Can't Get You Out of My Head
Literary intelligentsia are always echoing the same phrase, over and over, to describe a particularly roiling media encounter as if they think it spilled out of their brain and their brain only. It goes like this: “There is a time in my life before such and such thing and there is a time in my life after such and such thing.” I hate this phrase and all its canned inauthenticity for many reasons—not least of which is its suggestion of the author’s flimsy and impressionable worldview—and yet I can’t deny that there is a time in my life before I encountered Adam Curtis and there is a time after.
For the uninitiated, welcome. Perhaps you remember Kanye West’s much discussed tweet a few years ago imploring his Yeezy-wearing followers to watch The Century of Self, an iconic Curtis film that investigates the Freudian origins of our consumptive culture. It’s also an accessible point of entry to an auteur whose truth bombs have the propensity to overwhelm as they ceaselessly force you to reexamine everything you thought you thought you knew about the world.
Fundamentally, Curtis’s films follow a standard formula: combining archival, often unseen BBC footage with his auditory insights and the occasional synth-pop interlude to entwine a visual essay capable of persuading even the most resolute of psyches. But like any good narrator, Curtis presents you with an incomplete picture. The viewer’s experience is neither easy nor passive: you must actively draw your own conclusions and make what you will out of his hypotheses.
The first Curtis movie I saw was his last, Hypernormalisation, which came out right before the 2016 election and set into orbit my persistent fixation with anything he’s ever touched (including a hypnotic collaboration with Massive Attack played at their live shows). Travis recently alluded to another favorite, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.
For the last eighteen months I’ve maniacally scoured the internet for mention of his forthcoming project. I set up a Google alert in his name. I went into psychic withdrawal, unsatisfied by the flush landscape of low-rent content and concluded that no documentarian will ever make anything as good as Adam Curtis. Not even close.
On Thursday, the first episode of his new series drops. It’s called Can’t Get You Out of My Head. I’m legally prohibited from encouraging piracy; however, if you’re reading this post and you know how to jailbreak the BBC iPlayer, which prohibits play outside of the UK, I won’t not watch if you upload the episode to YouTube or send it directly to my inbox (it should go without saying that if either of these scenarios are realized, I will never turn you in because I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out than snitch).
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to think,” reads a characteristic Curtisism. And there’s beauty in the decay, power in our collective vulnerability. I hope your radicalization hurts as much as it sets you free.—Eleanor Sheehan
