THE CENTURY OF THE SELF

The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self

Introduction

How did British and American liberal politics devolve to the point where eight people sipping wine and popping back Cheerios have gained the power to define the policy choices of a national leader? How did our society become so selfish, trivial, materialistic and enslaved to its bottom-most register of desires? What enabled our businesses to gain a dictatorial control over the public imagination? Why did everything get so dark, dystopic and just plain dumb?

Adam Curtis's important film, The Century of the Self, supplies an answer to all these questions—and more. “There's A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed,” and “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering” are the two concluding episodes of a sweeping production. Curtis tracks the path by which a broad cultural revulsion against the notion of being possessed by corporate sprachen inspired a multifold liberation movement that crumpled into a new, ultimately vapid, ideal of self-empowerment, which, in turn, provided fertile soil for big business interests to sow a hyper-crop of rampant consumer desire (Aaron, 2002).

Discussion and Analysis

For the final twist, Curtis shows how the techniques developed by corporations to sell products were imported into the political arena. As mass surveys, aimed at determining how best to pander to lifestyle preferences of swing voters, became the strategy-of-choice for the Democratic Party under Clinton, and then—copycat killer-style—for New Labor in the election that brought Tony Blair to power, the higher social values of liberal politics became inexpedient, lost in a wave of redundancies. These two episodes present a devastating portrait of the reduction of the great democratic experiment to radically self-centered nichepolitics. The grand social collective doodles off into cocktail party banter.

There is, undoubtedly, a tremendous amount to learn here. No one who cares about—well—anything worth caring about, could applaud what passes for political process in this country today. We all want to know how we got here. Many of us, whatever historical methodology we espouse, cling to the hope that grasping how we arrived where we are today is theprerequisite to getting somewhere more palatable tomorrow (Ralph, 1976).

Adam Curtis draws a crystalline vector of the steps that led from 'there' to 'here'. Grossly telescoped, Curtis's arc to the apocalypse of automaton-frivolousness goes something like this: Sigmund Freud develops a theory of psychology based on the premise that vast, dark, irrational, unconscious forces drive the individual, and that these forces must be restrained if civilization is not to be drawn into the abyss (Curtis, 2002).

If we follow the dancing cigar from the beginning of the film to the end, the narrative goes: Freud to Freud, to Freud to Freud—to contemporary corporate fascism.

The Century of the Self is intelligent, often mesmerizing and, I would argue, ultimately utterly mad. Mad not in its details, which are often sharp and revealing; but in all that's forgotten and which, in its potent absence, having become subject to a kind of massive anti-Freudian slip, enables the dots ...