Adam Curtis’ ‘Shifty’: End of the Century Nausea
Shifty is the latest offering from prolific filmmaker Adam Curtis. Curtis is a somewhat divisive figure, with many viewing his sprawling, stock-film approach as pretentious, due to its jarring juxtapositions and on-the-nose narration choices. It’s also suggested that his documentaries often highlight problems and contradictions without offering clear solutions.
All of this is fair, to an extent.
They are, though, absolute catnip to me.
I’ve always been a sucker for strange archival footage, and an obscure snippet linked to music, and Shifty delivers. It is essentially a moving scrapbook of odds and sods from 1979-2000, and is an exception in Curtis’ canon in that it is an entirely domestic affair, sticking strictly to the shores of The British Isles, with rare forays to crumpled old outposts of the former Empire and war-torn Falklands adding to the feeling that this is very much about decline and fall. This does not mean that we are not treated to a rich variation of themes and footage, linked to each other with stark, plain white text.
Episode 1 opens with Margaret Thatcher, the chief protagonist of the series and of the period it is covering, opening her study door to a group of children escorted in by her favourite paedophile, Jimmy Savile, setting the tone for one of the main tenors of Shifty; the insidious abuses of power in Britain that goes all the way to the very top.
From that point on, we trace Britain through the 1980s—a time marked by the Falklands War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the miners' strike, seedy media figures like Maxwell, Clifford and McKenzie, the Specials, Wham!, the rise of surveillance, and a significant shift in how houses are valued, moving from comforting family homes to pure monetary assets, as well as meeting a cast of fascinating people who we never see anymore, from ventriloquists to miners.
We watch art and fashion become more commercialised, losing some of their former authenticity, and politics transformed from an ideological battleground to a resigned shrug at the mercy of The Markets. All these changes, Curtis surmises, disrupted traditional ways, blurring the lines between truth and perception, and pulling Britain away from its familiar roots, whatever they were in the first place.
In the following twenty years or so, the old imperial myths, customs, and stories struggled to survive amidst the rapid growth of new media, emerging technologies, economic experiments, and a growing emphasis on individual freedom, self-interest, and profit - trends that would lead to unpredictable and perhaps problematic consequences for society.
What strikes me, particularly on the earlier pieces of footage used, is how unfamiliar most people seem to be with being watched or interviewed, whilst the content we see lurches from quaintly wholesome to violent in devastating effect. A middle-aged civil servant’s lament on how his life is effectively over because of sheer boredom is particularly memorable, both for how it seems like a parody and yet also how candidly he opens up about the aching mundanity of his wife and life. This is followed up by a member of the public talking about the bombing of Lord Mountbatten’s yacht in an almost matter-of-fact manner, whilst debris lies strewn across his local beach. The ordinary violence at the heart of British life is strewn all over Shifty.
It is, and this is a rarity in Curtis’ catalogue, hilariously funny at times. The clips are allowed to speak for themselves, shorn of his usual clipped English narration (which we can also hear fade out of public common usage as the timeline of the series develops), and we have scenes that seem straight out of The Day Today or The Office, such as a man in a therapy group telling a woman “he didn’t very much like her face until she stopped smiling” or a ‘friends phoneline’operator deadpanning “we’ve got another wanker”. A brief but beautiful clip of builders playing cricket on the motorway they are constructing, or a factory conveyor belt full of thousands of crisps passing inspectors, or a mesmerising minute of a woman stamping China plates, it’s all part of life’s rich pageant as seen in these times.
As mentioned above, Thatcher and her ‘ism’ are the conduits of this series, from her ‘glory days’ of power through to the influence her policies continued to have, fiscally and otherwise. Curtis notes that it was the Nazis who invented privatisation and uses several talking heads to highlight how utterly derelict her policies were, spun into miracles by those elites that stood to gain money, who were creaming off the top all along. Merely by using unnarrated footage, Curtis can document how absurd it was at the time, and also capture Thatcher’s descent into a deranged self-righteousness, a loathsome individual with whom we’d thrown in all our chips and followed, almost to the present day. It’s difficult to watch any of the clips here and see what anyone saw in her, let alone decided it was a good idea to follow her misguided Churchillian ramblings.
In the following twenty years or so, the old imperial myths, customs, and stories have struggled to survive amidst the rapid growth of new media, emerging technologies, economic experiments, and a growing emphasis on individual freedom, self-interest, and profit, profit, profit… trends that would lead to both great progress and deeply problematic consequences for society.
Shifty’s main message, that the conditions of the past contribute to the mess of the present, is a fairly basic one, but one that bears repeating in our age. As said above, no obvious solutions are to be had, no heart-warming ending; it never ends. However, if you want something to make you think, or even just let wash over you with no real solutions, which Curtis does allude to in the finale’s coda, then this comes highly recommended.
