HyperNormalisation
- Year:
- 2016
- 166 min
- 6,418 Views
1
MUSIC:
The Vanishing American Family by Scuba ZEXPLOSION:
We live in a strange time.
Extraordinary events keep happening
that undermine the stability of our world.
Suicide bombs, waves of refugees,
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin,
even Brexit.
EXPLOSION:
unable to deal with them,
and no-one has any vision
of a different or a better kind of future.
MUSIC:
Something I Can NeverHave by Nine Inch Nails
This film will tell the story of
how we got to this strange place.
It is about how, over the past 40 years,
politicians, financiers and
technological utopians,
rather than face up to the real
complexities of the world,
retreated.
Instead, they constructed a
simpler version of the world
in order to hang on to power.
And as this fake world grew,
all of us went along with it,
because the simplicity was reassuring.
the radicals, the artists, the musicians,
and our whole counterculture -
actually became part of the trickery,
because they, too, had retreated
into the make-believe world,
which is why their opposition has no effect
and nothing ever changes.
MUSIC:
The Vanishing American Family by Scuba ZBut this retreat into a dream world
allowed dark and destructive
forces to fester and grow outside.
Forces that are now returning
of our carefully constructed fake world.
In dreams
I live...
The story begins in two cities
at the same moment in 1975.
One is New York.
The other is Damascus.
It was a moment when two ideas
about how it might be possible
to run the world without politics first took hold.
In 1975, New York City was
on the verge of collapse.
For 30 years, the politicians who ran the city
had borrowed more and more money from the banks
to pay for its growing services and welfare.
But in the early '70s, the middle
classes fled from the city
and the taxes they paid disappeared with them.
So, the banks lent the city even more.
But then, they began to get worried
about the size of the growing debt
and whether the city would
ever be able to pay it back.
And then one day in 1975,
the banks just stopped.
The city held its regular meeting to issue bonds
in return for the loans, overseen
by the city's financial controller.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Today, the city of New York is
offering for competitive bidding
the sale of 260 million tax anticipation notes,
mature on June 3rd, 1975.
The banks were supposed to turn up at 11am,
but it soon became clear that none
of them were going to appear.
The meeting was rescheduled for 2pm
and the banks promised they would turn up.
The announcement on behalf of the
controller is that the offer,
which we had expected to receive
and announce at two o'clock this afternoon,
is now expected at four o'clock.
Paul, does this mean that, so
far, nobody wants those bonds?
We will be making a further
announcement at four o'clock
and anything further that I could
say now I think would not advance
the interest of the sale,
which is now in progress.
Does this mean that you have not
been able to sell them so far today?
We will have a further
announcement at four o'clock.
What happened that day in New York
marked a radical shift in power.
take control of the city.
The city appealed to the President,
but he refused to help,
so a new committee was set up
to manage the city's finances.
Out of nine members, eight of them were bankers.
It was the start of an extraordinary experiment
where the financial institutions
took power away from the politicians
and started to run society themselves.
The city had no other option.
called "austerity" on the city,
insisting that thousands of teachers, policemen
and firemen were sacked.
This was a new kind of politics.
The old politicians believed
that crises were solved
through negotiation and deals.
The bankers had a completely different view.
They were just the representatives
of something that couldn't be negotiated with -
the logic of the market.
To them, there was no alternative to this system.
It should run society.
Just by shifting paper around,
these slobs can make 60 million, 65
million in a single transaction.
That would take care of all
of the lay-offs in the city,
so it's reckless, it's cruel and it's a disgrace.
There would be a fair number
of bankers, of course,
who'd say it's the unions
who have been too greedy.
- What would your reaction be to that?
- I guess they're right in a way.
If you can make 60 million
on a single transaction,
and a worker makes 8,000, 9,000 a
year, I suppose they're correct,
and as they go back to their little
estates in Greenwich, Connecticut,
I want to wish them well, the slobs.
But the extraordinary thing was
no-one opposed the bankers.
The radicals and the left-wingers
who, ten years before,
had dreamt of changing America
through revolution did nothing.
They had retreated
and were living in the abandoned
buildings in Manhattan.
described the mood of disillusion
that had come over them.
"I could not identify
"with the political movements
any longer," she said.
"All the manic activity in the streets.
"In trying to join them, I felt overwhelmed
"by yet another form of bureaucracy."
What she was describing was the rise
of a new, powerful individualism
that could not fit with the idea
of collective political action.
Instead, Patti Smith and many others
became a new kind of individual radical,
who watched the decaying
city with a cool detachment.
They didn't try and change it.
They just experienced it.
Look at that. Isn't that cool?
I love that, where, like, kids
write all over the walls.
That, to me, is neater than any art sometimes.
"Jose and Maria forever."
Oh, there's a lot of things, like,
when you pass by big movie houses,
maybe we'll find one, but they
where you can see clips of, like,
Z, or something like that.
People watch it over and over.
I've seen people, I've checked them out. All day!
I've gone back and forth and they're still there
watching the credits of a movie,
cos they don't have enough dough,
but it's some entertainment, you know?
Instead, radicals across America
turned to art and music
as a means of expressing
their criticism of society.
trying to change the world outside
the new radicalism should try and change
what was inside people's heads,
and the way to do this was
through self-expression,
not collective action.
U:
V:
W:
X:
Y:
Z:
But some of the Left saw that
something else was really going on -
that by detaching themselves and
retreating into an ironic coolness,
a whole generation were beginning to lose touch
with the reality of power.
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"HyperNormalisation" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 21 Nov. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/hypernormalisation_10432>.
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