Anticipating a Reckoning

ADAM CURTIS IS A POLARIZING AND ENIGMATIC FIGURE. A self-described journalist and historian, Curtis has spent decades at the BBC creating sprawling, authorial film essays, connecting the dots of 20th-century history to reveal a disturbing picture of the contemporary world. Curtis is maligned by those who view him as a conspiracy theorist, propagandist, emotional manipulator, or even a crypto-fascist. But his many devotees can be found across the political spectrum. Even Kanye West loves him—whatever that means.

Much is made of Curtis’s style, which is an idiosyncratically journalistic one with aesthetic sensibilities more familiar to art filmmaking than what gets filed under “factual television.” His films are ridden with alienation devices designed to remind the viewer that what they are watching is a narrative construction, and not a neutral account of facts: non-standard use of emotionally evocative music (with a preference for Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, and, more recently, Burial), loosely contextualized archival footage, jarring cuts. They’re more reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s than anything else you’d see on the BBC, but not anywhere near as opaque and maddening as that comparison suggests. His stylistic choices reflect his idea of journalism itself as an inherently rhetorical, narrative form, and they encourage us to question his conclusions and not to be duped by