It's a documentary which I very much like and enjoy, but given the rather one-sided narrative presented, my ignorance of modern global history and the fact that it aligns with my ideological preconceptions, I worry I perhaps take it too much at face value.
So- is it an accurate account? Is it too conspiratorial? Is it contradicted by a number of other sound narratives?
Hi there!
would you be so kind as to specify which claims the documentary contains and you'd like discussed in an answer? The film is 166 min. long and watching the whole thing is quite a bit of work for an answer.
Thank you so much!
I absolutely loved this film. I would say that the overall tone of the narrative, one which is infused with Curtis' trademark psychedelic style, in which we know he is trying to paint a very emotive, evocative picture with which to strike at the viewers minds in order to shake up their preconceptions... that his intent there is quite solid. His other pieces, Century of the Self and the Power of Nightmares for instance, at least to my understanding, show very truthful and accurate historical representations. Century of the Self especially I feel is quite a groundbreaking work in what it hoped to and did convey.
That all side, I did find HyperNormalization to be possibly the least historically accurate of the films of his that I have seen for one primary reason: The removal of agency and even guilt from Qaddafi for the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing.
I think that Curtis was very correct to assert, as he did, that the dispersal of the cultural meme of suicide martyrdom attached to the common Islamic faith of the people of the wider middle east ended up being uncontrollable, and that it was triggered primarily by Western intervention on the behalf of business interests.
However, after he speaks about Lebanon suicide bombing and comes to Qadaffi, is where I feel Curtis really lost his footing.
Still though, the way in which Curtis narrated Qaddafi's life in the film was masterful to the degree which is expected from him, showing him as a complex, flawed, idealistic, deeply troubled human being that was for much of his life the victim of racist white western european peoples.
Though, the extent to which Curtis asserts that the United States used Qadaffi as a scapegoat to justify their foreign policy I feel is pretty absurd. It could well be possible that the US attacking Libya because they felt that attacking Syria would be too risky a move is based in truth. The US war in Iraq would be a similar instance of an administration just wanting to attack "some arabs" for the wrong that had been done by very specific arabs.
But, Curtis absolutely goes too far in trying to exonerate Qadaffi. Whether or not he was a victim of any of the things described in the film, he still ran quite a centralized totalitarian regime in Libya, and built and extensive cult of personality around himself, which is never a good sign usually.
If you would like to examine an alternative perspective on the Lockerbie bombing, I would highly suggest checking out this article and watching the short documentary it references, about a man whose brother was killed in the bombing, who went to Libya himself years later to try and find answers and a greater sense of peace in his loss. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/u-s-and-scotland-eye-two-new-suspects-in-lockerbie-bombing/