February 19, 2021 - 7:00am

There are few better arguments for the licence fee than a new Adam Curtis documentary, and his latest offering, the six-part Can’t Get You Out of My Head, available now on the iPlayer, exemplifies why. It is impossible to imagine such a strange and discursive project, so intentionally tangled and impenetrable, on commercial television. For all the corporation’s flaws, only the BBC would broadcast such a work, in its own way a quiet form of British soft power.

Yet as with any Curtis documentary, there are dissenting voices. His films, so immediately recognisable as the auteur’s work, are easy to spoof. Instead of changing his style with each film, he has heightened it to the point of absurdity. His arguments are so circuitous, the links he draws so implausible, that his work is easy to dismiss as nonsense. It is tempting to say of his films of ideas, like Dr Johnson said of a dog walking upon his hind legs, that “it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

And yet… To attempt to critique the logic of his arguments is to misunderstand him. It is simply not true in any meaningful way to claim, for example, as he does, that Cecil Sharp’s collecting of English folk songs enabled the rise of ISIS. Attempting to parse his narratives for “truth” is just a category error: his films are art, designed to provoke, and shock us into seeing our world differently. Our rulers are corrupt and misguided, he warns us; all our institutions are failing: we need to forge a new path, and by doing so we will create new horrors.

Curtis’ medium is in fact his message: a sprawling, discursive, analogue Borgesian fiction constructed from film and VHS tape, marking his rejection of the digital world. The sudden jump cuts, the intentionally uncomfortable juxtapositions of footage and music, the shifts in tone, the leaps from grand ideas to grainy, blood-soaked footage are crafted to be discomfiting, alienating, disorientating. He constructs grand, absurd, all-encompassing theories of everything to deconstruct the failed ideologies we are trapped in, conspiracy theories that dissect conspiracy theories; an absurdist, he highlights the failure of liberal postmodernity from his improbable perch at BBC3.

The clues to his purpose are in his script: his characters, jihadists, fascists, murderers, outsiders, fellow dissidents against late modernity, are sympathetically portrayed. They are imprisoned by the “dreamlike myths” of modern politics, “trapped in a perpetual now, haunted by fragments of memory;” their memories are a “mass of fragments, nothing linked them, they made no sense;” His style is central to his purpose: his films are a bricolage, “extraordinary dreamlike stories built out of fragments of truth and fiction,” assembled from the misfiring synapses of modernity. Like the characters he follows, Edward Limonov or Dominic Cummings, his work is designed to shock the system into crashing down.

Like anthropology, Curtis’ films are crafted to make the familiar strange: it’s only fitting then, that his latest work is bookended by two quotes from the late anthropologist and anarchist thinker David Graeber, and culminates in his observation that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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