My lingering feeling that he sucks/is an op is growing. I’ve long figured that nobody truly subversive would be getting published by the BBC. The majority of his latest work is a borderline anti communist hit piece tbh.
He’s been pretty clear that he’ doesn’t hold left wing views, from 2012:
People often accuse me of being a lefty. That’s complete rubbish. If you look at The Century of the Self, what I’m arguing is something very close to a neo-conservative position because I’m saying that, with the rise of individualism, you tend to get the corrosion of the other idea of social bonds and communal networks, because everyone is on their own. Well, that’s what the neo-conservatives argue, domestically.
…
I’m very much a creature of my time. I don’t really have any. I change my mind over different issues, but I am much more fond of a libertarian view. I have a more libertarian tendency…
I still find his films an entertaining exploration of the superstructure, even if they don’t tie things back to the base with a material analysis. He’s certainly not an op, his stuff is just the right kind of Guardian-friendly edginess that BBC commissioning editors love.
He is sort of a natural moth-light for leftists and Marxists not because of his opinions but because his analysis is a familiar dialectic:
These people believe X and have material interests Y so they do Z, but these other people believe A and have material interests in B so they do C in response to Z. Etc etc. That sort of analysis is rare in documentaries. Candy coat it with some trippy archive footage and western Marxists gobble it up.
If anything he's a dialectical idealist in a way. Not like he believes the material world is an idea just that ideas shape the world more than material interests do.
I do think his work is extremely dialectical, you might have hit the nail on the head about why it appeals to marxists there.
If anything he’s a dialectical idealist in a way. Not like he believes the material world is an idea just that ideas shape the world more than material interests do.
Adam Curtis is a Hegelian confirmed
Having your non-Marxist, less correct and borderline anticommunist takes disseminated by the national media arm of a bourgeois imperialist state is rather damning evidence of being an op imo, even if the author or distributor is not aware of the op. I’m sure Adam would agree.
Not to say I don’t find his films enjoyable, some of his other work I’ve found very educational and they obviously have an aesthetic charm. I just haven’t come across anticommunism as harsh as this in the other films I’ve seen of his.
People do abuse "being an op" too much... Adam Curtis is an OP no more than Michael Moore is. Sometimes documentarians have bad takes and if they have perfect takes that went perfectly against power structures then they wouldn't have a budget and be relevant for obvious reasons.
There are some ops for sure but it really means nothing to speculate if they are or not. Like if you actually knew some modernist artists were CIA funded while they were making art, what good would it do you? Just criticise the bad takes for what they are and explain why instead of wasting your time trying to convince people someone is an op and why your not a loon for believing in ops
The most powerful feature of doing psyops is that their still effective even when you know they're real. Just insinuating that your doing psyops to someone is an effective psyop.
“Op” is shorthand. You don’t have to be directly in the employ of the government (even though Curtis literally is lol) for the outcome of your actions to work in their favour.
My lingering feeling that he sucks/is an op is growing
to paraphrase someone else: "difficult for me to trust the motivations and perspectives of a person on a no-strings-attached lifetime residency at the most prominent media organization of the empire that they criticize"
but i also, for the most part didn't read much of his last documentary as explicitly anticommunist (or at least hard for me to read it as a hit piece when all of his critiques of the persons at the top of the CCP are also interspersed with, at the same rate of screentime, a litany of US/UK/western imperial powers and the intelligence sector of the CIA/MI5/MI6/etc repeatedly and actively shitting up their own countries, the middle east, Africa and the global south everywhere they went) - the overarching message (not surprising from someone who despite their alignment with Mark Fisher's works probably aligns themselves more as a classical liberal/libertarian type) is less "communism bad" than "big govt elites fucked everything up everywhere and psychology bad", which you can make the argument is still a reactionary-coded take from certain perspectives, but i also don't think anyone here would argue that the sackler family deserves to be shot out of a cannon or oligarchic neoliberalism combined with an impotent drunk Yeltsin fucked up post-USSR Russia even if a guy working for the BBC also comes to the same conclusion.
i think there is a deeper binary at work than "this guy is based"/"this guy sucks and is a op/fed actually" that this website would due well to embrace.
but at the same time my critiques with the documentary funnily enough probably stem from the same energy OP has, just in a different way - so much of his work is very frictionless, contextless and for lack of a better word even "Amateurish" (mostly archival footage, narration/exposition only) filmmaking. By all technical standards, Adam Curtis is a godawful filmmaker and would probably barely pass the advanced editing course i had to take in college. And yet this man has basically unlimited access to the BBC archives, a music licensing budget that is probably bigger than most entire films, and is allowed to use an authoritative voice to bring "truth" to a kaleidoscopic narrative unburdened by actual evidence or context in-film other than "yeah you had to be there" or assuming the viewer already knows what's going on. There's a question of form in relationship to the institution at play here... sure, Ken Burns isn't exactly Godard either when it comes to film but never did I sit there watching any of his docs wondering why public funding allowed him to go crazy with windows movie maker. I don't think a black filmmaker or a woman filmmaker would get that sort of authoritative green light to do something like that. AC owes his viewers a deeper understanding of power both in front of the screen and behind it. He did this somewhat with Bitter Lake in pointing out how the media cynically takes contextless bits-and-pieces of documentation to create narratives, and yet you can argue Curtis' entire form is that.
AC works are in this weird strait where i would maybe recommend Hypernormalization or this doc to a normie friend as "cliff notes" or building blocks to a deeper situation but also only in a situation when i can be around to help contextualize and work through the material. Of course, as communists, this is what we're already committed to doing when educating our peers... right? 👁👄👁
Curtis' style might seem a bit simplistic or amateurish or whatever now, but perhaps that's because we've been through a decade and a half of amateur video essayists on YouTube overusing a very similar montage documentary style.
Great comment. As to your last point, there are some of his works I would show someone as a small part of a wider effort to radicalise them, mainly because they get people thinking outside of the box about power and consumerism and etc., but this latest film has so much scaremongering about past AES (along with capitalist states tbf) that I would be concerned it would do more harm than good to the openness to socialism of the person I was showing it to.
I just watched a 5 minute stretch where he just says “Deng believed...”, “Deng planned...”, Deng this, Deng that. No direct quotes. No dates, no references. Just Curtis telling me this is how it was, laying decades of Chinese national policy out and portraying it as a deliberate pre-planned scheme by Deng. I’m not a Dengist by any means but it seems a poor way of doing history/sociology/whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing
To put it in Marxist terms, Adam Curtis is an idealist, and that is his greatest fault as a social scientist. It's like if you took Jürgen Habermas and made him a documentary filmmaker.
That's the thing with AC though, I see his films as more of an art project based on history, rather than any sort of authoritative source on anything. I enjoy his work just because it gets the brain juices flowing a bit, rather than because he is "right" or anything.
what do you expect someone who mentions Franz Fanon's anti-colonial ideas and make it follows with footage of the Khmer Rouge? Adam curtis is a good movie maker but i don't feel like i learn more from him compare to reading Capitalism Realism twice
it was in the All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace documentary in the later part IIRC, they talk about creating "new system"
Average person believes what they're told by everyone around them except for a few things they've somehow learned about themselves. There's no "op" for 99% of them, they've just got mixed opinions, and they're hired into places of power because the mix is acceptable enough to the people doing the hiring.
His stuff is fun in the way a Pynchon novel is fun and is probably just about as much a work of fiction as a Pynchon novel.
Any western well connected journo or socialite: oh gommunism bad, both sides bad
Chapo chat: cia must be literally paying for that
“Op” is shorthand. You don’t have to be directly in the employ of the government (even though Curtis literally is lol) for the outcome of your actions to work in their favour.
On the other hand, he uses The Mekons "Where Were You" in one episode, and that song slaps so fucking hard
His soundtracks are indeed beyond reproach. “Don’t talk to me about love” in the intro to HyperNormalisation? So good.
My single takeaway from Curtis has been that you need vision to change society, a vision that goes beyond changing the status quo a little bit. And the only good vision around is socialism. I don't agree with his views, but he is spot on on this one.
Y'all keep quoting the doc out of context lmao. He covers a lot of ground and says stuff that he refutes later on. Later in the episode he basically calls the guy s facsist
