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? 👁👄👁