Not long ago, I stumbled upon the fact that Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, is the great-nephew of Edward Bernays, the inventor of modern public relations, which also makes him a relative of Bernays’s even more famous uncle, Sigmund Freud. I marked this up as a win for the peculiar methodology of the filmmaker Adam Curtis, whose celebrated 2005 film The Century of the Self explored the role of the Freud-Bernays line in forging the contemporary world. Make what you will of this family connection, but there is a certain continuity between Bernays’s applications of Freudianism to consumer manipulation and the Netflix approach to attention monopolization. Both assume a deeply irrational human subject whose desires can be harnessed for profit.
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that Curtis is on to something when he reveals the unexpected connections that link different moments in modern history, even if you’re not totally sure what. Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis’s latest documentary series and his most ambitious to date, features a lineage that originates with the mathematician George Boole, whose legacy haunts the new series much as Freud’s did in The Century of the Self. Boole’s attempt to model “laws of thought” in the mid-19th century went on to play a pivotal role in the development of computer science. But in the early 20th century, his daughter Ethel also exercised broad influence with her 1897 novel, The Gadfly, which inspired revolutionaries worldwide, especially in Russia and China. Later, she married book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, now best known for his discovery of the enigmatic illustrated manuscript, written in an indecipherable script, that bears his name.
The Boole-Voynich family offers a microcosm of the themes of Curtis’s “emotional history of the modern world,” which focuses heavily on two sorts of radical efforts to remake society. The first is political revolution, of which Ethel was an important but now forgotten advocate. The second is the attempt to subject human life to the rigor of computational logic, a project that emerged out of Boole’s theories. It has lately been continued by yet another member of the family: Boole’s great-great-grandson Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in the field of artificial neural networks. The Voynich manuscript, for its part, is an uncanny relic from the premodern world, which, due to its complexity or sheer meaninglessness, defies advanced decryption techniques.
In spite of its many wild associative leaps, Can’t Get You Out of My Head lays out a relatively clear linear narrative. According to Curtis, the 20th-century radicals of every major nation failed in their attempts to replace old systems of power with fully liberated societies. This failure stemmed from their inability to see a new order that was already emerging, regardless of their efforts: an order founded upon Boolean computational reductionism, in which human beings would be converted into data points managed by technicians to whom the political class would cede effective power. What’s more, Curtis argues, modern radicals — from Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, who helped oversee the Cultural Revolution, to the terrorists of the German Red Army Faction to the politically engaged rapper Tupac Shakur — all unwittingly aided the emergence of this new regime. This is because all were committed to the primacy of self-realization, a sensibility easily reconciled with the technocratic management of desires via consumerism.
What appear to stand outside of this new symbiosis of individualism and technological control are older notions of collective identity. Hence, as Curtis observes, reactionary populism has seemed to offer something otherwise denied to people in the present: a narrative that binds people to each other and to the past. On this matter, Curtis is ambivalent. He offers a surprisingly sinister account of the early 20th-century English folk revival, which he portrays as a prototype of various later fascist fantasies, but a remarkably sympathetic depiction of Eduard Limonov, the Soviet dissident writer who went on to found the “National Bolshevik” movement, which tapped into nationalist nostalgia as an antidote to the political nihilism of 1990s oligarchic rule.
Curtis’s conflicted account of nationalism is not the only ambiguous dimension of his project. The links he draws between historical trajectories and family histories have led some commentators to see continuities between his methods and those of conspiracy theorists obsessed with secret networks of power, another subject of Can’t Get You Out of My Head. For instance, Curtis considers the career of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose investigations of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination relied heavily on tracing chance connections between people.
He also tells the far-odder story of Kerry Thornley, co-founder of the parody religion Discordianism, who began by ridiculing conspiracy theories but became a true believer. Thornley’s pivot, perhaps best understood as a descent into madness, was prompted in part by a coincidence in his own life: He served in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald and had already written a novel about a character based on Oswald prior to the JFK assassination.
Curtis presents Thornley as a cautionary figure for all of us. In a world increasingly governed by abstract technological systems and complex economic networks, Curtis suggests, the temptations of conspiratorial pattern-seeking are difficult to resist. At one point, he compares the position of the average internet user today to that of the machine-learning algorithms developed by scientists, including Hinton: Like them, we are all inundated in an exponentially expanding trove of data and left to identify the principles of order underlying the chaos.
Surprisingly, given the sinister tone of his treatment of technology, Curtis argues that media narratives of recent years have exaggerated the possibility of new media changing the content of what people believe. Hence, he (correctly) dismisses the Cambridge Analytica controversy as overblown. While pundits have panicked about “misinformation” making people believe falsehoods, the real story of recent years has been an intensification of our affective relationship to all information, regardless of content. The risk, perhaps, is to overestimate digital platforms’ effect on what we think while underrating their effect on how we feel. Curtis’s “emotional history” is itself, first and foremost, an emotional experience driven by haunting music and enigmatic montages. This makes it all the more powerful, but it leaves key questions unanswered.
The Discordian movement promoted the acceptance of chaos, but Thornley, who helped found it, later succumbed to the pattern-seeking mania. For his part, Curtis reveals unsuspected linkages but stops short of attributing explanatory power to them. Instead, he evokes a mood of paranoia while being explicit about its shortcomings as a way of apprehending the world. His films offer a similar satisfaction to the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo: a meta-paranoia that explores the aesthetic seductiveness of the conspiratorial imagination.
The risk, as Thornley’s career illustrates, is that thinking about conspiracy and thinking conspiratorially can be difficult to keep separate. Curtis invites us to follow him down various rabbit holes, then leaves us to find our own way out. In opposition to technicians of human desire from Bernays to Hinton, he expresses a deep faith in human beings’ rational capacity to determine their fates. Whether that faith is warranted is another question.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
