[DEBATE] : 'Our anger is being ironed out of us'

[Patrick Bond]

Russell Grinker wrote:
> John Fitzpatrick 
> ...
> Sure enough, when confronted with The Trap several commentators – for
> example, in the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, New Statesman, Guardian
> and Sunday Times – promptly fell right into it, and reached for the
> ‘conspiracy theorist’ label. My conspiracy theory is that they all dine in
> the same restaurant. 

Since Jim Heartfield generously posted me the first of The Trap series, 
I watched it last night. I can't see anyone justifiably calling it a 
conspiracy theory - it's more ultraHegelian insofar as ideas drive 
*every*thing Curtis is interested in. This may be the problem with the 
whole sp!ked project, as well as sympathiser Curtis's two others 
(Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares), which I also saw 
recently: a refusal to dig deeper into structural power relations to 
unearth how accumulation dynamics and geopolitical interests are at the 
root of the trends in socio-cultural processes. (A good antidote would 
be David Harvey on postmodernity and Susan George on neoliberalism.) But 
the reviewer is right: Curtis' dry narration belies an unbelievable 
amount of material and exceptionally interesting footage; he must be the 
hottest political documentary around. I'll recommend some of this for 
the Durban Film Festival - except that this year's focus is on poverty 
and, again, that's just not something I think he's going to bother 
himself with, since he's so bound up in postindustrial psycho-social topics.