Radical Individualism

Curtis said, “I’ve been trying for quite a while to use film to invent a different kind of journalism—to do essays which tell stories, but their real function is to make people pull back and look at their time and to say: Look—in this age of the individual, where you are told that you are the center of the world, power hasn’t gone away. It’s just mutated and morphed into all sorts of different forms, some of which are good, some of which are bad, some of which have grave consequences.”

Reflect on what Curtis said: “… in this age of the individual, where you are told that you are the center of the world, power hasn’t gone away.”

Curtis wrote, “As I was growing up in journalism, I began to realize that the mainstream of political journalism, both the left and right, were sort of collapsing in on each other and becoming very narrow in their focus—they had a kind of consensus view that was enforced by think tanks and things like that, and I wanted to take a kind of helicopter view. But you’re spot-on: It’s about power.”

Curtis said, “I found footage of one of the women who had been one of the leaders of Tiananmen Square that was filmed a few nights before the crackdown in 1989. Watching it, when you see her beginning to realize that individualism could never produce the kind of collective power that old-style revolutions had produced, you realized that what she was doing was being deeply honest about the central dilemma of our time, which is that mass democracy depended on the collective power of the people to give them the power to challenge things. But then it produced this thing called individualism, which, like a horrible, monstrous child, began to eat mass democracy—to such an extent that, as I point out in the film, people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair realized that they had no collective power anymore. And you can’t blame them—they just gave up.”

Curtis said, “What I’m trying to trace in these films is the rise of that dream: that instead of an overarching narrative given to you by a dictator or a communist theory, you could have millions of people expressing themselves and living their own stories.”

Curtis said, “That started off as a noble utopian idea in the late 1950s and 1960s. But by the time you get to our current age, what you have is millions of individuals anxious, uncertain, and frightened of the future and definitely feeling rather disempowered.”

Curtis said, “I wanted to trace why that happened because if you do want to change the world, you’ve got to recognize what that era of individualism did. It was a glorious, wonderful moment—especially the ’90s; I still don’t think we’ve really understood the ’90s yet, which was an absolutely fascinating period.”

Curtis said, “What I also wanted to say at the end of my films, and I think I said it clearly enough—is that you’re never going to put individualism back in a box; it’s a thing, and it’s a thing in China, Russia, wherever you go.”

Curtis said, “But the politics of the future will be someone or something that finds a way of allowing us to still feel we are individuals and express ourselves as individuals, yet at the same time, without giving that up, feel that we’re part of something that is strong and powerful and can change the world and will go on beyond our own existence.”

Will Fenstermaker wrote, “In all of these stories, individual emotions are the most powerful guiding force. Curtis argues that systems of power and influence—from colonialism to conspiracy theories—have splintered collective identities and given rise to an age of individualism that overwhelms any sense of communal and social good. Curtis’s subjects insist on their individuality, which leads them to demand the world conform to their image, but they are unable to form collective aspirations that could actually change things.”

Fenstermaker wrote, “Individualism is both a natural result of mass democracy and a blight on it; politicians have become uninspiring, limited to managing details at the fringes. Curtis laments the absence of collective meaning.”

Will Bedingfield wrote, “Followers of Curtis’s work will recognize one theme – he tries again to square the circle of the individual and the collective. In Curtis’s eyes, this is pretty much the definitive theme of the 20th century. Individualism, he argues, began as a utopian ideal: freedom through self-expression. Then it morphed into consumerist enslavement. In other words, Curtis hates hippies.”

Curtis said, “The great big shift, which is the root of our age, is that somewhere in the late 1960s, the radical left who talked in terms of power, society, overthrowing the power structure – all that rhetoric – gave up. And instead, encouraged by radical psychotherapy, they went for an alternative idea which said, ‘Okay, if you can’t change the world, in terms of power structure, what you do is change yourself.’”

Will Bedingfield wrote, “When this culture of narcissism didn’t bring the Me Generation the nirvana they hoped for, corporations stepped into this emotional void. They offered these people other ways of pacifying their emptiness, like products to buy and pills to swallow – Robert Sackler, the developer of OxyContin, enters stage left – while the ideology that was actually generating this pain mushroomed. Fast forward to now, narcissism remains a generational diagnosis and the enemy of collective action.”

Curtis said, “You can’t just blame the elites. It’s you, it’s us, who are as much at fault for doing this. It’s not what the left or the right wants to hear. But it’s sort of true. If you have a society full of individuals, it’s like herding squealing piglets; you can’t collect them together into a mass group.”

Nick Bradshaw wrote, “Of course, Curtis is hardly the first to level a charge of vacuity at our secular society; I came of age in the 1990s reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and his other portraits of a West that had sacrificed God and now, with nothing to look up to or forward to, was stuck navel-gazing, with no stories to tell.”

Curtis said, “It’s the downside of trying to create a society full of individuals who live in their own worlds and their own dreams. After a while you run out of steam.”

Curtis said, “You know, that question of ‘What’s it all for?’”

Curtis said, “I had this idea, and I don’t think it’s nostalgic, that the old function of politics, as well as to manage and govern, was at least to give a framework of purpose. And in a funny way Mrs Thatcher was the last one who did that. She created the society that started to eat itself – but she knew what she wanted.”

“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”

Curtis said, “I think it’s right what Coupland was asking: ‘Well then, what do you believe?’ I suppose you’re supposed to believe in yourself, really, and if you didn’t there are lots of psychological ideas that would help you. But that’s sort of run out of puff now.”

Curtis said, “I’ll tell you what was lurking in the back of my mind and still lurks in the back of my mind throughout all this. What we are living through is a generation of liberal progressives who are feeling that power is moving away from them, and they don’t have any alternative, because they’ve run out of steam. Their roots lie in a radical culture back in the 1960s and 70s, and they retreated into culture in the 80s because politics went to the right. And they lived in that world of radical culture for quite a long time, still thinking they were powerful. And what Brexit and Trump showed them is that actually large chunks of the working class don’t care about their visions any longer. They’re angry and they want something else – not that benign paternalism which we saw with the Clintons and Blairs and their technocracy.”

Curtis said, “I mean, I’m doing lots of other things in these films, but I am charting a class beginning to feel power slipping away from them.”

Curtis said, “One of the things I’m trying to say in these films is that individualism, whilst being a product of mass democracy, began to eat away at mass democracy in all sorts of ways. And one of those ways is that art got possessed by the idea of self-expression, and gave up on trying to tell us about the realities of power, which is its real job in society. At which point – which I think is one of the fundamental truths of our time – power became invisible. It just disappeared; we don’t know where it is. There isn’t an art that tells us about it now, dramatizes it. The closest, funnily enough, is Damien Hirst, who got in there.”

Curtis said, “Can I say that I think what you’re doing is projecting a pessimistic ideology that you feel on to my films? I think I make it pretty clear that there is a great desire to change the world. Let’s look back at why past attempts to do that failed. One of the fundamental reasons is that the mistake people made in the age of the individual was to think that you could change things without taking account of what is inside people’s heads – the old ideas they’ve inherited from the corrupt world that you’re trying to change, yes? I don’t think they’re pessimistic, I think they are trying to confront these issues which the left and the progressive movement have shied away from, and retreated into an individualism, because they couldn’t think of the answer to it.”