TV Review: True Stories: The Shock Doctrine

IT IS not often a documentary can be said to have a cult following, but it's probably true of The Power Of Nightmares, Adam Curtis's 2004 BBC2 series that paralleled the rise of US neo-conservatives with radical Islamists, using stock footage to make unexpected connections. Repeated several times and passed around, samizdat style, on tapes and downloads, it had a surprisingly popular influence for such an intellectual series, with one review dubbing it the "red pill" of documentaries, after the mind-expanding substance from the Matrix films.

Though Curtis was not involved with The Shock Doctrine – he's moved on to work on an ambitious theatre and music project called It Felt Like A Kiss – his techniques were all over this film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, who also made the docudrama The Road To Guantanamo. Winterbottom is a highly accomplished movie director, probably Britain's most interesting if not consistent – he made 24 Hour Party People, In This World and Jude, but also some total stinkers.

All this backstory may seem like homework, but it is important, along with the fact that The Shock Doctrine was based on a book by anti-globalisation campaigner Naomi Klein, because the film itself was all about the connections between people and ideas which are forming our world, sometimes without us quite realising it.

This was, unsurprisingly, a polemic, presenting a radical case about how free-market capitalism has taken advantage of – or created – "shocks", which have shaken up societies so that drastic economic reforms can be pushed through.

Though the film aimed to illustrate Klein's work, she appeared only in extracts from various public speeches she's given, after an apparent disagreement over the adaptation. This made for an odd effect, distancing her from her own argument, which was presented using archive footage of historical events, linked by narration, in the method pioneered by Adam Curtis.

Perhaps as a result, the connection she has drawn between shock therapy, the psychological torture of people with mental problems begun in the 1950s, and the concurrent development of economic shock treatment by Milton Friedman, ended up blurred. His advocacy of an unrestrained market, with privatisation replacing government regulation as much as possible, was massively influential on General Pinochet in Chile, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but the effects on many ordinary people were as traumatic as those of sensory deprivation and electro-shock treatment on disturbed patients.

It's a complicated, serious argument, difficult to convey quickly, and while the film didn't quite make the nuances clear – or question Klein's thesis – it did provide an interesting introduction to a topic that is so important to us all. People are getting wise to "shock treatment", argues Klein, putting the blame for the financial crisis squarely on the bankers and their gurus who brought us to this state as we struggle to make sense of the new economic realities.

I don't know if The Shock Doctrine will have the same impact as The Power Of Nightmares, but it's perhaps representative of an encouraging new trend: though the news agendas are full of distracting trivia – prolefeed, as George Orwell called it – in times like these, there is also a stumbling, growing hunger for answers and new ideas. Agree or disagree with their theses, at least documentaries like these are trying to look at the world as it is – now that's real reality TV.