God help me, I tried to make this funny. Sadly, this kind of self-indulgent, pseudo-documentary is no joke.
So, critics everywhere are losing their collective shit over 'experimental' filmmaker Adam Curtis' latest documentary series Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, which premiered on BBC iPlayer last week. It's been called everything from a dazzling work of genius to a terrifying masterpiece, with many predicting awards on the horizon. As for the content, I'll let Curtis himself explain:
Sorry for being predictable, but I'm afraid I can't join in the orgy of backslapping and critical slobbering. I have no problem with the anti-narrative, 'collage' technique Curtis uses (I'm a great champion of filmmakers like Peter Watkins and Chris Marker who invite audiences to question how they receive information by breaking with conventional audio-visual grammar), but the combination of found images and sometimes ambient, other times discordant, electronic music never lets up on telling us how to think and feel at any given moment, making deliberate subliminal associations to cement Curtis' thesis that we're all going out of our minds with paranoia and anxiety as an inescapable, objective truth.
"Ah!" his champions say, "But it's an emotional history of our times, so it's perfectly legitimate to take this approach..."
No, it's not. It's his truth we're seeing played out, and he never makes that apparent. "We all feel like this," he says in his voice of God-style narration, failing to realise the irony of his central claim that the rise of individualism over collectivism cancels that out. As for the specific forces he cites as responsible for our post-millenial malaise, bizarrely economics doesn't even merit discussion. Never mind that the end of the Cold War and the rise of US hegemony has led western governments to dismantle - or, in some cases, sell off - the more benevolent apparatus of state since the 'triumph' of capitalism makes the need to present itself as a more humane ideology entirely redundant because that's not important, apparently: we all somehow became individuals, and in Curtis' mind the how and the why is immaterial. How this relates to the rise of China and Russia's 'Pivot to the East' (both of which occupy a sizeable amount of screen time) also goes without adequate analysis because, again, economics and its relationship to geopolitics is a moot point in Curtis' worldview. In fact, the impression I've formed watching this is of someone who's read a lot of Wikipedia articles but doesn't have the critical faculties to tie the information together. Instead of seeking out the 'grand narrative' (or, more sensibly, trying to reconcile conflicting narratives) they throw their hands in the air and say, "None of this makes sense, so don't even bother trying," before concluding, "My case is... I rest my case: we're all bonkers, so make the best of it."
This is the laziest kind of documentary. It poses questions it doesn't know how to answer, glosses over subjects that contradict its central argument and manipulates the audience's emotional responses with every audio-visual trick in the book while pretending it's actually doing the opposite. Okay, I get why critics have been blown away by this series (it's resolutely left-of-field in its approach, and it assumes a fair level of intelligence on the part of the viewer), but there's no interrogation of the form, much less any attempt to challenge Curtis' position. If I was being paranoid, I'd say it's almost as though this is the BBC's 'approved' message on how we should view the current state of the world, admonishing less palatable conspiracy theories (QAnon, etc.) while actively feeding others (populism is elite-sponsored, and so on). The problem is, as Ben Shapiro's made a whole career pointing out, facts don't care about our feelings, and when you've got a documentary that tells us only our emotions matter while forcing the 'correct' feelings out of us - say, resignation and acceptance - we're opening ourselves up to a whole host of problems for the future.
Perhaps it would've been cheaper for Curtis to film himself declaiming his message on top of a soapbox in Hyde Park for 8½ hours, but that wouldn't have had the same hypnotic effect. Indeed, without the use of film library footage and Aphex Twin remixes, he'd look a bit of a tit.
You can watch the entire series here, but don't say I didn't warn you.
