Can’t Get You Out of My Head
A TV Show Recommendation
A large portion of my creative life has been in some form related to the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. The name of my Substack is a line from one of his books. There are some dedicated acolytes worldwide, but very few more prominent or prolific as documentarian and BBC film archivist Adam Curtis. In 2021, he released a multi-part documentary series called “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” These feature-length video essays that Curtis edits himself create a sense of disquiet about modern recorded history. You get the sense something is amuck, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Auxiliary history characters—such as Lee Harvey Oswald, Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing or Tupac Shakur’s mother—enter the stage and exit the stage with perpetually shocking behavior, back stories, connections, and tribulations.
I find some of the insight so moving that I’m spending some time cutting the documentary into little snippets that will work for social media.
The most important part of Marshall McLuhan‘s work, as illustrated by the genius of Adam Curtis’ editing, is that we can look at our political enemies compassionately and our political allies dispassionately, depending on what facts and events about them we choose to focus on. The only conclusion one can draw from this reflexive fact is that humans are neither good nor bad, we are complicated, history does repeat itself, truth is stranger than fiction, and we do, in fact, live in a simulation.
However, this is not a computer simulation or some metaphor for understanding chaos; it’s simply a nod to the fact that at any given moment, powerful forces, usually as the result of an emergent collectively unconscious desire (rather than an explicit conspiracy) are really managing, controlling, and dictating various parts of our lives.
What does it feel like for a Kenyan, having been raised from birth to believe in the Queen and the crown and Britain’s superiority, to arrive in England only to realize he is not a full-fledged citizen but an immigrant and that the locals want nothing to do with him? What does it feel like for tens of Black Panthers to get arrested for planning a bombing only to discover that three of the plan's leaders were undercover police officers who didn’t know that the others were police officers? What does it feel like for Jiang Qing to finally feel like her revolutionary spirit is being set free, only to realize her own husband Mao Zedong has been using her to bring out dissidents and political opponents so he could kill them?
Through these dizzying stories, one after another, Curtis exposes the various simulations we all navigate through.
Here’s the first of those videos, tune in on my Instagram for more in the coming weeks:
Watch the full series here on BBC (will need VPN in Britain if you are outside of the UK). On YouTube here, albeit with Portuguese subtitles. And here on my Google Drive :)
I’m looking forward to your thoughts! Please come back and comment.
Thanks Darlin. You really moving here????
Content is only available in U.K.!