Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the World (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Robert Koehler

Produced by Sandra Gorel; executive producer, Rose Garnett; written and edited by Adam Curtis; research by Stuart Robertson; sound by Steve Speed. Color and B&W, six episodes with a total running time of 478 min. A BBC release available on YouTube or BBC iPlayer.

The image appears early in Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It is night. A dark city street. Silent. In a corner, adjacent to a building, a contained fire is rising, like an oversized urban campfire, but with nobody around it. The image, like many clips that Curtis selects for his montages—the most elaborate, most extended montages in modern cinema—has no specific context. 

But it does have a mood, and the mood is threatening. A fire is breaking out. It’s small right now, but it could grow. Who started it? Why? Will it spread? Or will it be snuffed out soon? And is it bad? Maybe the fire is an image of the spark of change. Maybe it’s the image that corresponds to the title of James Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time.

These were my thoughts about this one image, not so focused the first time I saw it early on in Curtis’s six-part, seven hour and fifty-eight-minute opus (he refers to each part as a separate “film”). But my thoughts about what I was seeing became more focused each time the image reappeared. This mysterious fire becomes a recurring image, just as Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, Natalie Beridze, This Mortal Coil, and Thomas Ragsdale are recurring artists in Curtis’s extensive soundtrack sampling. (Some maniacal Web researchers have tallied the total number of music tracks in the movie at an astounding eighty-nine.) 

So much time is spent in the writing about Curtis’s work within the confines of a word-based argument that his actual cinema—the interplay between sound and image, the narcotic effect of the image and sound recurrences, the sheer audio-video density—tends to get overlooked. Nevertheless, there’s no question that he is the supreme maker of essay films of our time. The Essay Film is the strangest genre, and few have a handle on it: that’s because it takes a literary form and translates it into audiovisual terms. This can be tricky to explain. Despite the movie’s subtitle, Can’t Get You Out of My Head isn’t quite history, although it comes the closest to a history work of anything Curtis has made during his long run as the BBC’s most liberated, free-range journalist. The essay film usually expresses its animating idea in a set of visual correlatives, signifiers, or metaphors. But Curtis doesn’t apply metaphors. The fire in the dark street is a metonym: it stands by itself, but it also suggests a greater idea, the uncertainty of our age.  

As he’s recently done, Curtis immediately diagnoses our present condition as “strange.” His previous movie, HyperNormalisation (2016), began with the use of the word. Can’t Get You Out of My Head begins in his somnolent yet commanding narrating voice: “We are living through strange days.” Curtis’s sprawling studies of the modern world go by many titles, such as his masterpiece The Century of The Self (2002), but they share one central concern: how the world as we know it came to be. Curtis’s ongoing theory, which he’s reworked from one project to another, is that the discordant nature of our lives and this world flows out of a dramatic collapse of the power of mass movements and the rise of a seemingly more powerful culture of individualism. The old forms of power failed. We’re at a point where the newer ones have failed, too. These old and new failures fell short of the same goal: their common purpose to change the world. We sense this dilemma, Curtis states, but we’re unsure how to solve it, how to change course, because we’re skeptical of returning to old forms of power, and doubtful that anything new can truly fulfill the desire for a new world. 

It is this doubt, he says, that is our greatest enemy. His final thought, at the end of nearly eight hours, is this: “If we regain our confidence, we will find we have the power to influence the future.” The irony of Curtis’s diagnosis is that the previous hours could, to the jaundiced eye, demonstrate why that doubt may be well founded. That fire in the corner may not be the spark of change; it may grow, spread, and burn down the whole block. 

Curtis is aware of this irony. There are ways to interpret the many “emotional histories” in his audiovisual essay as proof that history is pure human dynamics at work, a condition of perpetual change working its way through individual human beings and the societies in which they find themselves. History is not fate, but it can be, as he has titled one of his previous film essays, The Trap (2007). This theme that commands his storytelling is why watching Curtis recalls the tagline of the Howard the Duck comics: “Trapped in a world he never made.” Curtis takes the template he used in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004), applying the case studies of individuals on opposite sides of the post 9/11 war in the Middle East to comprehend how what historian Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid style” was used for post-Cold War politics, and pushes it more radically here. The result is an extraordinary gallery of unlikely characters, trapped like Howard, battling forces greater than themselves, and almost always failing. And it’s in comprehending these failures that insight on the future may occur.

Two of the most gripping emotional histories are the accounts of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong, and Michael de Freitas, a Trinidad and Tobago émigré in London whose life of crime elevated him into a Black anticolonialist and freedom fighter modeling himself on Malcolm X. Jiang’s story begins in the Shanghai showbiz world of the 1930s where she struggled as a supporting actor to leading ladies. Jiang’s jealousies and resentments in the Shanghai movie studios grew into a vengeful rage that fueled the rest of her life, when she joined the communist rebels and became Mao’s lover. Jiang viewed herself, contrary to the Maoist collectivist ideology, as “a unit of one,” and was thus one of the first true individualists of the twentieth century. Had events shifted another way, Jiang also could have become one of the first great feminists of the twentieth century, as she bucked the rules in the male-dominant Chinese Communist hierarchy.

Instead, burning with the desire to turn the tables on her many enemies in Shanghai and politics, Jiang was personally responsible for fomenting the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the most disastrous humanitarian and political catastrophe in modern Chinese history. But, as Curtis shrewdly observes, Jiang’s campaign of vengeance, cloaked as “revolution,” was actually used by Mao to get rid of his own enemies. And the guns were finally turned on Jiang herself, who committed suicide while in prison.

De Freitas’s story is much less well known, but just as wild. Arriving in a postwar Fifties London, de Freitas found that the image he grew up with of a happy England was shattered as he observed a nation festering with defeatism, backward nostalgia for a vanished empire, and, above all, persistent racism. De Freitas is like a crime fiction character who survives the street battles, rises up through the ranks of thuggery and gains respect and allies. These alliances unexpectedly opened his eyes to the U.K.’s exploitive system against its poor and racial and ethnic minorities, and naturally drew him to the work of Malcolm X. Renaming himself as “Michael X,” De Freitas was eventually targeted by authorities, imprisoned, and once released, found his Sixties alliances gone and replaced by Curtis’s most despised figure—The New Age Hippie, the well-educated liberal bourgeois primed for the New Consumerism. De Freitas’s violent fate resolved like the third act of a William Wellman tough-guy tragedy, without a hint of heroism.

In both cases, Curtis traces figures that went mad in their efforts to change the world. But these cases are the most extreme and dramatic, and taken by themselves in isolation, serve up a picture of sheer hopelessness. Curtis has said how much he admires collage as a form that accurately expresses the mood of our age, but, as a filmmaker, he isn’t so much a collage artist (someone like, say, Robert Rauschenberg) as a weave artist. Across the six episodes, he selects story strands of individuals inside history and coils these strands that result in a larger narrative. Each strand reflects the other, so as Jiang Qing’s crazy life plays out, the viewer is also following others, such as the absurd, roller-coaster adventure of Russian poet and dissident Eduard Limonov. A Soviet dissident at the time when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made such antiauthoritarianism a Western cause, Limonov ended up homeless and wandering the streets of New York. Out of this came his influential 1979 novel, It’s Me, Eddie, that became all the rage with Russian youth. Once returning to post-Soviet Russia, Limonov didn’t become a champion for democratic reform; instead, he led a hodgepodge movement of neo-Nazis and old guard communists united under a nationalist Russian banner that, in its own ragtag way, anticipated Putin.

The original dream of changing the world collides with the world as it is, and the dreamer is more often changed than the world around him. Curtis’s weave becomes confused in the movie’s middle passages, despite the fact that these episodes track the period that is crucial to the big essay theme he has developed across his work—the 1970s. This is one of the key periods, for example, of The Century of the Self (2002), in which he brilliantly examines the collapse of the New Left and its imaginative, energetic radical politics, resulting in a retreat to self-help groups and the self-obsessed New Age Industrial Complex, the machinery of the post-New Left consumerism and narcissism which produced, among other horrors, Donald Trump. Curiously, this time out, Curtis struggles with the Seventies, perhaps lacking the kind of compelling figure of emotional history that he had in the preceding episodes.  

This is when I wondered why Curtis didn’t explore the fascinating emotional history of Jane Fonda. No public figure better embodied this Left-to-New Age retreat than Fonda. Who else within the span of a few years ventured from working with Godard during his Maoist phase to producing cheesy workout videos? Fonda may best exemplify what Curtis declares in the finale as his best hope. She’s currently protesting and getting arrested in direct actions calling for passage of the Green New Deal. No American entertainment figure today is more directly demanding radical action on climate change. Fonda has long ago escaped her Seventies retreat, has rediscovered her purpose, and is putting herself on the line. 

Curtis has a taste for forgotten or underexamined characters, so Fonda may have been too famous a character for him. Still, he does explore the fascinating stories of Tupac Shakur and his mother Afeni, whose life inside the Black Panthers nurtured in her son a desire for deep, structural social change and power for Black people. The point is that while Tupac’s story is yet another in a line of failures and bloody ends, Fonda’s points to a kind of triumph. For the first time in my viewing of Curtis’s cinema, I began to wonder if his inclination for tragic ends was undermining his ultimate purpose.

The latter episodes build gloriously toward our heated, “strange” moment, tracking the phenomena of the retreat of nationalist forces in the U.K. and the U.S. toward white nostalgia, the culture of the “volk” (Curtis’s unearthing of the British strain of this trend is revelatory to American eyes and ears). This is paralleled with new suburban angst (mollified by new generations of antidepressants like Valium), the emergence of Complexity Theory steered by the Santa Fe Institute’s Murray Gell-Mann and the gradual takeover of complex economic systems by banks and financial institutions from a government scorned after the grinding years of Vietnam, Watergate, and Reaganism. 

A problem emerges in this section, and while it takes up a relatively small slice of the running time, the problem lingers—one that Curtis has extended in the many interviews he has done since the movie’s February release on BBC iPlayer and (free) on YouTube. Leading to his conclusion, Curtis decries what he views as “conspiracy theories” by progressives thinking that the 2016 election was stolen by Vladimir Putin. It is a big leap—Curtis has never been one to shy from them—but it places him in a realm where he may be out of his element. He equates the right’s massive jungle of conspiracies, including the already-fading QAnon trend, with what are well-researched investigations into collusion between elements of Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign. These investigations are of such substance that the FBI is currently investigating the case of Russian-Ukrainian political consultant Konstantin Kilimnik and his work with Paul Manafort and others in the Trump circle via his ties with Russian intelligence. In a report released on April 15, the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed the long-disputed collusion case that Kilimnik created a pipeline between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence to use the Trump campaign’s data to wage an online propaganda campaign targeting U.S. voters. These are not conspiracies; these are serious, ongoing investigations now confirmed by the U.S. government.  

Here’s a rare case of Curtis being, in a word, sloppy—and possibly something worse. By engaging in a kind of “both sides” analysis, Curtis unfortunately discounts the considerable power of the right’s new style of disinformation, often in concert if not in coordination with similar efforts by intelligence organs in China, Russia, and beyond, all of it metastasizing in social media in the West. Reporting in The New York Times recently described how the “Big Lie” campaign fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol and morphed into an anti-COVID vaccine campaign, supported by the network of January 6 insurrectionists, ranging from The Proud Boys to QAnon activists. Curtis’s chiding of progressive “conspiracy” perhaps too easily serves his ultimate, valuable political message directed at the left. (The viewer who’s new to Curtis can conclude pretty early on that he knows the right is beyond all hope.) That message is this: the left has lost its imagination and, with it, an energetic and hopeful vision of the future.  

This is emphatically, undeniably true, and nobody in any media has recently articulated it as well as Curtis does here. Coming near the end of the mind-bending hours of Can’t Get You Out of My Head—the movie often plays like an extended hallucination of dream images paradoxically originating from the real world, a byproduct of Curtis researching the raw feed of BBC TV reporting footage—this necessary message unfolds like an extraordinary plumage. This compels the viewer to review everything seen before in a fresh context. The chronicle of failures—the Jiang Qings, the Michael De Freitases—were all variations on the power of emotional failings trumping the imagination. They were not preordained, or chronicles of fate. Why did the Yippies, the New Left’s most imaginative wing, fail? Why has Burning Man failed to spark the revolutionary spirit that it once promised? Why has most of pop music detoured into a corporate trap of sheer emptiness and forgotten Tupac’s original vision? The answer may lie in this truth: that the creative individual, full of his or her own power to imagine, can’t force change on the world in a vacuum, as “a unit of one.” They can do it only in concert with society. If not a movement, at least a social momentum for change must be there, supporting the creative individual. As any student of Curtis’s cinema knows, the individual may be lionized in our social systems, but the individual, alone, lacks power. And the power for real change comes only from interplay between the individual and society. 

Curtis concludes his opus with optimism. Despite our strange moment, he’s more hopeful now, by far, than any of his previous work. He bookends Can’t Get You Out of My Head with a quote from the late anthropologist David Graeber—“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” This emphasizes the possibility of possibility itself, the potential of the thing ahead, though not the certainty of its success. And the key to a future change is an escape from today’s cultural rigidity. Curtis has hinted in interviews that his next project may explore how this rigidity came to be. So, the curious viewer may begin to think of examples of when the left has been fun and imaginative: The Living Theatre; Italian Communist prog-rock groups like Area; nonprofit, labor-of-love magazines like the one on whose Website you’re reading this right now; independent micro-cinemas screening experimental film, such as the ones I grew up on—Theatre Vanguard and L.A. Filmforum, both in Los Angeles—or full-service cinema collectives like Canyon Cinema in San Francisco; the Chicago-based Free Jazz collective AACM, which spawned such supergroups as The Art Ensemble of Chicago; the European Green parties of the 1980s and their emphasis on colorful, post-hippie designs and artwork that upended the stodgy looks of political parties. 

Still, the viewer senses by the end of the eight hours of Can’t Get You Out of My Head that Curtis hopes for much more than these specific, sometimes isolated projects—Burning Man, for example, way out there in the desert, a playground for the “alternative” bourgeois who can afford to get away for an extended weekend. These projects, and the individuals in them, can realize their vision of a new, better world only if they’re connected to something larger. It’s hardly enough for art and culture to realize gender parity and racial diversity, the projects consuming the concerns and energies of so many involved in and reporting on the arts. These projects are important means to an end, but they are hardly an end to themselves. The key to escaping today’s doldrums is a combination of genuinely exciting, creative artists working individually or in groups—the idea of spontaneous movements of artists—inspiring a large public to think more imaginatively. We don’t have a name for this new thing yet. Curtis’s next project, whatever it is, may move us closer to grasping what it could be.

Robert Koehler, a contributing writer for Cineaste, also contributes criticism and film writing for Cinema Scope, Variety, DGA Quarterly, and Sight & Sound.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3