Can't Get You Out of My Head

This should be required viewing for any person planning to join an organisation or belief system of any kind which has a 'Grand Plan' to change the world. The last century should have taught everyone where those sort of cults always lead but here we are.

First thing to say is that I've only watched the first episode so far. I loved his previous two documentaries, Hypernormalisation and Bitter Lake. I find it very difficult to describe Adam Curtis' style, but I'll have a go. It as if he has discovered a massive archive of TV and Movie reels, has spent several years watching them, then has taken numerous clips, stitched them together, and then concocted a theme that connects these seemingly random events together, in order to make a coherent story. He then uses music to great effect, which creates a kind of dissonance. It's brilliantly done. A visual treat. I feel after watching the first episode that my IQ has been improved by a couple of percentiles, but this may be part of the trick. You get the feeling when watching his documentaries that there is something even deeper, that you just can't quite grasp, which makes you want for more. I found myself walking the dog later, and reappraising what I had seen in my mind, and then later again seeking to look up on Wikipedia and Google some of the issues that were only touched on during the film, from such diverse subjects as the Voynich Manuscript, to William Keswick & Lord Kindersely. A must see series.

This is dense and at times feels all over the place, but it comes together and you'll have moments of sublime horror and comedy on the journey. It's cynical and dark at times but illuminating and powerful at the same time. Great soundtrack too!

How come we live in a world where toxic nonsense like Q-Anon is so widely believed? To address this question, Adam Curtis has made his most ambitious documentary series yet, essentially a personal history of the modern world. His thesis appears to be that the answer lies in the loss of political ambition coupled with the ever growing power of the new technology (whose greatest power, he suggests, is to convince us that it can indeed control us). As usual, he shows a great aptitude for digging out extraordinary, obscure stories and moreover finding great footage to illustrate them. Also as usual, the narrative is sprawling and Curtis has a certain join-the-dots tendency of his own that might not seem completely alien to that of the conspiracy theorists that are his part of his subject matter. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this programme is that it takes as unquestioned that the story of just about every major country is one of decline and failure. Planet earth faces many major problems, not least global warming, but the world has never been perfect and to summarise recent history solely in terms of "things fall apart" while urging the populous to adopt (unspecified new forms of) societal optimism is frankly bizarre. Ultimately, Curtis' conclusions are of less value than the extraordinary journey he takes to reach them. He himself certainly does not lack ambition; there's a self-indulgence here, but also a hundred strange tales that make you think about the world.

The tapestry that sits protected within its depressurised security glass seems enchantingly rich and lush, but when it's no longer attended to then it suddenly and rapidly begins to wither away until just the slightest wind is enough to detach the fibres into nothing more than a flailing and ruined mess. The same thing that captivated you suddenly becomes indistinct from anything else you saw before it... 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' is a work of art that is mesmerising just as much as it is troubling. As a Brit that has suffered in what I would call an 'empty meaningless life' then I recognise everything that Adam Curtis is divulging to us and from the merest mention of its subject matter until it's inevitable conclusion. This docu-series could of been told in an invariable amount of different ways and yet this 'mini-encyclopedia of reality' strikes chords that make it feel and seem so damned evidently true. A masterful production edited in AC's typical 'shock therapy fashion'. My advice is simply turn off the lights, get comfortable, and join the dots. Note: The BBC deserve a big shout out for showing this. They themselves could be guilty of using subterfuge and/or reverse psychology in playing this but whatever, 'props' are due because I thoroughly enjoyed this...