[This post is primarily for my readers who grew up in the UK in the last quarter of the 20th century, and for those international readers with an interest in Britain of that era.]
A five-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis available on YouTube (links to all five below). Emotionally powerful; massively nostalgic, full of surprises as well as those "ah, yes!" moments where we are reminded of an event or a personality from the era and you make the connection.
Funny, surprising, moving, but also making a powerful point Shifty shows how the seeds of today's screwed-up society were planted long ago. Curtis places the tipping point in May 1979, with Margaret Thatcher's election victory.
Watching Shifty, my children can see and understand the world in which their parents grew up as young adults and how it shaped their lives and their outlooks. And how those years shaped the world we live in today.
Curtis's method focuses on digging out archive material and found footage and putting them together without a voice-over, relying instead on captions and connections. The use of found footage is akin to understanding the history of life on earth from the fossil record. Very few organisms fossilise, and the fossils we have present an incomplete picture. In the same way, until the digital revolution, only tiny fragments of society were preserved in film (or indeed video) footage. The archives yielded many vignettes that initially seem puzzling and out of context but then after a while they click together and everything makes perfect sense.
One of Curtis's big themes that runs through all five episodes of Shifty is that we live in an age of the remix; just as our music is sampled and remixed, so our history, our social myths, our culture is chopped and reshaped to suit political needs.
Shifty considers the changes that were brought about through Thatcher's monetarism, privatisation and deregulation, all now seen for their negative long-term outcomes.
I spent most of the Shifty years working at the Confederation of British Industry, at the interface between business and government, I remember Sir Terence Beckett's "bare-knuckle fight" with Thatcher over interest rates. Cranked up to kill off inflation, they pushed the cost of working capital to 26% and killed off vast swathes of British manufacturing instead. I remember Sir John Banham bemoaning the replacement of engineering by financial engineering and slamming the obscenity of corporate raiders who'd "put companies into play" – buy them, break them up, strip their assets and leaving thousands out of work. Deregulation.
In the past there had been safeguards; a civil service that maintained the status quo. Mercenaries replaced the missionaries. Greed was good. A money-oriented society emerged.
Curtis mentions how Thatcher's revolution in the City of London allowed banks to compete with building societies in mortgage lending, but he didn't fully explain the consequences; ever-rising house prices, as banks leveraged a product with growing demand but static supply to make easy profits.
While the red braces of the post-Big Bang City made their bonuses and bought their Porsches and their country piles, new money blended with old, but old money ensured that its privileges remained secure.
In the final episode, looking at the Blair years, Curtis criticises Gordon Brown (then chancellor of the exchequer) for relinquishing control over monetary policy to an independent Bank of England, suggesting that this was politics handing over the last power it had to the money men. I'm sticking to economic orthodoxy here and would argue that interest-rate decisions are best kept away from the likes of Liz Truss or Boris Johnson or Kaczyński or Trump or indeed any politician.
Racial tensions and those who stoked them, politicians, comedians, musicians – is another thread running through the series that emerges in current-day debates about migrants. Open vs. closed societies.
God and science – Curtis follows the work and private life of Stephen Hawking. His differences on how the Universe began (according to him, an atheist, it didn't) led to his divorce from his wife Jane, a devout Christian. Curtis contrasts Hawking's mechanistic, physicalist worldview with those of Paul Davies and David Deutsch. The story of a random, purposeless cosmos plays into the hands of materialists. There is no God, just matter. So grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
Shifty notes the birth of the surveillance society – CCTV began to monitor our streets and property in the early 1980s. The very word 'shifty' can mean "having the appearance of being dishonest, criminal or unreliable", as well as "subject to changes in direction".
Technological change played a huge part day-to-day life. These were the early days of computers, corporate and personal; databases, data privacy and the infancy of the internet is also documented. Right at the end of the final part, there's a 1999 clip of David Bowie being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight. Bowie: "I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society – both good and bad – is unimaginable. I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying." Paxman replies: "It's just a tool, isn't it?" "No it's not," ripostes Bowie with a grin, "It's an alien life form".
The fifth part ends with Bowie's Absolute Beginners played over black-and-white images of the French Revolution of 1848 and American strikers rioting in the 1930s. The choice of music for the documentary series is excellent, not the obvious songs, but ones that resonate with the spirit of the age.
[A big thanks to Roman P. for pointing me to this excellent interview on The Rest is Entertainment, with Adam Curtis interviewed by Richard Osman and Marina Hyde. I watched this twice – once before and once after watching the entire five parts of Shifty.]
Curtis is a truly great documentary maker. If his stuff gets recommended to me by friends who are right wing and friends who are left wing, it must mean he is doing something significant rather than treading the mainstream path.
I ponder how much of Shifty is applicable to Poland. Not a whole lot. Polish society today tends to be more optimistic about the future, despite the glowering threat of Putin just across the border.
Links:
Part 1. The Land of Make Believe
Part 2. Suspicion
Part 3. I Love A Millionaire
Part 4. The Grinder
Part 5. The Democratisation of Everything
This time two years ago:
Wrocław's Hala Stulecia (Centennial Hall)
A Better Tomorrow - the lie of the land
This time four years ago:
New phone, new laptop
This time five years ago:
Longevity and Purpose
New bus stop for Karczunkowska
Who should pay for railways?
[How America built an electric railway line over the Rockies - over 100 years ago!]
This time 15 years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture
This time 17 years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"
This time 18 years ago:
The summer sublime
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