Hypernormalisation

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that governments, financiers, and technological utopians have, since the 1970s, given up on the complex "real world" and built a simpler "fake world" run by corporations and kept stable by politicians. The film was released on 16 October 2016

Running at nearly three hours long the film is divided up into sections.

The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense 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.

This chapter begins with a montage of unidentified flying object sightings recorded by members of the public in the United States. It argues that the phenomenon surrounding UFOs in the 1990s was born out of a counter-intelligence operation designed to make the public believe that secret airborne high-technology weapons systems tested by the US military during and after the Cold War were alien visitations. Top secret memos forged by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations were allegedly leaked to ufologists who spread the manufactured conspiracy theory of a government cover-up to the wider public. The method, called perception management, aimed to distract people from the complexities of the real world. American politics are described as having become increasingly detached from reality. Curtis uses the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s as an example of an event that took the West by surprise because reality had become less and less important. A Jane Fonda workout video is shown to illustrate that socialists had given up trying to change the real world and were instead focusing on the self and encouraging others to do the same. The video is intercut with footage of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, being executed by firing squad and buried following the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

This is a very complex film

I don’t quite know how to pick it apart.

People might describe it as a conspiracy theory but I think that term has been widely developed to deter different views and opinions of reality being expressed in order to keep the current reality we live in.

In his talk at The Serpentine gallery in 2012 Adam argues that brain washing is something that doesn’t actually exist when it comes to ‘cults’ and radically different beliefs. Again it is something that has been developed to make us feel we are a fragile creature that could quite easily be swayed to believe to most ludicrous ideas. We now live in a society that is fearful of anything that could be seen and radically different from the norm thus closing our minds and our society to alternate views and possibilities of the future that could in fact progress mankind. He argues that Christianity was a cult, Marxism and capitalism too.

Because of this assumption that aliens are a fiction the chapter in the film  regarding UFO sightings is particularly relevant. The US government is actively encouraging the belief of aliens to detract from their top secret weapon and aircraft testing. They did this by leaking top secret documents to key UFO theorists who then spread these ideas amongst the larger UFO community.

The reason this was done is an example of the Hypernormalisation, to distract people from the complexities of what was really going on. I don’t know if I believe this. Maybe part of me wants to believe in the mystery of UFOs still.

What I do draw from this is the creation of a ‘fiction’. A fiction many people want to be real and do consider fact. This blurring of fact and fiction.