Review by Aster Gilbert
On February 1, 2021 a military coup broke out in Myanmar. That same day a video circulated of a young woman performing an outdoor dance workout. While she bopped to the music, military vehicles raced past a blockade near the parliament building directly behind her. She continued her workout unabated. On Twitter a few people jokingly described the video as the long-awaited new film by British documentarian Adam Curtis. For those familiar with Curtis’s work, the comparison to Myanmar Dance Workout during the military coup Full video is uncanny. The short clip contains elements that define Curtis’s signature style: an individual doing the work of self-actualization while the transformations of state power unfurl directly behind her, all scored by a track that could be called ironic if it were an intentional choice. One could just as easily project onto the video an apolitical focus on the self that enables the re-entrenchment of political power. Whether she knew or cared matters less than what the image can do for us—for our imagined Curtis. It reflects a philosophy that permeates Curtis’ own use of such footage, a technique that he has been rightly criticized for that constructs an omnipotent observation of global events against the myopia of an individualism that is unable to see what Curtis—and by extension us—sees.
The actual new work by Curtis was released eleven days later. And while the reading of Myanmar Dance Workout as Curtis-esq remains apt, it contrasts with the newer directions attempted by Can’t Get You Out of My Head. The six-part series marks the first serious attempt by Curtis to redress the omnipotent archivist castigating the dancing dupes of history. The series is bookended by a quote from the late David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” It’s a message of empowerment and while it lacks any clear revolutionary program within the film, it’s a firm rejection of the central ideas explored in Can’t Get You Out of My Head: that any attempt to change the world for the better will always result in misery. Right out of the gate Curtis describes the current situation as a co-production between those in power and the rest of us. But unlike the criticisms of failed utopians and self-absorbed individualists that populate his past works the new series is marked by a palpable sympathy for failed revolutionaries—some of them anyway. From Afeni and Tupac Shakur to the Baader-Meinhof gang, Curtis shifts the frustration away from revolutionaries and re-directs it towards the overwhelming forces of technocratic states and global economic power that not only assassinate the revolutionaries, but co-opt their dreams.
At a staggering 8+ hours, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a sprawling peripatetic chronicle of the mutations of global power and the scattered forces of resistance. It’s a familiar continuation of Curtis’s ongoing project of tracing how ideas and their acolytes have transformed societies over the last century. Curtis takes the approach of asking how did we get here, which he then attempts to answer by tracing the genesis of ideas and their consequences. But it’s difficult to say what, exactly, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is about. The film’s subtitle, An Emotional History of the Modern World, signals an attempt to historicize the emotional fallout of over a century of failed revolutionary ideals and colonial fantasies. But often the series is more interested in the hollowing out of political power by the global financial systems that emerged near the end of the Cold War. It’s about the rising resentment of populations toward their governments and the fluctuations of conspiratorial thinking to explain the current state of things. It’s about the long shadow of colonialism and racism. It’s about the inability of those in power to address the cascading crises of the twenty-first century and the rise of ethno-nationalism in response to this stasis. It’s about the twin forces of collectivism and individualism.
If that sounds like a lot that’s because it is. Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a crucial autopsy of the present moment that is rushed and overextended. It forgets more threads than it remembers, crams too much into its single episodes, and makes leaps between subjects that often appear staggering if one is unfamiliar with Curtis’s other films. The new series both succeeds and fails through its relationship to Curtis’s body of work. It tries to synthesize his entire career, but often results in bewildering passages that remain undercooked. In fact, apart from the new material dealing with Trump and Brexit, nearly every subject in the new series is better argued in other films. The influence of Cold War systems theory on technocratic methods of population management is meticulously laid out in both The Trap (2007) and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011). The legacy of the British Empire and the interdependent development of American neoconservatism and radical Islam is forcefully argued in The Mayfair Set (1999), The Power of Nightmares (2004), and Bitter Lake (2015). I could go on. These works succeed by having a far narrower scope that allows for the unfurling of richer details. In his latest, Curtis risks undermining the veracity of his own arguments by coming off as a “Wikipedia rabbit hole” filmmaker—the most common criticism I’ve seen of Can’t Get You Out of My Head and one that reduces the work to a sum total of its missteps while ignoring its many strengths. Curtis conjures an image of a charismatic Wellesian figure talking to himself in the editing booth, surrounded by mountains of film cannisters. In the tradition of the British essay film, Curtis situates himself as an idiosyncratic voice of authority. His signature elocution guides the viewer through his accelerated montage. History rushes past you, more like a Scorsese epic than a dispatch of “This Is London Calling.“ Curtis depicts the cyclical repetition of ideologies with a cyclical repetition of phrases and images. His visual and narrative recurrences provide a sense of grounding for his argument, with patterns slowly taking shape in the non-stop torrent of images. The images become metonymic, standing in for concepts or reference points back to entire episodes. An aesthetic of helplessness emerges, of ceaseless mutation, and all of it is mesmerizing. It is, for better or worse, highly seductive filmmaking. While the style pins you down, the narration details failure after failure, producing a sense of paralysis. But the hope, as it is said, is in viewing the work. This is a diagnosis, not a prescription. But there’s also a sense of play in Curtis’s editing. This is an angry film that barely hides its contempt for the ruling classes, for the hubris of computer scientists, and uses smash cuts, needle drops, and on-screen text to agitate the viewer and indict the systems that we’ve inherited.
The suspicion of Curtis’s methods frequently leads to dismissals of what he reveals. The result of Curtis’s dynamic style is that he presents his arguments entirely as if they are his own, rather than being corroborated by historians, economists, and philosophers. One would be better served by reading David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality (not to mention the works of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson). But despite its overlap with these texts, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is marked by the curious omission of the word neoliberalism. The backbone of the series is a critique of the neoliberal revolution and how it facilitated the largest upward redistribution of wealth in history. Curtis charts how the policies born out of this ideology have left entire populations outcast and starving, like the rural opioid crisis and urban industrial rot of America. The series makes an urgent argument here, situating the resurgence of ethno-nationalism as a response to the ravages of neoliberalism. As the series’s gargantuan history illustrates, centrist technocrats are unable to see or imagine a solution—or even to fully grasp the causes of the problems. As the final episode touches upon, Donald Trump’s election and Brexit came as a shock only to those out of touch with the grievances of large swathes of the population. The myopia of technocratic centrism has left a vacuum to explain the economic ravages of neoliberalism, and this vacuum has been filled with the seductive elixir of ethno-nationalism, driven by its romanticized fantasies of the past.
At its best, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a timely indictment of neoliberal centrism, regardless of what Curtis calls it. The analysis presented across these six episodes, however messy, are essential. Where the series leaves off is where we now stand, facing down the barrel of a gun. The prevailing narratives that Trump and Brexit were crazy anomalies and the election of Biden has closed the door on that chapter are as romantic and out of touch as the imperialist dreams of an idyllic past. Curtis may not get it all right (the Iraq war was widely protested!) and he may have done it better in the past, but this attempt to grapple with the overwhelming history that brought us to this moment is worth wrestling with. And it’s not just the information that matters here. Curtis presents a cinematic language for depicting the current epoch of information overload, fake news, postmodern confusion, and accelerationism. To return to Graeber, these are all things we have to navigate in order to make the world differently.