In class we watched and discussed The Shock Doctrine Short Film, a flim by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein, which was created for/about Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. On her website, Naomi Klein had this to say about how the short film came to be:

 ”When I finished The Shock Doctrine, I sent it to Alfonso Cuarón because I adore

his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close

to the present I was seeing in disaster zones. I was hoping he would

send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together

this amazing team of artists — including Jonás Cuarón who directed and

edited — to make The Shock Doctrine short film. It was one of those blessed

projects where everything felt fated.” - Naomi Klein

I thought about the film long after our class, which I’m sure was their intention. After it was over, my classmates and I just sort of sat there silently, wide-eyed. We weren’t really sure what to say except, “Wow.” I showed many of my friends the film, and they all felt the same way.

 The film begins with the history of psychiatry and electro-shock therapy, showing video clips of patients undergoing their ‘treatments,’ many  of them flailing their arms and being jolted from the shock. It also showed clips of patients after their treatments, where patients were ‘reduced to a child-like state’. The CIA funded a series of experiments, and from these, they produced a secret handbook on how to break down prisoners to reduce them to this ‘child-like state’. It then showed parts of the CIA’s 1963 and 1983 interrogation manuals, which included sleep deprivation and keeping prisoners awake for extreme periods of time. These visuals were also disturbing. 

Throughout the film, they use a font that appears to be spray-painted on, which results in a dark sort of feeling. The colors are also primarily red, gray and black, which also adds to this feeling. At one point they show a clip of a plane flying through the air, and at the end it suddenly crashes into one of the World Trade Center towers, which is shocking and unexpected.

They then link the psychiatry and electro-shock therapy history to the ways in which our leaders in the past, and possibly today, take advantage of big events to push their policies all at once while we’re “down” and before we can regain our footing. Massive disasters served to “soften us up”. Milton Friedman called this the “economic shock treatment.” Naomi Klein calls it the “Shock doctrine.” They use the video clip of the woman flailing her arms from electro-shock therapy numerous times, which adds to the disturbing feeling of the film.

 They then flash numerous statistics and facts and visuals from past wars and impoverished countries, as well as natural disasters and various government decisions along the way. They fly at your face and you barely have time to read them all, which I believe was the point. It was almost as if they were saying that all of these events and decisions are flying by and occuring so fast before we even have the chance to say “what happened?” and “why did that happen?” We literally don’t have time to catch up.

 They then slowly show a quote by Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The font then gets bigger and faster and the quote is shown in pieces. They go back and forth from “CHANGE” to “CRISIS”.

The film ends after a man quotes (seemingly from the CIA handbook): ”Isolation, both physical and psychological, must be maintained from the moment of appre. The capacity for resistance is diminished by disorientation. Prisoners should maintain silence at all times. They should never be allowed to speak to each other.”

 Overall, the film creates a wicked feeling of disturbance and darkness, and is actually quite scary. Which, I believe, was the point.  

 I WILL be reading The Shock Doctrine this summer.