Can't Get You Out of My Head

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

The good: The individual stories, especially in the first part, are superbly interesting. Many other montage parts are informative, some are mesmerizing to look at and listen to, and the overall feel of the documentary series is almost hypnotic. The issue I have with it though are its generalizations and some of the conclusions and supposed insights, which are sometimes obvious, and sometimes just derived out of flimsy reasoning, derived from somewhat dubious or arbitrary premises.

The individual/collective dichotomy is strained at best, and could be challenged by many alternative arguments in the context of history and sociology. The technology part is interesting, but there is nothing new there. The political commentaries are also standard issue and a bit all over the place. The conspiracies narrative, again, selective and based on certain opinions and aspects, ignoring others, which is the approach in the film overall. That's fine it it is supposed to show only the author's POV, but here it seems to aspire to reveal some deep universal truths, and in that it fails through a faulty - or deliberately tendentious - methodology.

Overall, it's a fascinating series, but I think the author overreached in his ambition to tell a grand narrative that explains everything.

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...

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.