Something unexpected happened

How do you solve a problem like Adam Curtis? Every new work bearing his auteurial stamp brings with it, almost in anticipation of the actual product, an avalanche of self-conscious Takes. One would think, from the huffing and eyerolling on behalf of some portion of the audience apparently gulled into watching, that he doesn’t have a fanbase at all. And, indeed, with the right gestures Curtis’s oeuvre is easily dismissed. White, male, patrician (that haute-BBC voiceover), pseudo-intellectual or at least unwilling to bat around more than the surface details of his theoretical sources, set to the invariant music selection of your average Fifty Quid Man: all unforgivable sins. His reputation is best indicated by his place in an unfortunately now-deleted tweet about a certain type of man in London art circles, who’s in his 30s, keeps putting off marriage to his long-term girlfriend, is “not egregiously misogynistic but they probably do not read many books by women” and “watch[es] Adam Curtis documentaries to keep up with the sneery conversations on Facebook”. And yet, these criticisms never quite have the corrosive effect you might expect on the substance of the work. They seem beside the point: yes, Curtis is often silly, potentially vapid, on the verge of self-parody, his films sometimes barely coherent at the level of the voiceover, let alone in the relationship between scripted narrative and image; but so what? The problem is, in part, that the witnesses for the prosecution, in their rush to be unimpressed, mischaracterise the all-important tone of Curtis’s films—there sometimes doesn’t seem to be much in the late films besides tone. As Mark Sinker pointed out in 2008, the combination of withering contempt for the British establishment with the way “moral and political seriousness have always to jostle with dry or daft jokes” recalls precedents in The Goon Show as much as any engagé documentary. Indeed, the unconcerned drift in his most recent work between music-video montage, earnest but detached explanation, outright polemic and bizarre gags tarries, at its best, with utter derangement.

I was thinking about this recently because his new series (or long film, as I tend to think of them), Can’t Get You Out of my Head, at once affirms and dissolves the worst suspicions of Curtis. I’d put off watching because I’d found his last film, the nearly 3-hour Hypernormalisation, a vindication at last of the worst criticism, and the new series, at 8 hours long, would provide plenty of rope with which to hang himself. Instead, …Out of my Head seems to crystallise Curtis’ strangest and least defensible excesses into a narrative form that makes them virtues within its own framework. The series’ subtitle, “An emotional history of the modern world”, is already prone to unpleasant interpretation. Historians of emotion will, perhaps rightly, feel that Curtis is dilettantish and cavalier about the relationships between key categories like “history” and “emotions”, let alone that weasel phrase “the modern world”. The series lingers more on the mutation and transmission of political concepts of the conventional history-of-ideas genre than any phenomenology of an era where, as the postmodernists always maintained, “emotions” disappeared anyway in favour of floating “affects”. It entwines, in uneven congregations, claims made on very different registers: the psychology and intellectual history of political elites, the feelings of specially selected ordinary people, the self-conceptions of cognitive psychology as a discipline, political science, the history of technology, the “mass psychology”—to use an antique term—of democratic formations in their collapse. The characteristic sweeping claim—“but no-one believed in anything any longer”—follows from the ur-Curtis indicator of a causality that never actually clarifies its mechanisms—“but then something very strange happened”. Each episode shuffles in parallel between narrative threads separated by space and time. As a new episode introduces yet more narrative elements, touching on previous ones in an almost casual fashion, as if returning to a dangling anecdote, the viewer expects them to be drawn together slowly as the series inches towards its denouement, but this isn’t precisely what happens. The connections, for example, between colonial power, the cellular system of aggregate individuality that Gilles Deleuze called “the societies of control”, and the surveillance-pleasure networks of social media, emerge very slowly through repeated passages over the same material, as if a pattern were emerging from the movement of a loom. Explanation, which the authoritative presence of the voiceover promises, is as elusive as footnotes in a woven scarf.

But this ambiguity is productive for the kind of “story” Curtis purports to tell. Where, after all, is the “subject” of history now? After the endpoint of liberal capitalist society’s self-realisation, as Francis Fukuyama thought it, individuals supposedly make history, with every man an Elon Musk if he only rises and grinds. The era of structures is over. And yet, structures return in fury: the structures of the environment, the global banking system, party politics, the residual divisions of geopolitics (most obviously in the Middle East) that form only one legacy of the long twentieth century. “Terrible ghosts from the past”, in Curtis’s repeated words, as the montage drifts from anxious individuals to archival spectres of Klan rallies taken from Birth of a Nation. Agency, that hot potato of discourse, disappears wherever people seek it—people’s heads, the libraries of the powerful, the temporary arrangements of Tahrir Square, that strange phantom Curtis calls “mass democracy”—only to reappear somewhere else. Individualism, the terrible gift of neoliberal politics that remade the world in its image, falls victim to the reconstituted class power on which it founded itself, dissolving, by what Curtis doesn’t recognise as “the cunning of reason”, into technocratic disempowerment. It’s appropriate, then, that Curtis’ story should take place everywhere and nowhere, with the voiceover a sly mask, a placemarker. Julian Duane, in a brief piece on …Out of my Head, compares the montage strategy of Curtis’s increasingly lengthy work to that of Delillo and Pynchon. Their novels attempted to figure the post-war world-system in its unknowable proliferation, down to the archaic horror that the past that “story” names exerts on the present (the early modern Tristero conspiracy in Crying of Lot 49, the traces of German colonialism in Gravity’s Rainbow, the deadly trajectory of the JFK assassination in Libra and Underworld). Postmodernist theory always exaggerated when it claimed that the subject had been extinguished, rendered into a mere node for intensities, for in Pynchon especially it remains an illusory centre, as subjectivity spreads its interpretative filters across the whole unreadable world (Pynchon’s famed “paranoia”) and becomes an engine for the dispersive movement of style. The same impulse is at work in …Out of my Head, but now in the strange and deeply tragic key that arrives with subjective destitution—the “structure of feeling” of a work that finds itself at the very furthest edge of liberal art’s unhappy consciousness.