20th July 2025
I don't think I'd heard of Adam Curtis before a couple of months ago, when I started watching Can't Get You Out of My Head. It was hard to know what to expect from a series with such a strange title, something neither the cover image nor episode titles do anything to aid.
Broadly speaking, the series is about how Western and Eastern cultures evolved over the 20th Century. It does this by focussing on a small number of seemingly key figures, who played roles at various inflection points. I say "seemingly", because if I was to ask you for a list of the top ten most pivotal people in the last century, I would be amazed if more than a single name matched. These characters are used to illustrate the difference between the radical individualism that blossomed in the West after the Second World War, and Socialism in the East. Curtis blames the fracturing and abandoning of shared cultural history for many of the conflicts and misunderstandings that arise within the two cultures.
I wonder if this 'social entropy' is one of the drivers of the modern day hyper-fandom of fictional universes. As the real world becomes increasingly complex and impossible to understand, people take comfort in worlds where good and bad are obvious, and all of the rules of the game are clear.
As the series progresses, whenever it seems like a political movement will develop the momentum to overthrow the incumbent 'powers that be', they seem to find a way to use it to further cement their position. However; their control is far from secure, and they increasingly relinquish it, willingly, to banks and corporations. The series though, ends on a possible reason for optimism;
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.
This quote reminded me of two videos; one of Steve Jobs and Howard Beale's "I want you to get mad" speech from the 1976 film Network.
A couple of weeks after finishing the series, I watched We Are As Gods, a film about Stewart Brand. It struck me how well Brand personifies the individualism that Curtis describes. Unhappy with how he sees the world, he aims to remake it, by bringing back the woolly mammoth.
While I was making my way through Can't Get You Out of My Head, Curtis released a new series, Shifty, that I will definitely be watching soon.
Bonus: The series also introduced me to the fantastic punk track Where Were You by Mekons.