The new Adam Curtis series lacks, I think, the sense of solidity of narrative that attends the earlier ones. I wonder if that’s due to his choice to narrate only with captions rather than with voice-over? This is a withdrawing of sorts, Curtis seemingly getting out of the way of his own work, but in a way that serves to double down on the form, because the captions are still written in the way he always writes them—and so you can hear his voice anyway, if you choose to listen for it, dubbing it over yourself in your head, your own private edit. It’s as if he has elected to haunt his own work, which—for someone who is very much a part of the extended Fisherverse—is a curious choice, almost a voluntary diminishment.

This is perhaps of a piece with the way that, at the end of the film, he pulls the now-standard trick where he says “ah, but remember that everything you’ve just watched uses the very same techniques of nostalgic button-mashing that I’ve been exposing all the way through”. This is a po-mo-native trick I recognise from the media I grew up with, which I think is pretty much the same stuff, generationally, that Curtis would have been imbibing at the same age… but to younger people, so-called digital natives, it presumably reads rather more like a sort of meta-discursive dad joke: maybe Im a psyop LOL.

But it’s no joke, and on balance I think I prefer that he admits it than not, because it frees you up to consider just how carefully curated some of the segments must be: the middle-aged have many buttons available for pushing, of course, and there’s a particular array for Brits, and more particularly still for the demographic slice which is Curtis’s audience. I wonder if he’s studied the stats for his viewership, the better to imitate the algorithms whose apotheosis he’s storying?

(And who in the bowels of the Beeb keeps signing off on this strange little man roaming abround in the archives, periodically spitting out five to seven hours of moderately incendiary online-only material? What do they think they’re doing? What do they think Curtis is doing? Do they just see the stats, the deep engagement from an otherwise very cynical segment, and approve it purely on the basis of attention metrics? I’ve no idea.)

But yes: if you step back a little bit, it’s almost pantomime in its use of folk heroes and villains. Opening not only with Thatcher, but with school-age children being delivered unto Thatcher’s wood-panelled ministerial office by Jimmy Saville, is about as Shakespearean a move as you could make in this sort of media collage; get the main monster on stage right away, with as strong an associative scene as you can conjure. The rest of the cast is very much a generational pantheon, beloved culture-heroes long since gone to Hades: the other Curtis (Ian) makes an early showing, flailing away on stage, narrating his own loss of control, and Bowie bookends the thing in full Sixties-but-it’s-Nineties get-up, complete with purple-tinted tea-shades and his blonde hair chopped neatly into curtains (nuff respeck to all ravers).

As for villains, there’s the various cabinetry of the era, from either side of the old binary. The thesis here is that the distinction between the parties had been rendered irrelevant by, first, the unleashing of the animal spirits of finance in the Big Bang (a theme neatly counterpointed throughout by a sub-thread focussed on Stephen Hawking’s theories of a temporally closed and thus purposeless universe), the eventual corruption of politics by money in the wake of the former having effectively surrendered all other forms of power over the country to the latter, and finally its banalisation by the likes of Max Clifford and other fabulists-for-hire, resulting in a generation of political nihilists whose emptiness of mind is illustrated by the staggering vapidities of the Millennium Dome, an eschatonic whimper where there might plausibly have been some sort of bang.

(To be fair, I think that even those of us who were at that time perpetually addled by chemistry, and news-avoidant to boot, pegged the Dome as bollocks almost instinctively. The promo and hype for it sounded like the previous generation’s marketeers trying to sell you a rave without music, or perhaps some innovation- and growth-themed remix of the Glastonbury Green Field. I don’t recall knowing anyone who went, or who even expressed an interest in going… but then my memory of that period is rather holey, to say the least.)

But that’s it, that’s the thesis, and it’s neither spoilers nor particularly insightful for me to say so, because Curtis is a pretty plain and direct film-maker in that regard. I guess he has to be, given the collage method; the captions have to channel the material into the desired interpretive landscape. It’s not too hard to imagine ideological remixes of this series in particular: the exact same material in the exact same sequence, only with different captions. In a way, this is exactly the point that Curtis is making in those closing minutes, and throughout: local-interest news clips of pioneering DJs chopping chart hits into new forms and science-doco footage of Fairlight samplers are there to tickle the neurotransmitters of long-since-retired ravers, yes, but they’re also there to underscore not only the method of the piece but the popularisation of media bricolage as the primary form of creative engagement with the world. It all comes to rest in the atomised media-scape paradigm which, as Bowie notes in the final talking-head slot, began in the Seventies; personally I’d peg it earlier still, to the dawn of radio at least, though what seems in hindsight to be the exponential leap (of what I still hope will eventually reveal itself to have been an S-curve) comes in the wake of the second world war. After all, you need cybernetics before you can have the media cyborg.

The thing that really stuck with me, though—to the extent of providing me with some very weird dreams afterward—was the animals: Curtis using animals as proxies for “the people”, almost, and inviting the famous British sympathy for animals to grasp for the proffered pathos. Perhaps I’m too cynical and media-deconstruct-y not to see the dying horse in the final episode as being just a bit too on-the-nose—not to mention strange in juxtaposition with the roll-the-credits closing scene of revolution in the streets, in which horses carrying soldiery are stabbed by revolutionaries.

But credit where it’s due: Curtis knows how to beatmatch and keep the tempo flowing, but he also knows when a sudden scratch-rewind and quick, jarring cut back to an earlier track will hit the note he wants. The killer cut for me was at the end of the fourth episode, where we go from a live-in-the-TV-studio take of an impossibly youthful Pulp, just as they reach the peak of the gloriously excoriating first pre-chorus of “Common People”—and who better as a figuration of the very staunchest of critics of the system who would nonetheless be sucked up into its spectacular logics than El Jarvo?—to the frustration and fury of an elephant who, as we heard a little earlier, is losing its closest companions and life partner to funding cuts. Curtis plays ruthlessly on our expectation of the next part of the song—and, yes, our nostalgia for that song, and for the structure of feeling with which it was associated at the time—to give us a real gut-punch juxtaposition.

Again, to belabour the point, the core thesis is pretty much pure Fisher: the seemingly effortless recuperation of all critique by capital. But Curtis uses as his medium the very torrent of nostalgia that Fisher feared; perhaps he assumes that there’s no dry place to stand any more.

Perhaps he’s right.