Opinions on Adam Curtis and his sensationalist approach to historical

>>1976075

He's a propagandist, not an historian. His understanding of history is deeply selective and his documentaries are actually mockumentaries, he's as bad as Michael Moore when it comes to distorting facts to fit his narrative.

>but this was a fantasy

Seriously though, they're pretty good, if you take them with a grain of salt.

>>1976085
(OP) yeah, i like them but i feel like he exaggerates the connections he makes between people and events. Grand narratives. The latest ones are so long as well. Last one is 2 hours 46 minutes.

He's kinda all doom and gloom though - his dramadocs never seem to offer any real solutions, and just elaborately describe this inevitable shithole we've all fallen into from various depressing angles.

This is not particularly constructive. I mean, even Moore, for all his faults, at least offers some counter-proposals and solutions. (Though I'm not entirely sure if it's fair to draw the comparison.)

He's an entertainer, not a historian.

Which would be fine if he didn't present himself like one.

>>1976205

his problems are abit exaggerated though or oversimplified and he makes tenuous links between different narratives in a given film. they dont need solutions because alot of it is in his head

>>1976228
Well, his theme tends to be that "Line of thought X coupled with line of thought Y lead to 99% of the world's problems". (Obviously a slight exaggeration, as X and Y tend to vary from film to film.)

I'm of the personal opinion that any philosophy taken to its ultimate extreme, is ultimately poisonous, so I sometimes think he has a bit of a point (even if, yes, extremely narrow and oversimplified), but it seems he could at least provide a panacea to one or more of these destructive lines of thought - which is kind of a propagandist's job, rather than simply listing their follies. I suppose one might argue that it provides a word of caution to future generations, but as, in most of these commentaries, he puts these modes of thought forth as inevitabile products of their times, they are not a particularly useful cautions.

Granted, he's not the only such commentator to have this flaw. George Orwell did much the same thing - painting so many nightmares with no viable escape, which, while it certainly made them even more nightmarish, didn't do much in the way of educating his audience on how to avoid them, much less how to break free once they were upon them.