustaining a faith not one of them privately holds, kept upright by nothing but their knowledge of one another's complicity. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak would later give that condition a name: hypernormal, a world everyone knows is hollow and everyone keeps standing up. Adam Curtis's wager, in the strangest and most widely watched of his films, is that the West now sits in the same hall, and has since the 1970s, and that the applause has never quite stopped. He even fixes the moment we filed in.
In October 1975, New York City ran out of money, and the people who rescued it were not elected by anyone. The municipal government was drowning in short-term debt that the banks — having spent years happily loading the city with it — abruptly refused to roll over. The city was, in effect, placed into receivership. A body called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, "Big MAC," chaired by the Lazard Frères investment banker Felix Rohatyn, was created to manage its finances, followed by an Emergency Financial Control Board empowered to override the mayor and the city council outright. The terms were austerity: mass layoffs, a hiring freeze, hospitals and firehouses shuttered, tuition imposed at the once-free City University, a subway system left to decay for a decade. To buy the bonds that kept the city alive, the municipal unions were pressured into committing their members' pension funds to the very instrument that was disciplining them.
When New York begged Washington for help, President Gerald Ford refused, and the Daily News printed the headline that fixed the moment in memory — "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." This, the filmmaker Adam Curtis argues, is where the modern fake world begins. Not with a coup, not with a secret meeting, but with a quiet handover. Faced with a problem too tangled and too thankless to solve, the politicians stepped back and let the bankers run the machine, while continuing to perform the rituals of democratic government over the top of it. The historian Kim Phillips-Fein, in Fear City, reads the same episode as the first laboratory of the austerity politics that would govern the next half-century; Curtis reads it as the founding act of a managed unreality we have lived inside ever since.
It matters to Curtis's argument that none of this was a conspiracy. Rohatyn and his colleagues did not see themselves as usurpers; they believed, with some justice, that they were rescuing a great city from its own improvidence, doing the hard arithmetic that sentimental politicians would not. That is the unsettling core of the thesis. The handover required no secret cabal and no hidden meeting — only a set of reasonable people, each making a defensible decision, who between them quietly moved the centre of gravity of power out of the reach of voters and felt virtuous doing it. Hypernormalisation, like Yurchak's original, is a theory of systems that no one quite authors and everyone helps to maintain; the villains, where there are villains at all, mostly believe their own story.
That argument is the spine of HyperNormalisation, the two-hour-and-forty-minute film Curtis released directly to the BBC's iPlayer on 16 October 2016, three weeks before Donald Trump won the American presidency. Its thesis is enormous and, by design, unprovable in any single frame: that since the 1970s, politicians, financiers, and technological utopians abandoned the attempt to understand or govern the real world — which had grown too complex, too interconnected, too resistant to control — and retreated instead into a simplified, stable, fake version of it. And that the rest of us, half-knowingly, came to live inside that fakeness, sensing it was false yet unable to picture anything else, and so going along with it. The word in the title is not Curtis's invention. He borrowed it from a Russian-American anthropologist, and the idea it names is older, and stranger, than the film that made it famous.
Curtis made it for almost no money and released it the way nothing of its ambition is usually released: not in cinemas, not on BBC Two, but quietly uploaded to the iPlayer streaming service, a two-hour-forty-minute essay-film dropped into the same feed that served up soap operas and cookery shows. The timing was not innocent. Britain had voted to leave the European Union four months earlier, in June; the United States would choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump three weeks later. Curtis was offering, in that suspended autumn, a single key to both shocks at once — the suggestion that the bewilderment everyone felt was not a glitch in an otherwise functioning order but the order itself finally becoming visible. Whatever else it was, the film arrived as the perfect artefact of its moment, and it spread accordingly.
And it spread on the strength of a single borrowed word. Curtis took hypernormalisation from a work of academic anthropology almost no general reader had ever encountered, and in lifting it he both popularised and altered it — narrowing Yurchak's careful ethnographic finding into a charged, portable accusation about the whole of the modern world. To understand what the film is really claiming, and where it overreaches, one has to go back to the book, and to the strange late-Soviet reality it was originally trying to describe.
In 2005 the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak published Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, a study of how ordinary Soviet citizens of the 1970s and 1980s actually experienced their own slowly collapsing system. His central finding was a paradox. By the late Brezhnev years, nearly everyone — Party functionaries included — understood that the official Soviet world was a fiction. The banners, the production figures, the unanimous votes, the speeches about the radiant communist future: no one took them literally. And yet everyone kept performing them with total seriousness, reproducing the rituals, attending the meetings, raising their hands in unanimous assent, reciting the formulas word for word.
Yurchak coined a term for this condition. The fakeness had become so complete, so uniform and all-encompassing, that it began to feel permanent and normal — the only reality on offer — precisely because everyone was complicit in sustaining it. He called the state hypernormalisation: a world so saturated with maintained fiction that citizens simultaneously knew it was a sham and could not imagine its absence. The form of official language was endlessly reproduced even as its meaning quietly drained away; the gesture of belief mattered, and the gesture was what kept the world standing. When the Soviet Union finally fell in 1991, the suddenness astonished even those who had spent their entire lives certain it was hollow. It had felt eternal right up until the moment it was gone.
Yurchak's book — Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which won the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies' Wayne S. Vucinich Prize in 2006 — located the mechanism with care. Borrowing the linguist J. L. Austin's distinction between the constative dimension of an utterance (what it states) and the performative dimension (what it does), he argued that late-Soviet official language had undergone a "performative shift": the literal content of the slogans had stopped mattering, while the act of reproducing them correctly had become everything. One did not have to mean "Glory to the CPSU" to vote for the resolution that contained it; one had only to raise one's hand on cue, and in raising it affirm not the Party but one's membership in the community of people who raised their hands. Drawing on the political theorist Claude Lefort, Yurchak traced the freeze to a structural event: while Stalin lived, he stood outside the canon of authoritative discourse as its external editor, the single voice that could declare what was correct. When he died in 1953, no one inherited that external position, and the discourse began to cite only itself — fixed, standardized, endlessly recombined from prefabricated blocks, "hypernormalised" into a form that could be reproduced forever precisely because it had ceased to refer to anything outside it.
It is worth dwelling on how strange this makes the eventual collapse. Because the system was sustained by performance rather than belief, there was no reservoir of genuine conviction whose draining anyone could measure; the forms looked as solid the year before the fall as they had a decade earlier. Hypernormalisation is, in this sense, a theory of why hollow systems feel permanent and then vanish overnight — the rigidity is not strength but brittleness, and the unanimity that looks like consent is only everyone watching everyone else. This is the precise feature Curtis wants, and also the point at which careful readers grow nervous: Yurchak was describing one society with an explicit official ideology and a single party, and whether the same mechanism can be lifted wholesale onto the plural, market-driven, ideologically incoherent democracies of the West is exactly the question the film never pauses to ask.
Yurchak's argument was subtle and pointedly anti-conspiratorial. This was not a cynical lie imposed from above on a duped population. It was a shared structure that everyone inhabited and that no one quite authored — you could be an ironist and a participant at once, roll your eyes at the slogan and salute it in the same motion. He gave it the name stiob, the deadpan over-identification with official forms that was neither sincere support nor open mockery but something undecidably between. This is the seed Curtis transplants into the West. His wager is that the late-capitalist democracies arrived, by an entirely different road, at the same place the Soviet Union reached just before it died: a managed unreality that almost everyone privately disbelieves and publicly maintains, held together not by terror but by the simple absence of any imaginable alternative.
Yurchak fills the abstraction with faces. He describes Komsomol committee secretaries who ran their ideological meetings with flawless efficiency precisely because they had stopped listening to the words — for whom getting the ritual exactly right was a way of carving out time and resources for the things that actually mattered to them: friendships, physics, hiking, the "imaginary West" they assembled from smuggled records and shortwave radio. These were not cynics undermining the system, and not believers sustaining it, but people living fully inside a frame whose literal claims had become weightless. The system got its perfect performance; they got their real lives in the spaces the performance left untouched. It is a portrait of accommodation so complete that the word "complicity" barely fits — and it is exactly this texture, the knowing, functional, almost comfortable inhabitation of an acknowledged fiction, that Curtis insists has become the basic mode of Western life.
From the New York handover, Curtis builds his montage outward across forty years of archive footage, ambient drones, and an authoritative voice asserting connections that no footnote could ever fully secure. The 1975 fiscal crisis is the template: finance displacing politics as the genuine governing power, with elected officials retained as a reassuring front. This is also where the film touches the longest nerve in contemporary conspiracism — the claim, central to fears of a The Great Reset, that the transfer of sovereignty from voters to unelected technocrats and bankers was not an accident of one bankrupt city but the opening move of a much larger and ongoing project.
What made 1975 a template rather than an episode, in Curtis's telling, was how cleanly the New York solution travelled. The arrangement pioneered by Big MAC — suspend the democratic process, install financial managers, discipline the population with austerity, and keep the elected officials in place as a reassuring façade — became, over the following decades, the default response to crisis nearly everywhere: in the structural-adjustment programmes the International Monetary Fund imposed across the global South in the 1980s, in the rescue of the banks after 2008, in the unelected technocratic administrations installed in Greece and Italy at the height of the eurozone crisis. Each time, the same quiet transfer recurred — the genuine decisions migrating to people no electorate had chosen, while the theatre of voting continued undisturbed above them. This is the precise grievance that animates fears of a hidden governing project: not that bankers exist, but that sovereignty itself has been quietly and repeatedly relocated to where the ballot cannot reach it.
The same retreat, Curtis argues, reshaped foreign policy. He returns again and again to Henry Kissinger, whose realpolitik treated the Middle East as a balance-of-power puzzle to be managed rather than a region of actual peoples with actual grievances. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Kissinger's celebrated shuttle diplomacy moved the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad around the board like a piece in a stabilization game. And Assad, in Curtis's telling, came to understand that he had been used to prop up an order designed to serve others — a betrayal that pushed him toward a darker politics and helped incubate the new weapon of the suicide bomber that would eventually be turned back against the West. Whether or not that exact causal chain holds, the shape of the argument never varies: the powerful stopped trying to grasp reality and began stage-managing perceptions of it instead. The phrase "perception management," a real term of art in American defense and intelligence doctrine, becomes Curtis's name for the entire turn.
The phrase is not a flourish. "Perception management" is a formal term of art in American military and intelligence doctrine, defined in the Department of Defense's own dictionary as actions taken "to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning," and to friendly audiences to shape their behaviour. It entered the lexicon in the Reagan years and was institutionalised over the following decades as a recognised arm of statecraft, sitting alongside propaganda, psychological operations, and what current doctrine files under "information operations." Curtis's move is to take this admitted, documented practice — the deliberate management of what populations perceive — and argue that it stopped being a tactic deployed abroad in particular operations and became, instead, the ambient condition of political life at home. The state's stated goal of shaping foreign perception, in his account, curdled into a generalised substitution of perception for reality, until managing the story became indistinguishable from governing at all.
The most fully developed set-piece is Muammar Gaddafi. In the 1980s, Curtis argues, the Reagan administration needed a single satisfying face for the bewildering new phenomenon of stateless terrorism, and Gaddafi gladly auditioned for the part. The real networks behind atrocities such as the April 1986 bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin were tangled and politically inconvenient — the threads ran back toward Syria and Iran, states Washington had its own reasons not to confront. Libya, by contrast, was weak, theatrical, and led by a man who craved precisely the world-historical significance the script offered him. So Gaddafi was cast as the planet's arch-villain, bombed by American jets in April 1986 in Operation El Dorado Canyon, blamed for the December 1988 destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, and converted into a stable symbol that simplified an unmanageable truth.
What makes Gaddafi the film's emblem is that the role could be switched off as easily as it was switched on. By 2003, with the casting needs of the moment changed, Gaddafi was abruptly rehabilitated: he renounced his unconventional-weapons programmes, Tony Blair shook his hand in a Bedouin tent outside Tripoli in the 2004 "deal in the desert," and Western oil firms returned. Then, in 2011, when the politics shifted again, he was re-cast as a monster overnight, bombed by NATO under a humanitarian banner, and killed in a ditch by a mob outside Sirte. The same man had been arch-villain, reformed statesman, and monster again inside three decades, his actual conduct mattering far less than the part the script required at each turn. For Curtis this is the whole thesis compressed into one biography: the villain was always a fiction, edited to fit, and almost everyone watching understood that and played along regardless.
Curtis's reading is that nearly everyone involved knew, on some level, that the story was a usable fiction — and performed it anyway, because the fiction worked and the truth did not. It is Yurchak's hypernormalisation in Western dress: a fake world consciously maintained by people who can see straight through it. And it is here that the film's politics of vision converges with the documented machinery of the Mass Surveillance state, the apparatus assembled in the same decades not only to watch populations but to manage what they were permitted to perceive. Surveillance records what a population actually is; perception management dictates the simplified story it is fed back. Curtis's claim is that the two halves are one apparatus, and that we have been living in its output.
If politics had abandoned reality, where did everyone else go? Curtis's answer is twofold: inward, and online. Here HyperNormalisation reaches back into his own earlier work. The Century of the Self, his four-part BBC series of 2002, traced how Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays pioneered the engineering of mass desire, teaching corporations and governments to manage populations through their unconscious wants. By the 1970s, Curtis argues, that machinery had helped convert citizens into self-absorbed consumers who sought transformation within themselves rather than in the shared world. The defeated radicals of the 1960s withdrew into personal liberation and self-improvement; the artists of downtown New York, Patti Smith among them, retreated from a politics that had failed into the interior life of the self.
This was the thread Curtis had pulled hardest in The Century of the Self: the discovery, by the human-potential movement and the therapeutic culture that spread out of California in the 1970s, that the unrest of the 1960s could be neutralised by redirecting it inward. "Change the world" became "change yourself"; the barricade gave way to the encounter group, the manifesto to the self-improvement seminar. It was, Curtis argues, an astonishingly effective de-fanging — a generation that had frightened the powerful in 1968 was, a decade later, largely preoccupied with its own authenticity, and a politics of collective demand had been quietly converted into a marketplace of individual feeling. The retreat into the self was not simply a failure of the radical project so much as its capture and inversion.
The techno-utopians who followed in the 1990s promised that the retreat could become an escape. The cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow's 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" announced a new frontier of freedom beyond the reach of governments and corporations — a clean, weightless world to replace the dirty, intractable one. What the internet actually delivered, Curtis argues, was not liberation but a more perfect hypernormalisation: a frictionless feedback system that shows each user a flattering reflection of what they already believe, and neutralizes dissent by absorbing it. This is the seam where his thesis meets the The Dead Internet Theory argument that the open, organic web has been quietly supplanted by a maintained performance of human activity. The two accounts describe the same hollowing from different angles — one naming the synthetic information layer, the other naming the political will that wanted populations pacified, self-enclosed, and harmless.
The promise had been the opposite, and Curtis lingers on how total the inversion was. Barlow's generation, many of them veterans of the same 1960s counterculture that had retreated into the self, genuinely believed the network would dissolve hierarchy and route around every concentration of power — the structure of belief the critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron had already named in 1995 as the "Californian Ideology," a fusion of hippie liberation and free-market faith. Instead the weightless frontier was enclosed within a single generation into a handful of advertising platforms whose business was attention, and the tools built to free the individual became the most precise instruments ever devised for studying, sorting, and nudging him. The dream of escape delivered the most thoroughly mapped population in history.
The mechanism Curtis only gestures at, the activist Eli Pariser had already named in 2011: the filter bubble, the algorithmic personalisation by which each user is quietly fed a world tailored to confirm what they already are. A system built to maximise engagement learns that nothing engages like a flattering reflection, and so it gives each person their own bespoke reality, sealed off from the others. The political consequence, in Curtis's reading, is the perfect hypernormalisation: dissent does not have to be suppressed when it can be absorbed, monetised, and rendered harmless inside a feed that agrees with everyone simultaneously. The radical and the reactionary scroll the same app and each comes away more certain that they are right and that nothing can be done — which is, from the point of view of whoever benefits from the existing arrangement, the ideal outcome.
The film's most disquieting figure is Vladislav Surkov, the former avant-garde theatre man who became Vladimir Putin's chief political technologist. Surkov, Curtis says, refined hypernormalisation into a deliberate instrument of rule. He secretly funded opposition movements and their enemies at the same time — bankrolling liberals, nationalists, and even neo-Nazis simultaneously — and then let the manipulation be known, so that no one could ever again be certain what was authentic and what was staged. The aim was not to make people believe a particular lie but to drown the very possibility of knowing the truth, a "non-linear war" waged on certainty itself, drawn from the journalist Peter Pomerantsev's reporting from inside the Russian media machine. Curtis's unspoken implication, landing in the autumn of 2016, was that the West was now importing the technique wholesale — and that a candidate who lied constantly and visibly, indifferent to being caught, was not malfunctioning but operating the Surkovian system in plain sight.
For all its talk of stability, HyperNormalisation is structured around rupture. Curtis's managed world is not seamless; it is periodically torn open by events it did not predict and cannot explain, moments when the real world it had stopped attending to comes crashing back through the screen. The defining one is 11 September 2001. A national-security apparatus that had spent thirty years managing perceptions and abstracting its enemies into convenient symbols simply failed to see the actual attack coming — and then, in the years after, reabsorbed the wound into an even grander and more fictional story, the "war on terror," with its colour-coded threat levels and its imaginary geographies of evil. The pattern, for Curtis, is the tell: the apparatus cannot prevent the eruption, but it is extraordinarily good at metabolising it back into narrative once it has happened.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is the inversion that proves the rule: not a real eruption metabolised into a story, but a story manufactured whole and sold as reality. The weapons of mass destruction that justified the war did not exist; the dossiers, the satellite photographs of mobile labs, Colin Powell's vial held up at the United Nations, were perception management in its most literal and consequential form — a fiction assembled by intelligence services and broadcast until it became, for a season, the official real. When the fiction collapsed and the weapons were never found, the apparatus did not so much reckon with the lie as move on from it, and the people who had staged it kept their offices. For Curtis this is the clearest demonstration that the managed world had stopped being embarrassed by the gap between its stories and the facts. The gap had become the medium it swam in.
The same rhythm governs his reading of everything that follows. The 2008 financial crisis was the managed economy's repressed reality returning with interest — and the response was not to change the system but to pour money into the banks and carry on as before, the rupture sealed over within a single news cycle. The Arab Spring of 2011 was, in Curtis's account, a genuine eruption of human agency, organised through the very social media the techno-utopians had promised would liberate the world; and it failed, he argues, precisely because the networked, leaderless form that made it explosive left it with no way to hold power once the old regimes fell. Into that vacuum came ISIS, the most theatrically unreal antagonist yet, performing its own atrocities directly for the cameras. Each eruption is real; each is reabsorbed; and the inability of the managed world to learn from any of them is, for Curtis, the strongest evidence that it has given up on reality altogether.
Which brings the film to the edge of its own present. The figure hovering over its final movement, unnamed for most of the running time and then unmistakable, is Donald Trump — and Trump, in this frame, is not the opposite of hypernormalisation but its purest product. A man who lies constantly, openly, and without consequence is not failing at perception management; he is the citizen who has fully internalised Surkov's lesson, who grasps that once no one can tell truth from performance, the loudest performer wins. Curtis released the film three weeks before the American election almost as a warning shot: the technique the West had watched Putin's Russia perfect was now operating in plain sight inside its own democracy, and a population trained for forty years to half-believe everything and fully believe nothing was exactly the population that could be governed this way. Brexit, landing the same year, looked to him like the same rupture wearing a different costume.
None of this would land without the method, and the method is the most distinctive thing about Curtis. For three decades he has worked the BBC's vast film archive — millions of feet of unlabelled, half-forgotten footage shot for other purposes and never used — assembling from it a counter-history of the postwar world. Pandora's Box (1992) dissected the hubris of technocratic rationality; The Century of the Self (2002) followed the engineering of mass desire from Freud's couch to the supermarket; The Power of Nightmares (2004) argued that politicians who could no longer promise a better world had turned to protecting us from nightmares instead, inflating radical Islamism and neoconservatism into mirror-image fantasies; Bitter Lake (2015) traced how the unmanageable truth of Afghanistan was sanded down into a children's story of good and evil. HyperNormalisation is the summa of that body of work, and the six-hour, six-part Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021) its sprawling sequel.
Across all of it the grammar is constant: the godlike voice-over delivering vast claims in flat, certain tones; the abrupt cut from a politician's face to a dancing crowd to a burning building; and the music — Brian Eno, Burial, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails — laid under the archive to charge it with a dread the original footage never carried. That dread is not decoration; it is the argument. A Curtis film does not so much prove its connections as feel them into being. A caption announces a date, the camera lingers on an anonymous face, the synthesiser swells, and the cut to the next image insists — without ever stating — that the second thing followed from the first. The viewer supplies the because that the edit only implies, and the supplying feels like comprehension. Curtis is candid that he makes mood-pieces, "emotional history," rather than the footnoted kind. The question his films force, and never answer, is whether a feeling that powerful about how power works is a form of knowledge or a substitute for it.
Curtis defends the method as honesty about a condition rather than a failure of rigour. We already live, he argues, inside stories that powerful institutions tell us; the only useful response is to tell a bigger and more disturbing story back, one that makes the machinery visible by the same emotional means the machinery itself uses. A footnoted monograph would leave the spell intact; a film that out-dreams the dream might break it. Whether that is a genuine insight into how persuasion actually works, or merely a sophisticated licence to assert whatever the archive can be made to feel, is the disagreement his work has never resolved — and perhaps was designed never to resolve.
Whatever its weaknesses as history, HyperNormalisation achieved something rarer than accuracy: it named a feeling. Millions of people in the 2010s carried a low, persistent sense that politics had become theater — that elections changed the cast but never the management, that institutions performed functions they no longer fulfilled, that the official accounts of events were stories maintained for stability rather than descriptions of what had happened. Curtis handed that diffuse unease a single word and a genealogy reaching back to a bankrupt city in 1975, and the word stuck because it fit.
The film resonated because it captured the texture of contemporary experience: the curated unreality of the feed, the suspicion that consent is manufactured somewhere upstream of any choice, the difficulty of believing that things could be fundamentally otherwise. In this it sits alongside the Predictive Programming thesis that media conditions a public to accept a future already decided for it — except that Curtis generalizes the claim from individual seeded plot-points to an entire engineered atmosphere in which no alternative can be imagined at all. Hypernormalisation, in his hands, becomes the narrative face of a broader Invisible Control Systems account of power: domination achieved not by force but by quietly foreclosing the thinkable. The most effective control is the one that never has to be exercised, because the governed cannot conceive of the door, let alone reach for it.
Curtis was not alone in naming the feeling, which is part of why the word travelled so far. Seven years before HyperNormalisation, the British theorist Mark Fisher had published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), defining the mood of the age as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." Fisher and Curtis were describing the same prison from opposite walls — one in the language of theory, the other in the language of archive and dread — and both located its essence not in any active belief but in the atrophy of the imagination, the slow disappearance of the sense that things could be fundamentally otherwise. That is the deepest form the managed unreality takes: not a lie you are made to swallow, but a horizon you stop being able to see past.
That is also why the term migrated so readily into the wider language of dissent, attaching itself to everything from pandemic-era governance to the suspicion that the 1975 handover from elected politics to technocratic finance was the first stage of an order still being assembled. The concept is portable precisely because it is a mood rather than a mechanism. It explains the feeling of unreality without committing to any particular falsifiable account of who is doing what to whom — which is the source of both its enormous reach and its deepest vulnerability.
There is a sting in the concept's very success. A word that explains why nothing can change is a comfortable word to own, and HyperNormalisation has been accused — fairly — of handing its admirers a sophisticated reason to do nothing. If the system is a seamless managed unreality that absorbs all dissent, then resistance is naïve and withdrawal is lucid, and the knowing spectator who has seen through it all is excused from the harder work of building the alternative he has been told is unimaginable. The diagnosis can become the disease's most elegant symptom: a way of feeling awake while staying perfectly still.
Here is the strongest objection, and the film's admirers and detractors both eventually arrive at it: HyperNormalisation asserts vastly more than it demonstrates. Curtis's method is associative, not evidential. Across two hours and forty minutes of hypnotic archive — grainy news footage, eerie ambient music, a god-like narration delivering sweeping claims in flat, certain tones — connections accumulate that feel inevitable but are never actually argued. Kissinger therefore Assad therefore the suicide bomber; Gaddafi therefore the death of reality; the internet therefore the impossibility of politics. The cuts perform the work that citations would have to do in prose, and a montage cannot be cross-examined.
Critics have long catalogued the move. Curtis selects the footage that fits and passes over the counter-cases; he uses the conjunction "and" where a working historian would be forced to write "because"; he reaches for the elegant pattern over the messy exception. The result is less an argument than an atmosphere — a "vibe," in the harsher reviews — that induces the very sensation of helpless lucidity it claims to be diagnosing. When outlets from The Guardian to The Atlantic praised the film, they praised it as art and as mood; when they faulted it, they faulted exactly this, that it tells you everything is connected and fake without ever once letting you check the connection. The widely circulated parody "The Loving Trap" reproduced his entire grammar — the portentous voiceover, the abrupt archival juxtapositions, the synthesizer dread — to show how easily the style manufactures profundity out of adjacency.
The objection has a sharper, more historical edge as well. Curtis has been making essentially this film since The Power of Nightmares, and critics note that his architecture rarely changes: somewhere in the 1970s the grown-ups gave up on reality, retreated into fantasy or finance or the self, and everything since is the wreckage. It is a single grand narrative applied to subject after subject — and grand narratives, as the theorists of the very postmodernity Curtis diagnoses long ago warned, have a way of finding their own confirmation everywhere they look. Where a working historian deals in contingency, accident, and the things that simply failed to connect, Curtis deals in destiny. His Gaddafi was always going to be cast as the villain; his internet was always going to enclose us; the pattern is total, and a pattern that admits no exceptions is one that can never be tested against a case that might break it. Reviewers from The Guardian to The Atlantic have made versions of this charge even while surrendering to the spell — the films are routinely called hypnotic, brilliant, and impossible to argue with, which is, on inspection, less a compliment than a precise description of the problem.
There is a deeper, self-undermining irony, and the sharpest critics press on it. A film arguing that elites manage perception through seductive, totalizing stories is itself a seductive, totalizing story that manages the viewer's perception, narrated by a single authoritative voice that asks to be trusted absolutely. Curtis's thesis is, by construction, unfalsifiable: accept it, and the world's confusion confirms it; reject it, and your rejection can be read as the fake world defending itself. That structure is intellectually suspect for the same reason it is emotionally overwhelming. Yurchak's original concept was a careful, bounded ethnographic finding about one society in its late period; Curtis stretches it into a theory of everything, and in doing so risks reproducing the very vice he condemns — swapping the hard, irreducible real for a simpler, more satisfying fiction that merely feels like understanding.
And yet the case is not only atmosphere. Many of the film's load-bearing anchors are real and checkable: New York City genuinely was placed under the financial receivership of unelected boards in 1975; "perception management" genuinely is enshrined in U.S. military doctrine; Surkov genuinely did come out of the avant-garde theatre and did pioneer the simultaneous sponsorship of opposing movements that Pomerantsev documented from inside the Russian system. What Curtis adds is not invented facts but unprovable connective tissue — the claim that these verified pieces form a single forty-year pattern. A viewer can accept every individual anchor and still reject the shape they are arranged into, which is precisely the negotiation the film demands, and the reason it can be dismissed neither as fantasy nor accepted as proof.
The defense is not weak. Curtis has never claimed to be writing history in the conventional sense; he makes essay-films, mood pieces built to dislodge a settled way of seeing rather than to prove a chain of fact, and the proper test of such a work is whether the world looks different once it ends. By that measure HyperNormalisation plainly succeeded — it changed the vocabulary a generation uses to describe its own disquiet. And the charge of non-falsifiability cuts both ways: the experience of living inside a managed unreality is, almost by definition, one that resists clean proof, because the apparatus that would have to be examined is the same apparatus that supplies the evidence. Whether a thing that cannot be checked can nonetheless be true is the question the film leaves deliberately open. Fittingly, it refuses to manage it.