It’s that voice. The one from The Power of Nightmares (2004) and HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021). Emotionally neutral, almost deadpan; those deliberate cadences, the Oxbridge assurance, with something ever so slightly off. And it’s coming from the man in the room with me, Adam Curtis – the BBC’s coolest asset, the cult documentary filmmaker, the critical thinker who inspired an entire generation of YouTube video essayists and hopeful journalists, whose films play like the greatest pop video you’ve ever seen, while telling you stories about power and money and how the world truly is that stay with you indefinitely.
He greets me in a white shirt, blazer, modern cargo pants, and a pair of Converse, like a professor on sabbatical. One room I enter accidentally is empty except for a table stacked with books. In the kitchen, he begins to enthusiastically explain a tray of seedlings he’s raising like botanical children, some of them in the “hospital bed”, suffering. Mid-sentence, he remembers he has to check something and disappears into another room. Loud music starts blaring; it’s The Bug’s “Angry”, an agitated fusion of dubstep and dancehall. “So many tings dat get mi angry and/ So many tings dat get mi mad…” echoes off the tall ceilings of the house. A couple of minutes later, he returns unfazed.
“Spotify’s playlists – which apparently it makes all its money from – are just ambient backdrops to your life now. Have you noticed this?” the 70-year-old asks me from across the table in his Soho townhouse office. “Hanging with your friends: 50 songs.” I start to say that yes, I have noticed this, and instead of hanging with friends, we listen to songs that provide “vibes” rather than companionship. But before I can finish that response, his calm, authoritative voice comes in: “As though you were hanging with your friends, but you’re not.”
In a conversation with Curtis, there is limited time to process each of his thoughts. Like, “a lot of things that we blame on the internet were happening already before the internet”, or “in 20 years’ time, they’ll look back and the symbol of our age will be headphones”.
Incisive observations like these offhand ones are developed and channelled into films or series that capture our collective emotional histories from a bird’s eye view. Sometimes it’s about describing how everyone knows that our systems are failing but no one can imagine an alternative, so we all accept our unreal world as real, as in HyperNormalisation, his biggest global success. Or, in his 2002 series, The Century of the Self, how Freudian psychology was co-opted by institutions to control the masses, turning active citizens into blind consumers. In his new BBC series, Shifty, it’s about how British politicians lost their power by the end of the 20th century. We feel these things, but we can’t articulate them.
People fall back on calling his work, which makes meticulous and obsessive use of the BBC’s huge archive, psychedelic or kaleidoscopic. He chops and changes between clips of Seventies advertisements, protests, home videos, frontline warfare, and whatever else he finds. He’s an encyclopaedia of modern music and chooses tracks that support the mood of what he’s depicting. Sometimes that might be songs by an underground artist like Burial, or the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails, or drum’n’bass. The thought of ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” soundtracking one of his scenes about bankers? Unthinkable. “Notice most music in TV and movies is so literal. It’s almost treating you in a patronising way. ‘No, listen to us, we’re talking about money,’” he says wryly.
To me, rather than kaleidoscopic, the viewing experience of his style is closer to the way near-death experience survivors describe what happens at the end of a person’s life. It’s a playback of your time on earth but with the perspective of something greater, before you’re sucked back into the collective consciousness. At the very least, Curtis’s films make you feel as though you’ve been a part of something.
His film style emerged in the 1990s, when a new editing system was introduced that allowed shots to be placed freely, without the constraints of traditional sequencing. “It’s very similar to sampling in music,” he explains. He honed that style about 15 years ago when he noticed that the way people spoke to one another had become very “jumpy”, leaping around based on where their mind went. “I began to realise that actually, if you’re going to connect with the way people think and feel at this moment you have to make films in the forms that match them. If you live in an atomised and fragmented society where you’re never really sure what’s coming next, why not make a film like that?”
This, he believes, is part of why he connected with a young audience. In the mid-2010s he was discovered by disgruntled millennials about to have their hearts broken by Jeremy Corbyn’s election loss and Brexit. He’s lovingly memed and celebrated by the sort of people who were involved in the Occupy movement and read pop-cultural theorists like the late Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. “In fact, I knew Mark Fisher but I try not to be academic like they are,” he says in response to that characterisation of his following. “I don’t mean to be brutal but you must take pretentious s*** and make it really entertaining, really fun but at the same time say something serious. I’ll never use a word that I don’t really understand, like neoliberalism. I try to describe the world as I experience it.”
Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure
And the world post-pandemic is a weird and disorientating one. “You have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it’s almost like you’re treading water. Nothing is actually happening,” he says with verve. “No one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles.” A beat. “Four major movies about The Beatles.” He looks out his window to where his thriving plants are arranged on the balcony as he configures a timeline: it has been 65 years since The Beatles formed. “That’s like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It’s extraordinary! We’re trapped!” And it’s not just older people living in a haze of nostalgia, he says: everyone is stuck in the past.
Take Taylor Swift, for example. To Curtis, she recreates the American musicals from the Fifties in songs like “All Too Well”; in each chorus of that track she returns to a phrase and changes its meaning. “Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure. That’s not to diss any of what she’s saying but it’s quite held together in time and I don’t think that expresses now.”
There is no framework or guiding force to understand our times, he thinks. “Covid was the last moment of clear authority: someone telling us what to do. After that, apart from ‘stay home and wear masks’, they disappeared. We were left on our own. I think that’s had a big impact.” Politicians can’t give us a sense of what’s happening because the very language of democracy is no longer relevant. “We’re waiting for someone or some idea to make sense of it. The dread people feel comes from having no power. It’s like being on a plane in turbulence. You hunker down, terrified, watching the wing flap, knowing there’s nothing you can do. That’s how people feel now.”
Curtis’s new series, Shifty, is an eerie tale of how politics explained our lives until finance took over, hand in hand with its eager accomplice: the tech industry. Its five episodes focus solely on Britain and the increasingly powerless politicians that came after Margaret Thatcher. His classic voiceover is nowhere to be heard because, he says, the objectivity of it would have distracted from how this transition of power had an impact on people’s minds. It caused the people in his footage to be more frightened and fragmented.
As viewers we’re left to drift along until the payoff in the final episode. We see political operatives wander through the Millennium Dome they poured so much money and hope into, a supposed celebration of Britain’s past and future that ends up feeling like a cavernous monument to confusion. As the accompanying caption coolly notes: “The liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years. Now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth. They no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future.” Try to read that over a lingering shot of the dome without laughing.
The series concludes in the 2000s, but money is even more powerful today. Though Curtis doesn’t explicitly touch on how this has shaped succeeding generations of people, Shifty feels like the Gen Z origin story. Social media is brimming with Gen Z content about how to generate “passive income” like billionaires and how to get “rich aunty energy”. They know more about finances than their millennial elders, who they watched fail to reach financial milestones by playing the game. I tell him this, and, like everything else, he finds it fascinating, but says: “I’m not surprised. If the only thing that is really strong and powerful in our country and society is money these days, then of course it’s going to burrow into your consciousness – because people only feel secure if they’re given a frame, a language to describe the reality of the world they live in. Whether it comes from politicians or journalists like me or you or from expert think tank people. Money becomes this dominant force because it seems to be the only way of feeling secure.”
Our recent age of anxiety related to climate change and social media is over, Curtis agrees. We are now in a time of melancholy. A feeling of deflation, of ‘is this it?’ “I don’t quite understand why and it’s incoherent in my head at the moment but I can feel it,” he says, very frankly, looking straight at me. It could be the fact that we’re trapped in a feedback loop of social media, which is chaotic and doesn’t take people anywhere, other than towards emotions like anger and fear that companies can monetise. It might be the financial bleakness for so many people. Maybe it’s because what Curtis calls the “real self” has completely disappeared. He dates the disappearance, based on seeing the way that people suddenly started presenting themselves in the BBC archive footage, as starting in 1998. “What you’re left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you’ll never find it.”
This thesis won’t be his next project, because it would be impossible to explore without being a bit rude about people (“And I would never do that in my films. I treat everyone nicely, even Mrs Thatcher.”). Instead, he’s in the early stages of planning a film about America that will disrupt our ideas about what America is, using a post-colonialist lens, through the footage of the BBC’s outposts in countries like Japan, Korea, India and China. “You and I are very much children of that American culture. I have a feeling that people are becoming disenchanted with that culture and beginning to distance themselves.”
Of course it would be another collaboration with the BBC, which he doubts he will ever leave. “They give me a great deal of freedom, mainly because I don’t cost very much,” he says, excitedly. “I also think it’s a powerful organisation and, unlike something like Netflix, still has a purchase on reality. I go to Netflix to watch things that have absolutely nothing to do with reality. Emily in Paris – love it.”
When he’s not watching Netflix or zipping through the BBC archives “like it’s shopping – I spot it and if it’s good, I’ll have it”, he has to see his friends or do nothing. The doing nothing is important, he says, to decompress from watching so much content (Curtis is just like us, except most of us never stop).
So much of his work talks about the fact that progress has stagnated and change is only possible if we imagine new futures, but Curtis won’t be the one to do that. Put simply, he says, it’s not his job. “My job is to try and explain how we got here. That’s the best I can do,” he says resolutely. “I can’t tell you what’s coming because that’s what journalists don’t do. What they can be good at is to say this is what is happening.”
What’s missing from journalism, in his mind, is a sense of proportion: the 24/7 news cycle is not providing that, and that is something that as journalists – he gestures between us – we can do to break through this pessimism and melancholy. Good politics and good journalism can remind people of what they’ve forgotten: “What’s missing at the moment is knowing that as human beings we are much stronger than we think. We really are.”
'Shifty' is out now on BBC iPlayer
