The filmmaker produces thought- provoking TV. Now there’s a novel concept, says matthew carr |
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In the devastated wasteland of contemporary TV, a new series by Adam Curtis - an original and challenging filmmaker - is something of a cultural event.
His first series, The Century of the Self, examined the use of psychoanalysis as a technique of mass manipulation in the creation of the consumer society. In The Power of Nightmares he looked at the political manipulation of terrorism by Western governments and traced the parallel agendas of American neo-cons and the modern jihad.
These are challenging ideas for a medium that generally prefers to leave the brains of its viewers untouched. But Curtis is that rare phenomenon - an intellectual filmmaker who communicates complex ideas through a suggestive interplay of interviews, narration, film clips and striking archive footage.
All these qualities were on display in the first episode of his new three-part series, |
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| Curtis’s vision of a manipulated and controlled society is as unsettling and provocative as ever |
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The Trap. the series argues post-war Western society was lured away from collectivist models of social solidarity towards an individualistic and selfish concept of 'freedom' that is ultimately empty and destructive.
This thesis is illustrated with characteristic verve. In last night's opening episode, Curtis traced the origins of modern 'target setting' to the Cold War nuclear 'game theories' played by the US think-tank the Rand Corporation.
Along the way he made improbable but convincing connections between the paranoid mathematician John Nash, the radical psychiatrist R D Laing and the comedy series Yes, Minister, to show how a pessimistic vision of 'human nature' paved the way for Thatcherism and its Blairite variant.
Curtis's nightmarish vision of a manipulated and controlled society is as unsettling and provocative as ever, even if at times his analysis feels a little schematic. But a single hour of The Trap contains more food for thought than the average month of TV. 
The Trap continues Sunday night at 9pm
FIRST POSTED MARCH 12, 2007
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