Why Everything Feels Broken and the Filmmaker Who Predicted It
The world feels chaotic. Geopolitics, media, technology seem to be in disarray. Truth has morphed into something malleable and highly-personalized. Mainstream news gives fragmented headlines, but one filmmaker has been telling the full story for decades. His documentaries are the closest thing we have to a user’s manual for the modern era.
BUT THEN SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED
His films operate on multiple levels simultaneously. Some conscious, some unconscious. Some linear, some nonlinear. Some direct, some subconscious.
A bizarre collage of deftly-sourced archival footage, twisted music, and maybe even a dash of gallows humor all topped by a subdued and oddly calming British man’s voice. You might not be able to articulate exactly what the through line of the film was after you watch it the first time, but you’ll know it demystified the world more than anything else has.
Watching an Adam Curtis film is more like taking a drug that allows you to see the hidden machinations of the modern world than merely listening to a canned story. The concepts take hold of you and irreversibly change how you see events play out.
If you want answers to the following questions (and more), read on:
Why is the news so emotionally charged now?
Are we rational beings?
Is modern psychology/psychiatry correct?
What happened?
What is power and who wields it?
Why does everything feel broken?
A prescription for watching Adam Curtis films
“Film” is a reductive term for what Curtis produces. That’s not a value judgement, he uses the medium in a strange way that’s very different from anything I had seen before experiencing his work. It’s somewhere between a book and a lucid dream. I’ll give you some quick tips on how to watch and the best intro order of some of his films.
Okay - some quick tips. Curtis’s work builds on itself. The more of his films you watch, the more they will make sense. Sounds obvious but this happens in nonlinear ways. It’s hard to explain — it’s less like watching a bunch of Marvel movies and knowing all the characters and more like conditioning your brain to logic in the same way as the films do.
Related tip - don’t think too much. If you get hung up on a concept or theme presented that you don’t understand, drop it and pay attention to what’s going on in the film. It’s a meditative state where you keep in the present of the film instead of spiraling into thoughts about some material presented 15 minutes earlier. Probably opinionated but this is how I’ve gotten the most out of his work.
The Order
Here is an order of the best inroads to Adam Curtis’s work. Some of these are multipart spanning hours, others are shorter. If you’re in the UK I encourage you to pay the BBC whatever they charge to watch on iPlayer. If you’re not in the UK, Google/YouTube are good bets. FWIW I would happily pay an exorbitant fee to watch these on some official BBC streaming service in the US but AFAIK it’s not possible to do so.
1. The Century of Self (2002)
The backbone of Curtis’s ideas. Baby steps you through how Freud’s ideas were re-engineered by advertisers and politicians (is there a difference?) to shape mass psychology and consumer culture. This film explains why we think of ourselves as “individuals” but behave predictably.
2. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
If Century of Self is the backbone, AWOBMOLG is the legs by which ideas manifest themselves in the world. This one focuses on how computers, cybernetics, and Ayn Rand’s philosophy deluded people into believing that complex systems could self-regulate without politics. This film explains the current AI boom and exposes the thought-errors at the core of the AGI-believer’s philosophy, 14 years before it happened.
3. HyperNormalisation (2016)
Straightforward diagnosis of the current geopolitical state of the world. This was the first Adam Curtis doc that I watched. It made much more sense after I watched Century of the Self which is why it’s recommended first.
4. The Power of Nightmares (2004)
Explains how neoconservatives and radical Islamists really aren’t so different after all. A real mindfuck and one of the best rundowns on how life changed post-9/11.
5. Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021)
A six-part epic. Is it his magnum opus? Quite possibly. Watching this one before the others will melt your brain and feel like the ramblings of schizophrenic. Extremely ambitious. Weaves conspiracy, psychology, imperial history, and the collapse of collective dreams. It’s hard to put words to how significant this work is.
Bonus
Once you watch a few of the above, you’ll begin to notice a few recurring “Curtis-isms”. I grabbed this Bingo card for them from a reddit post a while back. Sometimes I sprinkle these in during work meetings to give myself a small laugh :)
