Skip to main content

On Adam Curtis

 

Adam Curtis is back (with a new six part series on iplayer, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head) and a lot of us seem to have had enough of his nonsense - all I’m seeing on my corner of social media is people disparaging him as pretentious, boring, or a charlatan. Pretentious he may be, and boring he can be (when his films were shown on TV rather than relegated to iplayer-only they definitely benefited from having to be squeezed into 30 or 50 minute time-slots). But a lot of my favourite artists are at least partly charlatans and none the worse for it, so I feel moved to spring to his defence.

I think a lot of people approach Curtis’s films as if they’re documentaries, and find their arguments tenuous and unconvincing. But while they use a documentary format, and Curtis’s sonorous voice sounds like that of a reliable BBC narrator, I think they’re really best appreciated as a sort of surrealist collage or William Burroughs-style cut-up fiction. Assembled entirely out of odds-and-ends of archive footage and scraps of old movies, they leap to and fro across the 20th Century, unearthing curious characters and interesting stories and then weaving a web of connections between them. The characters and stories are often fascinating - for instance, until I watched the first part of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head I knew nothing about rent-collector-turned-revolutionary-turned-murderous cult leader Michael de Freitas (here’s a good piece about him by the excellent Tomiwa Owolade). The connections often turn out to be non-sequiturs, or so contrived as to border on conspiracism, but I don’t think they’re intended to be taken entirely seriously. Curtis is operating like a novelist, appropriating bits of the real world and rearranging them in the service of his personal vision - specifically, a haunting and paranoid vision of the Twentieth Century.* His unsettling mix of the patrician and the avante-garde always reminds me of JG Ballard, and, like Ballard, his message seems to be that modern society is seething with barely suppressed primitive impulses which we do not fully understand, and cannot hope to control.

‘… which they did not fully understand, and could not hope to control’ is, of course, a classic Curtisism, almost as instantly recognisable as, ‘…but this was a fantasy.’ In any online discussion of the latest Curtis, someone will sooner or later post a link to The Loving Trap, a very accurate parody of his schtick by Ben Woodhams. The implication seems to be that Woodhams's spoof is some kind of killer riposte which, by exposing all Curtis’s verbal, visual, and intellectual tics, demolishes his films entirely. But this is a fantasy: it’s easy to parody Curtis, but it’s easy to parody any writer or artist who has a strong personal style - in fact, I think ease-of-parody could be probably considered one of the marks of a distinctive and original voice. 

The other thing that makes Curtis a good target for parodists, of course, is that he basically keeps making the same film over and over again. I first stumbled across his work in the 90s, and it hasn’t changed a great deal in either style or subject matter. It might be nice to see him move on from his secret histories of the Twentieth Century and turn his attention more directly on some of the weird, atavistic figures who haunt the Twenty First, like Donald Trump, or Greta Thunberg…** But I guess that (again like Ballard) Curtis is being true to his own obsessions, and I’m happy enough to let his films wash over me. Like dreams, they can be very compelling while you’re immersed in them, and if when they end I’m left wondering what that was all about, at least they have thrown up some intriguing images, and made me think. Curtis is actually doing what Science Fiction ought to do but seldom does - entertaining us simply by banging ideas together and seeing what sparks fly off. Personally, I’m glad the BBC is still giving him a space in which to do his peculiar thing.

*EG: To claim a link between Cecil Sharp collecting English folk dances in the 1920s and the creation of ISIS in the 2010s is a bit of a reach for a documentary. But it's exactly the sort of thematic rhyme that works in art and fiction.

** To be fair, the final episode does encompass the fairly weird Dominic Cummings, Trump, Brexit, and the Pandemic.

 Can't Get You Out Of My Head is currently in BBC iplayer: a lot of older Adam Curtis films can be found on YouTube. There is a good interview with him here.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after...
6 comments
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...
5 comments
Read more

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...
Post a Comment
Read more