Read on Twitter
It was with the Jiang Qing material that I realized something was wrong with Can't Get You Out of My Head. I covered it before. I'll be brief, but I'm going to start there. Adam Curtis imagines the Cultural Revolution as "driven" by a "unit of one"—Jiang Qing as spiteful despot.
This follows Witke's Western feminist account (there's also a strain of that in contemporary accounts in China—Jiang Qing as scorned woman). It makes the error of zooming in past the point that anything beyond Jiang Qing is recognizable.
There's no real explanation of the split in the leadership by the 1960s, or a discussion of people like Lin Biao. There's no attempt to explain why the arts were seen as so crucial, owing to longstanding theoretical conclusions that privileged the cultural over the economic come.
It also doesn't take Jiang Qing seriously. Her "political-aesthetic principle" of the three prominences and its affirmation of the "sameness of the revolutionary collective identity" (Yizhong Gu) is taken as a failed call for mass radical individualism to match her own.
It gets more incoherent. "But in reality, Jiang Qing had lost control." What had she lost control of? Why was it a repudiation for people to rise up against the elites? Wasn't that the intention? We snap back to Jiang Qing as a despot, "using her new power to avenge herself."
Here, it feels like the entire argument is undone: "[S]he began to realize that maybe [Chairman Mao] had been using her." There's the sudden introduction of Jiang Qing's model operas "promising a new kind of reality"—thwarted—but no explanation of what that would be.
I think these might be projections of Western politics and culture on 1960s and '70s China, maybe in particular the idea that individualism was hijacked by forces that played radicalism for its own benefit. Great archival footage, at least. I've never seen this before.
Deng Xiaoping is introduced as the next "unit of one." Again, the narrative is simple: Deng Xiaoping roars to power, repudiates Maoism, and introduces "a kind of mass consumerism never seen before in the world," fueled by Western banks lending money to Western consumers.
Seeing that scene of a slogan scraped from a wall, it's interesting to consider, with this footage, the world shaped by pulling from BBC archives. Maybe it doesn't matter. It makes sense, reading any Western account of 1980s China to proceed rapidly from 1979 to Wei Jingsheng.
Here, we turning toward what will be the a conclusion of the series, which is that individual imaginations of the future are crucial. But we have to stop at Tiananmen to visit Chai Ling.
Just like with the Jiang Qing story, this is an account of history too simplistic for it to make much sense: Deng Xiaoping unleashes capitalism, everything is seemingly fine for a decade, then students demand democracy as the final consumer product missing from the catalogue.
He focuses on Chai Ling, who vote against and then calls for students to stay put. I knew he couldn't resist using the footage of Chai Ling calling for blood. He reads this as her realizing that collective action and individualism cannot be combined.
Even if you want to read it that way (she wants to leave but she expects bloodshed [I happen to agree with Chai Ling that this is never translated correctly]), why does it matter, since clearly commitment to collective action prevailed (and she stayed until near the end anyways)?
Maybe I just don't get it. This is probably getting dull. We leave Chai Ling permanently there, jumping to Bo Xilai, then to Xi Jinping, our final "unit of one." Responding to depoliticization, he breaks with the radical reformer Wen Jiabao and proposes a social credit score.
"[Data] was being used to create a whole society where what went on inside people's heads was completely irrelevant. ... This allowed those in charge to bury and hide the anger and frustration... [I]f people didn't respond to the treats, they could be forcibly reprogrammed..."
China, rather than an "alternative future" is an "old, decaying society." Adam Curtis explains in the next segment that the only way out is high self-esteem ("we're far stronger than we think") and some kind of alternative individualism.
I focused on the China material because I can be more sure of myself, but the rest is full of the same leaps of logic, leaning on the idea that what drives nations and societies is the "unit of one," not fully connected to the thing they can move with their individual will.
