Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World

[coprolite]

2 hours ago, Detournement said:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140102024706/http://plover.net/~bonds/pandorasdocs.html

This is a good article about Curtis's links to the RCP, Living Marxism and Spiked and collects some quotes which shine some light on his personal politics. 

As the article explains with quotes from Curtis his films are attempts to promote a worldview which focuses on Great Men and battles of ideas and explicitly shuns historical materialism and issues of economic power. Now given that historical materialism has inspired the only successful challenges to monopoly capitalism I don't think it's an accident that the BBC are funding and promoting Curtis's work which when it comes down to it are reactionary ideas dressed up as radicalism.

Curtis's films are based on the form of Guy Debord's The Society Of The Spectacle but it has the entirely opposite effect. Debord (and all good Marxist analysis) is liberating because it provides a mental framework to understand the world around you. Curtis purposefully sets out to confuse and the overwhelming effect of his movies is to make his viewers feel the world/society is inherently unknowable and enigmatic.

 

One takeaway from Curtis' documentaries is that in the marketplace of ideas the marketing is way  more important than the quality of the product. 

Maybe if you set your arguments to entertaining archive footage with an incongrous soundtrack they'd be more interesting and people would pay attention to them.

Personally i do buy some of the broader narratives but find some of them over simplistic or just wrong but i enjoy the presentation. I think there is merit in the great man view but do agree that (except in the one about computers) he almost ignores systemic, emergent phenomena. 

[NotThePars]

Who's watched it then? 

This kinda cements for me that he's like John McDonnell in my mind. Someone that I have to build up and support because of the absolute dearth of comparable figures.

Edited February 12, 2021 by NotThePars

[coprolite]

2 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Who's watched it then? 

This kinda cements for me that he's like John McDonnell in my mind. Someone that I have to build up and support because of the absolute dearth of comparable figures whereas in an ideal scenario I could dismiss him for his many faults.

Watched episode one so far. Highlights have been more visual (mass rallies in China) and aural (Aphex Twin computer controlled acoustic instruments) than any great ideas or narratives.

I did enjoy the Oswald/playboy story and thought the theme of that was closest to meeting my expectations. 

I thought some of the archive footage about uk immigration was great but not convinced he built a great narrative or said anything interesting beyond the content of the clips. The China stuff was generally a misfire for me. 

Will be interested to see if these are separate threads from the rest of the series or will be woven together. I expect the latter but it's a much longer series than usual. 

 

[NotThePars]

44 minutes ago, coprolite said:

Watched episode one so far. Highlights have been more visual (mass rallies in China) and aural (Aphex Twin computer controlled acoustic instruments) than any great ideas or narratives.

I did enjoy the Oswald/playboy story and thought the theme of that was closest to meeting my expectations. 

I thought some of the archive footage about uk immigration was great but not convinced he built a great narrative or said anything interesting beyond the content of the clips. The China stuff was generally a misfire for me. 

Will be interested to see if these are separate threads from the rest of the series or will be woven together. I expect the latter but it's a much longer series than usual. 

 

From reading other people's reviews of the entire thing I think there is a coherent narrative built around power and the David Graeber (RIP) quote that opens (and apparently closes) the series. I think he's taken to heart a few of the criticisms levelled against him about how bleak a portrait he paints. Oh, and he's definitely clocked the Burial parody slaggings given he's replaced him with Aphex. I laughed out loud when Avril 14th dropped.

The Oswald bit, which I sourced, made me burst out laughing as well:

"At the camp he met another recruit who seemed to embody the figure of the free, independent individual he so admired, because he refused to bow to the power of the officers. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald."

So good.

[coprolite]

35 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

From reading other people's reviews of the entire thing I think there is a coherent narrative built around power and the David Graeber (RIP) quote that opens (and apparently closes) the series. I think he's taken to heart a few of the criticisms levelled against him about how bleak a portrait he paints. Oh, and he's definitely clocked the Burial parody slaggings given he's replaced him with Aphex. I laughed out loud when Avril 14th dropped.

The Oswald bit, which I sourced, made me burst out laughing as well:

"At the camp he met another recruit who seemed to embody the figure of the free, independent individual he so admired, because he refused to bow to the power of the officers. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald."

So good.

Goddammit i got the aphex album wrong. That's off of drukqs (sp?) isn't it. 

Looking forward to some virtuoso spinning to bring all these threads together now. 

[NotThePars]

On 12/02/2021 at 19:56, coprolite said:

Goddammit i got the aphex album wrong. That's off of drukqs (sp?) isn't it. 

Looking forward to some virtuoso spinning to bring all these threads together now. 

Aye drukqs. Yea, he's went even more out there than I would expect going by Hyper and Bitter but he's got 5 hours to bring them together. Having spoken to some people I know (who are fans) they said the Graeber quote which opens the first episode should serve as a mission statement which makes me think he's read Detournement's posts on here*.

*I do sincerely believe that he's fairly easily rattled because parts of what I've watched feel like direct responses to criticisms of him even down to shifting away from Burial as a mic drop moment.

[D.A.F.C]

Watching the first episode now, the release of Illuminati conspiracy to disprove conspiracies didn’t really work then.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy
 

 

[D.A.F.C]

Watched the first episode and the are we pigeons episode.

I think its a bit of a rambling mess and I'm not really sure what he's getting at. 

Seems like hypernormalisation with an unnecessary look into china's affairs. The stuff on Boole was interesting and that people can be excited, anxious or controlled to an extent by social media but not controlled into voting for trump or brexit. It was more the middle classes failure to realise the inequalities imposed onto the working class that caused it. Hardly ground breaking stuff. Thought he had some good ideas but it was too long, drawn out and incoherent compared to his previous docs.

Hypernormalisation, bitter lake and power of nightmares all better and have clear points.

Really what was the point of showing the adulterer guy or the wife of Mao for hours? Made me disengage completely.

[NotThePars]

4 hours ago, D.A.F.C said:

Watched the first episode and the are we pigeons episode.

I think its a bit of a rambling mess and I'm not really sure what he's getting at. 

Seems like hypernormalisation with an unnecessary look into china's affairs. The stuff on Boole was interesting and that people can be excited, anxious or controlled to an extent by social media but not controlled into voting for trump or brexit. It was more the middle classes failure to realise the inequalities imposed onto the working class that caused it. Hardly ground breaking stuff. Thought he had some good ideas but it was too long, drawn out and incoherent compared to his previous docs.

Hypernormalisation, bitter lake and power of nightmares all better and have clear points.

Really what was the point of showing the adulterer guy or the wife of Mao for hours? Made me disengage completely.

I've only watched the first two episodes but he's preoccupied with 1968 and the fallout of the cultural revolutions of the 60s. What's really funny is, at least so far, Curtis appears to be laying the blame for Cultural Revolution in China on Jiang Qing which has blown up half my Twitter feed.

[D.A.F.C]

He could have went more in depth about covid, algorithms, AI, trump but he chose some pretty obscure people and made some massive leaps.

The stuff on middle England being racist and unwelcoming is correct though there’s a denial of it but it’s what drove brexit through.

[ICTChris]

I've watched the first two episodes, I'm enjoying it. 

What's the song that's been played near the end of both episodes?

Edit: It's the Ravonettes Recharge and Revolt

Edited February 15, 2021 by ICTChris

[D.A.F.C]

Still think hypernormalisation dealt with this far better but theres some highlights within this.

One of the things he deals with and exposes is the motives and transfers of power. I find some of it hard to deal with, like saying there's no real hope in politics and even that the counter culture of invidualism is a load of shit. 

I tried to explain on another thread that the phenomenon of angry left vs right is a complete waste of energy. He says that the Internet is designed on feedback. So if you have a bunch of angry left/right/racist/empaths then they get angry, go online and their rants and anger only finds more of the same type of people and what we have is an endless argument and more feedback and content making those people more and more angry. All this to make money by grabbing your attention. People know there's something wrong but they don't know how to fix it. They didn't even believe in trump or brexit but voted for it because it felt more real than the horseshit most politicians come out with. 

If people were to really stand up they might lose things, thats on all sides so nobody will ever follow through and we are left with a fake simplified version of the world and events. 

I dont blame people for behaving like this because change is hard or scary and in the past change meant things like nazis, communism etc. Even when three million marched against the Iraq war nothing happened but what curtis said was that it was framed as not in MY name and this sums up that people don't want to be part of something and individualism is preventing real change.

Not really sure what the answer is. Maybe there isn't one?

[NotThePars]

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/in-defence-of-adam-curtis good review and wider critique of the way Curtis’s work is perceived

[D.A.F.C]

Watched the trap on iplayer.

Interesting idea of how the cold War produced paranoia and suspicion and that from this came a way of monitoring systems and people. Replacing the elite with metrics and computers but all this did was to divide and make things more unequal.

Third part talks about positive and negative liberty and what this actually meant. 

I was too young to remember the contras but the similarities between that and the wmd bs is striking. Its hard to disagree about what he's saying that negative liberty was somewhat turned into positive by American neo cons again paranoid about the cold War. Backing dictators and imposing their type of freedom onto countries like Iran, Iraq and Russia and the results were a disaster.

I dont necessarily think everything is factual here, its his ideas but it does make sense. The plan for Iraq was utter madness, wtf were they thinking? They basically created isis. In fact most of the problems in the middle East is entirely a result of meddling.

[ICTChris]