https://jacobin.com/2025/07/adam-curtis-y2k-blair-mcqueen
>The most common critiques of Curtis — that his narratives are too sweeping, his editing too manipulative, his conclusions more atmospheric than analytical — are not wrong exactly. I’ve made them myself, sometimes mid-episode. It feels, though, like this misses the point. It’s true that Curtis deals in allegory more than argument, in vibes rather than frameworks. But what vibes they are! Others have no patience for what they describe as his conspiratorialism. Fair enough, but it’s a strange species of conspiracy to suggest the problem is that no one is at the wheel rather than this or that cabal of villains is really pulling the strings. He’s on record politically as someone who believes progress is a result of great ideas that animate societies, not the class struggle. You could rebuke him with a line from the Eighteenth Brumaire followed by a discussion of the dialectical relation of the material conditions of society to ideology, but what would be the point, really? Critical viewers ought to allow themselves a little Hegelian idealism, as a treat.
LOL. Okay I'll watch Curtis' Shifty. #socialism #communism #marxism #LateStageCapitalism
>This isn’t to say that the ideas his films explore lack depth or theoretical rigor. Quite the contrary. It’s just that when you translate sprawling political and emotional histories of the world into montages fashioned from forgotten BBC specials — cutting between Muammar Gaddafi, rave flyers, and National Health Service waiting rooms — experts will always object to the connective tissue. But none of them — neither the historians nor the theorists nor the journalists — can score archival footage to ambient synths and spiraling monologues quite like Curtis can. He might not explain the world perfectly, but he may capture how its collapse feels better than anyone.
Alright alright alright I'm sold.
