Here’s a film about the 1950s – The World As It Was – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism.  In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today.  Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare.  Chapter One of the documentary series, Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, appropriately subtitled: “To see where we are, look where we’ve been,” does that brilliantly.

The series opened four months ago with “The Prologue” (see review) wherein the lives, importance, and assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are explored; how the government and media buried the truth of who assassinated them and why; and why it matters today.  Season One will unfold over the next year with chapters covering their lives and assassinations in greater detail.  Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Chapter One – “The World As It Was” – is about the 1950s, the rise of the Cold War with its propaganda, McCarthyism, the development of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, betrayals, blacklists, the abrogation of civil rights, censorship, and the ever present fear of nuclear war and the promotion of fallout shelters that set the stage for the killing fields of the 1960s and the CIA’s ruthless machinations.

One could say that the 1950s were the Foundation of Fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and that now we are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

The film opens with President Eisenhower delivering his famous Farewell Address, warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.  It is a short and powerful speech, concealing not a smidgen of hypocrisy since it must not have been Eisenhower who presided for eight years from 1953-19661 as this complex grew and grew and he poured 2 billion dollars in weapons and aid and a thousand military advisers to the ruthless and corrupt Vietnamese dictator Ngô Dinh Diêm, while saying he was “an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom.”  His speech, while still good, reminds me of all those who spend their careers quiet as church mice as the wars and assassinations rage on only to find their voices in opposition once they retire and collect their pensions.

In response to Eisenhower’s speech, some of which we hear, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – one of a hundred interviews done for this series over six years –  says that Eisenhower’s speech “is probably today in retrospect the most important speech in American history.”  While that is debatable (I would pick JFK’s American University speech), he rightly emphasizes the importance of Ike’s speech and the fact that his uncle, President Kennedy, fought against the military-industrial complex handed him by Eisenhower.  This is important, for although JFK did get elected emphasizing the Cold War rhetoric of a non-existent missile gap between the U.S. A. and the Soviet Union, he very quickly changed, having been betrayed by Allen Dulles and the CIA regarding the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam, Laos, etc.  The military brass quickly came to hate Kennedy, a naval war hero from World War II.  His three year transformation into a great peacemaker – and therefore his assassination by the CIA and its friends – is a story many still would like to squelch.  This documentary series will prevent that.

Those who control our present and wish to control our future are hard at work today trying to control our past and they will therefore hate this truthful film that is a powerful antidote to their attempted amnesia.  In thirty-nine sobering and entertaining minutes (with emphasis on both words), “The World As It Was” illuminates a period in U.S. history that is often dismissed as the staid and boring 1950s but was, in fact, when the infrastructure for today’s censorship, chaos, and fear were laid.  It was not the era, as a baseball movie about Jimmy Piersall and his depression from 1957 put it, when “Fear Strikes Out,” but the time when fear burrowed very deep into the American psyche and anxiety became a weapon of state.  Is it any wonder that today could be called “the age of depression, fear, anxiety, and pill popping”?

It is interesting to note that Eisenhower’s warning also contained an admonition to beware the growth of unchecked science, technology, and a future when computers would replace blackboards.  If he were still alive, he would no doubt not recognize the country controlled by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).  This vast computer-networked monster makes all the warnings about the 1950s snooping, informing, and controlling activities of government agencies seem like child’s play.  They can’t open snail mail now when few send any, but reading computer messages barely necessitates a finger’s movement, or, as Edward Snowden continues to warn, the entire electronic phone system is open sesame for government controllers. Cell phones acting as cells. Blackboards are gone but so is privacy.  The 1950s’ government snooping is pure nostalgia now.  We are through the looking glass.

As then, so today.  Oliver Stone talks about how in those days the constant refrain was “the Russians are coming” and how his father, a Republican stockbroker, told him that “the Russians are inside the country.”  Fear was everywhere, all induced by anti-communist propaganda aimed at controlling the American people.  Stone is still fighting against the Russia bogeyman stories, while today we are told again and again that the Russians are still coming.  We can only assume they are very slow.

Aside from RFK, Jr. and Oliver Stone, in this episode we hear from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the screenwriter Zachary Sklar, et al.  Because the film is so ingeniously crafted, many of the most powerful voices – for and against the government repression and fear mongering – are those from newsreels and television shows that are artfully spliced between the commentaries of the aforementioned people. For example, to see and hear FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rant about communists under every bed and to juxtapose that with the calm words of the filmmaker Dalton Trumbo, blackballed as one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, is an exercise in distinguishing sanity from insanity.

To this is added music, advertisements, movie clips, and jingles from the 1950s culture that place the viewer back in time to feel and absorb the “vibes,” as it were, of those days.  Like any era, it was complicated, but the overriding message from the fifties was not about mom making tuna noodle casserole but was that there were commie traitors everywhere throughout society and that every citizen’s obligation was to turn them in, even if that meant turning yourself or your parents in.  Children were taught to get under their desks when the sirens sounded, for they were safe places when the Commie Nukes start coming in.  Civil Defense drills screeched this fear into your every fiber.  In April 1957 the Army Air Defense Command announced that new Nike Hercules missiles with atomic warheads would shortly be installed around New York City, Boston, Providence, etc. to replace conventional warheads.  A spokesman added that these nuclear warheads posed no danger and that if the missiles were used, fallout would be “negligible.”  Of course.

Let me use an anecdote from pop culture that I think sums this up this sick game of fear and distrust – paranoia. My parents were on a game show in the fall of 1957 called “Do You Trust Your Wife?” hosted by Johnny Carson. By the summer of 1958 the show’s title was changed to “Who Do you Trust?” I used to joke that Hoover or Senator Joseph McCarthy was behind the change and their English grammar was atrocious, but I realize it was probably some fearful lackeys in the television industry.

Professor Miller, an expert in propaganda, narrates quite a bit of “The World As It Was” and does so admirably.  He correctly points out that to describe the 1950s as the era of McCarthyism is a misnomer, for doing so “let’s the whole system off the hook.”  It was the entire government apparatus that promoted a vast repression based on fear whose aim was to create meek, deferential, and obedient people afraid of their own shadows.

He points out that the basis for all this was established by President Truman in 1947 with his Executive Order 9835 that required loyalty oaths to root out communists in the federal government.  Six months later the CIA was founded and the country was off to the Cold War races with its anti-communist hysteria and the institutionalization of a militarized society.

The Red Menace, nuclear extinction, and the need to root out those traitors who were conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force were pounded into people’s minds.  Not only were these traitors in the government, but in the schools and colleges, the labor and racial equality movements – more or less everywhere.  Whom could you trust?  No one, not even yourself.  While McCarthy was eventually censored for going too far when Joseph Welch accused him of having no decency during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, he accomplished the goal of injecting his paranoic poison into the social bloodstream where it remains today, part of the political structure shared by both major parties.

But hope arose, as the film concludes, when JFK was elected in 1960 and in his first week in office went to the theater to see the blackballed screenwriter’s Dalton Trumble’s adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Spartacus, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome.  Fast was also blacklisted and wrote the novel secretly.  As RFK, Jr. says, this was a symbolic turning point when this was reported on the front page of The New York Times.

“It [the film Spartacus] is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times,” wrote the great journalist John Pilger in We Are Spartacus shortly before his death. “There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one.”

Yes, today we are told that the Russians are still coming.  The bad old days are back.  But so also is the slaves’ rebellion.

Four Died Trying is a documentary series that is part of this rebellion.  Chapter One, “The World As It Was” shines a very bright light on disturbing U.S. history.  It shows where we have been in order to help us see where we are.  Don’t miss it.

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Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  This riveting documentary is an excellent example of such cunning in action, not on the part of the filmmaker who is eminently fair, perhaps overly so, but on the part of some of those who appear in the film.  It demands that viewers use every skill in their possession to determine who is lying and who is telling the truth about the involvement of a woman named Ruth Paine (and her husband Michael) in the assassination of President Kennedy.  In many ways, it is akin to sitting in a jury box, listening to trial testimony from witnesses for the defense and prosecution and from a few whose slippery words seem meant to create uncertainty and never-ending debate about Paine’s innocence or guilt in the president’s murder.

The film will be an eye-opener for anyone unfamiliar with Mrs. Ruth Paine’s fundamental role at the heart of the president’s murder; and for those knowledgeable about her, it will be greeted as an important contribution to the case.  I believe it is not just a must watch for those interested in JFK’s assassination, which is the key to all subsequent American history, but for anyone trying to unravel today’s tapestry of lies and propaganda spewing out from the mainstream media (MSM) that go by different names – CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, etc. – but all of whom speak for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The basic equation is: CIA = MSM.

Since many people are adept at lying, they think they are good at sniffing out lies in others.  This is highly questionable.  We live in a country of lies, from the top down and the bottom up; propaganda and the everyday lies that grease the skids of social intercourse. Deceptions that deceive no one.  Lying is the leading cause of spiritual death in the United States, even as devotion to truth is embraced as a national platitude.  Even when such fealty to truthfulness isn’t professed or implied and the lying is admitted, as with ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s 2019 remark about the CIA at Texas A&M university – “We lied, we cheated, we stole” – such treachery is uttered proudly and with a chuckle. It’s what everybody knows and pretends they don’t.

There are some intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, who like to say that many who lie believe their own stories because of their institutional affiliations — journalists for the BBC, The New York Times, CBS, etc. (but not the Defense Department-funded MIT where he spent his career) – because such institutions require that the employees they hire have internalized the script in advance.  But they don’t call it lying, for it is built into the socialization process that leads to positions within such institutions. So they are only doing their jobs and lack awareness of any duplicity. They are innocent of their own complicity in censorship and propaganda in stories they report.  They have no knowledge of the fact that their mainstream employers have long been proven to be mouthpieces for the CIA, M-16, etc.

Focused exclusively on institutional analyses, Chomsky denies these people a place for individual freedom and consciousness, as he does with his long-held absurd assertion that JFK’s assassination is of little importance and his denial of the clearly documented facts about how Kennedy took a radical turn toward peacemaking in the last year of his life, a metanoia that led directly to his death.

He is correct, however, that such MSM people don’t need to self-censor, for their jobs require them to play the game according to the censorship rules under which they were hired, but he is very wrong to claim they therefore believe what they say. That assumes these people are very ignorant, which they are not; that they just obliviously do their jobs and collect their pay.  He fails to distinguish between playing dumb and being dumb.

It would be more accurate to say that they live in what Jean Paul Sartre calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), for “the essence of a lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding …. The ideal description of a liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying the negation as such.”

You can’t lie to yourself, for that would mean you were two people.  But you can lie to others.  And you can play dumb.  It’s called acting.  And, of course, many journalists and academics hold dual positions, since they secretly work as assets for the intelligence services.

I begin with these thoughts about lying because a good number of the people who appear in The Assassination and Mrs. Paine have no ostensible institutional affiliation but may be working in some capacity for an invisible institutional paymaster who calls their tunes.  No names required.  They implicitly present themselves as disinterested pursuers of truth, yet viewers are forced to assess the veracity of their claims, including those of Ruth Paine who appears throughout, answering Max Good’s interview questions.

Much has been written and filmed about the JFK assassination.  Most take a broad perspective.  This film is quite different because it approaches it through a personal focus on a woman named Ruth Payne who, for those who may not have heard of her, was the key witness against Lee Harvey Oswald at the Warren Commission (WC) hearings where she was asked more than five-thousand questions (her husband Michel was asked 1,000 or so).  She is the woman who invited Marina Oswald to live with her in her home in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, where Lee Harvey Oswald also spent weekends from late September 1963 up until the morning of the Assassination on November 22, 1963.  Her testimony led to the WC’s conclusion that Oswald, and Oswald alone shot, the president.

The Assassination and Mrs. Paine is Max Good’s second full-length documentary.  He came to the subject after reading a section (pp.168-172) on Ruth and Michael Paine in James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, a book considered by many to be the best on the JFK assassination.  He felt the Paines’ story shouted out for a documentary, and when he discovered that Ruth Paine was still alive, in her late eighties, lucid, and living near him in a Quaker retirement home in California, he contacted her and she agreed to be interviewed, something she has done for 59 years, always protesting her innocence, even though over the decades researchers have uncovered much evidence to the contrary.

Her ex-husband, Michael, also lived at the home but has since died.  There’s a brief interview of little consequence with him in the film since his memory was going, but I should note that he too is a crucial figure in the assassination story.  Both he and Ruth have always denied involvement in the plot and coverup, yet much evidence connects them to it.  Michael Paine’s involvement is artfully suggested by the film’s title – “Mrs. Paine” and not simply Ruth Paine, a woman acting alone.  The Paines, who have claimed they are pacifists, might best be superficially described as unassuming, liberal Quaker/Unitarian do-gooders, whose wealth and astounding family and intelligence connections would make heads spin, if they were known.  The film exposes many of those connections.

The fundamental undisputed facts are as follows. In February 1963, Ruth, who spoke and taught Russian, was invited to a party by George de Mohrenschildt, a White Russian CIA asset who was ‘babysitting” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of the CIA.  There she met Oswald.  Soon de Mohrenschildt would go to Haiti and Ruth would establish a relationship with Lee and Marina Oswald.  In September, Ruth Hyde Paine visited family in eastern Massachusetts on Naushon Island, owned by the Forbes family.  Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth’s mother-in-law, was Ruth Forbes Paine Young, from the blue-blood Forbes family of Boston.  She was friends with the CIA’s Allen Dulles since her best friend was Mary Bancroft who was Dulles’s mistress.  They had stayed on the island.

From Massachusetts, Ruth drove to New Orleans to pick up the Russian speaking Marina Oswald and the Oswald’s belongings to bring her back to Dallas to live with her. It’s a small, unassuming house, but there was room for Marina and her children because Michael Payne had conveniently moved out in the spring, allegedly because of marital problems, but would move back in the winter after the assassination and Marina’s departure. Ruth says she did this to help a woman in need.  On her long road trip south, she made numerous stops, including at her sister Sylvia Hyde Hoke’s house in Falls Church, Virginia.  Sylvia worked for the CIA, as documents have confirmed, and her husband worked for the agency’s front, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), yet to this day – and in Good’s interview in the film – she claims not to know where her sister worked.  Ruth’s father, William Avery Hyde, also worked for U.S. AID in Latin America and his reports went to the CIA. From her sister’s house, Ruth proceeded to New Orleans where she picked up Marina and took her to her house in Irvington.  In mid-October, again out of alleged kindness, she got Lee a job in the Texas School Book Depository, despite calls to her house from an employment agency offering him a much higher paying job.  When asked about this by the Warren Commission, Ruth gave an evasive answer.  Then when JFK was killed, an empty blanket roll that allegedly held Oswald’s rifle was found in the Paines’ garage.  And Ruth claimed to have found a note – the ”Walker Note” that was used to show his propensity for violence – and a letter also allegedly written by Oswald to the Russian Embassy that was used as evidence of his guilt.  There is much more of a strange and suspicious nature involving Ruth and the Oswalds.

The Paines have always said that Oswald killed Kennedy to make a name for himself – the little man kills the big one syndrome.  They repeat this in the documentary.  Ruth says of Oswald, “He realized he had the opportunity to no longer be a little guy but someone extraordinary.”  But as Jim DiEugenio (one of the finest and most informed commentators in the film) says, if that were so, then why did Oswald always claim he was innocent, a patsy who didn’t shoot anyone.  Those who wish to kill to make a name for themselves obviously claim credit, but the Paines seem not to get this.  Their claim makes no sense, yet they both repeat it in the film.

And although the film’s focus is on Ruth, not Michael, there are other undisputed facts about him worth noting.  As previously mentioned, his mother was Ruth Forbes Paine Young.  After divorcing Michael’s father, Lyman Paine, his mother married a man named Arthur Young.  Among other strange facts about Young, he was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, which was the prototype for the infamous Huey helicopter used in Vietnam.  Those helicopters were produced at the defense contractor Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Texas where Michael, the pacifist, worked through his connection to Arthur Young.  He had a security clearance; when the Warren Commission asked him what type of clearance, he said he didn’t know.  One of his cousins, Thomas Dudley Cabot (the Boston Cabots), was a former president of the United Fruit Company, and another, John Cabot, worked for the State Department where he exchanged information about the CIA-United Fruit coup d’état against Jacobo Arbenz. Later, he was president of the CIA front company Gibraltar Steamship Corporation that leased Swan Island in the Caribbean for the CIA, where the agency set up Radio Swan that was used during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, among other things (see pp.193-208 in James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, second edition, for important information on the Paines).

All this factual background on the Paines doesn’t definitively prove anything about them, but it is essential to assess their credibility, and watching The Assassination and Mrs. Paine is all about doing that.

The question about Ruth that the film asks is whether she is a truthful, naïve, Quaker do-gooder or a CIA asset, a pawn, or someone in deep denial (whatever that is).

She has her defenders and they appear in the film along with well-known supporters of her and the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald did the deed alone:  Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Jack Valenti, Michael Beschloss, and Peter Jennings.

From the so-called prosecution side we hear from: Jim DiEugenio, Dr. Gary Aquilar, Dr. Martin Schotz, Vince Salandria, and Sue Wheaton.

Paine’s defenders make sure to bash Oliver Stone and his film, JFK, and Ruth claims Stone never contacted her about her portrayal in the film.  Stone denies this and says she would not talk to him.  But she makes it clear that she is a big fan of various Network TV specials that support the WC, especially the London mock trial with Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi, and a Peter Jennings ABC special.

Ruth Paine is given a lot of screen time between her defenders and accusers.  As I said, Max Good is more than fair, perhaps too fair.  Paine is a cool character who only rarely gets a bit flustered.  She’s been doing these interviews for a long time, and is either a good actor or an innocent bystander, as she says, “I’m kind of naïve …. But I think it’s a blessing.”

After giving both sides their say – and a few others, whom I won’t mention, who make lawyerly-like slippery statements – Max Good interjects that there is “something about the Ruth Paine story that simply doesn’t jell.”  He then proceeds to ask her a series of hard questions that viewers will find very interesting.  But he never lets the audience know what he has concluded about her guilt or innocence.  He is impartial to the end.

I am not.  For before watching the film, I knew a great deal about the Paines and their roles in the assassination and its cover-up.  I completely agree with the Philadelphia lawyer Vince Salandria, one of the earliest and most brilliant critics of the official story, when he says “You can’t close the circle without the Paines.  There is no way they can be innocent.  No way.”

And he added the film’s penultimate statement about the assassination:

There is no mystery here.  It’s all self-evident.  It was a coup.  It was designed to be a false mystery and the debate would be eternal and why it [killing JFK] was done – forgotten. Now what is it to commit yourself to truth here?  Your changing your real identity from a citizen of a democracy to a subject of a military empire.  A big step.

Ruth Paine, however, gets the final word.  Regarding all the claims about her involvement with the CIA and the Oswalds: “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense …. I am interested in truth …. I’m a very independent person.  Nobody tells me what to do.”

I highly recommend that people watch this important film and reach a verdict based on the evidence it provides, and if they need more, to read the works of Douglass and DiEugenio mentioned earlier, among others.  As good as a film can be, it is only as good as the sources it relies upon.

Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  The Assassination and Mrs. Paine will force you to do that.  Don’t miss it.

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In his new, six-part, seven hours plus documentary – “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World” – the celebrated English documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis, who has worked for the BBC for decades, tells us that nothing makes sense anymore and it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” A profound shift in our understanding has occurred, he tells us early on, and he then proceeds to replicate this fragmented, unknowing modern mind by showing us an endless stream of video images from the BBC archives that jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point.

As the reviewer Lucy Mangan of The Guardian approvingly writes, the film is “a dazzling, overwhelming experience.”  This is true, but not in the way she thinks with her five-star rating. The film does dazzle, and fascinate, but in the sense of bewildering or casting a spell.  But to what end?

For Curtis maintains that there is no meaning anywhere (not even in a review); we are all living as if we are on “an acid trip”;  and we will never know what the hell is going on in the world because…well, because there is no logic to anything and our brains are scrambled with fragmented memories, fleeting images, and paranoid thoughts just like the movie Curtis narrates in his unemotional, matter-of-fact voice. He doesn’t have to say that he’s cool and everyone else is nuts. The style is the man when the authoritative voice calmly speaks above the din. Quite BBC-ish.

“Everything is relative,” is the underlying message, except that Curtis fails to spell out the contradiction in this post-modern meme: Everything is relative but the statement that everything is relative.  It is absolute. Some people know and others don’t.  Next video clip, please.

After watching his pastiche film that is filled with his compulsively fragmented skepticism about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere,” I was reminded of what a famous philosopher once wrote in his “Critique of Pure Dread”:

In formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know?  That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable.  Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything?  Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, ‘My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.’  By ‘knowable,’ incidentally, I do not mean that which can be known by perception of the senses, or that which can be grasped by the mind, but more that which can be said to be Known or to possess a Knownness or Knowability, or at least something you can mention to a friend.

Like Curtis’s title, I have never been able to get those profound words out of my head because they have always seemed in their own way to have captured the underlying zeitgeist of the past half-century and more – the unspoken message that has come to inform the neurotic skepticism of our times. And unlike Curtis’s  solemnity, at least Woody Allen makes me laugh.

Curtis is a serious man, and when he very seriously tells us in Part 1 that Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who was the only person to ever bring a trial in the assassination of President John Kennedy, was a man devoid of logic who once wrote a memo to his staff urging them to think illogically and just look for patterns based on “time and propinquity,” he wishes us to consider Garrison a crazy conspiratorial thinker who saw strange patterns when there were none.  To see Garrison as a deranged man who used a pastiche method of cutting and pasting disparate unconnected facts to form a conspiracy theory to convince you that there were hidden forces operating behind the façade of American society.

Echoing the CIA’s famous memo to its agents and accomplices in the media to use the phrase conspiracy theory/theorist to ridicule its critics, Curtis so solemnly tells the viewer that such crazy conspiracy theories and the method for arriving at them and their claims that there were hidden forces operating behind the scenes are paranoid nonsense and that they would come to infect the modern mind.  Most of Garrison’s thinking, he says, was pure fantasy and he could produce no evidence for his claims.  In other words, Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, not the CIA.

This claim is factually false, but it becomes the basis for the next five parts of the documentary.  And perversely, the entire documentary is constructed using the same method of cutting-and-pasting, “time and propinquity,” pastiche/collage so beloved of postmodernists, that Curtis accuses Garrison of using, a method devoid of logic or meaning.

This is not a Woody Allen joke.

There is no doubt that Curtis has found and presents very interesting historical film footage that ranges back and forth across the world and time.  He knows how to engage an audience and to draw them into emotive and dreamy experiences of fear and paranoia. As one watches, one feels the walls closing in and terrible disasters lurking in the shadows because no one is in control, for control is an illusion. You’ll never know.  You’ll never know. Everything is relative.

Yet there is much to learn and consider from his footage.  But context is all, and the hours one spends watching lead to part six when Curtis circles back to part one to tie the knot on his “emotional history” within what the writer George Trow once called “the context of no context.”  We learn about chaos and complexity theories, artificial intelligence, multiple selves, drugs, how neuroscientists and psychiatrists have claimed that consciousness does not exist, and that even though people think they are individuals in the age of individualism, they are deluded.  In the digital age people are now doing exactly what Garrison did fifty years ago; now they are creating conspiracy theories from patterns of data on the internet and it’s all a form of madness.

Thrown in as an aside, Curtis says of the attacks of September 11, 2001, that “no one had seen them coming.”  This, of course, is blatantly false, since the U.S. government was not surprised, as is very well known and confirmed, but Curtis’s claim reinforces the idea no one knew or knows what’s going to happen, that incompetence is the norm, that “nothing makes sense anymore,” and that the official narrative on 9/11 is correct, just as it is regarding the assassination of JFK, for Jim Garrison, the man who bravely and brilliantly explored the case early on, was just a nut case who believed in strange coincidences. And his crazy way of connecting the dots has infected our world today.  We can’t get him out of our heads.

When he finally brings us into the present, Curtis tells us that COVID-19 “was a force that came from completely outside the systems of power.”  Of course!  Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, we are living in a world where the ruling elites are at the mercy of chance and we think they are in control.  No, that is our illusion.  Shit happens. After spending hours showing us how the world’s elites are corrupt and do all kinds of devious things to maintain their power – conspire to do so – we are also told there are no conspiracies.  There are and there aren’t.  We are trapped in an insane world of double-binds, “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.”

I suppose this might apply to this film.  But no, it is very meaningful – in the way exquisite propaganda is.

Woody Allen can be hilarious, but Curtis is quite funny himself.  After seven plus hours of telling us we live in the world of nightmares where we are trapped and this sense of imprisonment is something we can’t get out of our heads and we’re all going bonkers, he ends by repeating his opening caption, which are the words of the anthropologist David Graeber:

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make.  And could just as easily make differently.

Really?  I never knew that.  Did you?

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