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In a crucial passage from a series of lectures he gave that would be published as Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault expounded on the concept of the imperial boomerang. Though the term was used and advanced by many political theorists and philosophers, most notably Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, it was Foucault’s conception of the term that has stuck in the public consciousness. “[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents,” he argued, “it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power…the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”

Yance Ford’s documentary Power acts as a piece of supporting evidence for what’s become known as Foucault’s boomerang. The film lays out in clear,...