Shifty by Adam Curtis: A Review

A Kaleidoscopic Haunted House

Margaret Thatcher’s beliefs and legacy form a strong undercurrent in Adam Curtis’ latest work: Shifty. The format is in one way typical of Curtis’ style of edited stock footage, whereby one clip follows to the next, untethered from chronological time and physical space, elucidating context and building upon central principles, but in another way it is unique in that it there is none of Curtis’ usual voice-over narration. Text is used sparingly as a means to introduce a new principle or theme or in order to provide a segue by way of montage from one topic to the next.

This bold creative decision pays off against a modern dystopian backdrop whereby most people in their own walks of life are experiencing the consequences of Thatcher’s ‘radical individualism’ and fallacious ideas about the behavior of money and markets much more thoroughly understood than could ever be explained contemporaneously. The content is fundamentally Hauntological: it speaks from the past to the future that never arrived, to us, very directly. Thatcher’s failures no longer have to be argued in 2025, against the backdrop of Thatcher’s second greatest achievement, Keir Starmer’s Nu Labour 2.0, the failures speak for themselves.

The main feature strongly demarcating the the past from the present, Thatcher’s early tenure from her late tenure and the subsequent leadership of John Major and then Tony Blair, the clear trend throughout, is the loss of agency and confidence. Thatcher began her tenure full of confidence and it’s clear in hindsight that in the 1980s the Baby Boomer generation wanted to make a clean break from their parents’ generation with their own vision. By summoning the spirit of Winston Churchill, the Boomers would define a radical ideology of individual freedom that clearly demarcated the West and NATO from the East and Communism and also themselves from the achievements and burdensome legacy of their parents.

Thatcher shifted the battleground of the Cold War from an economic and logistical one to a battle for hearts and minds, attacking the underlying ideology of communism at its roots. She was clearly influenced by libertarianism and the possibilities for human empowerment offered by the likes of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. But by unleashing these forces of individualism and self interest, Thatcher unleashed a managerial paradox: self interest and individualism became a dogma. Any human action that could not be measured in terms of the interest of the organisation and the interest of the individual was not only not able to be measured, it was, and still is, treated as a threat and a form of extremism and fanaticism.

Shifty highlights the fallacy of this Thatcherite view of human behavior and action in many ways. The most hard hitting of which are via the perspective of water privatization and the Millennium Dome project. The tragedy and travesty of water privatization mostly speaks for itself these days, but through the lens of the Camelford water pollution incident Curtis makes clear how and why privatization became not an exercise in unleashing human potential but rather an exercise in abuse and learned helplessness: a crushing lack of agency, a fundamental depression, that has become hypernormalized and taken root at the heart of British society. Curtis’ use of stock footage of ordinary people in Camelford, and particularly a rabbit breeder and a farmer, demonstrate that the implications of this radical self interest unleashed by Thatcher could not be further from their hearts and minds in terms of their own contribution to society and their own conception of their own nation. The litigious corporate instinct to file a class action lawsuit was not in their veins: they raised animals because they liked animals and they believed, broadly, that British society was about everyone playing their part for the greater national good.

The effects of this fundamental disempowerment and neutering of the public sphere and politics is later shown most evidently through the lens of the Millenium Dome project. The Millenium Dome was approved as a giant white elephant, that much was always true, but the white elephant served as a monument to a once in one thousand year event, whereby Britain could look back to the Scots, the Celts, the Saxons, the Normans and William the Conqueror and forward into the next 1000 years with a powerful statement and vision of the future. As a 15 year old at the turn of the Millenium who became 16 in the year 2000, I could not ignore the fact even if I wanted to that I was an important target demographic for this project, and that the project was designed and created for me as a gift that I was expected to be grateful for. The Millenium Dome was marketed relentlessly to me and to my peers as a symbol of destiny and a cultural baton being passed on not just between centuries, but also between millennia. What Shifty captures magnificently in its candid stock footage of the Millennium Dome and contemporary pop music of the time is the vacuous, hopeless and febrile ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the project and the committees overseeing it. Those with no stake in the future, acting in their own rational self interest, have no incentive to present any powerful and meaningful vision of it, and that’s exactly what the Millenium Dome turned out to be: a dog’s dinner of a school dinner.

What’s revelatory about Curtis’ twist on the Millenium Dome fiasco is the further view of it from the perspective of Alexander McQueen: a man whose fashion captured the essence of the time. Curtis argues that McQueen’s success came from an understanding of the central conceit of Thatcherism. Rather than being a form of Christian virtue which elevates people towards their higher nature and potential, Thatcherism created isolated and disempowered people unable to discern between reality and the representation, schizophrenic bodies without organs at the mercy of the creators of desire, those who can tap in to and take advantage of the primal subconscious forces that really shape decision making and thus sales.

McQueen saw that, rather than bringing out the best of our better nature, rather than enabling us to become rational individuals engaging in our own rational self interest, Thatcherism instead brought out the worst of our darker nature and unleashed powerful primal and psychological forces that could be ruthlessly harnessed by a new elite.

Thatcher had begun her monetarist crusade equating Ayn Rand’s concepts of virtue with Christian virtue, this was a radical and bold political masterstroke that redefined a generation and perhaps also, in part, won the Cold War. It created a new pact between the bourgoisie and a new confidence and clarity of purpose to Britain following the sclerotic 1970s, with many workers themselves becoming disillusioned with the concept of ‘working class solidarity’ as espoused by the Trade Unions of the time. The true cost of this Faustian pact, however, was to bequeath Millenials with no vision of the future whatsoever, and to unleash dark long forgotten primal forces, socio-sexual forces, violent forces, that we are only today beginning to understand and contain.

As a teenager just waking up to the world of adulthood and all that it entails, looking back on it now I find it unforgivable and, quite frankly, sick that the well was poisoned for us in that way. There has probably been no time in human history whereby so many with so much did so little for anyone but themselves and expected so much unwarranted and undeserved deference and respect in return. The message in hindsight is crystal clear: I’ve got mine, here’s some vague power point slides about buzzwords, now you go get yours. That’s what the turn of the millennium should be remembered for and I am thankful to Adam Curtis for bringing those buried memories, that trauma of fundamental betrayal to the fore. That alone was very therapeutic for me.

Shifty explains many complex principles described by the likes of Jaron Lanier, Diego Gambetta, Dr Philip Mirowski, Nick Land and Mark Fisher but what’s masterful about Shifty is that it does so by directly engaging the feelings and emotions of nostalgia, Hauntology, acceleration, anxiety, euphoria and depression. Shifty holds up a mirror to the viewer, a time capsule that demonstrates that the forms of media that we have become used to on the internet in the 21st century and the funneling of desire into echo chambers and pop culture cargo cults began not with the internet but with Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy and ideology and a very specifically English middle class views about freedom and elitism.

Heritage

One of the benefits for me of growing up in Scotland is that Thatcherism always was viewed as an alien concept at odds with the basics unspoken principles of Scottish national identity. The concept of my PE teachers going with us on the early morning coach to play rugby in Glasgow on a Saturday for their own self interest; or people joining the pipe band or the chess club for their own self interest was clearly intuitively untrue. People did these things as a form of self sacrifice towards a greater good and a sense of pride for their families, for the school, for their friend groups and pride for Scotland as well. The jocks competed with the nerds to do best at rugby or at computer programming. The theater kids competed with the sigmas in writing and dramatics vs skiing or golf or representing the school in sports regionally or nationally.

What Thatcherism then did to us as we progressed through university and then through the workplace is meticulously and systematically undermine that sense of self sacrifice for a greater good. Everything we were raised with was labelled as a form of ‘fanaticism’ or ‘extremism’ and we were hamstrung, as we were absorbed via osmosis from the Scottish system into the British system, we were told that not only was self sacrifice wrong, but also that it was essentially sinful and heretical according to the English dogma. We were consumed by a system that measured virtue by only what could be measured in terms of a very autistic and fundamentally invasive sense self interest with our Scottish identity relegated to some cartoonish portrayal of the ‘noble savage’, a Mickey Mouse performative thing at the company Christmas party, not a vital part of who we are.

The English have a conception of themselves and their ‘service economy’ as being enabling force and of themselves being a people and a culture that fulfill potential. They pride themselves on ‘diversity’ while allowing no ideological nor cultural diversity beyond the autism and nick-picking of prima facie capitalism: what they decide to measure for themselves. My entire experience of them, from family to friends to employers and having lived in England is completely the opposite to their own self conception. It was almost revelatory for me to watch Shifty with 20/20 hindsight, how my life, my sense of self and self worth relative to my identity as both Scottish and British came to be this way.

In Conclusion

Shifty is a kaleidoscopic journey into the past viewed from the future that never arrived. The lack of narration makes it a very personal journey. It is a work that will speak to every viewer differently, but what’s common throughout is that it separates the false narcissistic self imposed upon us by capital from our true selves, and it does so by working with the core material very perceptively and also very sympathetically. Curtis makes few assumptions about who the viewer might be other than that they are probably a human being from the YUKAY plc. He trusts the viewer and the viewer’s own experience, discernment and basic ability to learn. Many might view Shifty as Avant-Garde but for me it is everything that used to be good about public service broadcasting in that it performs a valuable and vital public service: it tells us who we really are.

Rating: 9/10