Amazingly I did not find a thread discussing this 2002 British television documentary series here.
I watched it years ago and found it insightful and chilling, but recently I started to wonder if it was perhaps a bit stilted and arranged.
Anyone of the Teeming Millions have a counter opinion/argument/criticism of the core elements and conclusions?
When I say Stilted and Arranged I mean this.
Haven’t seen that before, but it strikes me as a moderately on-target spoof of Adam Curtis’s undeniably distinctive style.
Somewhat in keeping with its line, my usual take on Curtis is that his stuff is usually brilliantly watchable, without ever being terribly reliable. It’s not as if any of the facts he states are wrong - and the accompanying montage of archive footage will be undeniably brilliant - it’s just that his overarching narrative is unlikely to make much sense. There are just too many factors contributing to 20th century history so that he can pick and choose from those that he has the footage for. Freud - to take the example of The Century of the Self - which I haven’t seen since the BBC originally broadcast it - did not actually cause the Vietnam War.
(Though it is perhaps worth noting that his best series, in the sense of sensibleness, is probably The Mayfair Set. Particularly notable given its topicality. Zac Goldsmith, the son of James Goldsmith, one of that series’s central figures has just badly lost the London mayoral election as the Conservative candidate. But then his father’s own spectacular electoral humiliation was in support of a Euro referendum equivalent to the one that the current PM is foisting upon us two decades later.)