In February, 1967, Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, wrote a five-page memo called “Time and Propinquity: Factors in Phase I,” which revealed some of the spurious connections he was making in his attempt to outline what he believed was the true nature of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Garrison believed that the best way to uncover well-hidden conspiracies was by noticing seeming coincidences—when two people happened to live a few blocks from each other or when someone ran a bar around the corner from where a cache of heroin was seized—and assembling a pattern from the resulting swamp of names, addresses, and dates. A few years ago, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis came across Garrison’s memo in “The Prankster and the Conspiracy,” a book by the zine writer and self-described crackpot historian Adam Gorightly. At the time, Curtis was trying to make sense of the political fracturing and rampant disinformation that accompanied the election of Donald Trump and, in his own country, the Brexit vote. “Normally, I hate conspiracy theories. I find them boring,” Curtis told me recently. “Then I stumbled on ‘Time and Propinquity’ and I just thought, Yes. . . . Fragments. That’s how people think now. They make associations, and there’s no meaning. That’s the world we live in.”
Curtis introduces Garrison toward the end of the first hour of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World,” his new, six-part series of films that will be released by the BBC on February 11th. (Curtis’s films tend to appear on YouTube within days of their original broadcast, uploaded by fans.) A seventy-second section of the film, spelling out the concept of time and propinquity, involves archival footage of (and this is an incomplete list) American cars going through an underpass; flaring streetlights; two men in loud suits, their faces out of the frame, smoking cigars and drinking whisky while sitting on garden furniture on the balcony of a high rise; men in dark glasses pausing briefly to make conversation outside a gas station; hands taking apart a bugged telephone; an impounded, gleaming pistol; Air Force One; a young man taking a book out of a filing cabinet; a bus lit by sunlight from the side; a view straight down a skyscraper; a helicopter flying low over people on the roof of an apartment block scorched by fire; a man in a red T-shirt in an office at night; a body on the floor next to a desk; a woman wearing dark glasses on a bus; a car pulling up outside an airport; a helicopter with a spotlight shining down in the dark; and a Mercedes-Benz approaching a toll booth. The images seethe with a sense of time and place, and yet they are also out of time and place. The only context is Curtis’s voice, speaking levelly over the interplay. “This theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future because it would lead to a profound shift in how many people understood the world,” he says. “Because what it said was that, in a dark world of hidden power, you couldn’t expect everything to make sense, that it was pointless to try and understand the meaning of why something happened, because that would always be concealed. What you looked for were the patterns.”
The sequence is beautiful and foreboding and could appear only in an Adam Curtis film—or a parody of one. For more than thirty years, Curtis has made hallucinatory, daring attempts to explain modern mass predicaments, such as the origins of postwar individualism, wars in the Middle East, and our relationship to reality itself. He describes his films as a combination of two sometimes contradictory elements: a stream of unusual, evocative images from the past, richly scored with pop music, that are overlaid with his own, plainly delivered, often unverifiable analysis. He seeks to summon “the complexity of the world.”
Curtis, who is sixty-five, rejects any talk of art in relation to this work. He describes himself as a television journalist. Part of his insistence comes from a particularly English middle-class aversion to being mistaken for an intellectual, but the rest comes from Curtis’s contention that his films are more accurate depictions of contemporary life and society than most straight reporting ever manages to be. “I’m fundamentally an emotional journalist,” Curtis said. “The mood my films create—and possibly the reason why people like that mood—is because it somehow feels real, even though it seems dreamy and odd. It actually gets at what’s going on in people’s heads, which is sort of what realism always is. People in the nineteenth century did not think and feel like we do today.”
Curtis has been on and off the staff of the BBC since the early eighties. His films have won four BAFTAs. He is one of Britain’s foremost nonfiction filmmakers, but his exact status is hard to pin down. Curtis’s job title says that he is an executive producer at BBC Three, the corporation’s digital channel, which specializes in documentaries and comedy and is primarily aimed at younger viewers. His e-mail account says that he works in “Current Affairs.” The truth is that Curtis is a loose particle within the organization, with an extraordinary license to explore and experiment with the BBC’s archive of television output from the past seventy-four years, which might be the largest in the world. Since 2015, Curtis has released his films directly on the Internet, via the BBC’s iPlayer, which has freed him from certain editorial constraints (Curtis’s films have become longer and more ornate with time) while allowing him to cultivate a niche, but global, following online. “I’ve discovered that if you don’t ask for lots of money, the BBC worries about you less,” he said. Curtis’s 2016 film “HyperNormalisation” had a budget of around eighty thousand dollars.
He doesn’t like being called an artist, but he behaves like one. In recent years, Curtis has also worked on projects with Punchdrunk, an immersive theatre company; Massive Attack, a British trip-hop band; and Charlie Brooker, the creator of “Black Mirror.” While Curtis was editing “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” he worked alone in a town house in Soho, London, that belongs to a friend who is a gallerist. When I dropped by one afternoon in late October, Curtis opened the door wearing an olive-green anorak. He has white curly hair. Since the previous time we met, a metallic column, a little over waist-high, had materialized in the center of the narrow, gloomy entrance hall. Curtis edged his way apologetically back into the building, past the sculpture. “Don’t ask,” he said. “It’s”—he paused for effect—“a work.”
Curtis finds writing much harder than what he calls “cutting the archive,” which he does briskly and without particular effort. He set up his first office in the house inside a sparsely furnished, wood-panelled dining room, hoping that its asceticism would help him to write. Then he moved into a more comfortable room. By late fall, he was working at a desktop computer perched on the kitchen table, with a clutch of external hard drives to hand and a space heater on the floor. That day, Curtis was struggling with the introduction to the series, which is around eight hours long and sweeps from the scientific projects of the nineteenth-century British empire to the Kursk submarine disaster, under the Barents Sea, in 2000, and on to our present calamities. “It’s very difficult to convey the breadth of what I’m doing,” he said. “Part of me wants to be really radical and just start like a novel. But I think that’s probably wrong.” At the moment, all Curtis had was the title card and a caption in Arial, the font that he favors, that read, “THE RISE OF A WORLD WITHOUT MEANING.”
“Can’t Get You Out of My Head” grew out of Curtis’s response to the populist insurgencies of 2016. Curtis was struck by the fury of mainstream liberals and their simultaneous lack of a meaningful vision of the future that might counter the visceral appeal of nationalism and xenophobia. “Those who were against all that didn’t really seem to have an alternative,” he said.
Curtis came to perceive a mindset among ruling élites of all stripes—among the American political establishment, in Russia and China, at think tanks and the European Union, international banks and tech companies—that was an attempt to manage the world without transforming it. After the violence and social experiments of the twentieth century, it made sense to give up on grand ideologies, but the result is that we live in societies without narrative coherence, with old myths boiling up. “There isn’t a big story,” Curtis said. “And that’s true in China as much as it is here. Everyone’s just trying to manage the now and desperately hold it stable, almost like in a permanent present, and not step into the future. And I don’t think that will last very long. . . . Because if you’ve got a story about where you’re going, when catastrophes like 9/11 or COVID or the banking crisis hit, they allow you to put them—even though they’re frightening—to put them into a sense of proportion. If you don’t have a story about where you’re going, they seem like terrifying random acts from another universe.” In conversation, Curtis sometimes speaks faster and faster, like the movie version of a math whiz, covering a blackboard in equations until he arrives, non-triumphantly but nonetheless definitively, at an answer. Each of his projects is anchored by a single, provocative idea, and the claim of his new series is that we have become unable to imagine the future—we are citizens of an eternal present stilled by dubious technology, hollow politicians, and catastrophic self-doubt. “IF YOU LIKED THAT,” run the captions over footage of a youthful Barack Obama, “YOU WILL LOVE THIS.” Enter Joe Biden, waving at supporters on a bank of screens. “The one thing I believe in is progress,” Curtis told me. “And, at the moment, we’ve somehow created a world in which it’s as if it has come to a stop. It’s, like, outside time.”
As a storyteller, Curtis is drawn either to revolutionaries, who want to change the world, or to engineers, who plan to stabilize and control human society with the help of machines. (He generally takes the side of the revolutionaries, even though he acknowledges that they are often wrong.) “The battle between those two things is the defining thing,” Curtis told me. “That’s what all my films are about.” In his new work, Curtis has sought a less schematic approach, seeking to portray not just ideologues and system-builders but individuals who become overwhelmed by what is happening around them. “This one is more emotional, more immersive,” he said.
Among about a dozen others, Curtis follows such figures as Michael de Freitas—a Caribbean migrant to West London, who became a rent collector and then Michael X, a Black power leader hanged for murder, in the seventies—placing his story alongside the rise and fall of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong and an animating figure of the Cultural Revolution, and the insights of Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who coined the term “quark” and popularized “complexity theory” as a way of understanding the natural world. Curtis juxtaposes the lives and minds of Tupac Shakur and Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born jihadist with a brain injury who was tortured by the C.I.A. after 9/11 and began to reel off imaginary terrorist plots drawn from disaster movies he had seen. “I’ve always tended to make films about people who have ideas about how you can do things, and how those ideas then play out,” Curtis said. “What I wanted to do in this one was something in which you mixed characters like that, but you also had characters who are acted upon by those ideas, and they get into their heads, and then they mutate and come out as something else.”
Curtis says that he works like any other journalist: people and ideas grab him; he wastes time on TikTok, which he adores; he footles about in libraries. But he also spends an unusual amount of his time letting old footage unspool across a screen. At the BBC’s main archive, in Perivale, which contains sixty miles of shelves, Curtis doesn’t just order up news items about the Mau Mau uprising, in British-ruled Kenya, but entire nightly bulletins or anything else shot in the region during the same period. He seeks out odd keywords, uncatalogued films. He craves the unseen. “I don’t know if you play computer games. But it’s like going up a level,” he told me. “There’s the stuff that everyone can get at. Then the stuff that hasn’t been digitized or anything, which is still on film, which I can get. Then, beyond that, there are really strange tapes.”
There is the BBC’s raw feed of news footage, for example, dumped by satellites around the world in the eighties, called COMP tapes. Curtis watches most of what he finds on fast forward, whizzing through QuickTime files. He allows himself to be distracted. “It’s like shopping,” he said. “You just go through it.” Curtis found out about de Freitas, the subject of an essay by V. S. Naipaul, when he was meandering through tapes from the late sixties. In the footage, de Freitas, poised and bearded, dressed in a black suit and tie, with his top shirt button open, describes his initial disbelief at the racism that he encountered in Britain, after his patriotic colonial education in Trinidad. “One hoped against hope that what one saw was not right,” de Freitas says. Curtis found everything about the interview captivating, from the patronizing blandishments of the BBC interviewer to de Freitas’s knowingness and edge of malice. “You see the roots of now in that film,” Curtis said. “And you think, Oh, back then was much more complicated than we think.”
When something catches Curtis’s eye, he slows the film down and makes a note. “VVVVVVVVG shots—beam plays over sleeping children,” Curtis wrote, of a BBC documentary about psychiatric therapies from 1970, in a viewing note that he shared with me. The number of “V”s indicates how good Curtis thinks the footage is. (I counted twenty-three “V”s before one “G.”) He then organizes his impressions into broad categories: whether something helps tell the story, or illustrates an idea, or reflects broader themes about the history of the world. “It’s messy,” Curtis said. “But I have a very good memory. I have an associational—I have a patterning mind, so I can remember where something is almost visually.” Curtis collects a lot of shots because they induce a particular mood. “I assume because I’m quite normal then it will also have the same emotional resonance with other people,” he said. “So I put it in my computer. It’s a ‘VVVG.’ ” When Curtis wants that mood in his film, he knows where to find it. “I will go, ‘Oh, yeah, that emotion. That feeling,’ ” he said. “It’s a time-and-propinquity thing in my head.”
