Perfect Christmas Presents 4/5: Can’t get you out of my head. An emotional history of the modern world. by Adam Curtis
I watched this 6 part documentary 6 days in a row. It tells the story of how we got into the polarised fear-ridden, fragile present — in a highly emotional, deep and surprising way.
Can’t get you out of my head is just the right film for the right time and it will make an easy last-minute Christmas present, as it is freely available (in continental Europe) on Youtube.
Adam Curtis is a long-standing BBC documentary filmmaker and made his name with a documentary on the history of the individual self. This new series tells the global history of the last 70 years, with a focus on the super-powers: the US, China, Russia and (post-colonial) Great Britain. It’s a story you might feel you know, but here it is told along very unconventional fresh lines, with many surprising images from pop culture, which magnificently evoke the mood of the times.*
There are far too many interesting perspectives in these 10+ hours to summarize here, but the documentary is especially convincing in explaining why there is so much fear, mistrust and emptiness in our world, and how power became so abstract and dysfunctional. Curtis shows how the narrative of Western exceptionalism and superiority, as well as a global doctrine of individualism and the practices of consumer culture, alienated humans from deeper meaning in live and destroyed the social fabric of communities. He skillfully outlines how politics retreated in favour of global financial institutions and lost touch with the population. You can’t get away from this film without feeling that the current info-wars and disinformation campaigns are not a symptom of new technology per se, but the natural outcome of decades of weakening democratic fibre.
At times, the videos really swept me away, hitting my with their deep emotional truths. Documentary as therapy.
You find the first part of the documentary here (and all sequences as well).
- Thanks to Hanno Burmester for recommending the series to me.
If you want to add another autobiographical perspective to this story, you might enjoy the frightful insider-look into Chinese capitalism and politics offered by Desmund Shum in Red Roulette. I listened to it on audible.
