In the first episode Shifty, the fresh documentary series by Adam Curtis, depicting the past of Britain's 2 last decades of the 20th century, we see a sympathetic authoritative in the middle-old age. The recording is simply a fragment of a tv study on the problem of misfortune in the English society of the 1980s. A man plays the violin, then he speaks to the camera. He says he doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, although he utilized to enjoy it, he doesn't go to the movies, he lives with his wife in parallel worlds – "Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about it, it's just that." He concludes: “I’ve given up completely, actually – you won’t believe and viewers most likely won’t either – I’m just waiting for me to end up in a coffin.” The man does not look desperate, he talks about it all, as if talking in a country pub about a somewhat disappointing cricket match, he is completely reconciled with his destiny and sadness, long ago he lost a tragic dimension to him. In the background, you could easy play Pink Floyd singing "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way".
This scene best sums up the temper of the full show. The communicative Curtis presents is simply a communicative of collapse, social decay, crises, and subsequent failed attempts to halt the inevitable.
Shifty in many ways resembles Curtis's erstwhile series, sensational, dedicated to Russia from the end of Gorbachev to PutinRussia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (2022). Just like in that production, Curtis allows first of all to talk to archives. Old recordings – both those depicting the key political events of the era and the lives of average people from all corners of the United Kingdom – bear a minimal comment in the form of short, frequently one-sided subtitles, we do not hear the narration comment from the off, which is the main means of expression in the director's erstwhile projects. Both papers cover a akin period, both are besides a communicative of the defeat of the elites, who effort to improvement their own states – the USSR and Russia in 1 and the United Kingdom in the another case – unleash forces which they cannot control and bear the consequences they never assumed.
Thatcherism like a perestroika
Although Margaret Thatcher liked to compare herself to Churchill, in Curtis' communicative it resembles Gorbachev. Like the last leader of the russian Union, Thatcher includes the state in a deep crisis. He promises a series of reforms to heal them. But nothing goes as it intended.
Curtis recalls that monetary shock therapy was designed not only to master inflation and break the power of trade unions, but besides to reconstruct global competitiveness to British industry. However, the consequence was a fast acceleration of the deindustrialisation of the British economy, which has been taking place slow but irreversibly since the 1960s. W Shifty We see many recordings from the era of Thatcher depicting the unemployed setting up for benefits, closing bets, empty mill waves, mill directors talking about the request to reduce production, people trying to find themselves in a fresh economy, where everyone has to become an entrepreneur of their own – mostly with mediocre results. In 1 of the most eloquent recordings we see closed shipyards in the town of Sunderland in the northeast of England. After the construction of the last ship has been completed, its equipment is sold for pennies at auction, 1 of the employees cannot halt the tears.
The Governments of Thatcher and Major, though they see that their policy has a very different effect than intended, but they are incapable to correct it in any way, to revise the ideology behind it – like the russian planners of the 1980s, which we saw in TraumaZone. The government is taking further decisions that bring mass unemployment, even if they feel that it will not bring good results. Although it is apparent that privatised companies do not supply public services of better quality, and profits, alternatively of investing in improving them, direct to the pockets of their shareholders, conservatives cannot admit that privatisation could have been a mistake.
Twilight manufacture is linked to the expanding importance of the financial sector, which strengthens government-friendly deregulation. Banks freed from old rules flood the British economy with money. It generates thatcher’s “economic wonder”, but it is based on debt and import. It makes the British economy highly susceptible to speculative attacks and whims of global markets, as shown by subsequent cyclically recurring crises.
The money wave besides pumps a bubble in the real property market, creating fresh opportunities to enrich the conventional British elite for centuries drawing its wealth from land control. Curtis shows how 1 of the largest economical beneficiaries of Thatcher's reforms becomes richest after the 1980s aristocrat queen, Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster. household wealth is mainly based on property ownership in the west of London, including luxury housing. The value of the property grows thanks to the bubble, the recently enriched city merchants can besides pay much higher rents. Thatcher promised that deregulated capitalism would make a more meritocratic and in its own way a just society, rewarding entrepreneurship and hard work – as we can see, it gained an aristocrat who, erstwhile asked for advice on how to get rich, answered with a gag that it was good to have an ancestor being a good friend of Wilhelm the Conqueror.
The Hollow Under the Dome
Finally, the leading paradox of the era of Thatcher in Curtis's position is that, on the 1 hand, the politician constantly put on a churchillian costume, promised Britain's return to a key position in planet politics, defended British sovereignty against threatening Brussels bureaucrats, and on the another hand, her policy stripped the British government of further tools of real control over the economy, giving it distant to global markets.
This trial cannot be stopped by the incoming governments of Thatcher and Major fresh Labour. As Curtis points out, 1 of Blair's first decisions was to give complete control of monetary policy to the Bank of England. The fresh power at the very beginning gave up 1 of the last tools for economical policy that were actually in the hands of the government.
Liberal elites, who returned to power with Blair, over the years despised Thatcher as the personification of a cultureless, vulgar small-town. In 1 of the episodes, we see a tv discussion from the 1980s, whose participants, as if they had come to a imagination consecutive from 1 of the Cambridge or Oxford colleges or from a literary salon in northern London, compare Thatcher to a store mannequin, patronizingly say that it looks like an thought of "town dwellers" about success in politics. Intellectuals, as Curtis shows, in the 1980s, discouraged the people's voter on Thatcher. The problem is that breaking the alliance between the folk classes and progressive intelligence weakened the position of the latter, strengthening the power of money in Britain.
At the same time, the Labour organization elite cannot present any alternate to thatcherian imagination of the country's politics and future. As a result, she was sentenced to proceed her politics, against the interests of the people who gave her power in 1997. alternatively of their own program, fresh Labour governments offer a focus group policy – we see a recording in which 1 of Philip Gould's main strategists with full seriousness explains that focusses are for him "not only a marketing tool", but besides a way to "give people a voice" and "a fresh way of conducting politics."
New Labour's programming void is symbolized by Curtis' past of the Millennium Dome, an exhibition building hosting the UK and the world's entry into the 3rd millennium. However, it shortly turned out that the committee appointed by the government was incapable to communicate on what should actually be under the dome, agree on 1 thing, a imagination of the past common to society as a full or propose one. Curtis writes: “The liberal establishment dominated British culture for a century and a half. He now built a dome that revealed a frightening truth: that he had nothing to say about Britain and its future."
In the Postsocial Desert
The British elite – and the liberal one, and the conservative 1 – proved completely helpless in view of the wider change: the dusk of industrial society. The industrial revolution not only gave the UK the position of a global economical power, but besides created the social ground on which democracy, the power of its dominant elites, the state and its basic institutions were based. This ground has been slipping from under our feet since the late 1970s, and subsequent attempts by politicians to control this process make it even little unchangeable – sounds the main thesis of the series.
W Shifty Stephen Hawking and his theories about black holes, the origins of the universe and the nature of reality return repeatedly. As Curtis said, industrial society has created more or little intuitive Newtonian physics, so the present planet is better described by Hawking physics, it resembles the space around the black hole, where, as Curtis reconstructs it, “the laws of physics we know before cease to work.”
In this reality, “power” can truly mean Authority of the financial marketswhich neither politicians nor democratic mechanisms nor media nor civilian society can control. “Art” is simply a tool for gentrification of degenerate post-industrial land for the improvement and banking sector. "Politics" is simply a branch of the amusement industry, "democracy" – focusses or democratization of access to luxury consumption. In the last part of the series, we see that in the 1990s, the employees of the financial sector buy estates in the countryside, the mediate class rents the palace for their wedding, and the female with a clearly proletarian habitus, in a cramped, ugly flat presents her collection of designer purses, which she buys across Europe, most likely by way of unmerciful debt.
In this fresh reality society collapses, ceases to be a shared reality, in its place arises a space inhabited by tomized individuals, occupied by narcissistic self-presentation, curing their own brand, consumption, envied and distrusted towards others. Curtis carefully extracts archives showing the first announcements of the birth of specified a society. Recordings showing the first Walkman users in the London subway, each immersed in their separate sonic reality. A study about a dating company that allows users to self-present a video recorded on VHS tape can be received by their possible partners; material depicting an older working class female complaining of a deterioration in safety in her vicinity and the commendable advantages of a fresh invention – a video telephone – which was mounted in her block.
In a loop
At the end of the series Curtis asks whether people will unite as in the past and start fighting against fragmentarianized by individualism, colonized by the power of capital and technology of the world. But he adds: or are akin questions simply another “nostalgia feedback loop, repeated images and sounds from the past”?
The sense of the loop may come in during the screening for 1 more reason. Like TraumaZone, premiered in October 2022, in the first year of the war in Ukraine, Shifty It is perfect for its time and temper of the British public. akin things Curtis says about the era of Thatcher and Blair can be said about Conservative governments from 2010-24 and Starmer's first year. The past of the last 15 years is besides a past of powerlessness, which, in an effort to change reality, unleashes forces that not only cannot control, but besides the consequences of which cannot predict.
The brexite referendum was expected to close the subject erstwhile and for all. Brexit and most likely anchor Britain in the Union. Boris Johnson promised to "restore control" and a prominent function free from the EU's corset of Britain in the planet – and did not fulfill any of these promises. Starmer's Government He promised that erstwhile alternatively Compromised Tories serious, liable people will return to power, this country will be on good tracks again, having akin problems with popularity present as the Tusk government and is constantly accused of program emptyness.
The belief that at least the last 15 years – if not 25 or even 45 – have been lost, and that the full political elite is guilty of it, is now heard in Britain on both the left and the right. They are voiced growing on the main intellectual of the anti-establishment right-wing architect Brexitu Dominic Cummings, as well as post-Corbynow left-wing from specified environments as Novara Media. This fall discourse can be politically dangerous, supporting radical, politically unfriendly environments, opposing the current state of affairs with nostalgic visions of the past and building a future that excludes full social groups – e.g. migrant descendants.
Curtis fortunately offers no nostalgic escape from contemporary problems. No alternative, no action plan. After watching his latest production, the British viewer can only feel sympathetic, waiting for only the authoritative mentioned at the beginning of the text. However, filmmakers have no work to present prescriptions for the salvation of the world, they work alternatively in diagnosis – and this one, like Curtis, is cognitively fascinating at all its discussion moments.
