Not every history lesson comes from a textbook. Last summer, at the Manchester International Festival in England, visitors to a site-specific installation about America's rise to power during the Cold War were directed toward a nondescript office building and met with the following warnings:
"Production contains strobe lighting and theatrical smoke." "The show is not suitable for people of a nervous disposition." "Please wear suitable footwear." In other words, abandon hope and bring good shoes, all ye who enter the dizzying, kaleidoscopic 20th century of Adam Curtis's imagination. An an in-house documentary filmmaker at the BBC, increasingly recognised worldwide as a propagandist par excellence, the 55-year-old Curtis has built an impressive and controversial two-decade career out of feverishly reinterpreting the currents of recent history to show how the "best intentions" of the powerful confuse, limit and often dictate the contours of our so-called individualism. Those with a nervous disposition are entitled to their blissful ignorance, the warning implies, but they'll miss a heck of a show.
It Felt Like a Kiss, the "psycho- political theme experience" created by Curtis and Felix Barrett with the theatre company Punchdrunk, and featuring music by Damon Albarn and the Kronos Quartet, blended all of Curtis's preoccupations about the nature of US hegemony into an expressionistic rush of loosely connected archival images, scored to songs from the golden age of midcentury American pop music. The titular tune, the Crystals' He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss) - a girl-group classic produced by Phil Spector and written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King from the point of view of a friend suffering at the hands of an abusive partner- might be pop's ultimate example of a syrupy façade masking a barbarous core, and the Curtis exhibit operates using similar logic, employing frightening juxtapositions of violent imagery and pop balladry. Kiss was Curtis' first outright avant-garde production, fragmented in a manner that replicates a waking dream of pleasure and paranoia, no less provocative for lacking a constructive political message. Walking from room to room, the visitor drifts between film sets designed to look like Baghdad in 1963; New York in 1964; Moscow in 1959; and Kinshasa in 1960. The opening credits of the film at the centre of the exhibit identify an all-star cast "featuring Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald, Doris Day, Enos the Chimp, and Everyone Above Level 7 In the CIA" - which should give some indication of the everything-is-connected logic that underwrites the entire Curtis project.
Reviewing It Felt Like a Kiss, Benedict Nightingale of The Times reflected that "I have never seen a more ambitious, elaborate example of site-specific work," while also admitting that he found the whole experience - especially the part where he was "chased by a hunched man with a chainsaw" - rather taxing. Indeed, even Curtis's more conventional work can be difficult to process. A barrage of facts, figures, unsettling Brian Eno music and ominous voice-overs, his films attempt to do no less than reprogram the circuitry of mainstream political thought. The exhibit's conclusion projects three ominous phrases onto a wall: "Now you are a free individual. Alone in the dark. It's what you wanted."
Speaking to me by phone from his office in London, Curtis becomes animated when I mention the Manchester event. "At the end, you run out screaming," he says. "You are so frightened. I'm talking about grown men and women. We didn't allow anyone under the age of 16." Curtis pauses. "I'm not going to tell you any more." Kiss is a definite anomaly, since the aim of a typical Curtis documentary is less to frighten than to overwhelm. He is a paranoid-style historian of ideas whose epic multi-part essay-films curate a collage of archival video, pop music, and talking-head interviews - moving parts kept in place by Curtis' playfully sardonic voice-over narration. Though Curtis' grasp of policy nuance is limited, and he has a tendency to claim to have demonstrated a murky hypothesis while leaving the sceptical viewer in the dust, his documentaries have been widely hailed for their formal ambition and willingness to explore the big-picture ramifications of social engineering. Century of the Self (2002), at four hours, explains how the field of public relations sprang from the invention of psychoanalysis; The Power of Nightmares (2004) charts the parallel rise of jihadism and neoconservatism; and The Trap (2007) posits that the simplistic model of human beings as robotic rational creatures led to a curtailing of freedom. Though each of these documentaries remaps the history of the 20th century Western psyche in entirely disparate ways, it's worth noting that their titles are somewhat interchangeable.
"One of the things I like about Curtis's films is that they're hyperbolic," says Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War. "They take things to extremes. They exaggerate, they overstate, but in the course of it they make you think about things in a novel and different way." Morris, who has done more to influence the style of documentary cinema than any contemporary filmmaker, tells me that his next film - though "not quite as daring as what he's doing" - will reflect the hallmarks of Curtis's influence.
Shown on the BBC but not conventionally released outside the United Kingdom, Curtis's controversial films have spread widely across the internet like pieces of audiovisual samizdat. "My official position," Curtis says about online bootlegs, "is that I have a neutral attitude to it. People record the programs and put them on the internet. There's nothing we at the BBC can do to stop them. Although I don't in any way condone it, I'm not disappointed that my films are up on the internet." Curtis is being diplomatic, but no one at the BBC can deny that his documentaries benefit from the web's repository of information - and that they appeal to a generation of viewers who have grown up sceptical of establishment norms, history textbooks, and conventional news sources. (Conspiracy is the internet's lingua franca.) When The Power of Nightmares introduces the al Qa'eda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, or The Trap offers a minute-long rendering of Friedrich Hayek's complex defence of free-market capitalism, viewers can pause the programme, conduct a Google search, and delve deeper into theories of which Curtis' fast-paced films can offer only a skeletal summary. These programs are unbalanced and unfootnoted, but they inspire audiences to conduct their own fact-checking.
It can be hard to identify the cinematic progenitors of the Curtis aesthetic because his films sometimes seem like outward manifestations of the world wide web. His projects reorganise and remix previously existing material with new interviews and fieldwork into a new kind of narrative, one that seems analogous to a web browser with 20 tabs open at once. They debunk the utopian ideologies of earlier eras while offering grand, unifying narratives to make sense of our current hyperlinked universe, and succeed to the extent that viewers can keep several complicated arguments in their heads at once. After one emerges from the hypnotic sway of a Curtis film, it can take several days of reflection and research to assess the validity of his arguments. The entirety of Curtis's constantly evolving enterprise hinges upon a single, unusually optimistic principle: "Audiences are much more sophisticated than we give them credit for."
A Curtis plot thread generally begins with a surprising connection that unravels to reveal layers of historical intrigue. In The Century of the Self, it's the idea that Edward Bernays, who invented the field of public relations, was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Proving the durability of his uncle's ideas, Bernays exploited Freud's insights about the unconscious to devise a blueprint for maximising corporate profits. Corporations could make the masses want things they didn't know they wanted by linking their products to unconscious desires. For example, he made it acceptable for women to smoke cigarettes in public, by staging demonstrations in which young ladies congregated on street corners to light up their "torches of freedom". More importantly, his understanding of latent desire paved the way for a consumer society composed, to use Herbert Hoover's terminology, of "constantly moving happiness machines". There are plenty of detours on Curtis's road from Bernays to the rise of Bill Clinton and New Labour, many of them unconvincing, but Curtis demonstrates the way that human yearning for self-expression was co-opted as the ultimate political and corporate marketing tool. Exhortations like "Yes We Can!" and "Just Do It!" are revealed to be part of the same continuum. Viewed through this lens, the little-known Bernays becomes one of the most influential thinkers of the last century.
Indeed, in the Curtis documentaries, ideas take prevalence over actions; his stories begin in think tanks, universities, and mosques - not the White House and Parliament. His major accomplishment is to have fashioned a televisual rhetoric that conveys the force of ideas, the way they evolve and transform through cross-pollination, and how the utopian goals of a past age can yield unintended, world-historical consequences down the line.
Originally broadcast on the BBC (and screened at the Cannes Film Festival) a year after the invasion of Iraq, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear took aim at the moralistic pieties of the global war on terror by documenting the parallel rise of radical Islamism and American neoconservatism. Controversially, Curtis argues that the threat posed by groups like al Qa'eda has been exaggerated and distorted into a mythic nightmare by politicians seeking to unite citizens around a common fear. If Islamist terror didn't exist, Curtis seems to be saying, then the neoconservatives would have found a way to invent it - because the role of government is no longer to build hopes but to protect us from unseen dangers. Curtis had been planning "a very academic history of western conservative ideas", when he stumbled upon Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim intellectual who, upon pursuing an education degree in Greeley, Colorado in the late 1940s, quickly became disgusted by the selfishness and materialism of American society. (In true Curtis form, the wheels of Qutb's radicalisation are set in motion by the experience of watching young couples at a church function dance to Baby, It's Cold Outside.)
"I realised that Qutb actually operated within that tradition of pessimistic western conservatism," Curtis explains. "Of course he was a scholar of the Quran, and he was infused with the politics of the British Empire in Egypt, but he was also well read in Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and all pessimistic conservative philosophies. He saw himself as part of that tradition. And I suddenly realised: this is actually fascinating. This is a man whose ideas, in a distorted way, inspired those who flew the planes on September 11. No one has done the history of how his ideas percolated through and led to that apocalyptic conclusion. I wanted to do it, and I realised, my god, this is not just some strange, alien set of ideas." In Curtis' rendering, Qutb's distrust of liberal mores dovetails neatly with the views of political philosopher (and neoconservative godfather) Leo Strauss, who thought Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" reforms failed because individual selfishness had undermined the country's moral infrastructure. As Curtis says in a voice-over: "Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure."
The film's rhetorical sophistication extends to the director's stylistic choices. Curtis accompanies footage of Afghan mujaheddin shooting off rockets and lounging in front of stockpiled weapons with a mellow folk ballad by Donovan. "In many ways," Curtis tells me, "the mujaheddin were sort of like hippies! I know they were firing guns and shooting Soviets, but a lot of the idea of jihad, whilst it was translated into warfare, is also about self-development, self-exploration? finding yourself in a new and liberated form while spending a period of isolation in the mountains. The modern jihadism that comes from people like [the Palestinian jihadist and Bin Laden mentor] Abdullah Azzam did actually self-consciously borrow from a lot of countercultural ideas. They knew about self-liberation." Like the idea of Qutb's visit to a church dance planting the original seed of the September 11 attacks, this is another perverse line of argument that fuses pop and politics to reveal underlying structural truths.
The unifying thread in Curtis's films is that our desires and fears are not simple manifestations of individual need, but products of history, power, and politics. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom attempts to prove the discomfiting hypothesis that the western conception of liberty depends on a narrow understanding of human beings as cold, calculating, and suspicious automatons, a view initially developed by game theorists studying the dynamics of Cold War nuclear deterrence, and later developed by Chicago School economists into the ultimate justification for the free market. The programme is as mesmerising and stirringly Orwellian as anything Curtis has done, but he was criticised in some quarters for tackling too many disciplines at once. According to a review in the New Statesman, "In using just about all that has happened in science and economics in the past 50 years to boost a single, spooky argument - we are in a cage! - Curtis is now scarily close to becoming what the neocons always said he was: a conspiracy theorist."
Curtis, who briefly taught politics at Oxford before moving into television, admits to no particular expertise, and his mind moves too quickly to bear down on one subject. "I could make a whole film about game theory," he says, "but I find it more interesting to say that game theory was part of something bigger. It's a bit like riding in a helicopter above a landscape - you pull up, and look at this thing, and see that it's part of a wider current of history. In a lot of factual television, people try and tell one particular story in isolation, when in fact power moves in much wider currents."
Curtis may partake of the wheels-within-wheels frisson that drives so much of the internet, but he has a distinct advantage over the army of armchair Eisensteins uploading their homemade agitprop to YouTube. He is employed by the BBC as an executive producer, which allows him to not only make documentaries for television - early warning: his next epic essay-film will "tackle our contemporary ideas of nature and their political roots" - but "to try out all sorts of experiments in finding new ways of developing content." Curtis has access to the BBC's vast archive of recorded material, one of the largest such treasure troves in the world.
Since last June, Curtis has been producing a blog on the BBC's website, where he posts video and selected documentary evidence to illuminate the arguments that kick around his brain on a daily basis. His current projects include a history of the Western involvement in Afghanistan and the legacy of European empire in the Congo. One lengthy post explores the parallel fates of Yegor Gaidar, the eventual architect of economic "shock therapy" in Russia, and Benazir Bhutto, the late Pakistani prime minister, after their respective countries meddled on opposing sides of the mujaheddin resistance in Afghanistan. It feels almost like a fascinating outtake from The Power of Nightmares that could anchor a separate documentary. "As I've gone on with this project, I've gotten bolder," Curtis says. "I got access to the rushes, the unedited material of stuff we shot in Pakistan, Afghanistan, over the last 30 years, and just put it up. I put up a six-minute shot of just driving - a shot from a car driving between the front lines of the Taliban in 1996, when they were besieging Kabul - and people like it, they seem to like watching it. I put it in context, I explain what's happening, and I'm using it to put forward an argument, but I then just let people watch it, and that's not something you normally do on television."
For Errol Morris, "The most interesting thing about Curtis is his use of archival material. You have this huge, exponentially growing library of visual material cast off by the world - visual detritus. Those repurposed images become the grammar of Adam Curtis's moviemaking. And they're really quite wonderful. They pull and push your head around in all kinds of unspeakable directions." Surprisingly, considering the importance of the internet to Curtis' work - both for enabling his films' associative leaps and allowing audiences worldwide access to his history lessons - the man is something of a web sceptic. Curtis refers to most bloggers as "anti-journalists", and remains suspicious of Silicon Valley's evangelistic predictions of a new democracy, which to him resemble so many other empty utopian promises. "It's not a distribution of power," he says. "It's a distribution of information. I haven't noticed the structure of power in my country or in America changing as a result of the internet. The hierarchies are, if anything, more stratified, more rigid, than they were before the internet came in." This is just the latest iteration of the typical Curtis paradox: the tools we use to maximise our freedom will always enslave us, as long as we don't know how to ask the right questions.
While newspapers and magazines blame the cyberspace rabbit-hole for shrinking the modern attention span, Curtis actually credits the internet for priming the open-minded to think more intelligently. "The most important thing about the internet," he says, "is that it has brought about or at least emphasised a new sensibility among our audience. It has made mainstream audiences more courageous and more accepting of things that jump around - make big jumps - in a way that only avant-garde films used to do. Most of our programs, especially drama, here on the BBC, haven't caught up to that. They still make really pedantic, simplistic narratives." If the Adam Curtis campaign of historical re-education is to be a movement of consequence, it must convince the sceptics that the stories we tell about How We Got to Where We Are can no longer move in a single direction. Keep up if you can - but make sure to bring sensible shoes.
Akiva Gottlieb is a contributor to The Nation and the Los Angeles Times.
