Can't Get You Out of My Head

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.

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!

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.

Schitzophrenic, complex, profound and revealing. Seemingly unrelated stories intertwine with others to tell new stories if their own. Reality and fantasy intertwine and influence eachother on an international scale. I've only learned of Alex Curtis recently, but I can comfortably say he's a creative genius.

Keeps you interested, comes at you with surprises, creeps up on you, then blows your mind.