Why Millennial Leftists Have Made a BBC Filmmaker a Cult Hero
Flowing dreamlike between pop culture, politics, and psychology, Adam Curtis’s documentaries both complicate and articulate a senseless world.
An Adam Curtis documentary might start with images like these: a group of men waltzing with invisible partners, the wealth of the British empire running through their tailcoats; shaky mobile-phone footage of a bomb in Afghanistan; a young Donald Trump in a helicopter, Manhattan spread out below; an aerobics instructor clad in ’80s pink and sticky lip gloss; a man shot in the head, bleeding in the dirt; a panda sneezing.
The footage might be tied together by a haunting Burial or Aphex Twin song. A title card in Arial font could declare something like . Then perhaps Curtis’s disembodied voice, all elongated vowels and faint adenoidal superiority, would augur that “this was a fantasy.” For the many fans of the
