Yeah, Thornley;s story is properly crazy. I think there's a point where conspiracies thinking starts to generate magical effects. That's what I think of when I read about him. The Secret Sun guy talks about the same stuff at some point.Curtis can't use Thornley to demonstrate the stupidity of conspiracy thinking, although he might want to, because of the way Thornley gets sucked into paranoia despite himself. It's very instructive.
Do you think Curtis is/was a stoner? The way he responds to the film footage suggest he is or has been.I bought Tom Vague's pamphlet on Rackman and Michael de Freitas probably from Compendium around the same time as I was reading RAW or bit later. it's feeling very my bookshelf circa 2000 right now.
It's moving stuff, and I ask what he thinks about the criticism that he manipulates people by seducing them into his narrative; cherry-picking a disparate collection of subjects, mixing them about and re-editing them into a fiction-like narrative? He seems exasperated. "Yeah, of course it is [manipulative] because what do you want me to do, make a boring programme? No, I want to make programmes that mesmerise you and provoke you, so you're going 'hmm I like that, hmm, no I don't think that!' I want you to get engaged. So of course I'm playing with you. But that's what a good film maker does. It's an emotional thing. I think I'm quite honest about it, because here you are, you're saying don't you do this, and I'm like, well yeah, I do!