I have long been an admirer of Curtis. I can’t recall if it was The Mayfair Set, the Trap, or the Power of Nightmares that first struck me, but they were pivotal in getting me into academia – his use of library footage and music engages on a visceral level with ideas that can seem overly abstract to a novice. At the same time, his work is frequently derided for making tenuous connections between events, movements and historical figures, and more recently, has been accused of inciting the same kinds of paranoid conspiracies as those loved by the alt-right.
I am not going to provide a thesis on Curtis’s work but I just wanted to make a brief comment on work that I believe is helpful to understanding his work but has not been picked up on by many commentators – the work of the sociologist Stjepan Meštrović, in particular, his book Postemotional Society. I stumbled across his work during my Masters during a talk given by Andrew Edgar of Cardiff University, who masterfully used it to understand nationalism and sport around the time of the 2012 London Olympics. Meštrović’s work, written in 1996, was a response to what he saw as an over-reliance upon information of objectively measurable factors by social scientists at the expense of considering the political force of more nuanced and difficult to measure emotions. His work in many ways was a harbinger for the very strange world we live in in 2021 and one that Curtis attempts to comment upon, perhaps at risk of overkill, in his nine hour documentary.
The unseen or at least difficult to measure forces that Meštrović and Curtis attempt to describe struck me during my PhD, which for the most part was conducted in the shadow of Trump and Brexit, and ended less than a month before lockdown measures were imposed. For instance, whilst teaching a seminar on the occult, it occurred to me that many of the ideas expressed by alt-right were not new and were seen in Aleister Crowley’s irrationalism – although a response to Victorian high-mindedness, it was enthusiastically taken on by 1960s counterculture and contributed to some of the darker episodes from the time including the Tate murders by the Manson family and Bowie’s flirtation with fascism. Similar dissatisfaction could be seen in online groups such as the r/DarkEnlightenment, a now banned fascist reactionary sub-Reddit. Through his case study of the causes behind the Balkans War, Meštrović anticipated forces that would come to make very real political gains during the second decade of the 21st century.
For those who disagree with his methods, Curtis also anticipated these forces. His late 90s The Mayfair Set charts the anti-globalisation of James Goldsmith and the illegal, paramilitary action of a declining British aristocracy grasping on to the last threads of the British Empire. He picks up on this thread in his recent series when he seems to explain Brexit through a nationalism that is partly the product of thwarted colonial ambitions, or the failure of a rather small island to come to terms with itself. It seems to draw a parallel between populism in a past-world power with the alt-right in the US. The irrationalism of these movements Curtis thinks has been developing since universal rights to vote were established in liberal and capitalist states, and political leaders sought to use emotion to manage society. The key development of C21st is that now the ways people get their information has fractured, and newspapers and television no longer are the gatekeepers of meaning.
Although crude, drawing a parallel to the vacuum left in the Balkans in the wake of the death of Tito can provide ways of reflecting upon the force of emotion in 2021. Emotional power could continue to have a very tangible influence, namely through anti-vax movements and refusal to take up vaccines. It could even frame debates on liberty and freedom in the face of public health measures to manage the outbreak. How do we measure this? Can emotional factors be measured? I don’t really know if they can. But I think through telling stories that are based within archival footage, like Curtis’s, we do at least begin to frame critical debates that fall between the those conducted by professionals on one end, which are often inaccessible without expertise and training, and those to non-specialists.
Kevin Matthew Jones 