The black and white world of Adam Curtis.

If you don’t know the BBC’s Adam Curtis is, you can use Google, wikipedia and Google video to find out.

I fell in love with Curtis’ analysis in The Power of Nightmares, possibly his most acclaimed work. Being hooked, I trailed my way through most of his other work and began to see a pretty big problem: Curtis sees the world in black and white. No I’m not talking about ‘race’ I mean virtually everything he does is cast as everything consisting of just two opinions.

I began to see this on his program about ‘game theory’ particularly on a statement about JFK and the Cuban missile crisis, and since then I see it a lot. It actually turned me off watching his last programs about the loving machines, and the bi-focus he ‘explains’ the world in, is simply inaccurate.

I’m beginning to think that his bipolar constructions are a reason as to why he gets the acclaim that he does, because people are much much happier when they are offered to chance to see things in a bipolar way. Anything else is confusion.

The world has a lot of bipolar-ism in it, but Curtis’ geopolitical “analysis” that only sees things as one philosophy at loggerheads with another actually cheapens and brings into serious question the things that he says. He also proposes that the whole world is moved by the bipolar spread he lays out. Until he makes another program and then the world actually moved because that that other spread, until that is the next program comes out.

I finally penning an article to this because low and behold, Curtis is at it again…

He’s Behind You
How Colonel Gaddafi and the Western Establishment Created a Pantomime World

By Adam Curtis

Curtis’ work is valuable but quite overinflated and rather formulaic stitched together to hide the seams with some nice interesting music. Here’s a golden ‘oldie’ for you…

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