Some rambling, possibly simplistic thoughts –
I’ve been watching the new series plus taking the chance to catch up on earlier ones like Power of Nightmares and Century of the Self that I’d either missed the first time or forgotten about. Also had a look over some great old threads about him on here. I’ve got a lot of time for Curtis. Like Grizzle said, at the very least his work has opened up the ideas of a lot of important and influential 20th century thinkers to many people (off the top of my head Freud, Reich, Marcuse, Hayek, Issiah Berlin, RD Laing, Qutb, Leo Strauss, Rand, Dawkins – I’m probably missing a few here) . Obviously some are treated in more depth and with more reverence than others, and there’s been concern in some cases about the accuracy of his treatment, but even if he’s just set people down the route of finding out more about them for themselves, that in itself is something that’s quite rare these days.
When it comes down to what his documentaries are about and what he’s trying to achieve, I’d say I don’t have quite as open/free an interpretation of his work as the ones rob & grizzle have offered upthread. I see his work as mainly being about the links between ideas and institutions, the way ideas are taken up by different people, groups and power formations and change and develop in the process. Might just be me but I often feel there’s a strong influence of Foucault on his work, especially in The Trap.
I don’t agree with the view of his work as being a form of conspiracy theory – his programmes deal with things that are a matter of public record, and when he deals with politicians and political groups, he largely deals with what they have done openly and as part of their official role. Also his presentation of history and society gives a good deal of room for accident in a way that conspiracy theory doesn’t - one of the most profound things I’ve gathered from his work is the way that policies and initiatives that were introduced with sincere or benevolent intentions have ended up producing very unfortunate consequences that were often the opposite of their initial aim.
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, but I think a lot of the people and events he includes in the programmes (e.g. the different generations of the Freud family in Century of the Self) are chosen as striking examples of large-scale, systematic processes. I don’t think he actually intends to present a whole historical narrative as being ‘all about’ a tiny number of individuals.
I do think there are problems with his method though. A lot of it comes down to what Rich was talking about: the way each series basically sets out by saying ‘we are trapped in these terrible ways of thinking and behaving, I am going to trace how these developed and got progressively worse and more constricting’ – but the problem is he’s used the same structure for at least 4 different series, covering different ideas and ways of thinking, some of which sometimes contradict each other. They can’t all be totally dominating society, the reality must be that they are different, sometimes conflicting forces within society but his approach doesn’t really allow for this.
Also although I’ve enjoyed the current series I do feel it was one of his weaker ones comparatively. Century of the Self was to me his most coherent and compelling series, with The Trap not far behind. All Watched Over seemed rather higgledy-piggeldy by comparison, as a lot of you have already said. The second episode was the strongest for me because he showed how the concept of ecosystems tending towards a natural equilibrium has actually been discredited at a scientific level. By contrast in the last episode, while his distaste for the idea that gene replication is the main driver for all human behaviour is clear, he doesn’t really make any arguments against it (except for the ‘argument’ that the people who came up with it were personally a bit odd). That said, it was still compelling to watch the way he brought all the different strands of the narrative together around Hamilton’s trip to Rwanada.