#128 Fri (10/28/22) - Adam Curtis' Russia: TraumaZone and 'Years and Years' on BBC

I watched two interesting programs recently; one a documentary by Adam Curtis and the other a tv drama starring Rory Kinnear.

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone is a found footage documentary showing life in Russia during the fall of communism and then the subsequent fall of democracy. It was a turbulent decade that even with the benefit of hindsight seems confusing and contentious.  Largely showing the rise of Yeltin as the president of Russia and then the Russian Federation, the doc features short view of the first Chechen War and the destruction of Grozny, as well as the rise of the oligarchs and the establishment of the private banking network that is the infrastructure of the klept class. This is an impressionistic work, that shows, not tells, how life was and what things looked like. It does not spend much time explaining the things it shows.  I feel that I know far more about this period than the average person, having watched Commanding Heights the Daniel Yergin documentary which covered the economics of this period in detail. And yet, I could not exactly remember the political details - was Yeltin the one on a tank (Yes, he was).  Was Yeltsin inside the building surrounded by tanks? (Yes, he was.)  Same building, the White House, the Russian Parliament building, different times.

Note, Amazon is starting The Peripheral series now, which also takes a long view and imagines a klept class taking over after a technological singularity.  Future London under the klept is a truly magical and horrific place.

Years and Years - a bbc tv drama about an extended family in Manchester post-Brexit.  Similar to the TraumaZone, this single season takes place over a span of more than a decade (2019 - 2036).  It falls into a speculative, sci-fi type show, but although technological improvements are clearly included (wearable computing, human augmentation, quantum computing, robotics and ubiquitous computing), it is really about the political decline and collapse that is currently underway and drives the show.  In some ways it felt like an extended episode of Black Mirror with hints and flashes of V for Vendetta and Children of Men.  It is not hard to visualize the rise of a faschistic militarized corpocracy, in fact, it requires no vast imagination to extend all of the trend lines in the same direction for a few more years and imagine the effect.  The show was very well done and I think prepares us for how the hammer blows will fall in succession.  The thing about it is that every expection seems to become ever diminished as all hope and possibility is gradually or suddenly withdrawn.  At a certain point, choice is removed and one becomes a helpless cog in a brutal machine.  One is reminded of Winston Smith in 1984.  Heroes are those who engage in a futile personal act of resistance that is ultimately doomed. Somehow, the final episode holds out a hope that everything can be put right if only people would pay attention and do something about it, which although a welcome respite at the end of a long bleak ordeal, seems just impossible and totally fantastical.

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