It\u2019s that voice. The one from The Power of Nightmares (2004) and HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head <\/a>(2021). Emotionally neutral, almost deadpan; those deliberate cadences, the Oxbridge assurance, with something ever so slightly off. And it\u2019s coming from the man in the room with me, Adam Curtis \u2013 the BBC\u2019s coolest asset, the cult documentary filmmaker, the critical thinker who inspired an entire generation of YouTube video essayists and hopeful journalists, whose films play like the greatest pop video you\u2019ve ever seen, while telling you stories about power and money and how the world truly is that stay with you indefinitely. <\/p>\n He greets me in a white shirt, blazer, modern cargo pants, and a pair of Converse, like a professor on sabbatical. One room I enter accidentally is empty except for a table stacked with books. In the kitchen, he begins to enthusiastically explain a tray of seedlings he\u2019s raising like botanical children, some of them in the \u201chospital bed\u201d, suffering. Mid-sentence, he remembers he has to check something and disappears into another room. Loud music starts blaring; it\u2019s The Bug\u2019s \u201cAngry\u201d, an agitated fusion of dubstep and dancehall. \u201cSo many tings dat get mi angry and\/ So many tings dat get mi mad\u2026\u201d echoes off the tall ceilings of the house. A couple of minutes later, he returns unfazed. <\/p>\n \u201cSpotify\u2019s playlists<\/a> \u2013 which apparently it makes all its money from \u2013 are just ambient backdrops to your life now. Have you noticed this?\u201d the 70-year-old asks me from across the table in his Soho townhouse office. \u201cHanging with your friends: 50 songs.\u201d I start to say that yes, I have noticed this, and instead of hanging with friends, we listen to songs that provide \u201cvibes\u201d rather than companionship. But before I can finish that response, his calm, authoritative voice comes in: \u201cAs though you were hanging with your friends, but you\u2019re not.\u201d <\/p>\n In a conversation with Curtis, there is limited time to process each of his thoughts. Like, \u201ca lot of things that we blame on the internet were happening already before the internet\u201d, or \u201cin 20 years\u2019 time, they\u2019ll look back and the symbol of our age will be headphones\u201d. <\/p>\n Incisive observations like these offhand ones are developed and channelled into films or series that capture our collective emotional histories from a bird\u2019s eye view. Sometimes it\u2019s about describing how everyone knows that our systems are failing but no one can imagine an alternative, so we all accept our unreal world as real, as in HyperNormalisation, his biggest global success. Or, in his 2002 series, The Century of the Self, how Freudian psychology was co-opted by institutions to control the masses, turning active citizens into blind consumers. In his new BBC series, Shifty, it\u2019s about how British politicians lost their power by the end of the 20th century. We feel these things, but we can\u2019t articulate them. <\/p>\n People fall back on calling his work, which makes meticulous and obsessive use of the BBC\u2019s huge archive, psychedelic or kaleidoscopic. He chops and changes between clips of Seventies advertisements, protests, home videos, frontline warfare, and whatever else he finds. He\u2019s an encyclopaedia of modern music and chooses tracks that support the mood of what he\u2019s depicting. Sometimes that might be songs by an underground artist like Burial, or the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails, or drum\u2019n\u2019bass. The thought of ABBA\u2019s \u201cMoney, Money, Money\u201d soundtracking one of his scenes about bankers? Unthinkable. \u201cNotice most music in TV and movies is so literal. It\u2019s almost treating you in a patronising way. \u2018No, listen to us, we\u2019re talking about money,\u2019\u201d he says wryly. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n \u2018Shifty\u2019 looks at how politics explained our lives until finance took over, hand in hand with its eager accomplice: the tech industry (BBC)<\/p>\n To me, rather than kaleidoscopic, the viewing experience of his style is closer to the way near-death experience survivors describe what happens at the end of a person\u2019s life. It\u2019s a playback of your time on earth but with the perspective of something greater, before you\u2019re sucked back into the collective consciousness. At the very least, Curtis\u2019s films make you feel as though you\u2019ve been a part of something. <\/p>\n His film style emerged in the 1990s, when a new editing system was introduced that allowed shots to be placed freely, without the constraints of traditional sequencing. \u201cIt\u2019s very similar to sampling in music,\u201d he explains. He honed that style about 15 years ago when he noticed that the way people spoke to one another had become very \u201cjumpy\u201d, leaping around based on where their mind went. \u201cI began to realise that actually, if you\u2019re going to connect with the way people think and feel at this moment you have to make films in the forms that match them. If you live in an atomised and fragmented society where you\u2019re never really sure what\u2019s coming next, why not make a film like that?\u201d <\/p>\n This, he believes, is part of why he connected with a young audience. In the mid-2010s he was discovered by disgruntled millennials about to have their hearts broken by Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s election loss and Brexit. He\u2019s lovingly memed and celebrated by the sort of people who were involved in the Occupy movement and read pop-cultural theorists like the late Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. \u201cIn fact, I knew Mark Fisher but I try not to be academic like they are,\u201d he says in response to that characterisation of his following. \u201cI don\u2019t mean to be brutal but you must take pretentious s*** and make it really entertaining, really fun but at the same time say something serious. I\u2019ll never use a word that I don\u2019t really understand, like neoliberalism<\/a>. I try to describe the world as I experience it.\u201d <\/p>\n Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And the world post-pandemic is a weird and disorientating one. \u201cYou have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it\u2019s almost like you\u2019re treading water. Nothing is actually happening,\u201d he says with verve. \u201cNo one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles<\/a>.\u201d A beat. \u201cFour major movies about The Beatles.\u201d He looks out his window to where his thriving plants are arranged on the balcony as he configures a timeline: it has been 65 years since The Beatles formed. \u201cThat\u2019s like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It\u2019s extraordinary! We\u2019re trapped!\u201d And it\u2019s not just older people living in a haze of nostalgia, he says: everyone is stuck in the past. <\/p>\n Take Taylor Swift<\/a>, for example. To Curtis, she recreates the American musicals from the Fifties in songs like \u201cAll Too Well\u201d; in each chorus of that track she returns to a phrase and changes its meaning. \u201cTaylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day<\/a> figure. That\u2019s not to diss any of what she\u2019s saying but it\u2019s quite held together in time and I don\u2019t think that expresses now.\u201d<\/p>\n There is no framework or guiding force to understand our times, he thinks. \u201cCovid was the last moment of clear authority: someone telling us what to do. After that, apart from \u2018stay home and wear masks\u2019, they disappeared. We were left on our own. I think that\u2019s had a big impact.\u201d Politicians can\u2019t give us a sense of what\u2019s happening because the very language of democracy is no longer relevant. \u201cWe\u2019re waiting for someone or some idea to make sense of it. The dread people feel comes from having no power. It\u2019s like being on a plane in turbulence. You hunker down, terrified, watching the wing flap, knowing there\u2019s nothing you can do. That\u2019s how people feel now.\u201d <\/p>\n Curtis\u2019s new series, Shifty, is an eerie tale of how politics explained our lives until finance took over, hand in hand with its eager accomplice: the tech industry. Its five episodes focus solely on Britain and the increasingly powerless politicians that came after Margaret Thatcher. His classic voiceover is nowhere to be heard because, he says, the objectivity of it would have distracted from how this transition of power had an impact on people\u2019s minds. It caused the people in his footage to be more frightened and fragmented. <\/p>\n As viewers we\u2019re left to drift along until the payoff in the final episode. We see political operatives wander through the Millennium Dome they poured so much money and hope into, a supposed celebration of Britain\u2019s past and future that ends up feeling like a cavernous monument to confusion. As the accompanying caption coolly notes: \u201cThe liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years. Now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth. They no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future.\u201d Try to read that over a lingering shot of the dome without laughing. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n ‘HyperNormalisation’ is Curtis’s biggest global success (BBC)<\/p>\n The series concludes in the 2000s, but money is even more powerful today. Though Curtis doesn\u2019t explicitly touch on how this has shaped succeeding generations of people, Shifty feels like the Gen Z origin story. Social media is brimming with Gen Z content about how to generate \u201cpassive income\u201d like billionaires and how to get \u201crich aunty energy\u201d. They know more about finances than their millennial elders, who they watched fail to reach financial milestones by playing the game. I tell him this, and, like everything else, he finds it fascinating, but says: \u201cI\u2019m not surprised. If the only thing that is really strong and powerful in our country and society is money these days, then of course it\u2019s going to burrow into your consciousness \u2013 because people only feel secure if they\u2019re given a frame, a language to describe the reality of the world they live in. Whether it comes from politicians or journalists like me or you or from expert think tank people. Money becomes this dominant force because it seems to be the only way of feeling secure.\u201d <\/p>\n Our recent age of anxiety related to climate change and social media is over, Curtis agrees. We are now in a time of melancholy. A feeling of deflation, of \u2018is this it?\u2019 \u201cI don\u2019t quite understand why and it\u2019s incoherent in my head at the moment but I can feel it,\u201d he says, very frankly, looking straight at me. It could be the fact that we\u2019re trapped in a feedback loop of social media, which is chaotic and doesn\u2019t take people anywhere, other than towards emotions like anger and fear that companies can monetise. It might be the financial bleakness for so many people. Maybe it\u2019s because what Curtis calls the \u201creal self\u201d has completely disappeared. He dates the disappearance, based on seeing the way that people suddenly started presenting themselves in the BBC archive footage, as starting in 1998. \u201cWhat you\u2019re left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you\u2019ll never find it.\u201d <\/p>\n This thesis won\u2019t be his next project, because it would be impossible to explore without being a bit rude about people (\u201cAnd I would never do that in my films. I treat everyone nicely, even Mrs Thatcher.\u201d). Instead, he\u2019s in the early stages of planning a film about America that will disrupt our ideas about what America is, using a post-colonialist lens, through the footage of the BBC\u2019s outposts in countries like Japan, Korea, India and China. \u201cYou and I are very much children of that American culture. I have a feeling that people are becoming disenchanted with that culture and beginning to distance themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n Of course it would be another collaboration with the BBC, which he doubts he will ever leave. \u201cThey give me a great deal of freedom, mainly because I don\u2019t cost very much,\u201d he says, excitedly. \u201cI also think it\u2019s a powerful organisation and, unlike something like Netflix, still has a purchase on reality. I go to Netflix to watch things that have absolutely nothing to do with reality. Emily in Paris \u2013 love it.\u201d<\/p>\n When he\u2019s not watching Netflix or zipping through the BBC archives \u201clike it\u2019s shopping \u2013 I spot it and if it\u2019s good, I\u2019ll have it\u201d, he has to see his friends or do nothing. The doing nothing is important, he says, to decompress from watching so much content (Curtis is just like us, except most of us never stop). <\/p>\n So much of his work talks about the fact that progress has stagnated and change is only possible if we imagine new futures, but Curtis won\u2019t be the one to do that. Put simply, he says, it\u2019s not his job. \u201cMy job is to try and explain how we got here. That\u2019s the best I can do,\u201d he says resolutely. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you what\u2019s coming because that\u2019s what journalists don\u2019t do. What they can be good at is to say this is what is happening.\u201d <\/p>\n What\u2019s missing from journalism, in his mind, is a sense of proportion: the 24\/7 news cycle is not providing that, and that is something that as journalists \u2013 he gestures between us \u2013 we can do to break through this pessimism and melancholy. Good politics and good journalism can remind people of what they\u2019ve forgotten: \u201cWhat\u2019s missing at the moment is knowing that as human beings we are much stronger than we think. We really are.\u201d<\/p>\n ‘Shifty’ is out now on BBC iPlayer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-197306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114710407062443916","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u2018Shifty\u2019](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/526210.jpeg\")
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![\"'HyperNormalisation'](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/p04c0tsb.jpeg\")
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