Review of “American Psychosis” (2017)
Seen in 2020.
Chris Hedges expounds on contemporary US narcissism and functional illiteracy.
The nature of illusion is that it’s designed, at least at the moment, to make you feel good, about yourself, about your country, about where you’re going. In that sense, it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged, not so much for the veracity of what they say but for puncturing those feelings.
Succinct and almost entirely correct. The interview is set to quotidian images, mainly of Manhattan, because it’s about reality; it could have used something like “Old Glory” (1939) to show what Hedges refers to, but that would have been a distraction from reality.