Legendary Documentarian Adam Curtis on His Extraordinary New Series, Can't Get You Out Of My Head

Watching an Adam Curtis film can be daunting: For four decades, he’s been combining highbrow philosophical concepts and psychological theories, copious historical arcana and geopolitics (for starters) to root out what amounts to a secret history of the hidden power structures that govern our world and our psyches. His collage-like documentaries are sweeping in scope and often breathtaking in their assertions—while somehow also managing to be idiosyncratic and visually delightful tone poems of mood, meaning, and emotion culled from the largest film archive in the world—and soundtracked by everyone from Tupac Shakur and Phosphorescent to Massive Attack (with whom he’s currently working again to, well, reinvent the concertgoing experience as we know it). We Zoomed with Curtis recently to discuss his new six-part series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, which recently premiered on the BBC’s iPlayer in England (and was even more recently bootlegged on YouTube and elsewhere).

Vogue: Let’s start with a kind of establishing shot to ground those who haven’t seen your work: Is it fair to say that you make nontraditional documentaries that cover big-picture themes, centrally focusing on the exercise of power—excavating the ways in which power is often hidden, though sometimes in plain sight?

Adam Curtis: That goes right to the point of what I do—the only thing I would kick back on is that I don’t see myself as a documentary filmmaker; I see myself much more as a political journalist. I’ve been trying for quite a while to use film to invent a different kind of journalism—to do essays which tell stories, but their real function is to make people pull back and look at their time and to say: Look—in this age of the individual, where you are told that you are the center of the world, power hasn’t gone away. It’s just mutated and morphed into all sorts of different forms, some of which are good, some of which are bad, some of which have grave consequences.

As I was growing up in journalism, I began to realize that the mainstream of political journalism, both the left and right, were sort of collapsing in on each other and becoming very narrow in their focus—they had a kind of consensus view that was enforced by think tanks and things like that, and I wanted to take a kind of helicopter view. But you’re spot-on: It’s about power.

More specifically, this new series presents six films about the difference between the collective power of totalitarian regimes in places like China and Russia and the more positive kind of collective power in things like labor unions—and it sets those dynamics off against the age of individualism.

That’s the interesting dynamic of our time. The thing I set out to answer in these films was why—in both your society and mine [Curtis is English and lives in London]—a lot of people who would see themselves as progressive are aching for change and yearning for change yet seem somehow paralyzed and frozen in their ability to produce it. In your country, you had four years of hysteria, but quite frankly, looking at things from this side of the Atlantic, actually nothing has changed in your country. We had Brexit and four years of fury, but nothing has changed. And I wanted to try and trace what has gone on inside the heads of these individuals which has led to this paralysis—to explain, through stories and characters, that paralysis. Why do we find it so difficult to do the very thing we say we want to do—to change things?

There has, of course, been criticism of your work—largely from people who would say that you’re either inaccurate in some of your evidence or require great leaps of faith to buy into the constructs you’re developing. I don’t want to get deep into the weeds with you about what Trump did or didn’t do; I’d agree with you that in terms of policy fairly little changed because Trump didn’t care about policy. But I’d argue that the United States changed radically under Trump. The very notion of a modern American president as adversarial to half of the citizenry; his effectiveness at convincing large swaths of the American public that any news, or any election, that doesn’t favor him is fake—these are toxins introduced into our society that may have existed before but essentially went nuclear under Trump.

I think a number of political journalists don’t quite fully understand what I do. They don’t realize that I’m doing what you said I’m doing: making provocative essays that try to make you look at the world again. I see my role—and the BBC has encouraged me to do this—to provoke; to pull back and say, No: Have you thought about looking at it this way? And yes, of course people go, “ugghh” and disagree, but that’s what journalism should be doing and, in my knowledge of it, what it gave up about 25 years ago when the left and the right of mainstream politics in your country and my country began to blend together. And underneath the consensus that came out of that is something very powerful.

It is an underlying assumption that somehow all of this—everything around us—is inevitable. That things just happen—and the best you can do is to try and manage the consequences. I think that sense of inevitability emerged because what the politicians and technocrats adopted 20 years ago was a managerial view of the world, and that has a very static vision of things that says, “This is all there is.” That feeling of inevitability has now become the dominant ideology of our time—even among many radicals and liberals. And it was that that I wanted to challenge in the films: to show how it was all of us, both the politicians and we, self-expressive individuals, who together have created that feeling which has led to a sense of paralysis. And how it is not true; that things aren’t inevitable. We made this world—which means we can make it different. I find that thrilling—and it is what politics needs to recapture. All I’m trying to do is pull back and apply a bit of imagination—and why shouldn’t I make big assertions? You don’t have to agree with me.

There are some people who find all that a bit destabilizing, but I’ve found that there are lots of people who really like that. It’s for those people that I make these films. In any case, the audience is way ahead of us now, both because they got bored with that very narrow consensus but also because of the internet—they’ve gotten very used to making extraordinary jumps and big connections. The last film I did, HyperNormalisation, cut through to 18- to 25-year-olds in a massive way. Journalism hasn’t kept up with the sensibility of its audience. It seems old—and like it’s not reflecting the world we see or describing the way you feel about things. People got off journalism because it doesn’t do that anymore—and it should because it’s thrilling.

I think a lot of liberals in your country got bogged down in all those details of Trump. It was almost like codependency: Trump would say something very bad, and they would then write in big capitals, “This is appalling and disgusting.” And outside of all that, the big forces of power stormed on. And from the moment when both left and right and the mainstream of politics collapsed together, people who were hurting and feeling lonely and anxious and uncertain were offered no alternative, and along came Trump and Brexit and—I’m going to use a bad word here—they were offered a very big button that said “Fuck off” on it, and can you blame them for pressing it? Sometimes things are very simple. That’s what they did.

And they were offered a story of greatness—whether that story was true or not. They were fed a compelling narrative.

Exactly. And if you want to change the world, which is really what I’m trying to get to at the end of these films, you have to go and talk to the people who believe in these narratives, even if you think they’re racist. They’re not racist because they have some disease; they’re angry and furious, and they may not be very nice people, but you have to talk to them.

How did you put your films together—and how long did this new series take?

From thinking about it to producing it, it took about three years. I wanted to do a film that was more character based than, say, HyperNormalisation, and I’ve always wanted to do something more like those 19th-century multipart novels: to take a group of characters that can recur and come back in different forms after something’s gotten into their head and changed them. But it’s an organic process: I start with a question, and then I start telling stories, and then I find bits of interesting footage. I found footage of one of the women who had been one of the leaders of Tiananmen Square that was filmed a few nights before the crackdown in 1989. Watching it, when you see her beginning to realize that individualism could never produce the kind of collective power that old-style revolutions had produced, you realized that what she was doing was being deeply honest about the central dilemma of our time, which is that mass democracy depended on the collective power of the people to give them the power to challenge things. But then it produced this thing called individualism, which, like a horrible, monstrous child, began to eat mass democracy—to such an extent that, as I point out in the film, people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair realized that they had no collective power anymore. And you can’t blame them—they just gave up.

I read recently that you’re obsessed with TikTok. Could it be argued that your films are the world’s longest, most highbrow TikTok?

[Laughs.] I love it! I do love TikTok because of its chaos. I hate Instagram because people who do it are so controlling and buttoned-up and everything’s designed, whereas TikTok is just wonderful chaos, and I love exploring it. Funnily enough, [last year] people from TikTok approached me and said, “Would you like to explore TikTok and do something weird and odd with us?” But then that whole TikTok-China-Trump-ban thing happened, and the whole thing went to pieces.

If you can escape the algorithm—which is the real game of TikTok, to cheat the algorithm—you can find very odd corners, including a whole area called Alt-TikTok, which is fascinating and very political; it’s done by 17- and 18-year-old kids, and it’s really inventive. I started in television in what’s best described as trash TV—I filmed talking animals, singing dogs, things like that—and I learned a lot about deadpan humor doing that. And one of the things I tend to do is take a lot of what I learned from that and bolt it together with high-end pretentious stuff, so there’s a lot of silliness in my films, and a lot of the silliness on TikTok is like that—very deadpan.

Could you tell me how Kanye West became one of your supporters?

He did a load of tweets suddenly one night [in 2018]. I mean, God knows what he was doing—just saying that I was wonderful. And for the next three or four days, I had that moment of, “Oh! Kanye West tweeted about you.” But that was it. There was some theory that he wanted to get in contact with me, but he never did.

What are you working on at the moment, and do you have any plans to expand your work to different forms—say, along the lines of what you’ve done with Massive Attack at the Park Avenue Armory? 

Massive Attack have actually come to me to ask if I would design another show for them and said that I could be even more ambitious this time. We’ve talked about this a lot, and they think—and I think they’re probably right—that once the pandemic is over, hopefully by the end of this year, that there will be a hunger for just going out but also just experiencing stuff together. And I suddenly thought, Ah—you can explore that whole idea of collectivism and individualism in a whole other realm. So that’s what I’m doing next. So many music shows—I’m sure you’ve been to many of them—use video but in a really quite predictable way. They’ve got a bit stuck with big screens and trippy colors, but there’s some kind of new theatrical experience waiting to be done in live concerts. And I like Massive Attack because they’re one of the few who still have a political idea or want to play with politics.

Music seems a central—and, to me, stunning—part of what you do. But your use of it is unusual—it doesn’t make literal sense, but it makes a kind of mood sense. You’re hearing about the death of a Chinese premier, but you’re watching a video of people dancing the Charleston or something.

I’m obsessed with music. And I worked out quite early on that if you’re trying to do that thing of pulling back to make people look at things again, one of the key elements of that is to create the mood that will enable them to do that—not just the stories or the facts. And the way to do that is by not being literal. The real problem with a lot of television journalism, to be brutal, is that the people who make it are not very interested in music—I’ve noticed this. And they leave it to the assistant editors to put some music on at the end, which is why the result is just really boring and predictable—putting “Money” by Pink Floyd over shots of banks.

Also, my father’s generation grew up talking about politics to each other, and they knew if they liked each other by the political discourse they had with each other. I grew up talking to my friends about music and film, and I knew whether I liked them and they knew whether they liked me by the sort of references. I simply brought that into journalism.

I found myself shattered after watching almost every episode of the series: We meet these people, generally young, filled with bold ideas about transforming their world and their culture, and then we see the array of powerful forces that seem to conspire against them. It’s heartbreaking. Is there a way out? Can we get beyond these power structures?

What I’m trying to trace in these films is the rise of that dream: that instead of an overarching narrative given to you by a dictator or a communist theory, you could have millions of people expressing themselves and living their own stories. That started off as a noble utopian idea in the late 1950s and 1960s. But by the time you get to our current age, what you have is millions of individuals anxious, uncertain, and frightened of the future and definitely feeling rather disempowered. I wanted to trace why that happened because if you do want to change the world, you’ve got to recognize what that era of individualism did. It was a glorious, wonderful moment—especially the ’90s; I still don’t think we’ve really understood the ’90s yet, which was an absolutely fascinating period. What I also wanted to say at the end of my films, and I think I said it clearly enough—is that you’re never going to put individualism back in a box; it’s a thing, and it’s a thing in China, Russia, wherever you go. But the politics of the future will be someone or something that finds a way of allowing us to still feel we are individuals and express ourselves as individuals, yet at the same time, without giving that up, feel that we’re part of something that is strong and powerful and can change the world and will go on beyond our own existence.