The United States-led invasion of Afghanistan began nineteen years ago, though you would be forgiven for forgetting it remains an active combat zone. Adam Curtis’ 2015 documentary, Bitter Lake, is a cinematic tour de force of compiled footage from the BBC archives that explores the invasion and its historical antecedents in the relationship between modern Afghanistan and the West, specifically the United States and United Kingdom. Through Curtis’ narrative and film-making technique, the viewer comes to understand the invasion as a bellwether for a world in which traditional narratives about politics and history have lost meaning.
Curtis’ proposition resonates with postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s classic formulation that the Orient is a lens through which the cultural pathologies of the imperial core can be identified and studied. A nebulous category by design, the Orient exists to separate the West from the rest, Afghanistan included. Having devolved into a morass with no discernible victory in sight, the invasion’s stated goal of building democracy has been exposed as an empty promise. Now, it seems as if democracy is a far more fragile and particularized phenomenon than we in the West once thought. One scene in Bitter Lake is remarkable in its tone and symbolic function. Well-meaning British academics, having come to Afghanistan to participate in the construction of the country’s liberal democratic future, teach a group of young Afghan students about Conceptual Art.
More specifically, a group of incredulous students are gathered facing a projection of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” as they are lectured on its profound importance. Their brows furrowed and mouths agape, the esoteric lecture given by the Western instructors seems to fall on deaf ears. Lacking the social and historical framework in which Duchamp’s work is situated, the paradigmatic shift inaugurated by Duchamp’s piece — among other Conceptual and Dada works — is completely stripped of any texture. This point seems particularly resonant when the very ideals Duchamp’s work sought to desacralize — nationalism, democracy, and capitalism — were integral to the U.S.’ agenda for Afghanistan’s reconstruction. The Western teacher’s inability to create an artistic discussion centered around any mutual cultural exchange or understanding gestures towards the documentary’s broader theme. Art, ideas, and stories once rich with explanatory power no longer hold the same cache, especially when imposed on an alien context.
Today, cultural narratives that have previously shaped Western political discourse, namely a dogmatic belief in liberal democracy as the highest good a society can achieve, have been subject to intense scrutiny. Scrutiny that, in part, originated from the abject failure of the invasion of Afghanistan to construct anything meaningful out of the destruction it unleashed. The election of Donald Trump and his far-right allies in Europe, seemingly averse to the norms of democratic governance, can be contextualized in a complex genealogy tracing back to the failure of the War on Terror.
Having arrived at a point where faith in liberal democracy has waned to such a great extent, we find ourselves enmeshed in a cultural atmosphere not far from Marcel Duchamp’s in 1917. Firmly rooted in the Dadaist movement of early twentieth century Europe, Duchamp’s piece exists in an artistic current that was engaged in a nihilistic rejection of the prevailing social order. The First World War had unleashed catastrophic destruction on European society, leaving many to question the usefulness of capitalism and nationalism as modes of social organization. Dada artists challenged society’s values and turned to anarchistic spectacles of public performance to reignite the people’s passions. Suffice to say, Duchamp would criticize the usage of his work as proof of the conceptual innovation produced by liberalism.
The film often meanders through seemingly endless montages of excavated footage, leaving viewers to ponder the meaning of these empty cinematic expanses. However, this quest and subsequent failure to find meaning again points to the ethos animating Bitter Lake’s artistic vision. Much like the politicians who sought to impose a liberal democratic order on the chaotic realities of Afghan politics, the viewers’ innate desire to impose their interpretation and their inability to do so signifies a nihilistic void residing within our constructed image of reality.
As the viewer’s subjective experience of the film is constructed through Curtis’ camera, our objective reality has taken on a similarly constructed dimension through the laptop camera. The pandemic and its attendant devastations have compromised narratives society once unconsciously accepted. Resigned to conducting our lives through virtual mediation, many have felt an acute sense that life during the pandemic resembles a hollow simulation of life. Moreover, uprisings motivated in part by the failures of the state to provide for one’s basic right, that of life, again underscore an empty political vision. Despite being released five years ago, Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake and the artistic imagery it draws upon brings to light a crisis that compromises the institutions out of which order and meaning once emanated.
