Adam Curtis' Spooky Carnival: The Documentarian as World Historian

Todd Scarth

     "We live in a strange time," the narrator intones in the proper accent and easy authority of a BBC announcer. "Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world. Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them. And no one has any vision of a different or better kind of future." The accompanying images pass by in a quick-fire montage: a flashlight beam moving through a forest at night; strobe-like sequences of faces in a crowd looking up uncertainly; news footage of migrants clinging tenuously to a capsized boat; camera-rattling bomb blasts; Trump at a rally; Putin at a microphone shrugging mischievously; more explosions segueing into a contemporary dancer falling theatrically; an inflatable tube man lurching in the wind. The camera pans over an empty hotel conference room.  Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, Scuba Z's electronic breakbeat song "The Vanishing American Family," drones along ethereally. "This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place. It is about how over the last forty years politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring. Even those who thought they were attacking the system—the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counter-culture—actually became part of the trickery, because they too had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect, and nothing ever changes."

     These are the first two minutes of Adam Curtis's latest documentary film, the two-hour-and-forty-minute HyperNormalization. This short sequence serves as an introduction to both his distinctive documentary style and his engagement with world history. Curtis is a cinematic and intellectual bricoleur; he assembles a diverse range of images and ideas, welding these little bits together to create coherent and strongly argued films on big themes. His use of found footage and music is not in itself innovative, of course, but his quick-cut montage technique is highly distinctive. Part journalistic documentaries, part essay-film in the genre pioneered by Chris Marker, Curtis' films use an instantly recognizable collage technique. Formally they owe debts to Sergei Eisenstein, the cut-up methods of Tristan Tzara or William Burroughs, the sound collages of Negativland, and especially to the experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Curtis himself has cited the collage technique in John Dos Passos' USA trilogy as key influence.¹ Less sympathetically, a widely viewed online spoof compares Curtis' films to "a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence."²         

     The typical Curtis sequence is visually seductive, hypnotic and disorienting. Archival images flash by quickly and often without context, combining newsreel footage with B-Roll ephemera and giving an overall impression of visual noise that can be hard to make much sense of, especially on first viewing. Some of the images refer directly to the narration, while others are impressionistic rather than illustrative. The music on the soundtrack – think large doses of trip-hop, EDM, industrial, Brian Eno, Soviet-era punk, Ennio Morricone, and found noise—alternately resonates with and clashes with the visuals. Serious passages of political figures or images of shocking violence are interrupted suddenly by quirky digressions or dreamlike repetitions. Curtis' weird juxtapositions, presented completely deadpan, can be hilarious and off-putting. The dissonance makes us laugh, but just as often the laughter dies in our throats. In this way Curtis' films are different from those of, say, Michael Moore, a filmmaker who also uses pop-culture juxtapositions, but to much less ambiguous effect. Indeed, by combining cut-up montages with conventional documentary techniques such as authoritative, omniscient voiceovers, strong narrative lines, and factual information conveyed via inter-titles, Curtis does little to resolve the contradictions. Rather, he arguably uses them in a kind of meta-fictional way, calling attention to the conventions and seductions of the historical documentary form itself.

     Curtis has been making documentary films on themes in contemporary world history for the BBC since the early 1980s, although it took him a decade or so to find his voice; the first recognizably "Adam Curtis" film was 1989's "The Road to Terror," ostensibly about the killing of mujahideen fighters in post-revolution Iran, to which Curtis added a world-historical argument about Iran's parallels with the French Revolution. Most of his visual materials are drawn from the immense BBC archives, perhaps the biggest and messiest video archive of the last half-century, where he spends countless hours fast-forwarding through the accumulated footage. Curtis' films have won major prizes including BAFTAs, been covered enthusiastically in newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times, and analyzed in film journals. Revered American documentarian Errol Morris announced "I want to be Adam Curtis when I grow up."  Curtis' stylistic tics and tropes have even been parodied in a widely circulated online "Adam Curtis Bingo" card. (Examples: "Cheerful pop tune played over morbidly contrasting scenes;" "This is the story of…;" and "Glitchy VHS footage with timecode on it.") But little effort has been made to consider Curtis' documentaries in relation to the field of world history – even despite Curtis' own claim that "the key to what I do [is] I'm fundamentally a historian."³

     Curtis returns repeatedly to certain themes in contemporary history, including the contradictions and failures of liberalism, the rise of mass consumerism, and the power of ideology. These are big ideas, but it could be argued that even they do not accurately convey Curtis' capaciousness. According to Jonathan Lethem, writing in the New York Times, Curtis' subject matter is "nothing less than the cultural and political subconscious of the last half of the 20th-century and the first decades of the 21^st," and his methodology is to "take familiar subjects—the Cold War, the growth of public relations or financial or military-industrial bureaucracies, the premises of the ecology or anti-psychiatry movements, the enmeshment of Western democracies in quasi-colonial military adventures in the Middle East—and render them strange."⁴ Curtis himself identifies his favorite theme as "power and how it works in society."⁵

     This article introduces Curtis' major films to world-history scholars who may not be familiar with them. It explores the films both as "texts" that analyse contemporary world history, and as potential sources for teaching world history. Informed by my own experience using Curtis films as teaching sources in my modern world history university courses, it highlights a number of potential teaching opportunities regarding Curtis' films, including both the formal (the use of digital sources; Curtis' technique of using pastiche and juxtapositions from found footage; his faux-authoritative narration) and thematic (he audaciously draws connections between world-historical phenomena—"extraordinary events"—you would not have thought of as being related). The first part of the article briefly summarizes Curtis' major documentaries, in chronological order. The second part identifies a number of themes and ideas that I think would be of particular interest to world history scholars and students.⁶

Pandora's Box: A Fable from the Age of Science (1992) (6 episode mini-series)

     For the purposes of this essay, Pandora's Box is the first important Curtis film. It can be considered along with 1999's four-part The Mayfair Set: Four Stories about the Rise of Business and the Decline of Political Power, which covers British corporate raiders, arms dealers, and asset strippers in the 1970, showing how these personalities and practices went evolved into fiscal policy in the Thatcher years. Both films can be seen as an embryonic version of Curtis' later films, in terms of argument and methodology. 

     Pandora's Box's title sequence is based around footage from Design for Dreaming, a 1956 short industrial film about a woman who dreams that a man who resembles a masked Fred Astaire dances through her bedroom window invites her to join him "where tomorrow meets today," which turns out to be the General Motors "Motorama" and Frigidaire's "Kitchen of the Future." (Design for Dreaming has become a cult favourite. Some students may recall that Michael Moore also borrowed clips from it for Capitalism: A Love Story. Excerpts were also used in a Nine Inch Nails concert film.⁷) The kitsch Design for Dreaming introduces Curtis' high-low aesthetic. It also signals his central concern with corporate influence over imaginations (in Design for Dreaming, literally our dreams), and with the unintended consequences of technocracy in the twentieth century.  Unlike Curtis' later, more visually innovative films, in Pandora's Box the various stories are kept apart in separate episodes. Through these six case studies, Curtis develops an argument about the role of technology and rationalism in the twentieth century.

     The first episode, "The Engineers' Plot," introduces the theme using the example of the Soviet Union. "To those who began the revolution in Russia … science was a grand liberating force. They believed Karl Marx had discovered the scientific laws of society, which they would now use to unlock the gates to a new world where everyone would be equal and free. But within twenty years the revolution was taken over by technocrats who looked down at the crowd below as though they were atoms. They were inspired not by Marx but by the laws of engineering. They believed they could transform the Soviet Union into a giant rational machine which they would run for their political masters." The Bolshevik Aleksei Gastev was a pioneer in scientific management. By the late 1930s, rational targets and benchmarks began to have perverse unintended consequences, and by the late 1970s, "what had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society had revealed itself to be a "pointless, elaborate ritual."  

     The second episode, "To The Brink of Eternity," describes how the US government attempted to use game theory to control and manipulate human emotions. It focuses on the RAND Corporations's mathematical analysts—the purported inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

     The third episode, "The League of Gentlemen," covers the failures of Keynesian policy makers to engineer economic growth in 1960s and 70s Britain and the way monetarists moved in to fill the void. (This episode, a quarter of a century old and without the benefit of the huge volume of work on neoliberalism, stagflation and the crises of the 1970s that has appeared since then, is relatively uninteresting to a contemporary audience.)

     By the fourth episode, "Goodbye Mrs. Ant," we have moved beyond the realm of geopolitics to cover the story of the insecticide DDT. The unintended environmental consequences of DDT use are well known, but Curtis seems to suggest here that ecology itself became a kind of technocracy, in which ecological scientists came to determine the relationship between humans and nature. The fifth episode covers Kwame Nkrumah's vision for industrialization and development, focused around the huge Volta River dam, in postcolonial Ghana. Finally, in episode six "A is for Atom," Curtis tackles the history of nuclear power. He argues that nuclear failures, most famously the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, were a product of corporate greed, political expediency, and the underappreciated complexity of nuclear energy.

     More advanced world-history students might be interested in following up Pandora's Box by reading James C. Scott's work, in particular his brilliant Seeing Like a State (1998). Scott asks why so many ambitious state-led schemes to improve the human condition have failed so badly. Like Curtis, Scott examines some of the grand social experiments conducted shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, as well as China's Great Leap Forward and other attempts to achieve modern industry and agriculture in the developing world. Scott's thesis—highly compatible with Curtis'—is that these projects share a "modernist" orientation. That is to say, they are utopian and show enormous faith in modern science and technology. This technocratic quality is the main problem, as it tries to reduce complexity to legible order and quantifiable results. Meanwhile, local knowledge and traditional practices are snuffed out. Both Curtis and Scott make compelling arguments about the unintended consequences of technocracy in the modern world, framing it as a world-historical phenomenon.

The Century of the Self (4 episodes) (2002)

     The Century of the Self introduces Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays, who is credited with appropriating his uncle's theory of the unconscious and repurposing it for use in mass-consumer culture when he invented "public relations." (More mundanely, Bernays also had Freud's works translated and marketed as bestsellers, and then marketed himself as an expert consultant.) Instead of merely extolling the virtues of a product, marketers began crafting stories that appealed to consumers' subconscious desires, basing ad campaigns on these stories. Curtis then follows this thread through the twentieth century, showing how Freudian ideas were adopted by political and corporate interests. Public relations and advertising strategies are applied to electoral politics, first in the form of Gallup polls and then the use of focus groups. In short, politicians came to be marketed using the same psychoanalytically informed strategies as mass consumer goods. Curtis points to the Third Way politics of Clinton and Blair as the culmination of these developments, personified by Freud's great-grandson Matthew. (Were he making the film today, Curtis could fruitfully explore more recent developments, such as micro targeting of voters based on profiles developed from analyzing their consumption habits.)         

     A version of this story is also told in Larry Tye's The Father of Spin: Edward Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. (1998) However, Curtis' documentary fuses the argument (through a discussion of the "Human Potential" movement's  critique of Anna Freud's belief in human conformity) to another argument about the legacy of Freud's ideas: that they helped create the uniquely contemporary self-interested individual subject.⁸ Personal desires became lionized, with consumption a key way to express one's individuality. As Curtis summarizes it, "consumerism had an ideology just as much as fascism or communism did. It was another way of managing the masses in an age of mass democracy."⁹ The ways in which the advertising industry has made buying more stuff understood as a true expression of "revolution" and "individuality" is discussed in numerous books, but one I feel works especially well with Curtis' film is Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (3 episodes) (2004)

     The Power of Nightmares traces the emergence of a political phenomenon in which promises of happiness were replaced by fear as a form of social control. As with many Curtis films, it announces its strong thesis early on. And as with all of his later films, Curtis' starting point is the failure of liberalism. Politicians' "power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people," Curtis' narration tells us. "Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in their ideologies…Now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand."

     Curtis traces this trend through a twinned history of militant Islamism led by the Egyptian religious scholar Sayyid Qutb, and the neo-conservatism of Leo Strauss. Curtis portrays both movements as essentially reactionary responses to modern liberal democracy, with both based on a kind of nostalgia for a pure past. This film also suggests that Al Qaeda's activities are better understood as acts of failure and desperation rather than triumphs, and that Al Qaeda's reach and threat was vastly overblown by western governments as a way of consolidating power and public support. Specifically, the film argues that US prosecutors had to portray Osama bin Laden as head of a massive terrorist organization in order to try him for the 1998 US embassy bombings. More broadly, neoconservatives in the US administration used the September 11 attacks to launch the War on Terror and various "pre-emptive" interventions and attacks on civil liberties. This argument was, not surprisingly, controversial, and Curtis has suggested it may be the reason the film has never been shown on US television.          

     It is worth clarifying that Curtis' argument does not enter the realm of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Still, Curtis' films frequently wander close that territory. For J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, Nightmares, while "often brilliant," also demonstrates what it proposes to demystify.¹⁰ I have taught Nightmares alongside Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. This book also takes a historical perspective on the origins of Al-Qaeda, beginning with a portrait of Sayyid Qutb's visit to the US in the late 1940s. Wright's more journalistic account complements Nightmares' critical perspective.

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? (2007)

     The Trap further develops and extends ideas from The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares, arguing that in the West over the past half-century, the ideal of freedom has been changed from political freedom to economic freedom. The rise of individualism Curtis charted in Century of the Self now comes under a political-economic analysis, and Curtis now sharpens his critique of what he considers the irresponsible use of psychiatry in the yoke of western capitalism. He sets his sights on Isaiah Berlin's famous "two concepts of liberty," in which "positive" freedom from want (which Berlin associated with utopian movements and statist regimes, is contrasted with "negative freedom," which manifests itself as freedom from state interference. (The two freedoms are roughly correlative with equality of condition and equality of opportunity.)  Curtis argues that in western capitalist democracies Berlin's preferred negative freedoms have been twisted through such concepts as game theory, rational choice and "the selfish gene." These notions, first developed by game theorists as a tool for setting geopolitical strategy in the Cold War, are based on nothing less than a new understanding of human nature: that humans are fundamentally self-interested, competitive individuals. Consequently, there is no such thing as the "collective will," and democracy is best understood as an aggregation of individual consumption choices.  As a result, we are "self seeking, almost robotic creatures," faced with the existential impossibility of expressing our true selves by making consumer decisions. World history students may recognize the parallels to arguments made about the "social contract" between the Chinese state and its citizens after the Tienanmen Square uprising: economic liberalization and vastly increased consumer opportunities, but none of the political freedoms protestors had been demanding.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (3 episodes) (2011)

     This film begins by telling the relatively well-known story of Ayn Rand's libertarian philosophy and its influence on Alan Greenspan and other prominent conservatives. Curtis, however, weaves into that story another one, namely the rise of tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. In what Curtis calls the "Californian ideology," individualism meets utopianism. Technology itself, it was believed, could make individuals Randian heroes. Technology could allow individuals to free themselves of political control, liberated to pursue their self interest. Along the same lines, a self-correcting algorithm could be seen as equivalent to a self-correcting market.     

     In Curtis' version of events, Rand's ideas flowed through Greenspan to Bill Clinton, who was convinced to "let markets, not politics" reshape the United States. Technology now reappears on centre stage, as the so-called New Economy of the 1990s helped inflate the tech bubble. Machines—computers, the internet and the mathematical models on which they were based—were no substitute for real democracy.

Bitter Lake (2015)

     Bitter Lake is the first long-form Curtis documentary not to be broken up into separate episodes. At 137 minutes, it runs longer than most Hollywood features. It begins with familiar Curtis concerns about the breakdown of dominant myths and ideologies: "Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense, and how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world." It contains a complex historical narrative centred on the many disastrous military interventions in Afghanistan by Russia and western countries. Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, yet foreign powers continue to try to intervene militarily—and continue to fail. Curtis attributes this pattern to a profound arrogance that produced disastrously oversimplified interpretation of Afghanistan's social, religious and political cultures. The film combines this thread with It also outlines the historical relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia—essentially a geopolitical compact over oli—which produced deadly unintended consequences in the form of militant Islamic organizations, from the Mujahideen to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

HyperNormalization (2016)

     HyperNormalization's title comes from Alexei Yurchak's 2005 book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Yurchak argues that in the final years of the Soviet Union, it was clear the system was dying. People in grocery stores literally fist-fighting each other over bread, soldiers dying in Afghanistan in a war that officially was not one, a monstrous bureaucracy that had taken on a life of its own—for Soviet people experiencing these things in their everyday lives, reality was apparent. But at the same time, the system had become so effective at using propaganda to choke off social or political alternatives, that an alternative to the status quo was literally unimaginable. Yurchak called this "hypernormalization" to situation, in which people choose to live with what they know to be a lie because conceiving of an alternative is impossible.¹¹ For Curtis (who probably fails to give Yurchak adequate acknowledgement) those of us living in the West have reached an equivalent moment: "As this fake world grew, all of us went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring," Curtis intones.

     HyperNormalization's narrative begins in two cities in 1975, ""a moment when two ideas about how it might be possible to run the world without politics took hold."

     First, New York City, which in 1975 experienced its now-famous cash crunch. Triggered by a confluence of macroeconomic changes, including oil-price shocks, the collapse of urban manufacturing and the collapse of its middle-class tax base due to white flight from the inner cities, the crunch became a full-blown fiscal crisis when the banks essentially went on strike and refused to buy city bonds. Without this source of income, New York was brought to the brink of bankruptcy and was forced to respond with painful cuts to hospitals, schools, and its other rich and cherished public services. It was perhaps the first example of the banker-mandated austerity with which we are now so familiar. (These events are covered in detail in Kim Phillips-Fein's 2017 book Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics.) 

     Meanwhile, in Damascus, Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad comes into conflict with Henry Kissinger over the Palestinian refugee crisis. Kissinger, through his doctrine of "Constructive Ambiguity," effectively pulls off a bait-and-switch by convincing Egypt to sign a peace agreement with Israel that did not include Palestinian repatriation – very different from what he ad promised Assad. "In reality," Curtis tells us, "the Palestinians were ignored." Kissinger's perfidy releases "demons hidden under the surface of the Arab world." In a harrowing sequence, Curtis shows how Assad started using suicide bombing against Americans, inspired by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who invented the tactic which had previously been unthinkable for Muslims, for whom suicide is heretical. Suicide bombing spreads across the Middle East, while Ronald Reagan, without a narrative to adequately explain these global dynamics, publicly blames the wrong countries for terrorism and provides money and weapons to dubious allies of convenience – acts that would come back to haunt the US.

     Curtis has worked some of this ground in previous films. He adds to the mix his claim that the rise of individualism is a key condition of the twentieth century, an idea he first developed in The Century of the Self. Here he suggests that a kind of left-ish radicalism of the self, emerging out of the art world, supplanted collective "real" politics. To tell this story Curtis returns to mid-70s New York, showing Patti Smith admiring graffiti, and then Jane Fonda's transformation from 1960s radical to 1980s purveyor of workout videos. The "Californian ideology" we were introduced to in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is also further developed and incorporated into HyperNormalization, as Curtis shows the optimistic early visions of pro-internet proselytizers becoming appropriated and perverted by state and corporate power. The internet now looks more like the bleak "cyberspace" predicted by the novelist William Gibson.

     HyperNormalization is packed with ideas, images and provocative arguments. Many of these threads come together in a section introduced by an inter-title reading "America at the End of the Twentieth Century," where, Curtis' narration tells us, "all optimistic visions of the future had also disappeared. Instead, everyone in society, not just the politicians, but the scientists, the journalists, and all kinds of experts, had begun to focus on the dangers that might be hidden in the future. This in turn created a pessimistic mood that began to spread out from the rational technocratic mood and infect the whole of the culture." What follows is a virtuoso montage of Hollywood disaster movies, all made before 9-11, in which various New York landmarks are destroyed by terrorists, aliens, and natural disasters. Set to the soundtrack of Suicide's bouncy 1979 single "Dream Baby Dream," this section is a brilliant example of film editing and cultural history.

Part 2: Curtis as World Historian

     This article is primarily concerned with Curtis' documentary films from a world-historical perspective, not an aesthetic engagement. However, I have found there are teaching opportunities in including discussion of some of Curtis' primary formal influences while teaching his films. In my experience, Curtis' documentary films offer many opportunities for discussion, debate, and further research. In the rest of this essay I will identify a handful of issues that I believe are particularly germane to the study of world history.

     One of Curtis' signature moves is to paint his argument with an exceptionally broad brush, as in the phrases "no one has any vision" and "nothing ever changes" that introduce Hypernormalization. His films are full of such bold claims, conveyed by his voiceover narration and by title screens. Some appear to be over-stated arguments, while others almost seem to verge on parody. What to make of such claims? For example, if an undergraduate history student submitted an essay that began, as the narration in Bitter Lake does, "Once upon a time, politicians told confident stories that made sense of the world. But then everything became chaotic and unpredictable," it almost certainly would not be well received. When exactly was this golden time when politicians' stories made sense the world? When and why did it change? What do you mean "no one has any vision?"

     There is a particular irony arising here from the tension between Curtis' subject and his methodology. His major themes include the failure of grand explanations and tidy narratives; his most frequent targets all-encompassing and ahistorical explanations for how our world came to be as it is. Yet arguably his films themselves propose a new grand theory, in a sense to replace the one he has discredited. This produces a dialectical tension and an interesting ambiguity. He regularly pillories social and political elites' self-defeating arrogance in the face of complexity. More specifically, he is interested in the ways in which, historically, powerful people clean to certain logics and rational positions, even while those positions curdle into irrationality, ideology, and even a kind of superstition. It is important to emphasize that Curtis does this both through the analysis he expresses through narration, and through the dissonance he creates through editing. Paul Arthur, writing in Cineaste, summarizes Curtis's montage approach as a process of "taking the detritus of 'entrapping' image structures and turning them against themselves." This is a very cogent point, but it remains unclear to me what is the status of the claims he makes through narration when the images at that moment do not illustrate, or even support, his analytical argument.

     His films all tend to follow a similar progression: they begin by exploding one or more of the prevailing myths of our time, sending its component parts flying off in all directions. The overall sensation is one of entropy. By the end of the film, however, the feeling of entropy is gone, replaced with a suspiciously satisfying and tidy conclusion. Order has been restored. Several critics have made this point at greater length and more powerfully than I can. For example, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that Curtis' films seem to suggest that once we have torn down the particular myth that is his target, "we're almost as wised up as we need to be."¹²  Along the same lines, Paul Meyerscough writes, "I find myself more worried about his documentaries when I go along with them than when I don't."¹³

     A related and very interesting question has to do with the power and problems of historical narrative. Curtis unpacks the way ideas are used to maintain political power and control—elites tell stories that simplify a complex world—and what happens when those stories become, as he says in "Bitter Lake," "unconvincing." Yet at the same time, his films are also characterized by a strong narrative. Indeed, perhaps his most famous trope is the some variation of the phrase, "this is the story of," usually in the first few minutes of his film, some of which he refers to as "fables," while others begin "once upon a time." 

     There is a clear polemical strategy at work here, closely related to the way Curtis casts himself as an omniscient narrator. It is as if he has granted himself special dispensation to simply complexities because he is doing so to reveal "greater truths." I feel it remains an open question whether Curtis intends this approach to function as one more layer of irony in a kind of meta-documentary that calls attention to itself as a constructed entity – and by extension calling our attention back to the dangerous seduction of "tidy" arguments. Finally, Curtis himself has suggested that he is, in a sense, "sexing up" what would otherwise be staid historical arguments: "I'm fundamentally a historian who nicks larky ideas and techniques from art, pop music, and all the other things around, and who just bolts them together with some quite basic and often quite boring historical research. I'm not some sort of trendy filmmaker. I know that you can make ideas interesting and attractive by using those things." All fair enough, except that because Curtis' documentaries contain such probing critiques of advertising and the use of emotion to sell everything from cars to politicians to political ideologies, the notion of using "larky ideas" to sell "boring historical research" deserves a more thorough investigation. Whatever we think about the intentionality of the filmmaker, however, the questions Curtis' films raise through their problems and contradictions are perhaps best seen as opportunities for further debate and research. In my experience history students have been able to explore the issue with real enthusiasm and nuance. 

     If we set aside for a moment the formal experimentation of Curtis' films, his core intellectual approach is fundamentally, even conventionally, historical.¹⁴ The films typically begin with a contemporary problem or phenomenon and Curtis asks, "How did this come to be?" He then takes us back to a key moment—the end of the Cold War, the rise of mass production, or just "forty years ago"—puts that moment in historical context, and proceeds to develop a narrative of change over time. The films themselves are awash in the language of temporal causation and contingency: "meanwhile;" "at the same time;" "then it all changed;" "what happened next was;" and so on. And he is a connoisseur of social complexities and the ironies of history.  

     How might we situate Curtis' documentaries within the discipline of world history? There are a number of interesting connections. I will suggest a few here. First, world historians are generally interested in global connections and "big" questions. Curtis's films blow the doors off any methodological nationalism, and their total lack of tentativeness about connecting the dots across the globe, pursuing surprising connections, and asking big questions are bracing and even exciting in a world-history classroom. Second, Curtis pulls off a neat (and pedagogically helpful) trick: by painting with such a broad brush he makes it easy to talk to students about the subtleties and nuance of historical events. When Curtis makes a claim like "no one believed in anything," history students are confronted with a provocative opportunity to engage with concepts such as mono-causal explanations, contingency and complexity. Finally, while Curtis' argument may leave behind the sulphuric whiff of conspiracy theories, his main thematic concerns — the contradictions and failures of liberalism, the influence of technocratic elites, the conjoining of psychology and mass consumption, the relationship between ideology and social power, the harnessing of science by corporations, and the neoliberal tendency to subject an ever-expanding proportion of social life to the logic of the market — are at the heart of contemporary world history. 

Todd Scarth is Assistant Professor of History and Global Political Economy at the University of Manitoba.

¹ Chris Darke, "Interview: Adam Curtis." Film Comment online. July 17, 2012.  https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-adam-curtis/ Accessed Aug 10, 2018.

²  "The Loving Trap." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg Accessed Aug 15, 2018.

³ Darke, "Interview: Adam Curtis." But note that elsewhere he has claimed, "I'm a journalist who stumbled over a story, not a historian." (https://www.hgi.org.uk/resources/delve-our-extensive-library/interviews/century-self)

⁴ Jonathan Lethem, "It All Connects: Adam Curtis and the Secret History of Everything." New York Times Magazine. Oct 27, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/adam-curtis-documentaries.html. Accessed July 20, 2018.

⁵ Darke, "Interview: Adam Curtis." 

⁶ Curtis' documentaries have all been produced for BBC, and the most recent two, Bitter Lake and HyperNormalization, were only made available on the BBC iPlayer. Many of his films have been shown at festivals in the US, though the expense of obtaining rights to all the soundtracks and Hollywood clips probably rules out any chance of them appearing on US television. However all of his films are widely available online, including, as of this writing, on youtube.  

⁷ Rose Everleth, "What's a 1956 General Motors Ad Doing in 'The Stepford Wives' and Super Mario?" Atlas Obscura. Archived from the original on June 17, 2017. Accessed Aug 10, 2018.

⁸ The Century of the Self also makes reference to the horrifying experiments carried out by Dr. Ewan Cameron, whose CIA-funded "brainwashing" experiments on patients involved the use of LSD and electroshock therapy. Cameron's exploits provide the reference for Naomi Klein's  book The Shock Doctrine.

⁹ Ivan Tyrrell, "The Century of the Self: A seething mass of desires: Freud's hold over history." Human Givens Institute. (https://www.hgi.org.uk/resources/delve-our-extensive-library/interviews/century-self) Accessed July 20, 2018.

¹⁰J Hoberman, "The Phantom Menace: Unclear and Present Danger: Three-part polemic constructs novel narrative of neo-con game." Original dated Dece 5, 2005. (https://web.archive.org/web/20070329224946/http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0549%2Choberman%2C70708%2C20.html) Accessed Aug 15, 2018.

¹¹ I have taught portions of this documentary alongside Svetlana Alexievich's Boys in Zinc and Secondhand Time.

¹² Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Negotiating the Pleasure Principle: The Recent Films of Adam Curtis." Film Quarterly, Fall 2008 (Vol. 62, No.1). (http://www.jonathanroenaum.net/2017/12/ Posted December 13, 2017. Accessed June 24, 2018.

¹³ Paul Meyerscough, "The Flow: The Trap" London Review of Books, April 5, 2007, p. 35..

¹⁴ Less conventional—and an interesting topic of conversation—is his use of archival materials. The films contain no references, and no way to follow up most of his claims.