The 2016 election has made soothsayers of any number of historians, academics and philosophers, but one of the few filmmakers who saw Donald Trump coming was the documentarian Adam Curtis. One might even argue that Trump’s victory was the closing argument of a thesis he has been refining and developing for the last 15 years.
Since his 2002 opus, The Century of Self, Curtis has traced the myriad ways in which the left has abandoned politics in favor of a radical individualism, online and off, that has allowed reactionary forces to metastasize across the West. As he ominously declares at the beginning of his latest film, Hypernormalisation (2016), these forces are now puncturing “the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world.”