THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.44 - ADAM CURTIS

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

Adam talks to British journalist and documentary maker Adam Curtis, whose films include The Power Of Nightmares, The Century Of The Self, Bitter Lake and HyperNormalisation. Thanks to Nicky Waltham and her editor friend Doug Bryson for helping me put this episode together along with my regular production support pal Seamus Murphy Mitchel. Visit adam-buxton.co.uk for related links. Music and jingles by Adam Buxton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton. I'm a man. And I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing podcats? Adam Buxton here. Not in the fields of East Anglia today, but out in a park in Bristol, in the west of England.

in a park in Bristol, in the west of England. And I think this park is called Manor Woods Park or Manor Woods Valley. But listen, let me tell you about episode 44 of the podcast, which features a conversation with British journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Adam started his career in the late 70s working on the long-running BBC magazine show That's Life with Esther Ransom, where he researched investigative segments and found dogs who could sing. By the early 90s, Adam was making documentary films that wove intricate narratives about the weird machinations of power and authority. He quickly developed a signature style that blends carefully selected bits of footage from the BBC archives

with strikingly off-centre music choices and his own soothing but sometimes sinister narration throughout. Titles and chapter headings in Adam's documentaries, typically in bold Helvetica or aerial font, also help to create a viewing experience that often feels more like an art film or a music video than a straightforward documentary. Here's a few Adam Curtis films that have made a particularly strong impression on me. Here's a few Adam Curtis films that have made a particularly strong impression on me. The Century of the Self from 2002, which explored how those in power have used the theories of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to, and I quote Adam Curtis's narration,

try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. I loved The Power of Nightmares from 2004, which argued that in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the threat of radical Islamism was being exaggerated to suit the agendas of global leaders, especially the neo-conservative group in the US. Adam Curtis returned to the subject of radical Islam with particular reference to historical conflicts in Afghanistan for his 2015 film Bitter Lake. And last year, 2016, his film Hypernormalization argued that in a world increasingly fraught with paradoxes and depressing complexities, governments, financiers and tech leaders have, since the 1970s, been building a more manageable fake version of reality, run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.

Yeah, man, I knew it! I met Adam Curtis on the 16th of December 2016 in the meeting room of the London production company where my producer friend Seamus works. And in the wake of Brexit and Donald Trump's election and all the other fun stuff that happened in 2016, the conversation often focused on a favourite theme of Adam's, I think it's fair to say, which is where the pursuit of individualism is leading us. We also talked about how Adam uses music in his films, because he does so very strikingly and memorably, and I sneaked a bit of death chat in there too. You're welcome. It's not a podcast without a bit of self-indulgent death ramble.

But before all that, Adam began by asking me what the general tone of the podcast was. Was I hoping that we would keep things silly and light or quite serious and political? You'll find out how I answered that question in just a moment. And at the end of the podcast, I'll be back for a little bit more rambling. But right now, here we go. Ramble Chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. I come from a comedy background, so people aren't really looking for political commentary from me. They're just wallowing in a friendly conversation. Fine. Is that your mode? That is my mode, but I certainly don't mind going anywhere else.

And it's quite nice to... I could be a little bit rude. Oh, God, yeah. No, it's nice to be able to... For me, the most interesting thing, the stuff I like listening to is when it's honest and when it's not too mediated, you know. And if that includes

politics or... I'm afraid politics and power is what you know. Fine. And if that includes politics or... I'm afraid politics and power is what interests me. Absolutely. Well, it's... I'm not very funny. Come on. We'll get something out of you. Have you done comedy stuff before at all?

Well, I've been on stage with Mr. Russell Brand. Right. I did a thing with John Ronson and him on stage where I attacked him viciously. In what way? And his response was to try and kiss me in front of 2,000 people. Which was remarkably successful. It made me blush and shut me up.

Did you try to physically attack him or verbally? No, verbally attack him. I mean, I ended up saying to the audience, well, you know, you say you want change and revolution. Do you know what revolution is really involved? It's really like everything goes and you lose your savings and nothing's stable. What do you know what revolution is really involved it's really like everything goes and you lose your savings and nothing's stable what do you really want just the banks to be a little bit nicer there's complete silence it was great very funny and then he stepped in and

kissed me kissed you to diffuse the atmosphere because he's a manipulative little fuck yeah um but i like him he's funny but of course people found a lot of what he said incredibly irresponsible when he was on news night and he seemed to be people just decided that what he was about was encouraging people not to vote and to reject political activity altogether to be fair to mr brand if you look back at that point he was sort of ahead of the game. Because what he was essentially saying is, what is the point of voting? Because whichever party you vote for, you'll get the sum pretty much the same. And if you're dissatisfied

with the same, what is the point of voting? Well, if we then jump forward two years to Brexit, that's precisely what would seem to be saying is is that people are saying if we vote for the normal things we just get the same, so we're going to actually we've got this giant big button that says fuck off and I'm pressing it. Well that's sort of what, he was ahead of his time he didn't express it possibly in the right politically clear way, but he was

onto something. Okay, but what's the alternative? Practically speaking, you know what can you do? I think that's the sort of helplessness that a lot of people feel and that's a feeling of helplessness I think that goes across social boundaries don't you I think you are talking here simply about the liberal mindset because if you look at the events of the last four weeks yeah six weeks from Brexit through to the vote for Donald Trump you could argue that there is a lot you can do, but it doesn't appear to be you who are doing it. And I do think one of the most astonishing things at this present

moment we're living through is how the liberals constantly want change, yet whenever they try and do it, they can't do it. They stumble, they fall, they stall. When someone else does it, they squeal. Yet if you actually look at what's happened, a group of people, you may think they're stupid, you may think they're wrong. And I'm not judging them in any way. I'm just looking at this forensically. A group of people in both America and in Britain have changed the world through democratic means. So in a way, what you've just talked about is a mindset of a particular group. You change the world by revolting against something. It doesn't always have to be a coherent picture.

What's most important is to bring into focus the roots of your dissatisfaction. And then once you've got an idea that coalesces around that, you've got something to react to. You know, it's like often you find yourself doing good stuff, and I'm sure as a comedian you find doing this, by reacting against something, because it brings into focus what you're trying to say. And I suspect that's how democratic change happens. You know what you don't like. And the really bad thought that sometimes goes through my brain is, do the liberals really want change? Because if you look at it in the great scheme of history, they're living through a period of extraordinary privilege. In relative terms, this country is very safe, and as most is West New York. I know

horrible things happen, but historically, it's been an extraordinary period. In terms of relative ease and wealth, yes, I know there are problems with housing and property markets, and I know all these bad things, but it's a very nice life. Do you really want change? Because the thing that puzzles me all the time is, over the last 10 years, liberal or left-wing radical groups have come up and said, we're going to change the system, we're going to challenge it, and then nothing happens.

It just puzzles me. And then a sort of incoherent right-wing populism pops up in the last six months and changes everything whether it actually will or not is another question but at least it's got further than the occupy movement did that is not to say it's i'm judging it as good or bad i'm just being a bit like a detective looking at it and thinking, now, come on, liberals. Isn't that, though, because it's so much harder to imagine alternatives, which is what the Liberal project is all about, or at least, you know, to propose an alternative to the undesirable things happening in the world?

Yeah, I mean, what I find really strange about our time is how everyone constantly reworks the past yeah because i don't think anyone has a vision of the future no one i mean i don't i'm thinking i would absolutely say you're completely wrong to say the liberals are trying to do that and if you look at our culture it sort of reflects that i always think you know look at the culture films are constantly they don't they're not called remakes any longer they're called rebo reboots. Everything is rebooted. Everything is rebooted. Even Amazon reboots you every day.

It's looking at you and saying, well, Adam Buxton liked that, so maybe he'll like that. So they're constantly rebooting you as a new version of you. And I think that's what both right and left are locked into. And I think the really strange thing is, if you live in a world of nostalgia, where everything you want for the future is based on your analysis of the past, whether it be Amazon or your own imagination, what you cannot do is imagine something that has never existed before. And that's how real change happens, is something really does, of course it borrows from the past, but it genuinely is new and different and and i can't see that i'm sure it's going to happen out in the margins

and i the thing that i'm sort of not obsessed by but i constantly keep on returning to is maybe the the things that many of the liberal left hold on to as their sort of rag dolls, their real beliefs, might be actually the things that are stopping us imagining something else. And the thing that I'm really obsessed about at the moment is the whole idea of self-expression and art. The idea of being a true individual and expressing yourself authentically might actually be the conformity of our time. You know, you look back at past ages and you see, oh, they're very conformist. The Victorians were very conformist in this area. And you look back and the historians, the cultural historians say,

well, that stopped them really seeing the things that were happening out on the margins. And sometimes, you know, maybe in 50 years' time, people will look back and say, this obsession they had in that period from 1970 to 2026 about self-expression and art that was their conformity and they missed this and i'm really fascinated by what we're missing which doesn't fit within the template of our idea of what is an authentic person because that's what we're obsessed by at the moment is what makes us a true person as an individual. And there are so many other different ways of looking at the world. Well, what are the most obvious things that we're missing then

by pursuing this individualistic agenda? Collectivism. Of all kinds. Religious, political, simply emotional. Joining with other people. Giving yourself up. Love. The thing I'm really really interested at the moment is um our definition of love if you're if you believe that the individual is the supreme thing and what you feel and what you want

is supreme then the notion of love is quite a narrow one because the oh the other idea of love is that you give yourself up to a mad passion. You dissolve into someone else. You lose yourself in someone else. You don't get that these days because in the age of hyper-individualism, that's sort of wrong. You don't know if you don't get that, though, surely. I mean, we're both getting older.

Those days are probably in the past for us, but for young people these days, they may well be losing themselves in each other surely i don't see that in the culture yeah do you but it's no longer my culture i'm an old guy i'm getting older now i think one of the points of being a journalist i mean you're a comedian but yeah as a journalist is you you want to know what's going on yeah and. And I look for clues at that. I don't whinge on about Tinder and things like that. That's fine. I meant in a more general sense, in the culture.

You don't get a sense from novels or for films these days of a sense of surrendering yourself. I mean, you don't get it politically, do you? I mean, that was the problem with the Occupy movement, is past political movements that really did change the world, like the civil rights movement in America. White activists of all ages, but a lot of them young, went down to the southern states of America, joined with young black activists, and for years gave themselves up to that. Often they got beaten up, some of them got killed. We don't know know their names they weren't heroic in that sense but they did it for years after year after year after year and finally 10 years later

they changed the world i mean i know there's still racism in america but they changed the world through three really important acts brought in by lyndon johnson they surrendered themselves the point about the occupy movement is that no, if you look at what happened to them, no one wanted to surrender themselves. So they had these strange meetings where everyone was equal, everyone was an individual. And they got completely locked into this. And a great movement, because they had a fantastic slogan, and they had a lot of people behind them who would not normally have gone this way,

they blew it. And I think they blew it because they got trapped in that individualism. So I'm afraid again empirically that's my answer to you. Look at what happens when you do try and change the world and how individualism which in many ways is great and liberating and I'm not trying to knock it but it does limit your perception of the world. It sort of locks you off. The way forward, though, surely, is to go back to the whole liberal project, is to try and cherry-pick the best bits of the past

and get rid of the worst aspects of it. You wouldn't want to live in 1950s America if you're a black person. But for a lot of people, they look back at those days as, oh, everyone was nice to each other know they didn't mug each other so you you imagine a future where you you're able to hang on to um to the good bits of individualism self-expression etc but you try and put yourself in touch with the idea of community again and with a duty to others would you say or yeah that's very nice all i'm saying do you think it's unrealistic well all i'm saying is that just in this case

we've been talking about is that the the effect of individualism is to limit what you can achieve collectively in community terms because you have to surrender yourself to something i mean religion for example is about i think there's a phrase which is, in whose service is perfect freedom, which is an idea of freedom we would find absolutely reprehensible today. You give yourself up, you free yourself from yourself and become a more liberated person. No one believes that. I mean, no one in the West pretty much today believes that. Some people do. But the majority idea would be that would not be authentically true to yourself. But the reason they don't believe that, or the

reason that it's not fashionable to believe that, is that people have been brought up to believe that it's better to know the truth and to come to terms with the reality of being alive than to have your principles guided by this kind of fantastical notion of an afterlife or a controlling power or whatever. And for a lot of people, they just see that as living in denial of what the reality of existence is. And they also see it as dangerous because in the name of giving yourself over to those those things you can be convinced to do all sorts of other unsavory things and of course people have been throughout the ages by religious groups so that's why we're at that point now though isn't it well the key thing in what you just said is that is the reality of existence no it's not you know it's one version sure of the

reality of existence i know but that's how they see it. No, but every age has its definition of what is real. Yeah. Yeah? So what we think of as real today is what goes on inside our heads. If you look at all novels these days, they are all written from the internal voice. There are very few novels that stand back and describe characters. The thing of our time is what goes on in my head and what I feel and what I want and what I desire, minute by minute, second by second, is real. Other ages have completely different ideas. And you're quite right. The reason we don't believe in collectivism these days is because look what led to last time.

It was jolly. It wasn't very nice, was it? But in those times, people gave themselves up to totalitarian movements to religious movements but you know if you were part of Stalin's five-year plan in 1935 unless you were being tortured in the KGB you had given yourself up to something and you really believed in it even though around you the evidence was that it was horrible but you sort of believed it and all i'm really saying is that what i find fascinating about our time is what are we not seeing what i'm not saying it's the same as tanya at all i'm not saying that but what i'm saying is that the definition of reality at every age stops you seeing other things which might be a good

thing but all i'm intrigued by is what are we not seeing at the moment? And I think if we can see what we're not seeing, or just little glimpses of it, out of that comes real change. Yeah. So for example, the Brexit vote, the Brexit vote revealed shockingly, how little the journalists, the economic commentators, the think tanks, the politicians, The journalists, the economic commentators, the think tanks, the politicians, television people, pretentious journalists and comedians did not see. We did not see anything. It showed for a moment how our definition of what was real is so narrow, so limited. But the thing we didn't see is the thing that's actually changing us at the moment. How we handle it is another question.

that's actually changing us at the moment. How we handle it is another question. But it's much more... What's the word? It's given a much more bigger impetus to change than anything that came out of the liberal movement in the last ten years. And that's a condemnation of the liberal movement. I mean, I just think that...

You know, I'm a liberal. I think there are lots of inequalities and things that really should be changed. And I think it's really good. And I had real hopes of the Occupy movement. And I was completely shocked and rather saddened when they stalled. I went down and watched them. And I just thought it was tragic, because they threw away so much. Yeah, you know, Brexit comes along. And now we're in a sort of bobbing along in like a cork on a stormy sea, waiting to see what happens. So here's perspective on the Occupy movement from

someone who is interested in politics, but not sufficiently well read. And you talked about civil rights in America at a certain point, and how important that was to creating a revolution there. But literally, in those days, things seemed more black and white. And nowadays, the Occupy movement, I didn't really understand what it was even about at the time I say okay what are they actually proposing though what is this what are they trying to achieve the room of the Occupy movement emerged after the financial crash yeah and in specific terms what they were saying I mean beyond wanting just more regulation and more transparency well no it's bigger what they were saying... I mean, beyond wanting just more regulation and more transparency... Well, no, it's bigger than that.

They were saying, look, power has shifted away from politicians to finance, and look what happens when finance gets control. It runs out of control. And that is a powerful message because throughout the last 200 years, there has been a battle, especially since the late 19th century, between finance and politics. And they wanted it pulled back. And then the strangest thing happened. They failed.

The politicians bought into the financiers' version of what happened. And we got austerity. And everything clicked back to where it was. I mean, you could argue that you're absolutely right. They didn't have a project that grabbed people's imagination. That's what you're saying, isn't it? Yes. There wasn't a simple narrative.

That's what politics always needs. Politics needs a sense of, this is where I'm going to take you. And come with me. Give me your votes. And give yourself up to my idea. And we'll go there. and i'm sorry to sound like a cracked record but what went wrong with that why you didn't have that picture is because in an age of individualism everyone has their own story it's this idea that's central to the modern

idea of democracy which sort of comes out the internet is that the idea of elites telling you having a story that you say okay i'll give myself up to that is bad that we all have our own story and each person's story has to have its is equal i discovered that when i did a really interesting thing with that theater group punch trunk oh yes i did an immersive theater thing with them which was absolutely fascinating because what they had got onto was that in our age of individualism everyone wants to go and experience stuff their way they don't want to be sat down in the theatre and have something presented to them in which they felt not subservient but it was being given to them

what punch drunk invented was this sort of incredibly exciting wonderful way of you could go into a dark building go anywhere you wanted and experience it anywhere you wanted. And in a way, it's like a three-dimensional rendition of the Internet. You can go anywhere. You can make your own story. And it was beautiful. And people loved it. But what I learned from it was that whilst you could create the most magical world for people to experience, It was very difficult to tell them something they didn't know,

to tell them something new, because to do that, you have to assemble facts and feelings and stories in a line. You have to say, come with me down this line, and we'll get somewhere interesting. And that's sort of what politicians have to do. They say, it's a leap of faith. Come with me, and we'll go down down this line and we'll get to this. People like President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher did that.

I think they were the sort of last big politicians who really did that. Who had big ideas, easily graspable. Exactly. It was a story. Come with me. But also it has to link to something that was lurking in the back of people's minds. And I think what was lurking in the back of people's minds in the 1980s was that they had been, they'd come out of a working class and middle class background, had been well educated, but felt not only kept down, but also looked down on.

And Mrs Thatcher and Reagan touched on that. They brought those people up and said, no, no, no, this is your time. And it was good. That's the good aspect of Thatcher and Reagan, is they broke the elitist stranglehold. But they had a story. And I don't even think Tony Blair had a story. Tony Blair had a

thing saying, well, you know, you tell us what you want and we'll give it to you, which is much more a focus group thing. And I think politics got lost at that point. And he tried to desperately recapture it through Iraq, and that went very badly wrong. But I think you do need a story. But we live in an age where to give yourself up to someone else's story is considered a bit suspicious.

Democracy is about individuals all talking to each other, and then the internet seemed to give us that almost literally, that we can have a system of correspondence without leaders, where we can all talk to each other. But I think that was really good. And I think that's one of the reasons why we are actually living through a golden age of relative peace, because we've embraced this idea of democracy. But it's static. What it lacks is giant pictures of the future which may be a good thing and it may be that's the condition of our time and that really to try and imagine anything else at this present

moment is probably not on the cards that's that's one way of looking at it but static worlds tend to get corrupted and a bit like stagnant ponds they begin to just get a bit stuck and dark. And I think people are beginning to feel that somehow. What do you do on the internet? What do I do on the internet? I do what everyone else does on the internet. I skitter around it like a sort of, like Bambi in the forest, yeah? I just jump everywhere. And I think what's really interesting about the internet

is that, myself included, it has reshaped, we accept jumping around now. Have you noticed us movie narratives are much more jumpy? And we accept the sort of fragmented narrative structure that only pretentious movies used to make. I mean, you know, I remember watching on a plane the first Transformers movie. Do you remember that?

Sorry, yeah, yeah. It was torture, wasn't it? But if you looked at it... Actually, because it wasn't a very good movie, I started noticing the structure. OK. I didn't know there was one. It jumps. The first 20 minutes, it jumps. Yeah. Like those sort of art movies used to do. But it was doing

it. And people are much more happy with this. So in answer to your question, that's what I do. I jump around it and I use it. And also I don't do social media. I find social media confining. Yeah, man, you would have a hard time on social media, I would say. Why? Because people would just be giving you shit all the time. I presume you've never read your YouTube comments underneath your films. Oh, yeah. That way madness lies. Of course you do sometimes. And you come away remembering the horrible

ones. Do you really read them? What a maniac. Well, you get lost. No, no, no, every now and then I do it. I'm beginning to wonder about the internet. Do you remember those movies in the 1970s? No, the 1980s, every now and then I do it. I'm beginning to wonder about the internet. Do you remember those movies in the 1970s? No, the 1980s, usually made by people like John Carpenter, where the inner city had become this strange place full of people who dressed in really weird ways,

sort of post-Goth, slightly steampunk, slightly industrial, and they were all in ruined buildings, and they all drove cars and had fun and really did bad things with extremely large weapons. Yeah. And it was just like this strange place and everyone else lived out in this netherland of the suburbs. And I sort of wonder whether the internet,

or large chunks of the internet, are going to become like this. That it's going to be this strange fairground you go to to have fun and to be weird and reality has completely dissolved. And meanwhile, everyone else retreats out to the suburbs like they did in America in the 80s. And sensible things will be reinvented. Books will be reinvented.

Newspapers will be reinvented. And the internet will be this... You go there. It'll be a nutty playground. Yeah. It's a sort of... A giant nutty playground where the reality has long ago gone.

But if you give yourself up to it, it's really fun, but also frightening. You know, there's zombies around that corner and there's strange things around here, but also there's beautiful things. And I just wonder whether the internet will become like that. Well, it sort of is already, isn't it? It's on the way.

Bits of it are, certainly. There's a disenchantment growing. You can feel it, can't you? Yeah, yeah. But I guess what it does, though, is that it amplifies a lot of what's inside you already. And you end up being able to find things that satisfy all your desires if you look hard enough. And you can concentrate on those.

And the algorithms ensure that the more you visit those sites, the more you're encouraged to do so. So you'll probably explore less, come across less unusual stuff. so you'll probably explore less, come across less unusual stuff. And also you end up on social media having all your ideas about the world mirrored back to you in lots of ways. And as you say, you're encouraged not to step outside of the prevailing wisdom. Not by a dictator, but by everyone else. Exactly, by everyone else. Who are like you. So it's the strangest thing

say you and i are in our little echo chamber with a few million other people who all like the same thing and we're all feedbacking each other with stuff that we know the other would like so we're all happy and we're together and then someone comes along and we force them out we can't perceptually see that actually there are a few million lines of code that are making us do this that we are enforcing that person out we are like nodes in a network or a circuit that's decided to eject this but somehow we've all done it together because we still think we're individuals expressing ourselves so when that person comes along and says Donald Trump is good, and we all start putting lock caps and go, Donald Trump's bastard, he's horrible, he's not like that. We think of ourselves as being self-expressive individuals, but the collective

act is to censor something that doesn't fit with us, and they're kicked out. We think we're individuals. We think that's the reality. But the real reality is that we have been managed by a few lines of code into a complex system that ejects what the system doesn't like. But we don't see it. We don't see that reality. You know that musician called Burial, who I really like? You know him? Burial, yeah.

I use a lot of his music. And I read an interview with him once where he's very suspicious of social media. And he said he's beginning to feel that when he's got the computer mouse and he's holding it and he's looking at the screen, he's wondering whether it's like a Ouija board because actually, is he in control of it? Or is it actually a series of lines of code

behind the screen that is actually making him move his hand like that? And it is like a Ouija board. And I thought, yeah, spot on. That's exactly what it is. Again again it's a perceptual thing in an age of individualism we can't let go of that idea that i'm sitting there as an individual and i'm making the choices with that mouse but what burial was saying is no just turn it flip it around look at it the other way there are what you see on the screen is just a two-dimensional simulacrum of the world behind that there's a load of code and that code is actually moving

your hand but we don't think like that because we think of ourselves as individuals yeah this is a thing that lurks in the back of my brain you know there are lots of people writing books at the moment saying the robots are going to take over and we're all going to be out of job it started with the working classes in the 1990s but you wait the middle classes are all going to get taken over by robots and they'll all just have to go to art classes and do nothing they have to get jobs in the robot factory exactly no but these are the robots do that anyway oh yeah so but i have this counter theory that actually if you look at how we behave online you ask me what how what i do on the internet. I do what everyone does, is I go click there, and then it offers me some options, and I go there, and I go there.

And then I begin to think, hang on, maybe I'm being trained to fit with the machines. So I'm becoming a component. Essentially, I'm a node when I'm doing that, of a signal coming down that part of the internet, to me and then saying well you could do that we could do that do that so i do that if you like this you'll like that yeah that maybe we're being trained to become much more simplified as human beings in order to fit with the circuits at which point we stop looking closely at the complexities and the ambiguities of the world i I mean, for me, it comes down to how badly do I want to see which child stars are unrecognizable now?

You know those websites that you sometimes drift onto and they've got all these sidebars? It's called clickbait. Yeah, man. And usually I abandon it. I do sometimes. I think, well, I do sort of want to see which stars have really let themselves go.

So I'm going to have a little look. But then, I mean, now they split it into so many stages. So many clicks, because it's clicks. Yeah. Doesn't that get you grumpy? Yeah, it does. Yeah, it makes me very sad. And it makes me angry with myself and ashamed of myself.

Because it's like my impulse was bad and actually what I'm doing is bad and now I'm being punished for it by just wasting my time and my clicks. Yeah, it's no good. But your response as a journalist is to make these very heavily authored, impressionistic, emotional films, which are sort of encouraging people to think about what we've been talking about think about how we got to to the point we are at in various ways the danger of course is that those films will be consumed by more people who are already on you know part of the program as it were and they will read into them what they want to read and then you'll get the conspiracy nutters looking at them and going yeah but he's missed this out and he's he's

not told the truth about that and he's so how do you feel about all that and about about your position in this whole thing where do you see well i'm a great believer in a lot of my contemporaries who make documentaries have moved off television and go into cinema because they think television's got too trashy. I'm a great believer in television because it's still a mass medium. It's still one of the few mass mediums.

And by that, I mean you cross across boundaries with it. You really can. And it's powerful like that. So I think it's an area where, and what you're talking about is me being, I'm provocative. I try and say, have you looked at things like this? And the more you can do it to different people, the better it is.

And a mass medium like television still allows you to do that. Whereas, I don't know, if you go and make documentaries for what's called a cinema release, you tend to just be going out to another echo chamber of people who already believe that, I don't know, bankers are bad or global warming is terrible. I'm not saying those are wrong,

but you get locked off in a bubble. What I do is sort of, I'm emotional. You're absolutely right. I worked out very early on that I'm very much typical of my time. I'm emotional. Far more than, say, people would have been 20 years ago. So I'm going to emotionalise my journalism, not distort it, but to just give it that push that grabs people, pulls people in,

which I've noticed a lot of journalism on television doesn't do. So I pay a lot of attention to the music. I mean, it's genuine. I love music. But I'm trying to create an emotional way of drawing you in. Again, that's to try and draw all sorts of people in who you wouldn't normally get yeah so you're constantly trying to get to people and say have you thought of this have you thought of that and doing it in a larky way and an emotional way because so much of television at the moment well all sorts of things but television is the one I know, is when a programme starts,

you know within about 20 seconds what it's going to be like for the rest of the programme, don't you? Partly because they flag it and they trail it. No, but they flag that for three minutes. The first 20 seconds, you know pretty much what it's going to be like. Mood, music, conclusion, level of doominess it's predictable and the more you can be sort of unpredictable and you're not quite sure where you're going

it's so rare i mean there are just so i love movies when you just don't know what's going to happen either the movie that was just come out recently called american honey do you see that i haven't seen it now what's brilliant about it is that you're going on a road trip through America through all these things with this young girl who's completely in love and therefore very open and very emotionalised. She's constantly going to situations where you think you know what's going to happen.

You don't. It pulls the rug from under your feet all the time and it's just brilliant because it's so refreshing. It makes you look again. Of course, the reason that emotionalism or an appeal to the emotions is largely absent from most journalism, or at least that's the convention, is because it seems too intimately connected to the idea of you having an agenda

and pursuing that agenda and foisting it upon people via an appeal to the emotions. You know what I mean? But you're sort of stepping outside of that definition of journalism. All journalism tells a story. All journalism goes out into the world, and the world is chaotic. It's just full of millions and millions of bits of stuff happening at this very moment. And it pulls those facts together, and it turns them into a story. I would argue that I make it much more obvious that I do that in the way I make my films, that I'm sort of transparent. You can see what I'm up to.

Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things they do on television is these things called cutaways, or what used to be called noddies, where when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut. I would never do that. I'd just cut. And you can see what I'm doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument. I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That's what television journalism has. And you can either dress it up as,

this is the absolute truth, or you can dress it up with me by saying look i'm telling you a story all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this to provoke you and of course i want people to agree with me because i'm you know all human beings will but i understand that that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty at the present moment to go back to my original point you know what you're going to get with most journalism so therefore you sort of switch off and you go oh yeah it's a climate change film oh yeah it's a bankers a bankers have done something ever bad again you want and therefore you don't look you it's like if you're showing a picture of the mona lisa you go yeah that's the mona lisa you don't look at it's like if you're showing a picture of the Mona Lisa, you go, yeah, that's the Mona Lisa.

You don't look at it. You just look at it as a pattern. You go, oh, that's the Mona Lisa. I don't know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa. I don't think I ever have because it's a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah I really love talking to you so much. Now, music is central, I would say, right, to the films you make. And this must have been said to you before,

that your approach to making these films is almost being a DJ, not only in terms of the music, but in terms of the way you use archive, the way you sometimes will use the same bit of archive in a different context, but you're always striving to create an emotional connection. Creating a mood. Yeah, to create a mood. Brian Eno's your best friend in that respect. No, I haven't used him for a while.

I used one bit of him in the most recent film, but then I moved away from Mr Eno towards Mr Burial. To Mr Burial, yeah. Who I just think is the genius of our time. What would you recommend if people didn't know where to start with Burial? The most important Burial song to listen to, which will tell you everything about him, is a song he did called Come Down to Us.

It's, I think, about 13 minutes long. From there you can explore outwards. But why it's so incredible is because what Burial does is he takes what is essentially noise, and noises and industrial noise, and songs, but fuses them together to create something that is epic and romantic and sort of gives you a clue of the sort of thing that might be coming culturally, which is a high romanticism, I think.

And I think he's there ahead of everyone. It's so emotional, yet at the same time, just noise. And I don't know, it's just, I can't, sorry, this is me being inarticulate, I just, it's just wonderful. The film I made last year, which was called Bitter Lake, I opened the film with a long section of Come Down to Us. And it just, I don't know, it takes you into another world.

You see, I think the thing about our time is that we're living through a period where those in charge are very pragmatic, functional and utilitarian. So everything, if you work in an office, you know that everything is measured. Measured outcomes, measured this. Economics dominates the whole of politics. Everything is practical. So everything is very measured outcomes measured this economics dominates the whole of politics

everything is practical so everything is very very functional very pragmatic and i feel that in reaction what's yearning to come through and i often think this is where conspiracy theories are signals of there's something's trying to burst through which is to try and re-enchant the world and make it magical again yes and mysterious like you. Like, you know, Britney Spears was brainwashed by Walt Disney and the CIA in the 1980s. Is that a real one? Oh, God, yeah. That's really big.

But the trouble is with the brainwashing, it only lasts for about five or six years, which is why all the Mouseketeers, I think all the Mouseketeers were brainwashed, which is why then five or six years later, they go mad because the brainwashing has gone wrong. It's the Illuminati, I think, who are behind it.

It's the Illuminati working with Walt Disney and the CIA using their brainwashing techniques they developed in the 1950s. They all came together somehow in the 1980s and took the Mouseketeers and turned them into robots. Quite what for? No one seems to know. But that's one of the big conspiracy theories.

But what I find fascinating about it is that it's like a magical world, isn't it? Which is where strange and mysterious things happen. And I just wonder whether that is that desire to re-enchant the world, coming, breaking through in really weird, distorted and sometimes rather sad ways.

But it gives you a clue of what might be coming which is which i again i think burial is onto i know that sounds pretentious is a sort of high-blown almost melodramatic romanticism about the world which will be a reaction against our rather narrow last 20 30 years in. In hyper-normalization, you have that section about UFOs and how the government at that point was using the whole idea of there being unidentified flying objects to cover up the fact that they were testing new bits of military equipment. And that's sort of heartbreaking in a way, isn't it? Because there may well be UFOs, right? Like that seems to be at least within the realms of possibility. If you live in a pragmatic age't it because there may well be ufos right like that seems to be at least within the realms of possibility if you live in a pragmatic age the one thing you can't really discuss

is how much we don't know yeah because what you have is a technocratic class essentially the people who run think tanks and economists and and people in scientific measurement systems and cognitive behavioral therapy all that sort of technocracy. The idea that we know so little and that beyond that lies extraordinary things that we might know or we may never know, we just don't. What you're talking about is there are things to believe in because we know that we don't know everything. That was like the whole raison d'etre for the X-Files, to the extent they had that poster there in the back saying i believe and it was all about wanting this other world to

exist yes it's wanting something beyond and i do i'm sorry to go back to this but if you live at a time when you are encouraged to believe that you're the center of the universe then actually the sadness of that it's great in many ways and it's incredibly liberating, but the sadness that lurks under everyone in an age of individualism is, is there anything else? Is it just me? It's lonely. It's lonely. Whereas other ages, religious, optimistic political ages, there was this idea that you were part of something that would go on. Right, you were part of a continuum and you may not be able to see the results of your efforts in your lifetime,

but you were encouraged by the idea that generations from now things might be better. People fought for things. Early days of socialism in this country in the late 19th century. I had a grandfather who was an arch-socialist and he used to stand as an MP in completely pointless places that he would knew he would never get in. But he used to tell me this is no, this is for something much bigger, which will go on beyond. Is that goofy, though? No, it's noble.

It's no, I think it's noble. But I've got friends who are nice people and who treat other people properly and with respect. But when it comes to certain things like climate change, for example, they say, I don't care. I'm not going to be alive. Who cares what happens? You know what I mean? They say, I'm not going to get too upset about it because I won't be around. And I'm like, yeah, but what about your children?

Don't you, you know, he hasn't got children, the guy I'm thinking of. But to be fair to your friends. He's pragmatic, right? Well, I think it's beyond pragmatism i mean this is the problem i have with the climate change we're shifting a little bit here but i do have a problem with the climate change movement is that instead of trying to dramatize it and link it to what you can do now to change the world it just keeps on telling me that we're all doomed and that it's all going to be shit in the future it what i think was a great missed opportunity with the climate change movement was not to say look we can change the world now in extraordinary ways that will actually liberate

people from toil and poverty by inventing new types of technology and all sorts of things like this and will change the world for the better in the future instead what they did it got captured by the scientists and what the scientists did was just say we're all doomed whereas a true political response to a problem like climate change is to dramatize it in an emotional way that creates a mood amongst your friends who as you say are nice good and probably very giving people to say well okay we can do something now we'll actually transform now and the future whereas the scientists who tend not to be great empaths have simply dramatized it as an apocalypse waiting somewhere in the darkness in the future to which the honest response is well what do i do now nothing oh i won't buy a plastic bag

yeah yeah just recycle yeah and uh and then worry about how much of it just goes into the landfill anyway yeah at which point you start worrying about i don't know what's in a five pound nobe i mean human beings have done extraordinary things in the history haven't they i mean they've done extraordinarily bad things but they've also done extraordinarily wonderful things and the level of worry at the moment i call it odierism i made a short film about this which which was silly but it also had a serious point is that the liberal mindset and imagination used to have a dream of creating a completely different world new world now it's reduced to people either opening up their

newspaper or flicking the screen and getting going on the news page and going, another boat turned over in the Mediterranean, 250 refugees killed. Oh, dear. And that's it. Well, you know, has it come to, what's the phrase? Did I shave my legs for this? It's just not enough. You're an inheritor of a fantastic tradition

of transforming the world for the better. And you're living,itor of a fantastic tradition of transforming the world for the better and you're living actually a very nice life but you could do so much more you could transform the world into something just beautiful you're living in this this incredible age of relative peace for your own society interest rates are incredibly low you've got all this time and all you do is go oh dear yeah but you sort of think well practically speaking if a person who has a family and has a job and they're both working parents or whatever passionately believes or is passionately depressed by something like the iraq war back in back in the day are you suggesting that if they want to be taken seriously

or if they want to see their indignation through, that they have to totally restructure their lives and that's the only meaningful way to do anything about it? I mean, I take your point. But if you really believed in something like that, you would go and work at it in your spare time, putting pressure on your mp publicizing it just encouraging people to be like you but i suppose people do that or people feel

they're doing that now on social media people feel they're doing that by creating a prevailing political mood they're sort of trying to create a gang of people who say, no, this should never be allowed to happen again, kind of thing. But hang on. Let's look at this empirically. In the period that the internet has risen up to be a powerful force of mutual communication between people, during that period, inequality in power, wealth, life expectancy has gone up massively. The politics in the West has shifted ruthlessly to the right. That mood that you create may well exist on those echo chambers on social media, but it hasn't changed the world. At which point, to play you, to me, you go,

yes, but I mean, maybe that's the point, you just can't do it, power is so strong now. A few weeks ago, with Brexit and with Donald Trump, a group of people took an opportunity and actually signalled no. I'm not saying they were right or wrong, I'm just saying you can do it. Yeah? They said, we don't want to be part of europe any longer and they're still very vocal and they're they're threatening that if there is this uh vote in parliament they'll have hundreds of thousands of people down in parliament which they might well do yes you can what i find strange is the liberal a strange right-wing populism got there first well what does that tell you about what didn't get there?

That maybe it was unthought out, a little lazy, a bit odierist. I don't know. It's one of the great puzzles of our time. How do you feel, Adam Curtis, if I read to you a few YouTube comments that I've collected that I saw beneath some of your films? What is your intention? Because I think from the point of your transparency, you should reveal to the listeners your motive. Yeah, my motive is,

whenever I read criticism of your work, right, I think, well, I sort of agree with some of that, but broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to what you do and I like what you do very much. So I always feel like, hmm, I wonder what Adam Curtis, how he would defend himself to some of these people. I mean, I think you would be ill-advised to engage with a lot of these people because I don't think they'll ever be satisfied with any explanation you give.

But I'm always curious, and I thought this might be a nice, safe way, Adam, for you to deal with some of your critics. How do you feel about that? You can do whatever you want. All right, good. See how you deal with some of your critics. How do you feel about that? You can do whatever you want. See how you deal with this. Or as Dow says about hyper-normalisation. Ironically, this

doc uses brainwashing techniques brackets image bombardment pretty heavily. Best to take this one at a critical distance and only in small doses. Watch out guys. Do you want me to comment on that? Yes. I would argue that all journalism is propaganda. You are propaganda for a story you are telling about the world. You are trying to make sense of the world. That's all journalism

does. And in that sense, it's saying, out of all the millions and millions of chaotic stuff, And in that sense, it's saying, out of all the millions and millions of chaotic stuff, I've constructed this story. My colleagues on BBC News do that. I do that. I would argue that I just make it completely obvious that that's what I'm doing. And that in a way, I am far more honest and transparent in the way I make my films because I'm showing you the nuts and bolts of what I'm up to. I'm also trying to make you agree with me by creating a mood you like and all those things but I'm also showing it to you whereas a lot of possibly how would you describe more conventional television reporting by tends to conceal that by having a mood of authorial inevitability about it this is is it. This is true.

I think you can tell from the way I make my films. In a somewhat larky, emotional, and sometimes silly way, that I'm playing. I'm saying, look, this is my story, but I'm showing you how I've done it. So I think I'm... I just disagree. I think there are things that are far more subtle forms of propaganda on television than I am. But then all journalism is propaganda. Primarily, you're interested in entertaining as well.

Can I also say one other thing? Yeah, yeah. I think you find it very difficult to see where I'm coming from politically in my films, because basically I don't know either. You're exploring. I am exploring. Making connections. Where is the politics in

hyper-normalization? Am I left-wing? Am I right-wing? I don't think, I think they're completely pointless things at the moment. I'm trying to make sense of the world, you know, and point out things that possibly have become mythologized, simplified, and what you can't see. So I'm being provocative, but I don't think I am coming from a political particular point of view. I guess the thing is that you have this way of speaking, you lay out your thesis, as it were, in quite a categorical way. You say always at the beginning, this is a story about such and such. But that's what I'm doing. I would have thought that's the key thing. I don't say this is it. I say this is a story about, because that's exactly what I'm doing. I am taking the complex reality of, in this case,

the last 40 years, crossing across the world, and I'm putting it together into a story. And on top of that, I'm then saying, have you thought that this story might mean this? And as you say, I get hundreds of thousands of comments. Some of them disagree with me, some of them agree with me. I think that is the highest point of what the BBC should be doing, telling people about the world and also telling them about different ways of looking at the world. Because really good journalism is not just about facts,

it's about perception. It's about saying, look at it this way, or about saying look at it this way or you can look at it this way yeah because at the moment we live in such a limited pragmatic world what is assumed to be the truth is just it there isn't another way of looking at it and it's very difficult to break it i mean there are so many crazy funny comments that people have left about your stuff. The best one I liked was... I can't remember who said it. There were two of them.

One of them said, he's like a guy pushing a supermarket trolley along a motorway, filled up with old bits of film, shouting at passing cars. And I really liked that one. With some Brian Eno playing on the beatbox. Exactly. And the other one was... With in-dark trees really like that one. With some Brian Eno playing on the beatbox. Exactly. The other one was... With In Dark Trees playing at high volume.

You mustn't over-obsess about the Brian Eno. I love him. No, but I've moved to my... I love his music. I'm just saying that if one was to characterise a typical Adam Curtis... There's always Nine Inch Nails. Ah, yeah, yeah. And who's the... Oh, man, you introduced me to that Kanye West track in Bitter Lake. Isn't it beautiful?

And I did not know who on earth it was. I was like, who the hell is this? It's the latter part of it. Yeah. What's the name of the track? Runaway. And will you... It's beautiful.

For people who haven't seen that film, will you talk about that sequence and how you used that piece of music? What I was trying to do in that film, I'd been given everything that the BBC had ever shot in Afghanistan, not just the news reports, but the actual original Rush's material that had been shot. So I had thousands and thousands of hours of original material, some shots lasting 10, 15 minutes. And I mean, a lot of it was very boring, but a lot of it was extraordinary. And as you let the shots run, it made you look at the society in a different way.

So what I did with that is I literally took a piece of music by Kanye West, which I thought was incredibly beautiful. It was a bit where he just repeats again and again one piano note and then builds up the noise above that. So again, it's like burial. He's taking what's essentially noise, but making it romantic. And I put that against long-held shots of just stuff happening in Afghanistan. I mean it was instinctive but what I suppose I was trying to do

was again make you look again. All the reporting from Afghanistan was about bombs going off, people being killed by what were called IEDs and British squaddies with GoPro cameras. And I thought that it was incredibly limited view of this really strange, complex country. So I tried to run these shots along and then put music that actually was our kind of music, Western music, over it to try and de-strange it. Because there is also a terrible tendency in television, journalism, documentaries, is when they go and report a foreign country they try and put foreign music over it which i always think is not authentic it's deeply patronizing right because it's somehow saying they're others and this is their other culture whereas actually the people in afghanistan they come from a different background

from us but they are complex weird weird, strange, intelligent. They have all our complexities. They're just like human beings like us. And the more you bring that into focus, the better. So I was trying to do that. That mood that you then create, and it happens a lot in your films, that you find yourself in a very strange,

exciting, unusual place, you know, emotionally and but that's because but that's because journalism is about making you emotionally think something as well as i mean what i was trying to say in that film was that we have closed down how we see the world so much that when we went to afghanistan us and americans and others from West, we didn't really see it for the complex country it was. We simplified it down to a world of goodies and baddies. And all I was trying to in that film was create, as well as say that in commentary and with the interviews I used and with the facts I told you, I was also trying to say emotionally. I was trying to give you the experience. I wanted it to be like you were on drugs. You know that experience when you've taken drugs and

you think you've got reality and then suddenly it sort of goes a bit experience. I wanted it to be like you were on drugs. You know that experience when you've taken drugs and you think you've got reality and then suddenly it sort of goes a bit weird. I would never take drugs, but I can imagine it. Yes, I'm told this is what it's like when you take drugs. That it comes and it goes, yeah? And actually, to be honest, most people these days have taken drugs at some point in their lives.

So they are aware of the sort of perceptual shifts you can get, whether you've smoked marijuana or whether you've taken something stronger. Perception is this fallible, strange thing. And I suppose I'm playing with that as well. So the sense I wanted to get was, as well as saying all that, I wanted to literally emotionally have this effect that you think you see this world and then you don't, that it sort of somehow goes out of your grasp.

And therefore putting that music against those shots was part of that i mean normally you would expect some afghan music wouldn't you yeah at which point the whole image would recede from you and you just look at it as this thing i was trying to pull you in with the music and then put other images that contradicted it but also worked with it so you had that strange mood and then in reverse i took a very beautiful afghan pop song that i loved and put it over this i think it was a four minute shot of a soldier just holding a bird on the end of his rifle oh yeah it was great because it made me cry when i was yeah yeah it just made me cry so i thought i'm just going to do that. Because again, it makes you look again, doesn't it?

And it was beautiful. It was, man. I'm feeling emotional thinking about it. Emotion. Emotion. Do you have songs that always make you tear up? Can you tell me about some of those? I mean, it changes. It varies. Here's my list, right?

Go on. And they're kind of embarrassing. This is the list of songs that make you cry? Always make me cry. Okay, go on. And it's a bit embarrassing because some of them are very... I would like them to be more obscure. Rocket Man, Elton John. That's all right.

It's a good song. I mean, the thing about songs that make you cry, right, is that often they make you cry for all sorts of reasons. Just as long as you don't cry over Daniel. Rocket Man. Oh, mate. Lay All Your Love On Me, Abba. Something about some,

there's some sort of major emotional, epic shit going down there that just gets me. One Day I'll Fly Away, Randy Crawford. Although that's now been used in the John Lewis ad version of it, which is a shame. So I'll have to.

I think you'll have to move away from that. Have to move away. I'm Not The Man I Used To Be, Fine Young Cannibals. Do you mean like that? Yeah. Really? Yeah, I don't know why.

Listen to it again. All right. Don't be sniffy. No, no, no. About the cannibals. Okay, you're not going to like this one then. Dance the night away by the Mavericks. And that makes me cry because it's so crazily up

and optimistic and madly happy. Do you know what I mean? And it just makes me sort of weepy. So anyway, give me some of yours, if you can think of them off the top of your head. I can't think. I was desperately trying to think of them off the top of my head. Can we do this at the end?

Sure, okay. I'll think of some at the end. All right, then. Do you think about how, I've been thinking about, you know, death a lot. My dad died last year. So that encouraged that whole jag,

obviously, as it does for a lot of people. And you find yourself quite surprised that there aren't more people talking about it. You sort of think, why isn't everyone talking about this? This is staring me right in the face. I'm still in my 40s and it's staring me in the face and it's only going to get more urgent.

So... Well, of course, it's the thing you don't talk about. Yeah. Because in an age of individualism, the one thing you can't talk about is death because it means you won't exist any longer. So it denies the one thing you believe in, doesn't it? What else do you believe in these days?

The family? That's the only thing that's going to go on beyond you. I often think the obsession with the family at the moment is the fact that we don't believe in anything else that goes on beyond us. My Twitter feed will still be up. People will be able to go through my archive. My dad's Twitter is still there, I think. Yeah.

But what won't go on is something beyond you. Yeah. What you're talking about is the... Remnants. The tail. The tail that you left through life. Yeah, yeah. Like some strange group of asteroids wandering through the universe. Yeah, like little

dingleberries scattered throughout scattered throughout time but what there isn't is something going on and i think that i mean you know you look back to the victorians oh i think this might not be completely true is they all talked about death they didn't talk about sex oh yeah we all talk about sex but don't talk about death do you think that uh it's a good idea not to talk about death, that there's no point, that it's just going to encourage a kind of even more intense, mawkish self-regard?

I think that's possibly... If you don't have a mechanism or an architecture around you that gives a grander purpose and meaning to your life that goes on past your death, then I think all talk about death just goes into, oh, I'm going to die. It sort of feeds the pessimism. I mean, I do think that's interesting of our time. Someone said to me this about the way climate change was taken,

is that starting in the mid-90s, the first wave of baby boomers began to face the inevitability of their own death. And because they are at the centre of the universe, as far as they're concerned, in a narcissistic age, instead of facing up to their own death, they projected it onto the world. You know, if I'm going to die, the whole world's going to die so what was actually essentially a political and economic and scientific problem became co-opted by a sort of dark pessimism about their own deaths and what could have been a really good attempt to change the world scientifically economically and politically

using the dangers of climate change but got imprisoned in a cage of the fear of death and it still hasn't escaped from it which is why so many people find it quite difficult to find inspiring yeah because it's coated with a feeling of pessimism and mortality. Mmm. I know a lot of people who fit into that. They're called O'Dearists. O'Dearists. Yeah. Well, they do. But it's more extreme than O'Dear. Have you not noticed how

in the liberal middle classes there is a great feeling of pessimism? Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's not their job. Yeah. We're going to wrap this up shortly. I'm still interested to know what songs make you cry, if you can think of any. Do you ever DJ?

Actually just go and play records at places? I get quite a lot of requests to DJ, but I just think, nah. But I mean, you're right. Part of what I'm doing in my films, it is the inner DJ coming out. But it's that, but it's a sort of, it's not trying to get you to dance, because the problem with DJing for dance, it's like those computer games that you're sending them on rails.

Whereas I like the idea that you just change moods all the time. Or maybe you could VJ, like I can imagine a live event, where you just had a laptop full of bits of footage that you'd gathered together, and then someone else is actually putting on the records and you throw up these images on a screen or whatever and create a mood that way. Come on, that would be good, wouldn't it? You're not buying this. I'd get bored.

Okay. What are you working on now, if you can say? I actually want to go back to sort of specific journal. I mean, there are lots of areas that I want to write and do short films about. Turkey, for example. The Yemen. All these things that are not being reported at the moment. I mean, everyone is obsessed by Trump.

Mm-hmm. Understandably, I guess. Well, yeah, but there are lots of other things going on in the world. Of course, yeah, but I mean... There's a war in Yemen going on, which is extraordinary, and no one's reporting it. Sure, but Trump's got everything. It's got surprise, it's got a goofy fucking guy, It's got reality TV. It's got... I know, but

always go off to the margins sometimes. Just, I don't know. I'd like to say we're in Russia. I don't know. I'll see. I mean, I think I pushed that one really right to the edge, that hyper-normalization film. Yeah, I really enjoyed that that by the way and um i looked at the length of it before i watched it and i thought oh my goodness this is going to be a windy windy journey but actually i thought that overall it was pretty coherent um i pull it together narrative yeah and so many memorable strange moments obviously i hadn't heard that story about the weapons of mass destruction guy watching The Rock with Nick Cage and describing... That's in the Chalkot Report.

Oh, my lordy. What I did in Hypernormalisation, in the film I'd done before called Bitter Lake, I collaged lots of images from different sources. In Hypernormalisation, I was essentially collaging stories. I was going further than I ever done before. I was sort of... You have Syria, the history of cyberspace, but somehow it's all going to make sense at the end.

So you're jumping, and you've got New York, and you've got Patti Smith, and you've got all these different characters. Because the things that, people sometimes ask me, what films do you like? Or what films do you take inspiration from? The answer is not very many, because really what inspires me are novels, old novels,

epic history novels where you have lots of different stories and somehow they all come together at the end because I like that. Have you thought of a song yet? Oh God,

give me a, just cut and I'll think. All right. What do you want to keep then? Keep the tension. I just keep, I mean, I mean,

all sorts of things really make me cry. Some bits of opera. Have you got more weepy the older you've got? No. You've always been like that? I'm always completely soppy. And really strange ones make me cry.

Like, there's a Nine Inch Nails song called, is it called Which Side of the Glass Are You On? Something like that. Which, the lyrics are actually silly and naive, and I don't really like them, but the mood he creates just makes me want to weep. Burial makes me cry. That song, Come Down to Us, is just so moving.

There's a song I put at the end of Hypernobulisation called Standing Room Only by a Canadian country singer called Barbara Mandrell. It's a bitter, second-wave feminist song from the 70s, but it's just really moving That makes me cry I think moments of experience capture the songs Which actually a lot of country makes me cry sometimes

Blanket on the ground used to make me quite weepy No, I can't go there That's your problem I love that song. Holy shit. There's a bit of Richard Strauss that I really love because it just builds up and up and up and up and up and makes me want to cry. Which is that one?

I can't remember how to tell you. It's one of the... Has it got singing on it? No. But then there are bits of Richard Strauss. Those four songs about death. What are they called? the four last songs? Those make me cry.

They're incredible. Standing Ramone by Barbara Mantrell. Which Side of the Glass Are You On by Nine Inch Nails. That burial track. Dance the Night Away by the Mavericks. 1969 by Smashing Pumpkins. Oh, yeah. Which is just one of the most beautiful songs. My brotherhing Pumpkins. Oh, yeah. Which is just one of the most beautiful songs.

My brother loves that one. It's beautiful. Because it's so sort of, when it's optimistic, you just lose yourself in it. And you want to dance. I forgot about that song. It really makes you want to dance.

I mean, actually, a lot of Smashing Pumpkins. The Cure. Oh, really? What's your favourite Cure stuff? I can't remember which. I mean, lots of Cure. Really want to cry. Oh, really? What's your favourite Cure stuff? I can't remember which. I mean, lots of Cure. Really want to cry. Oh, come on.

I've never thought about them as an emotional band in that way. I'm always a bit suspicious of the Smiths, but there is a light that never goes out. Oh, that's beautiful, yeah. Which is a really, really beautiful song. I've listened to that as well. If you read the lyrics, it's emotionally very grown up. Yeah, yeah.

Which you wouldn't know from Morrissey. Well, that's kind of that loneliness thing. I want to see people and I want to see the young and the light. But imagine, you know, a moment we might die. It's sort of what he's got in that song. He's captured that moment of all sorts of things flashing through your mind as you are driving into the underpass.

It's just beautiful. Wait. continue. There we go. Thank you very much indeed to Adam Curtis for giving up his time to talk to me. I've posted a few links to some of what for their hard work on this episode. Now the evening is setting in here in Bristol and it's getting a little bit cold so I'm going to head back to my hotel shortly on my pink Brompton which I've been cycling around. I've been called a wanker not once but twice since I've been here in Bristol by local youths unaccustomed to seeing a great great looking metrosexual man on a pink Brompton. But that's fine. Helps me to keep things in perspective. Now listen before I

go today I wanted to give you a podcast recommendation in a roundabout way. It's an excellent two-part interview, which I am going to put a link to on my blog as well. And it is with someone else I think you would find very interesting. Though the way I came to be aware of it and download it in the first place was rather sad. The podcast is called Conversations and the two episodes I listen to are with an Australian journalist and broadcaster, Mark Colvin, who died of cancer aged 65 on May the 11th. And if you're from Oz Squadron listening to this, then you'll know all about Mark. from Oz Squadron listening to this, then you'll know all about Mark. From 1997 to 2017, Mark was the presenter of PM, one of the flagship Australian radio current affairs programs on the ABC radio network, but he had become a hugely well-respected and well-liked reporter long before that. I'm now paraphrasing from Mark's obituary in The Guardian.

Since contracting a rare autoimmune disease in 1994 while covering the genocide in Rwanda, Colvin lived with severe pain and disability, kidney failure and two hip replacements. Throughout it all, including three years on dialysis while waiting for a kidney transplant, he continued to host PM, staggering into work at 3pm after spending the day in hospital preparing for work on his iPad. His father's life as a senior MI6 spy was the background to Colvin's acclaimed memoir,

Light and Shadow, Memoirs of a Spy's Son, which was published last year, 2016. I just ordered a copy. And that book also chronicles the international events that Mark witnessed as a foreign correspondent. Now, I knew pretty much none of that before May the 11th, when I learned that Mark had died. I knew he was a journalist only because I'd looked at his Twitter bio a couple of years ago when he tweeted a particularly nice message about something that I'd done. So I went and checked him out. Turned out that he and his family used to listen to the Six Music podcast that I did with Joe back in the day. And in fact, I think I may have even met Mark and his son, Will, when I was in Sydney a few years ago. I think 2010, doing some bug shows. They may have come along. But I didn't know who Mark was, really. I was just happy to meet some

fans of the podcast. After I started following him on Twitter, Mark would occasionally send me very touchingly enthusiastic and hugely encouraging messages about this podcast as well. And there were more kind and supportive words from Mark when my dad died, but never once did I have a clue about Mark's own extraordinary life and his many struggles with his health. His last messages to me a few weeks ago mentioned in passing that he was in hospital, but I just assumed, you know, he was a little bit poorly and I wished him a speedy recovery.

And then on May the 11th, I saw a tweet from him that said simply and finally, it's all been bloody marvellous. Someone else on Twitter said I should listen to the interviews that he did for the Conversations podcast. And that's when I discovered just how interesting his life had been. And he also sounded every bit as engaging and likeable as his messages suggested. So I recommend you give those interviews a listen. I think you'll really find them interesting. Mark Colvin.

I wish I'd known him better, but I'm glad that we connected at all. And hey, that goes for you too, podcasts. So till next time, take very good care. And, you know, if you see me on my my bike please don't call me a wanker it's just i mean on the one hand it's good to toughen me up on the other hand it does make me a little bit sad all right i'm not going to shout because there are people around bristolians and

i'm a little bit frightened of them. Take care. I love you. This is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop and I'd like to access your members area and

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