A caution with Curtis - he presents big, challenging, and sometimes useful ideas in a compelling way.
However, he never lets truth and facts get in the way of a good story. He knows what he wants to say and presents evidence to fit his thesis regardless of the quality of the evidence.
A silly but easily provable example - in "All watched over by machines of loving grace" he claims Silicon Valley was founded by Ayen Rand fans, and points to and shows photos of companies with Rand related names such as the RAND corperation and Fountainhead corperation. The RAND corperation was named named in the 1940s, and the Fountainhead corperation is not a silicon valley tech firm - it's a constrution company that doesn't even have a HQ in the area. One isn't related to AR and the other one isn't a SV firm, so his assertion is actually not supported by the evidence, but we wave it through because a million new assertions hit us first, like a trump speech.
In his recent work on China, people pointed out more serious problems where he appeared to combine different historical figures - mixing their histories together to form fictional actors with real names that played out the story he wanted to tell. Presenting these as actual history was misleading.
If you see the whole thing as post modernism, where everything is to be interpreted and nothing is neccesarily real but there is maybe a real truth in the underlying arument, then that's fine. But that isn't how it's presented.
It often feels like there is no explicit thesis put forth. Although there always seems to be some idea suggested to you, but it's still up to you to think it through and then connect his or your own dots.
For instance in "Can't get you out of my head", he brings up the town where prozac was invented, and then mentions that it's also the home of BlackRock... I'm not always exactly sure what to do with information like that, but it certainly gets my mind wandering in directions I wouldn't have expected.
I would argue that there is a thesis—one that is fairly explicit, shared among various Curtis works, and not even particularly controversial, although it can sometimes feel slippery when presented via Curtis' cinematic techniques.
He suggests that the 20th century was a period of intensely competing utopian ideologies, all of which ended in chaos, disaster, and disillusion as they intersected with problems of individual freedom and weakness. What proved most "stable" for Western societies were cynical policies in which the health of financial markets, and the suppression of contra-modern movements through overwhelming military force, were prioritized over sweeping social reforms that reeked of the old failed ideologies. This led to a period of brief peace and prosperity in the West during the 1990s which is sometimes called "The End of History," and which led some people to believe that financialization was not merely a cynical tool, but in fact the best means to also ensure individual happiness and prosperity.
However, he argues that Western political leaders have proven unable or unwilling to change these policies in the face of the increasingly serious crises of the 21st Century, as they believe their personal fortunes and the stability of the societies they manage are tethered to the goodwill of markets. In the face of this stasis, various elements of Western societies most affected by repressed upheaval have turned to nostalgic or otherwise magical thinking, recalling the old failed ideologies of the previous century. Both those who govern and the governed seem trapped, unable to conceive of anything genuinely new.
Curtis' documentaries, in particular "Can't Get You Out of My Head," attempt a kind of psycho-history of 20th Century ideologies, their ultimate failure, and the consolidation of forces that led to the End of History. They further attempt to restore a sense of absurdity to present-day political and social thrashing-about, and ultimately suggest that none of our present conditions are inevitable, and can be changed through will, imagination, and consciousness of our past.
(Happy to be corrected by any Curtis obsessives if I've missed anything.)
> If you see the whole thing as post modernism, where everything is to be interpreted and nothing is neccesarily real but there is maybe a real truth in the underlying arument, then that's fine.
No, it wouldn't be.
If someone found that Baudrillard flat out mis-attributed a theory to Lévi-Strauss or something, that would be a real criticism of his writing. Baudrillard fans would really be forced to admit it. Even back in the day Baudrillard was alive he would probably have been forced to revise it.
There are so many problems with post modernism, many of which Alan Sokal wrote about in his book "Fashionable Nonsense." But there is a good reason he didn't title it "Fashionable Falsehoods."
I'm honestly curious now-- why did you decide to add that last paragraph? You gave a nice critique of the author which I'll definitely use to be skeptical of his output in the future. But now all I can think about is how you managed to casually write one of the few critiques of post modernism which is rarely true.
I may know less about the specifics of these things than you.
The reason I added this was to resolve in my head the inconsistency between my belief that what Curtis has to say is Useful, and my belief that Curtis is untrustworthy. I guess my compromise was "maybe he's not a scumbag, maybe it's just the style". The reason I mentioned postmodernism is, unreliable narrator is a postmodern thing right? I've seen it used in essays that I'd considered postmodern as a rhetorical technique (write half your essay from the POV you want to argue against, then half way through abandon it and attack the arguments you just made, sort of thing). So a video essay could be non-literal like that too...
However, he never lets truth and facts get in the way of a good story. He knows what he wants to say and presents evidence to fit his thesis regardless of the quality of the evidence.
A silly but easily provable example - in "All watched over by machines of loving grace" he claims Silicon Valley was founded by Ayen Rand fans, and points to and shows photos of companies with Rand related names such as the RAND corperation and Fountainhead corperation. The RAND corperation was named named in the 1940s, and the Fountainhead corperation is not a silicon valley tech firm - it's a constrution company that doesn't even have a HQ in the area. One isn't related to AR and the other one isn't a SV firm, so his assertion is actually not supported by the evidence, but we wave it through because a million new assertions hit us first, like a trump speech.
In his recent work on China, people pointed out more serious problems where he appeared to combine different historical figures - mixing their histories together to form fictional actors with real names that played out the story he wanted to tell. Presenting these as actual history was misleading.
If you see the whole thing as post modernism, where everything is to be interpreted and nothing is neccesarily real but there is maybe a real truth in the underlying arument, then that's fine. But that isn't how it's presented.