Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear

Adam Curtis
BBC 2004
Reviewed by Oluchi Ebere

The film begins with a dark and serious tone of each episode that sets the stage for a thrilling account of political power. The narrator begins each episode reciting “Instead of giving us dreams, politicians promise to keep us safe from nightmares”. The film is sprinkled with expert accounts, interviews from former CIA experts and intellectual favorites such as Noam Chomsky. Within this seemingly rigorous body of work, “The Power of Nightmares” (2004) manages to lay in sarcastic old movie clips and different layers of thematic songs which interestingly enough breaks up the homogeny of the film.

In the film, the narrator states that politicians have created a falsified sense of urgency to defeat international terrorism. The film illustrates the enemy is not a real one but one create in the fantasy to leverage people’s fear. The Power of Nightmares is a 3 part series that details the convergence of two unlikely worlds: the rise of the Neo-Conservatism ideology and Islamic fundamentalism. These series of short episodes document the historical manifestation of these two seemingly unrelated phenomena. The film presents that these Islamic extremism and Neo-conservatism in America are countervailing events and by revealing their origins explains their current manifestation. These seemingly unrelated events were born from the failure of the liberal creed to create a better world to live in. Whether or not the viewer supports the idea that these two movements are similar in their manifestation the film arguably presents a compelling case. The film is draped with details on the origins of both movements.

In “Power of Nightmares” the film details the seeds of Islamic fundamentalism (Egyptian immigrant Sayyid Qutb) and Neo-Conservatism (Professor Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago) which began in the 1940s. The filmmaker, Adam Curtis, posits that both this idealists’ philosophies arose from this failure to create the ideal world. In reaction to this failure, both groups radicalized and manifested their so called power by injecting fear into the masses. Sayyid Qutb was executed in 1966 but his ideas still spread across the Islamic world and according to the film influenced the Iranian revolution and the rise of Osama Bin Laden.

The film then moves to the 1970s where there is a chilling account of how Neo-Conservatism picked up momentum to influence many people in the U.S. The film discusses the confiscation of the Christian Right by the Neo-conservatives as a way to broaden their message and couple it with a way of life that many are comfortable with: Religion.

Throughout the film, there are many compelling and cutting edge theories presented but one that attempts to expose the mishandlings of the Neo-conservatives on the so-called “War on Terror” is the accusation that Al-Qaeda was fictitious entity crafted as a manner to prosecute Osama Bin Laden.

The film is filled with details that support what politicians want to do which is to hold on to their power by promising the population protection from the “bogeymen” and menacing threats across the world. The film ultimately debunks this idea of protection from evil and threats by politicians and concludes that it is completely false.