Adam Curtis’ last series, TraumaZone, used archive footage and an increasingly abstract editing style to portray the dissolution of Soviet society. It showed political leaders slowly realising their mental models bore no relation to reality, that their people had lost faith in the system and began to overstep it, while the commons were looted by a class of corrupt oligarchs and the regions spun into ethnic conflict.
In his latest series, Shifty, he repeats this story for our own collapsing regime, at times obliquely and at others through more direct comparison. “There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move,” reads the caption at the beginning of each episode, setting up what is essentially the origin story of today’s troubled and quasi-revolutionary UK, witnessing “the last dying gasp of an old system of power.”
Early in the five-part series, we see miners hauling wooden pit props into the shafts by hand, pensioners bundled against the cold trudging through vast, alienating Modernist housing estates, and families fighting to survive in damp, freezing council flats. The effect is to conjure Soviet-style squalor and quiet collapse. Yet the cure, we soon see, is worse than the disease: “In 1986 Mrs Thatcher opened Britain to the full force of international capital,” the caption reads. “A new breed of tycoon emerged. They used the vast power of this new money to take over landmarks of the old Britain.” With his disembodied captions — a stylistic device introduced in TraumaZone in place of Curtis’s old, avuncular voiceover — he later observes of privatisation, “and just like the Soviet Union/many of the old state managers were now running the companies/and just as in the new Russia they exploited the new system ruthlessly”.
The birthpangs of today’s UK are presented as a horror story. Discordant electronic drones and whines soundtrack the camera as it hurtles along silent corridors, abandoned factories and empty Tube stations with the superhuman speed of a pursuing wraith. At other times, there are glimpses of folk horror between the imagery of industrial decline, and a picture of some lost pastoral England that functions as a dark, bitterly ironic Anglofuturism. We see cricket matches under electric pylons, fox hunting in front of closing coal mines: like the hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain abandoned on a lonely Falklands shore, Britain’s industrial future is a forgotten relic. Landscapes both bleak and bucolic break up the scenes of urban decline with bitter irony: Thatcher reads a Rupert Brooke poem to the sarcastic accompaniment of Britten’s Peter Grimes, riot police break up a New Age Traveller encampment in Wiltshire’s ancient countryside, an electric storm breaks over the forbidding Belfast Hills. In undercutting the shallow myths of Our Island Story, Curtis still alludes to something older and more powerful beneath the ailing state.
The series plays on the feeling, surely common now, that today’s headlines are the fodder of some future history, establishing the background of the dark events to come. Foreboding news stories screen in the background: footage of riots in northern England play across the screen in the window of a TV rental shop, as an employee dusts the sets unconcernedly. Dark, paranoid themes — state surveillance, masonic conspiracies, the illusory nature of reality — are introduced, and abandoned, as either consciously unresolved loose ends or spinning off in strange directions. The effect is unsettling, disorientating: we are not witnessing a logical argument being constructed, but a society coming apart, with all the surrealism that entails. Northern Ireland features heavily: for Curtis, as for other dissidents, the province functions as a dark mirror revealing the British state’s true form. In Belfast, young Loyalist women clap along to songs of sectarian violence with footage of flames and the pounding tribal rhythm of drums. “When Britain was powerful it could hide its dark secrets and cruelties,” we are told, “Now as the power declined they were going to start coming to the surface.”
“The series plays on the feeling, surely common now, that today’s headlines are the fodder of some future history, establishing the background of the dark events to come.”
Curtis’ politics, always a matter of speculation, are here laid out in economic terms as resolutely Old Labour. In pursuit of a Utopian vision, the Thatcher government’s privatisation and financialisation schemes (in one scene, a City trader rattles off an impeccable Marxian critique of them) are shown to have established the dysfunctional political economy of today’s ailing UK. On the other issue roiling modern Britain, that of immigration, Curtis works more obliquely. Footage of skinheads and of victims of racist violence punctuate each episode as mood music, without textual commentary. An old man listens to a recording of the last evensong in a deserted Rotherham church; we see the birth of al-Muhajiroun; Morrissey wanders the Manchester streets of his childhood, saying “The place I grew up no longer exists. Now it’s just so foreign to me, and that’s sad I think.”
For all the misery he presents, there is a constant nostalgia evoked by the footage, shown in BBC employees assembling Airfix kits to cover the Falklands War, joyful house parties in the provinces. Curtis is happy to deconstruct the myths of the old Britain, yet also deftly shows that its replacement is simply… nothing. As New Labour struggle to fill the Millennium Dome with banal platitudes, we are told that “The liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years/now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth/they no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future/and they were left with practically nothing.” As well as a farewell to the postwar social-democratic state, the recent past is reassembled as a bricolage portrait of today’s UK. Unease, distrust and paranoia are everywhere. Vigilantes film their sex-crime stings, with the captions noting, from an ambiguous vantage point, that “They didn’t trust the corrupt mainstream media to expose the corruption of the police.”
What does it all mean? Is it a chronicle, cataloguing the disconnected succession of events, or a history, driven by an overarching narrative? Time across the series is meaningless, chronology is complicated: narratives overlay each other like audio samples. A subplot on the introduction of the synthesiser observes of its pop-cultural fruits that “They became known as remixes. Others realised they could use the same technology to manipulate and play back images from the past/ They could remix history, which meant that maybe you couldn’t trust the past.” Here the auteur, always in love with digital media, reveals his own craft: “Is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia/repeating back sounds, dreams and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you/and is the way this series is made?”
The most obvious, though perhaps counterintuitive, parallel to Curtis in British politics is Dominic Cummings: both reach back to historical parallels, and use scientific metaphors, to explain the current moment of regime crisis. Indeed, both Curtis and Cummings have recently likened the present moment to 1848, and both anticipate a revolutionary tumult to come. The series concludes, over footage of fiery riots and revolution, with the question “Will people come together as they have in the past and fight back?” Like the viewer he has guided to the dismal death spasms of our old political system, Curtis views its looming, so far formless replacement with a mixture of hope and apprehension, scrying a vision of the future like the soldiers in rural Northern Ireland he shows struggling to make out a Magic Eye picture. We already live in post-Soviet Britain, Curtis shows us, but something else is coming: whether it is something new or very old is a matter of interpretation.
