Can't Get You Out of My Head

First thing to say is that I've only watched the first episode so far. I loved his previous two documentaries, Hypernormalisation and Bitter Lake. I find it very difficult to describe Adam Curtis' style, but I'll have a go. It as if he has discovered a massive archive of TV and Movie reels, has spent several years watching them, then has taken numerous clips, stitched them together, and then concocted a theme that connects these seemingly random events together, in order to make a coherent story. He then uses music to great effect, which creates a kind of dissonance. It's brilliantly done. A visual treat. I feel after watching the first episode that my IQ has been improved by a couple of percentiles, but this may be part of the trick. You get the feeling when watching his documentaries that there is something even deeper, that you just can't quite grasp, which makes you want for more. I found myself walking the dog later, and reappraising what I had seen in my mind, and then later again seeking to look up on Wikipedia and Google some of the issues that were only touched on during the film, from such diverse subjects as the Voynich Manuscript, to William Keswick & Lord Kindersely. A must see series.

The good: The individual stories, especially in the first part, are superbly interesting. Many other montage parts are informative, some are mesmerizing to look at and listen to, and the overall feel of the documentary series is almost hypnotic. The issue I have with it though are its generalizations and some of the conclusions and supposed insights, which are sometimes obvious, and sometimes just derived out of flimsy reasoning, derived from somewhat dubious or arbitrary premises.

The individual/collective dichotomy is strained at best, and could be challenged by many alternative arguments in the context of history and sociology. The technology part is interesting, but there is nothing new there. The political commentaries are also standard issue and a bit all over the place. The conspiracies narrative, again, selective and based on certain opinions and aspects, ignoring others, which is the approach in the film overall. That's fine it it is supposed to show only the author's POV, but here it seems to aspire to reveal some deep universal truths, and in that it fails through a faulty - or deliberately tendentious - methodology.

Overall, it's a fascinating series, but I think the author overreached in his ambition to tell a grand narrative that explains everything.

I would recommend watching no more than one episode per day. There is a grand narrative there that's tied up neatly in the final episode. As always Curtis drivers an interesting collection of stories to feed your imagination and provoke. Documentary as art. Superb

Schitzophrenic, complex, profound and revealing. Seemingly unrelated stories intertwine with others to tell new stories if their own. Reality and fantasy intertwine and influence eachother on an international scale. I've only learned of Alex Curtis recently, but I can comfortably say he's a creative genius.

This should be required viewing for any person planning to join an organisation or belief system of any kind which has a 'Grand Plan' to change the world. The last century should have taught everyone where those sort of cults always lead but here we are.