For my entire adult life I've been watching the relative decline of the country which is nearest to the one I live in and continues to occupy most of its northernmost province. There is a certain signposted disinterest in England present in a lot of the social circles I move in, but though I might rue the historical causes I am completely fascinated by the country's history and its spectacular pop cultural output; Joy Division, The Fall, grime, Chris Morris, Ken Loach, Warp Records, Play for Today, the group of critics, historians, sociologists loosely clustered around New Left Review and more recently Mark Fisher. Literature is one that I see is missing here, I don't think the literary novel or the poem in England had much going on after the 30s, and is definitely moribund in the west at the moment. (Ireland's energies for obvious reasons were plugged more into folk, language revival, armed struggle rather than documentary or film, due to a combination of colonial underdevelopment, an avant-garde that was necessarily sceptical of outside influence, population size and parochial state bureaucrats).
There is a sense of a receding tide here. A friend once made the point that Fisher's argument about cultural inertia don't apply anymore because culture has continued to happen and I maintain that it still holds up because whats decisive here is not just new stuff but their coinciding with political options and is why most of my grasp of the place now is derived from the farce of their political and media class, each and every one of them privately-educated morons the colour of billyroll who conspired to crush a soft-hearted social democrat, who was also their last hope. Recently the malignant thrill I get from seeing Starmer trot out his herrenvolk shit while Reeves scapegoats the vulnerable to distract from her being in possession of the effectuality of a wellness coach has been tempered by an awareness that this is an image of Ireland's very near future, the signs are everywhere that a sizeable section of the middle-class, cheering on the burning of whatever remains of a social contract (whatever that is), are in the driver's seat. Curtis has made the definitive film about this.
The man has a decent number of imitators, who have made films which are worth watching, but primarily serve to underline how it is exceptionally difficult to juxtapose footage from different sources in a way that’s interesting. Like idk, late Herzog, Curtis can show you something that just is, and completely make another world out of it. Some of the cuts from horror to comedy to talking head to ambience here are just unbelievable and confirm my belief that his non-narrative films are his better ones. Watching The Power of Nightmares on tv was spirit-shocking at the time but seeing it, Machines of Loving Grace, Can't Get You Out of My Head now is a bit irritating. A very astute critic of Curtis and others' work once made the point that it's not Curtis' job to be a good historian, and this is absolutely true, but this line needs to taken the next step and I need to hear why distorting Jiang Qing into the shape of a maenad is a good thing. I don't mind the politics fuzzing out when they're not positing some very unearned stuff e.g. Ayn Rand lived in a society, or quoting David Graeber to the effect that we can re-make the world.
Though we could say there's some of those same simplifications here, some manufacturing brain or a slant on monetarism that pitches it as caprice or snobbery rather than a legitimate response of private actors in pursuit of profitability. The argument that politicians have no power might have something to it if we're speaking in very immediate terms about fluctuating asset markets or stochastic terrorist attacks, but politicians as mere träger for neoliberalism - understood as a kind of flattening nihilistic egalitarianism - just isn't true anymore, if it ever was. COVID, China, Ukraine, Palestine, immigration, on a daily basis the most powerful are making decisions about and propagandising for actual political programmes and go to great lengths in ensuring that they are legitimated. But anyway who cares this was great.