Adam Curtis’s career feels like a series of glitches at the heart of the BBC. His films are completely separated from the output of this channel. The first episode of his series "The Trap" (2007) covers the rise of game theory under the paranoia during the Cold War. It starts with a chilling title card ("Humans will always betray you") and is broadcast directly on BBC 2 after Crufts—, an extension of an international dog beauty contest.
Adam Curtis
Now, however, Curtis’s films can be obtained democratically on the Internet and are wildly welcomed by young people. They are documentaries on the surface, but his method is closer to poetry or video art than traditional narrative TV programs. Curtis also carefully avoided the stipulation of political labels, sometimes criticized the instability of capitalism with revolutionary Marxism, and sometimes he was a liberal technical utopian. However, in his infectious soundtrack and baroque visual style, Curtis is consistent with unwavering romanticism. He wants the audience to have a feeling-not simply explain the world.
I can’t get you out of my mind poster
Curtis’s new series "Can’t Get You Out of My Head" is a real epic. This six-part eight-hour series depicts the ups and downs of society from collectivism to individualism. His unrestricted access to BBC archives gave each episode an all-powerful eye, which Curtis used to locate and explain power, and the change of hands of power uprooted the world.
It all started with a sentence by David Gray Bo, using Curtis’s trademark all-capital Helvetica bold font-"The most secret truth in the world is that it is made by us and can be easily made into different shapes". With the development of the plot, the series tries to understand why this ultimate truth is really hidden, not dazzling. Through each episode (the last episode weighs 120 minutes), Curtis explores this issue emotionally through personal stories that try to change the modern world (from Russian dissident Edward Limonov to Tupac’s mother and former Panther member Afeni Shakur).
In the interview, Curtis told jacobin magazine about his new drama series, populist left wing, conspiracy theory and his love for music.
You subtitled this new series: "Emotional History of the Modern World". Why "emotion"?
AC：I want to explain why we are so anxious about the future. We know that we are dissatisfied with what we have today. But no one is willing to propose an alternative. I want to explain this paralysis through the rise of individualism, which makes people feel anxious and lonely, and individualism was supposed to liberate them.
In our personal time, our feelings are placed at the center, and we are taught that our inner feelings are the most important. In fact, consumerism also responds to this. Therefore, I want to describe a history of "emotion", because I am interested in the idea that your feelings are related to your system-this is really a forgotten idea.
Your previous series of works followed the narrative convention to some extent, but this series feels more like a collage, and the stories are intertwined in a nonlinear way. Why did you choose to do this?
AC：Part of the reason is that I am restless and I want to try something different. But mainly because I want to do something that feels more like a novel, a multi-part novel, just like what they wrote in the 19th century.
One of the people you pay attention to is Abu Zubaydah, whose brain was reduced to a random image by the torture of the CIA. This series feels a bit like being told through Abu Zubeda’s brain.
In fact, at the end of the film, I had a narrator who said, "We have all become like Abu Zubaida’s brain". But I deleted it because I thought it was too hard and I should let people see it for themselves. And I was right-you did see it. However, the problem about Zubaida is not torture, but that he was stuck in his brain by a shell fragment in 1991 and had such an effect that his experience is no longer meaningful. I think we have all become like this.
This series seems to be deliberately chaotic and disorderly, but history is also chaotic and disorderly. Is there a conflict between making a coherent narrative film and keeping a chaotic description of history?
AC：I want to do both. I want to describe the feeling of living in history in the era of individualism, where you have to rely on yourself and try to make all this meaningful.
You described this personal era, which flourished after World War II and is said to have liberated society, but now you say it is declining and it is no longer interesting as an individual. Can the genie be put back in the bottle?
AC：No-you can’t put it back. People are quite afraid of large-scale and twentieth-century collective efforts to change the world, which often leads to terror. The personal era comes from mass democracy as a response to mass democracy. But it actually leads to individuals who are deprived of power. They all want something different, but they don’t know how to get it. But I think another thing will appear soon, a new kind of politics, which allows you to be an expressive individual, but it is also part of something bigger than yourself. If we can regain control of the Internet from venture capital funds, then this is a good start.
You often talk about the shift from politics to culture, where radicalism just sits there and makes a lot of noise. Well, I am deeply suspicious of radicalism in art. With the rise of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, leftists and liberals retreated to culture, thinking that they could change things from there. But things have not changed. I believe that the function of art is to express its times beautifully. Interestingly, it now beautifully expresses the paralysis of our time. Culture is a comfort blanket for radicals to cling to, so that they can avoid the terrible fact that they have no answer.
Has Covid-19 uprooted power?
AC：Covid-19 showed quite cruelly that the closer you are to power, the less likely you are to die. This understanding is shocking, and it will be as profound as the financial crisis in 2008.
Bernie sanders-and Britain’s jeremy corbyn-led the populist left-wing movement, trying to awaken the traditional collectivism, but they all failed. Why do you think that is?
AC：You must distinguish between the two. Sanders is likely to win the election in 2016. I remember what he said was almost exactly the same as Trump-talking to the white working class and how they were betrayed by the think tank in Washington. Although, in the primary election in 2020, his language has changed. He gave up talking to people that liberals are very afraid of.
I really don’t know Corbin well enough, but I remember talking to Labour activists during the 2019 election. What shocked me was their contempt for Brexit voters. I didn’t vote for Brexit, but I understand why people do it-not just because of anger, but because it is a tactical way to declare your alienation from the mainstream politics managed by technocrats. I know that many gin-drinking colonels in Surrey also voted for Brexit, but the elephant in the room is that all these former Labour voters have suddenly become stupid in the eyes of liberal metropolises.
You can’t deny these people, you must take them seriously. You don’t have to agree with them or believe that their racism is correct, but you must take them seriously and understand their feelings. The same is true in the United States, where Trump supporters are dismissed as being fooled by Putin, leaving them in a crumbling infrastructure and a booming opioid epidemic.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Putin. In this series, you compare the story of "TongRumen" with anonymous Q as a different way to react to the deadlock of Trump’s failed promise.
AC：When you run out of stories-that’s when you get conspiracy theories. There are many people who can’t face up to what is happening. People will not tell how Trump was chosen by Americans instead of Russia, or that he was actually very useless and was not blocked by pedophiles Satan in deep countries. I think these conspiracy theories are suitable for The New York Times, because they increase their reading, and also for intelligence agencies, because they are suddenly known as part of the resistance against Trump.
Back to collectivism, what about the society envisioned by radical Islamism?
AC：What we westerners don’t understand is that modern Islamic radicalism, which began in the late 1950s, was completely unable to bring the masses into it by the mid-1990s-maybe not in Iran, but it has completely failed in the Sunni world. The attack on the World Trade Center was not the result of a powerful movement, but the lashing out of a failed movement. The Sunni masses had not stood up at that time-not in Egypt, nor in Algeria.
But these tendencies are collectivist in thought?
AC：The question of our time is this-how do you manage a world of millions of individuals, millions of screaming pigs-how do you get them together? There is a saying that it is not the politicians’ fault that we got this withered managerialism-it is just a way to deal with millions of pigs desperately. We are little monsters. Seriously, we are.
I want to ask you a question about ghosts. M.R. James has a story called "Oh, whistle, I will come to you, my boy", and you are influenced.
AC：The inscription on the whistle that the hero of that story found on the beach-"What’s coming?" (What is this that is coming)-almost became the title of this series. But this is not a stupid thing. M.R. James wrote these stories in the 1890s, which I think is a similar era to the present. The British Empire is collapsing. With this feeling of fear and guilt, something will come back to haunt you. I think the United States has felt this way since the Vietnam War.
It’s a bit like what Mark Fisher wrote-the ghost of the past came back to cover the future.
AC：I know Mark. We used to meet in a cafe next to Liverpool Street Station and have a long talk about all this. We appeared on the stage together in Berlin, I think. But back to this idea about ghosts, I use certain characters, because they have the idea that you can force ghosts out of people’s minds and create a new society. But they forget that the most important thing is the ghost in their own heads.
The same is true of Brexit, who are troubled by a fictional and idealized vision of British history. Dominic Cummings (Boris Johnson’s former adviser, who is considered to be the mastermind of the Brexit movement) entered Britain through nationalism, which is something that liberals are very afraid of.
This is why Edward Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party is so symbolic in Russia.
AC：Exactly. Limonov is not a very nice person, but he did put forward an interesting point, that is, unless the left wing either uses nationalism or creates a stronger new myth, they will not have enough people on their side.
The last message in the series is likely to be quite promising. It says that if we can become more confident, then we can create a new vision for the future. This makes me feel strange, because it sounds like self-help, and you seem to despise this kind of thing?
AC：No, it’s the opposite of self-help. It is "stop imagining what you can do to yourself and start imagining what we can do to change the world". The starting point of self-help is that you can transform society by transforming yourself, but what we end up with is a society full of anxiety. I hope people can get out of this matter of self-help. That’s why I quoted David Gray Bo.
Your film has a very wide audience and many disgruntled young people are watching it. What do you want to say to a confused and depressed 16-year-old boy?
AC：Nothing. The last thing they want is for me to tell them what to do. I know I have such an audience, but I don’t know why. When I was filming All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I heard that children broke into the house occupied by Croydon (a town in South London) and held an all-night party to watch my movie. It was strange, and then I realized that I had broken through.
Poster "Everything is guarded by the grace machine of love"
Your movies can also be silly.
AC：Yes, I can be silly. But you must keep a straight face. You can’t let people know that you are trying to be funny, because it’s not funny. But back to the original question, there are also old people who like my work. The people who never seem to like it are political journalists. They are not interested at all. They can’t understand why I put music in it.
It’s time for us to talk about music. Why do you choose tracks instead of using original soundtracks?
AC：Basically, I want to create an emotion. But this is not cynicism. It’s always my favorite music. For a while, I decided to end the series with Zombie by the cranberry band, because it seemed appropriate. But the terrible fact is that I don’t like that song. Just before this series was about to air, I was lying in bed thinking about this song and couldn’t sleep. Finally, I replaced it with Til I Gain Control Again by This Mortal Coil.
Why did you choose this?
AC: Because it makes me cry.
Is music the first? Have you ever changed what you want to write because you want to use a song?
AC: Not in general. I tend to use images. I will use a piece of music to oppose it, and then sometimes I will adjust something to suit this song. This is an organic process, but sometimes they just work. In "Lake of Bitterness" (a film about America and Islam made by Curtis in 2015), there is a david bowie song called "The Bewlay Brothers". I put it in and it was a success. I’m never literal. You see, I’m emotional. Another example is that in the first movie of the new series, I used the German version of Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and at first I used the version sung by Donovan.
Bitter Lake
You also used Burial’s Forgive, who is a frequent visitor to your soundtrack.
AC：Yes, that song is very cute. But "Come Down to Us" is the best one. It is one of the great works of our time. But there are many Burial songs that I don’t like, because they are too dubstep.
I like that you use The Specials’ Do Nothing. That song is cheerful, but it is also quite nihilistic. The same is true of Sex Pistols’s Who Killed Bambi from The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle.
AC：I want to put skinheads in. Look. I always thought skinheads were said badly. I used to be a skinhead when I was young, because I like reggae and ragga (reggae branch, combined with rap) music. Skinheads are ambiguous figures, and I am attracted by ambiguous figures.
To tell the truth, a lot of this music, it sounds like "Adam Curtis Music".
AC：[Laughter] Well, I think we all have certainty and uncertainty about our personality. I’m really not sure about my writing style. I’m really not good at writing, and I’m troubled by it. But I’m very sure about my taste in music.
Can you tell me something about your editing process? The image in my mind is that you-a person-are sitting in front of a huge control panel and gradually accumulating copyright invoices. Is this real life?
AC：Corresponding to what?
Well, as long as you snap your fingers, you will have a team of student volunteers to browse the BBC files for you. But you won’t do it.
AC：What’s the point? If you draw my career, it is completely connected with the digitalization of everything. When you start digitizing images, it’s easy to rotate them quickly. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. I have thousands of hours of videos on many hard drives.
How do you arrange your hard disk? Are they marked with things like "dark train shots" or "city view at night"?
AC：[Laughs] No. I read one day that Amazon’s execution center randomly stores items because it is more efficient. My stuff is also very random. I have a coding system, but I also have a memory of visual patterns, so I always know where everything is. My main rule is that if it makes me cry or want to dance, then it works.
Back to your use of language, what I like is how you speak in these grand ways-you put the world in epic historical terms.
AC：Do you still remember Marianne Williamson (American writer) in the primary election of American Democratic Party? I like her because she speaks in epic historical terms. Because of this, I have a lot of trouble with my American liberal friends. Back to M.R. James and "What’s coming?" This is coming. Some people put this uncertainty and confusion on a big and historic level. Britain needs the same thing. I mean, now Labour’s argument makes me want to cry.
Why is this?
AC：Because it is speaking in utilitarian terms set by the think tank. Political needs are exciting. It can be exciting because it can tell a powerful story. We are eager for this kind of story and this kind of excitement.
Yes, there are indeed many revolutionary attempts based on grand ideas that have led to terrible results. This is an indisputable fact, and it has penetrated into people’s consciousness. But it is also true that many other things based on grand ideas and revolutions have led to amazing things: for example, the United States, or mass democracy, or the welfare state. These are all born out of grand ideas. So, we are in this pessimistic world, and we seize those failed examples and say that this means that you can never change the world. But what I want to say by quoting David Gray Bo is: Yes, we all created bad things, but we also created great things.
Original link: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/Adam-Curtis-BBC-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-interview.
