From Despair to Where:Can't Get You Out Of My Head.

"Pretend there's something worth waiting for. There's nothing nice in my head. The adult world took it all away" - From Despair to Where, Manic Street Preachers.

"Won't you stay? Won't you lay? Won't you stay forever and ever?" - Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Kylie Minogue.

"We need no Gods or emperors and we don't believe in saviours of any kind. We do not want to serve as tools of dictators with personal ambitions for carrying out modernisation. We want to modernise the lives of the people. Democracy, freedom, and happiness for all are our sole objectives" - Wei Jingsheng.

We live in strange and uncertain times. Things keep happening that seem to defy all logic. People regularly vote against their own, their country's, and their planets best interests. Lying is accepted in a way that it seems never to have been done so before. Division is rife, encouraged even. And, on top of all that, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has so far taken just short of two and half million lives.

How did we get here? How do we move on from here? Adam Curtis', whose over eight hour long Can't Get You Out Of My Head:An Emotional History of the Modern World is currently available on the BBC iPlayer, is not going to give anybody a direct answer to either of those questions but what he can do is put together an epic, artistic, confusing, frightening, dense, and powerful documentary to try and explain at least one way of looking at what's been happening.

If you've seen any of Curtis' previous documentaries (Bitter Lake, Hypernormalisation, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, The Power of Nightmares, etc;) you'll know what to expect. A visually spectacular collection of found footage, people dancing, talking heads (but only in archive footage), empty basements full of banks of mainframe computers, images of traffic refracted through the windows of skyscrapers, block capital titles in large Helvetica font. These all come together to create a vision of chaos while Curtis' calm, slightly nasal, narration attempts to create order from this chaos.

It's a journey from then to now told via the rise of China, the rise of conspiracy theories, the rise of AI, the rise of opioids, and the rise of identity politics. With the threat of climate change and mass automation lurking in the background at all times along with demons of the past that lurk in the inherited structures of our minds as surely as they lurk in the inherited structures of our societies.

Episode titles like Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, and Are we Pigeon? Or are we Dancer? are tempting enough on their own but when Curtis weaves together a story that brings together such seemingly disparate characters as Fidel Castro, Ayn Rand, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, H Rap Brown, Joan Baez, Colonel Mengistu, Ken Dodd, Boris Yeltsin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bertrand Russell, Sandra Paul, Richard Nixon, BF Skinner, Cecil Sharp, Jane Fonda, Sir Walter Scott, Bobby Seale, Betty Ford, Radovan Karadzic, Bob Geldof, Yuri Gagarin, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler, Rodney King, and Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer you realise this is an exercise in lunatic scholarship.

There are several 'lead' characters whose narratives, to some degree, intertwine and Curtis returns to these time and again throughout Can't Get You Out Of My Head. Afeni Shakur, Julia Grant, Stokeley Carmichael, Jiang Qing, Michael X, and others (and their extraordinary stories) are the touchstones in this tale of inequality, this story of split and polarised societies, corrupted governments, and chaos. A moral maze we seem unable to escape from.

We have created technology that allows us to have the same thing, the thing we like or think we like, over and over again but seems incapable of ever offering a different tomorrow. Our politicians, too, seem as hardwired as the technology and we end up with an all you can eat buffet where with each return we choose the same thing again and never try anything new.

In an age of twenty-four hour sports channels, people can watch football all day and shield themselves from news, documentaries, art, or anything that may fundamentally question their values. Safely cocooned in our beatific idiocy, we are willing tools of the state and we choose, time and again, not to punish, or remove from power, insider dealers, bankers, or politicians who protect and enable them. We choose the inherent violence and corruption of our powerful institutions because we're sold an idea, or fear, that it would be unsafe to do otherwise.

We are presented with bogeymen, real and imagined, to cow us but these bogeymen also live in our heads. Can't Get You Out Of My Head takes us from Stuttgart to Prague, from New Orleans to Shanghai, from Doncaster to Lvov, from aeroplane hijackings in Entebbe to Californian wild fires, from British attempts at psychological manipulation of African minds and the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya to the plight of the Vietnamese boat people and the foundation of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

There is torture, killing, fear, irrational hatred of immigrants, Nazis, forced sterilisations, cannibalism, Siberian labour camps, slum landlords in Notting Hill, Saudi Arabia's nefarious tactic of turning fuel into a weapon, paranoia, power struggles, exceptionliasm, gaslighting of women who speak out, the famine in Ethiopia, and a consideration of the anger and melancholy at the heart of the English over the loss of their empire. But, despite these horrors, Can't Get You Out Of My Head is never boring and is, perhaps oddly, strangely uplifting. As if we are taking a step back and viewing ourselves from an outsider perspective.

Curtis' use of music does a lot of the heavy lifting on this front. Nine Inch Nails, Stars of the Lid, The Incredible String Band, Burial, Marlene Dietrich, Clint Mansell, Henry Mancini, Death in Vegas, William Basinski, Harold Budd, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ennio Morricone, Do Nothing by The Specials, The Sex Pistols' Who Killed Bambi?, Where Were You? by The Mekons, and Schneider TM's glitch cover of The Smiths' There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. The Aphex Twin's beautiful Avril 14th gets multiple callbacks.

In China, in the mid-thirties, Jiang Qing was a modestly successful actress. Her self-belief outstripped her ability and she believed that this drive for fame and fortune was such an important part of her that it was, in fact, the only thing holding her together. Later she joined a guerrilla group in Yunan, near the border with Myanmar, and began an affair with the group's leader, Mao Zedong.

Who she would go on to marry. Jiang's individualism, "I am a unit of one", upset the collectively minded Communists and, as time passed, she would be sidelined. At one point she ended up living alone with her pet monkeys and her nurses (who she trusted less than the monkeys). On another point on her strange journey, she was locked in a Moscow sanatorium.

The Cultural Revolution in China saw 120,000,000 students revolt against their teachers who were forced in to the streets to repeat the mantra "I am a demon. I deserve to die". These ideas didn't help people in China buy food or live happier lives and when Mao died in 1976, a power struggle took place between Jiang (with three others, her group became famous as the Gang of Four) and Deng Xiaoping whose grand idea was that China could produce items the West wanted more cheaply and sell to the West to increase China's wealth and power.

It was a triumph of managerial government over ideological government and that was repeated globally. Michael de Freitas arrived from Trinidad to the UK, the 'homeland', to find a 'sad and frightened' country. Soon he became an enforcer for slum landlord John Rachman before reinventing himself as a statesman for British black power and renaming himself Michael X.

When Michael X made an inflammatory speech with racist undertones, at much the same time as Enoch Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech, it was Michael X who was punished, imprisoned, and Powell who went on to gain further power. This, to Michael X - and others, was proof that the power structures of the west were so established and ingrained they could only be changed by violent revolution. In the streets and in people's minds.

In the US, extreme right wing groups fuelled paranoia about the uncertain future, there came to be a suburban theory that President Eisenhower was, somehow, a dedicated and conscious agent of the Russians, it became accepted by many that the Bavarian Illuminati (who wanted to replace religion with reason) were a secret group dedicated to the destruction of American democracy.

Operation Mindfuck, and the concept of Discordianism, began with a letter to Playboy. It was a parody religion in which humans, much like Curtis in his documentaries, create order from chaos. It was intended to be as ridiculous as possible, such an outlandish spoof that it would break the spell of conspiracy theories but, as we all know now, it was believed. Soon many decided that the Illuminati were behind the wave of assassinations that shocked America throughout the sixties.

The human mind was posited as the last outpost to be colonised, planting suspicion in human minds could be a weapon in this colonisation, algorithms and patterns could dictate how people, en masse, may behave, and the data and the systems that people created in this era automatically transferred all our only too human faults, prejudices, and hostilities into cyberspace to float around consciousness forever more.

Mass consumerism and sexualised imagery were deployed to detract us and lull us into a false state of peace and susceptibility but that illusion could only be sustained by exploitation, often in the form of deadly wars, elsewhere in the world. People under the burgeoning new system of neoliberalism became mere objects to be monitored and monetised. The self became an accessory used fpr processing a never ending avalanche of incoming data.

The inevitable anxiety created by these machinations was treated with Valium and diazepam. Drugs that were taken up, initially, overwhelmingly by suburban housewives who found that the new 'freedom' and independence they were supposed to be enjoying had, in fact, just made them desperately lonely. They were the crest of a wave of isolated despair. 

Collective action had, in the past, risen from people migrating in large numbers to big cities to work and from unions and other community groups. With oil, rather than coal, becoming the dominant fuel of the future, people were beginning to find themselves too geographically diffuse to agitate, educate, and organise each other. Or even give comfort to each other.

With the rise of the Internet age, this was doubled down on and, with the pandemic, it has reached what we must hope is its peak. This retreat to our silos, to our bubbles, is, of course, necessary, vital even, now. But, as a quote from the American anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber (who died last year) reads at the very start of Can't Get You Out Of My Head:-

"THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD IS THAT IT IS SOMETHING WE MAKE AND COULD JUST AS EASILY MAKE DIFFERENTLY"

The Russian novelist and philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn posited the theory that ideology itself was the problem. Yet the counter ideology he proposed was a belief in nothing - and people need a reason to live. We can't stare endlessly in to the void for all our waking lives. We need hope, we need reason, we need to live, and we need to love. We need to see our humanity reflected back at us in the eyes of a friend, a lover, or a child.

The understandable tragedy of recent decades is that governments worldwide have abandoned transformative idea and become agents of surveillance, management consultants for bankers, tech giants, and the establishment. A deeper tragedy is that this idea has become so deeply embedded now in so many minds that we are divided between passive consumers of life and the products we're told are vital for living it and those of us who are permanently staring into the abyss of deep existential gloom. 

Those of us who are not served by the supposed 'rational bureaucracy' of our contemporary world. Simplified, robot men who play the game of working, shopping, and consuming prosper whereas anyone who questions that suffers in a private world of anxiety and pain. Those that believe that redemption and transformation can never be found in material objects, wealth, or status but in friendship, in love, and in nature.

How we transform the world when so many don't seek transformation, when so many rail against imaginary, rather than real, foes, I do not know. Neither does Adam Curtis. It is his job only to ask the questions and that he does in a fashion quite unlike anyone else.

It makes him easy to ridicule and many do, some quite validly - Ben Woodhams' brilliant parody The Loving Trap went viral and even Curtis admits it made him have a rethink, but, to my mind, this is because he is such a distinct and idiosyncratic voice in British culture right now. His powerful and, often, entrancing documentaries tell disturbing and fantastical stories but he guides us through these choppy waters with a sure hand and a compelling narrative. Surely, the first step towards a positive transformation of society is to at least ask where are we, how did we arrive here, and where are we going?