TraumaPorn from Adam Curtis

Evgenia and I talk about TraumaZone, Adam Curtis’ latest doc series. It’s about seven hours long and tries to tell the story of the twin destructions that took place in Russia: the destruction of communism and the destruction of democracy.Despite a lot of simplifications and its Anglo-Saxon misery porn fetish, Evgenia thinks it’s a valuable historical document and it could only have been made by an outsider, precisely because of how traumatic that decade was for ex-Soviets. Even today few people there want to think about happened, let alone alone to dig into the archives and construct a clear narrative about those times. The entire population suffers from PTSD.—Yasha LevineA couple of notes.Evgenia mentions a documentary that Paweł Pawlikowski made about Vladimir Zhirinovsky. She wrote about the film a while back — check it out. Evgenia also mentions a couple of documentaries by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson: Born Rich and the The One Percent. As Evgenia says, they stand out because documentaries are as a general rule made by the rich about the poor. But Johnson, fresh out college, made a couple of docs about his own oligarchic class — his family and friends, even Ivanka Trump is in there — and that’s very unusual. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe