Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
The trailer for Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, coming to the BBC's iPlayer streaming service from 11th February.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Dec 29, 2021 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Gregory
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:07 pm
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: Adam Curtis
Can't Get You Out Of My Head Episode 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain
There is something strangely comforting about seeing familiar pieces of stock footage from previous Adam Curtis series turning up here, almost knowingly used as a kind of shorthand hyperlink back to previous arguments that do not need to be re-stated again. The big moment of that in this first episode comes right at the end when we get the "OR... OR... OR... " fast-paced run through of potential candidates for the JFK assassination that was a central moment of bewildered loss of innocence in It Felt Like A Kiss. Here its more about everyone retreating into supporting their own preferred candidate to then as individuals build their own world out of going forward.
But the other piece of stock footage (also from It Felt Like a Kiss) occurs a little earlier, with the father playing a game of pretend-shooting his children on the neat lawn of an early 60s suburban dwelling, which contrasts against the dramatic gun wielding of patriotic revolutionaries on the stage of the newly re-written Chinese operas as the episode transitions into American capitalist version of utopia, which also uses weaponry in its power fantasies.
I am writing the following at work based on a quickly fading memory of the episode watched yesterday, so apologies if things have started to shift and melt into new forms in my mind in the following post! :
This is the scene-setting episode where we get introduced to a number of figures across the world and see them start to formulate their theories of how the world works: Jiang Qing going from an ambitious supporting actress in Chinese film (including the titular Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain in which she played second fiddle to Li Lili, whom she apparently despised) to leaving her husband going to join the Communists after her film career did not work out and becoming Mao's third wife, with an idea of re-shaping society; Michael de Freitas as a disillusioned new immigrant to Britain working for a corrupt property developer Peter Rachman (but who would rent his slum dwellings out to people that the white establishment would never otherwise have provided any space for, which Curtis suggests is because of Rachman's own past giving him an almost mercenarily amoral approach towards right and wrong) and eventually taking over the business but with ambitions of going further into re-shaping society and destroying the dominant culture; and in America Kerry Thornley, friend of a pre-fame Lee Harvey Oswald and the co-founder of Discordianism, who wanted to parody religion and conspiracy theories by seeding Illuminati conspiracy theories into Playboy Magazine and other publications, but only ended up writing a book that influenced Jim Garrison and creating another conspiracy theory that eventually re-shaped society.
The episode cycles between these three stories throwing in extra digressions into Britain's involvement in war atrocities, the beginnings of psychological investigation into the world inside an individual's head (and whether there is a world apart from the conscious one that can be appealed to, or preyed upon) and the culture of the UK at the time. Regarding the UK section the flaw I felt in this episode is that I do not entirely buy the way in which the country is simply portrayed as racially, ethnically, politically and culturally conservative, because it does not really mention the much bigger issue that has always crippled the UK: class and inherited status. Whilst there will always be discrimination in those terms, the bigger factor would not entirely be the colour of one's skin or religion but more being born into the correct social group and not trying to impudently move up or down within that system. Arguably the thing that Curtis misses in this set up is that beyond resources and power on the world stage the other reason for the British Empire was to disenfranchise the working class within Britain itself by exploiting workers from other countries instead, often offering illusory promises of a better future (which also worked the other way in sending off people from Britain overseas to seek their fortune elsewhere, because otherwise there was nothing for them at home).
You can see that happening in dramatised form in a passage in the novel Parade's End where one of the main characters briefly talks about never wanting an uppity Northerner for a butler or general manservant because being English they feel that they exist on a level playing field, which is why he would always choose a Scotsman, because they will always be more concerned about the issues of their homeland over English political issues. That is perhaps why when people migrated to the UK hopefully for a better life they were still met with such hostility because now the exploitation was not just 'over there' any more, and the working classes already disenfranchised from the systems of power, but knowing their place within the system (at least until the once self-sufficient communities were devastated with the mining closures), were suddenly faced with people willing to do the jobs that they were not if it gave them a chance of moving up in a newly aspirational world of the 1960s. Who themselves, now just being English, were facing their own disenfranchisement from exploitation (but with no new way of being open to them as a compensation) and disillusionment with the 'promised land', and would start to formulate new ways of thinking in response.
That is perhaps the reason for the footage of the skinhead gangs trashing the club at the end of the episode: a working class culture that was initially about sharing and assimilating across cultures would eventually become associated with partisan racism. Because if you can get the working classes fighting amongst themselves and blaming each other for their lot over petty issues such as race that prevents the creation of any united front against the class barriers that exist in the society that are the real problems for everyone. From this first episode at least I am not sure that Michael de Freitas really understood that, with his anger getting funnelled indiscriminately against all white people for their ways of thinking, rather than trying to understand how those ways of thinking were fostered by the rigidness of the class system that he so wanted to become a part of. He reached the glass ceiling and then proceeded to start smashing all the windows of the greenhouse in response.
I suppose intolerance breeds intolerance, as we also see in the Jiang Qing section, as her frustrated ambitions that had curdled to bitterness within return to dominate the country when she is given the opportunity to re-shape it, at first through its culture. Contrasting with Thornley (who sees the absurdity of making oneself a figurehead) and de Freitas (who is all about thwarted ambition) she is actually given the power to re-imagine society, yet with that she cannot escape her own prejudices and long held resentments from resurfacing. Consciously or unconsciously (though really it seems consciously!) she gathers like-minded people together for a cause and brooks no dissent, finding that people (for their own reasons: maybe ambition, maybe wanting to be a part of the group, maybe the actual message itself, maybe the fear of not being a part of the group) subscribe to the new movement in their masses, and the purges of undesirables begin, starting with those filmmakers who never recognised her talents and natural star status.
The most interesting part of this first episode is the beginnings of psychological probing strand, which gets into the most damning territory of all in the MK Ultra experiments (which Curtis describes as being the 'real' conspiracy theory as compared to all the pop culture ones surrounding JFK), where people have their pasts wiped to make them blank, amoral (almost Peter Rachman-like, just seared clean by science rather than long term emotional trauma) characters than can then be 're-programmed' into properly functioning members of society, content for the roles in which they are to inhabit. But they find that whilst the stripping away is easy, adding things back is not. And so the test subjects are left adrift in a lack of context to ground them.
The episode ends with Curtis noting that both the revolutionaries (self-actualised or putative ones) and the MK Ultra psychologists both diagnose and try to treat only one half of the 'problem' of the human being in society - by changing either the human being or the society. When it is suggested that it is neither 'nature or nuture?' but both simultaneously. You cannot remove the context the human being lives in that is affecting their behaviour just as you cannot remove the individual reaction to that context that a specific human being has at a specific moment in time based on their life experiences to that point that itself also drives their responses.
Perhaps because of that complex interaction between the inner space and outer space specific revolutions or organisations are unable to capture and shape movements in any form less blunt than rhetoric and threats? But we briefly see lurking within the stock footage an ominous sign that may provide the one-stop solution to 'people management': computerisation.
There is something strangely comforting about seeing familiar pieces of stock footage from previous Adam Curtis series turning up here, almost knowingly used as a kind of shorthand hyperlink back to previous arguments that do not need to be re-stated again. The big moment of that in this first episode comes right at the end when we get the "OR... OR... OR... " fast-paced run through of potential candidates for the JFK assassination that was a central moment of bewildered loss of innocence in It Felt Like A Kiss. Here its more about everyone retreating into supporting their own preferred candidate to then as individuals build their own world out of going forward.
But the other piece of stock footage (also from It Felt Like a Kiss) occurs a little earlier, with the father playing a game of pretend-shooting his children on the neat lawn of an early 60s suburban dwelling, which contrasts against the dramatic gun wielding of patriotic revolutionaries on the stage of the newly re-written Chinese operas as the episode transitions into American capitalist version of utopia, which also uses weaponry in its power fantasies.
I am writing the following at work based on a quickly fading memory of the episode watched yesterday, so apologies if things have started to shift and melt into new forms in my mind in the following post! :
This is the scene-setting episode where we get introduced to a number of figures across the world and see them start to formulate their theories of how the world works: Jiang Qing going from an ambitious supporting actress in Chinese film (including the titular Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain in which she played second fiddle to Li Lili, whom she apparently despised) to leaving her husband going to join the Communists after her film career did not work out and becoming Mao's third wife, with an idea of re-shaping society; Michael de Freitas as a disillusioned new immigrant to Britain working for a corrupt property developer Peter Rachman (but who would rent his slum dwellings out to people that the white establishment would never otherwise have provided any space for, which Curtis suggests is because of Rachman's own past giving him an almost mercenarily amoral approach towards right and wrong) and eventually taking over the business but with ambitions of going further into re-shaping society and destroying the dominant culture; and in America Kerry Thornley, friend of a pre-fame Lee Harvey Oswald and the co-founder of Discordianism, who wanted to parody religion and conspiracy theories by seeding Illuminati conspiracy theories into Playboy Magazine and other publications, but only ended up writing a book that influenced Jim Garrison and creating another conspiracy theory that eventually re-shaped society.
The episode cycles between these three stories throwing in extra digressions into Britain's involvement in war atrocities, the beginnings of psychological investigation into the world inside an individual's head (and whether there is a world apart from the conscious one that can be appealed to, or preyed upon) and the culture of the UK at the time. Regarding the UK section the flaw I felt in this episode is that I do not entirely buy the way in which the country is simply portrayed as racially, ethnically, politically and culturally conservative, because it does not really mention the much bigger issue that has always crippled the UK: class and inherited status. Whilst there will always be discrimination in those terms, the bigger factor would not entirely be the colour of one's skin or religion but more being born into the correct social group and not trying to impudently move up or down within that system. Arguably the thing that Curtis misses in this set up is that beyond resources and power on the world stage the other reason for the British Empire was to disenfranchise the working class within Britain itself by exploiting workers from other countries instead, often offering illusory promises of a better future (which also worked the other way in sending off people from Britain overseas to seek their fortune elsewhere, because otherwise there was nothing for them at home).
You can see that happening in dramatised form in a passage in the novel Parade's End where one of the main characters briefly talks about never wanting an uppity Northerner for a butler or general manservant because being English they feel that they exist on a level playing field, which is why he would always choose a Scotsman, because they will always be more concerned about the issues of their homeland over English political issues. That is perhaps why when people migrated to the UK hopefully for a better life they were still met with such hostility because now the exploitation was not just 'over there' any more, and the working classes already disenfranchised from the systems of power, but knowing their place within the system (at least until the once self-sufficient communities were devastated with the mining closures), were suddenly faced with people willing to do the jobs that they were not if it gave them a chance of moving up in a newly aspirational world of the 1960s. Who themselves, now just being English, were facing their own disenfranchisement from exploitation (but with no new way of being open to them as a compensation) and disillusionment with the 'promised land', and would start to formulate new ways of thinking in response.
That is perhaps the reason for the footage of the skinhead gangs trashing the club at the end of the episode: a working class culture that was initially about sharing and assimilating across cultures would eventually become associated with partisan racism. Because if you can get the working classes fighting amongst themselves and blaming each other for their lot over petty issues such as race that prevents the creation of any united front against the class barriers that exist in the society that are the real problems for everyone. From this first episode at least I am not sure that Michael de Freitas really understood that, with his anger getting funnelled indiscriminately against all white people for their ways of thinking, rather than trying to understand how those ways of thinking were fostered by the rigidness of the class system that he so wanted to become a part of. He reached the glass ceiling and then proceeded to start smashing all the windows of the greenhouse in response.
I suppose intolerance breeds intolerance, as we also see in the Jiang Qing section, as her frustrated ambitions that had curdled to bitterness within return to dominate the country when she is given the opportunity to re-shape it, at first through its culture. Contrasting with Thornley (who sees the absurdity of making oneself a figurehead) and de Freitas (who is all about thwarted ambition) she is actually given the power to re-imagine society, yet with that she cannot escape her own prejudices and long held resentments from resurfacing. Consciously or unconsciously (though really it seems consciously!) she gathers like-minded people together for a cause and brooks no dissent, finding that people (for their own reasons: maybe ambition, maybe wanting to be a part of the group, maybe the actual message itself, maybe the fear of not being a part of the group) subscribe to the new movement in their masses, and the purges of undesirables begin, starting with those filmmakers who never recognised her talents and natural star status.
The most interesting part of this first episode is the beginnings of psychological probing strand, which gets into the most damning territory of all in the MK Ultra experiments (which Curtis describes as being the 'real' conspiracy theory as compared to all the pop culture ones surrounding JFK), where people have their pasts wiped to make them blank, amoral (almost Peter Rachman-like, just seared clean by science rather than long term emotional trauma) characters than can then be 're-programmed' into properly functioning members of society, content for the roles in which they are to inhabit. But they find that whilst the stripping away is easy, adding things back is not. And so the test subjects are left adrift in a lack of context to ground them.
The episode ends with Curtis noting that both the revolutionaries (self-actualised or putative ones) and the MK Ultra psychologists both diagnose and try to treat only one half of the 'problem' of the human being in society - by changing either the human being or the society. When it is suggested that it is neither 'nature or nuture?' but both simultaneously. You cannot remove the context the human being lives in that is affecting their behaviour just as you cannot remove the individual reaction to that context that a specific human being has at a specific moment in time based on their life experiences to that point that itself also drives their responses.
Perhaps because of that complex interaction between the inner space and outer space specific revolutions or organisations are unable to capture and shape movements in any form less blunt than rhetoric and threats? But we briefly see lurking within the stock footage an ominous sign that may provide the one-stop solution to 'people management': computerisation.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Feb 15, 2021 11:55 am, edited 2 times in total.
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JSC
- Joined: Thu May 16, 2013 9:17 am
Re: Adam Curtis
Perhaps unwisely, I blitzed through all six episodes over the weekend and my head was kind of reeling afterward.
Like all of Curtis' work, it is fascinating to see him pull the almost invisible threads of people, ideas, and movements
together into his main narrative. His visual motif of archival footage of people dancing to non-diegetic music is always
a standout for me. Sometimes I think he occasionally overstretches the logic of his arguments and a certain amount
of deja vu hangs over the proceedings.
i.e. the various hooks in his voice-over.
"What they discovered was astonishing...."
"But then, things became even stranger..."
However, it was definitely worth the wait (HyperNormalisation was already four years ago!)
Like all of Curtis' work, it is fascinating to see him pull the almost invisible threads of people, ideas, and movements
together into his main narrative. His visual motif of archival footage of people dancing to non-diegetic music is always
a standout for me. Sometimes I think he occasionally overstretches the logic of his arguments and a certain amount
of deja vu hangs over the proceedings.
i.e. the various hooks in his voice-over.
"What they discovered was astonishing...."
"But then, things became even stranger..."
However, it was definitely worth the wait (HyperNormalisation was already four years ago!)
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ford
- Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:44 pm
Re: Adam Curtis
Loved it. A brilliant but sympathetic deconstruction of New Left ideas about individualism and ethno-nationalism/identity.
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thirtyframesasecond
- Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:48 pm
Re: Adam Curtis
I watched these over a couple of days and have started rewatching (I'm on episode 4 second time around). I wish these were broadcast on BBC2 for a wider audience, but iPlayer may just give Curtis more freedom and allow him to develop ideas without the need to worry about time slots (though Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation often meandered and some editing control could have helped!)
In some ways, this plays as a bit of Curtis's greatest hits. For two decades he's been wrestling with the idea of the role of the individual in society and how freedom may not be what we were promised. He reuses some of the same/similar interviews from before - the Ewen Cameron psychological experiments of wiping 'defective' memories, for example. But it never feels like it's going through the motions. I think this is probably more timely than ever since 'feelings' have been encouraged to take precedence over facts, rationality and common sense and the effects of this are not uniformly positive. His weaving between storylines in China, Russia, the US and UK can sometimes be a little convenient in the parallels he tries to draw (what connects Michael de Freitas and Jang Qing, for example?) but those individual stories themselves are so fascinating that this is fine. Curtis's techniques are familiar and well-honed; his brilliant v/o ('but this was just fantasy' - easy to play Curtis bingo, isn't it?), the use of archive footage, the superb use of music (he quite amusingly wraps the series up with Gang of Four). I find myself pausing often to go to Wikipedia whenever a new person is mentioned - who was Eduard Limonov, for example? The eight hours just blitzed by.
In some ways, this plays as a bit of Curtis's greatest hits. For two decades he's been wrestling with the idea of the role of the individual in society and how freedom may not be what we were promised. He reuses some of the same/similar interviews from before - the Ewen Cameron psychological experiments of wiping 'defective' memories, for example. But it never feels like it's going through the motions. I think this is probably more timely than ever since 'feelings' have been encouraged to take precedence over facts, rationality and common sense and the effects of this are not uniformly positive. His weaving between storylines in China, Russia, the US and UK can sometimes be a little convenient in the parallels he tries to draw (what connects Michael de Freitas and Jang Qing, for example?) but those individual stories themselves are so fascinating that this is fine. Curtis's techniques are familiar and well-honed; his brilliant v/o ('but this was just fantasy' - easy to play Curtis bingo, isn't it?), the use of archive footage, the superb use of music (he quite amusingly wraps the series up with Gang of Four). I find myself pausing often to go to Wikipedia whenever a new person is mentioned - who was Eduard Limonov, for example? The eight hours just blitzed by.
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ford
- Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:44 pm
Re: Adam Curtis
His early books, like Memoir of a Russian Punk, are excellent.thirtyframesasecond wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 5:52 amwho was Eduard Limonov, for example? The eight hours just blitzed by.
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furbicide
- Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:52 am
Re: Adam Curtis
Just finished it – it's excellent, but my only disappointment is that he didn't spend more time on the Trump era, which ended up feeling a bit rushed being packed into the last 20-30 minutes. But there's so much great material here.
This might be a super-obvious observation, but what hit me about Curtis while watching the documentary is that he's first and foremost a storyteller. Most documentaries are framed as stories (for better or for worse), but Curtis' works are like short-story collections – ones in which the short stories are often interwoven, or parallel one another in interesting ways. This visual griot/troubadour role accounts for both his strengths (i.e. it's one of the key things that makes his documentaries so compelling) and weaknesses (the oversimplifications and elisions he gets criticised for) as a documentarian. You might not necessarily believe every single thing he says, but it's hard to think of a better person to tell the story of the modern world (even if only because few others would have the audacity to try).
This might be a super-obvious observation, but what hit me about Curtis while watching the documentary is that he's first and foremost a storyteller. Most documentaries are framed as stories (for better or for worse), but Curtis' works are like short-story collections – ones in which the short stories are often interwoven, or parallel one another in interesting ways. This visual griot/troubadour role accounts for both his strengths (i.e. it's one of the key things that makes his documentaries so compelling) and weaknesses (the oversimplifications and elisions he gets criticised for) as a documentarian. You might not necessarily believe every single thing he says, but it's hard to think of a better person to tell the story of the modern world (even if only because few others would have the audacity to try).
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domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
Thanks to everyone who put this near the top of their Top 10s for the year, as this was not on my radar at all and now our collective is one stronger. I was blown away by the dense novelistic structure of Curtis' eight hour exploration-- I loved how the first hour or so is just Curtis introducing seemingly endless different "plot" strands with characters who will reverberate throughout the film in ways large and small as he continues to pile on masses of information and dot connections. Having no exposure to Curtis' other work, even what at first seemed to me to be an unnecessary crutch, the indie music-scored interludes of stock footage, quickly became vital to allowing a viewer to pause and reflect on all of the new information. I'll probably be processing this for a while, but even on first pass it is clear to me what an incredible achievement the film is.
For those who plan to check it out, I think I also inadvertently stumbled upon the best way to bisect the viewing times (there's just too much information here to fully digest in a full eight hour go), as it turns out there's a more or less natural pausing point between the fourth and fifth parts, given how the fourth part ends with the montage of images we will understand in context in the last two parts
For those who plan to check it out, I think I also inadvertently stumbled upon the best way to bisect the viewing times (there's just too much information here to fully digest in a full eight hour go), as it turns out there's a more or less natural pausing point between the fourth and fifth parts, given how the fourth part ends with the montage of images we will understand in context in the last two parts
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DarkImbecile
- Ask me about my visible cat breasts
- Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
- Location: Albuquerque, NM
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
Where did you see it, domino?
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domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
I saw it via a circulating HD rip on back channels, though this feels like a vital film that should be seen right now so hopefully it gets some kind of official release in the states. For those in the UK, I believe it can be accessed straight from the BBC's website, as it was commissioned for streaming purposes. Five of the six parts (all but part 4) appear to be on YouTube
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therewillbeblus
- Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
If you simply type the title + "streaming" into google, the first link that pops up has all six parts streaming for free, albeit with hardcoded Spanish or Portuguese (I can't tell the difference) subs
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domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
Also looks to be up in full on Archive.org. Seem to be a few options at least for those not in the UK or with access to back channels
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swo17
- Bloodthirsty Butcher
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
- Location: SLC, UT
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
Glad you liked it, though it must have been a tough pill to swallow learning that
SpoilerShow
the Illuminati aren't real 
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BigMack3000
- Joined: Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:27 pm
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
I believe this, along with most of Curtis's other works, are also up on thoughtmaybe.com.
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
That is definitely a Curtis characteristic in a lot of his series, where after a wordy deluge of heavy ideas there is almost the equivalent of an Ozu-like 'pillow shot' sequence to allow the audience some space for reflection. It is interesting that you put it this way domino since the two works that seem to diverge the most from the Curtis style (yet at the same time become the purest direct expression) are those that drop his commentary to a minimum or altogether: Bitter Lake - which is all about the B-roll stock footage - and the art gallery installation piece It Felt Like A Kiss, which is all about the musical score providing the commentary on the imagery. I would pretty much agree with thirtyfamesasecond's comment earlier that this latest series feels like a 'greatest hits' series, but not so much in recycling of themes that this implies, but about taking themes (and stock footage!) used in previous series and pushing them onwards to the next conclusion.domino harvey wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:23 pmHaving no exposure to Curtis' other work, even what at first seemed to me to be an unnecessary crutch, the indie music-scored interludes of stock footage, quickly became vital to allowing a viewer to pause and reflect on all of the new information.
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swo17
- Bloodthirsty Butcher
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
- Location: SLC, UT
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
I've seen a fair amount of Curtis' work, and given the zeitgeisty subject matter and sheer scope of this series, it certainly feels like something of a crowning achievement...though I think all of what I would count as his best films play that way--The Century of the Self, The Trap, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace--he's very good at coming in every few years and detailing how we're all quite doomed at the moment
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: Can't Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021)
It probably helps that he does not really need to modify his basic themes too much in light of new events that come to light in between his productions. It is probably telling that the final conclusion of Can't Get You Out Of My Head is a kind of restatement of the message he has been making all along: everything is too disorganised, clashing and haphazard to be an organised conspiracy in the "everything is connected" way that pop culture likes to think of conspiracies; those people who find themselves in a position to inflict their ideas on the world often have no conception of the long term consequences of their actions (or are too incompetent or (humanly?) flawed to be able to have a long term view, and any impact they have on the society is usually in spite of their actions rather than because of them. Although that should not absolve them of the responsibility of their often hideously harmful short term, thoughtless actions); wealth and power keeps getting consolidated and re-consolidated into an ever smaller group of people; people management/pacification through societal means is a hideously blunt tool, even before computerisation was brought in to lighten the burden on the managers; and the way that Curtis often ends with a (sadly hollow ringing, yet touching in its hopefulness) plea to the idea that there has to be a new idea for living out there just waiting to be heard amongst the toiling masses.