From the New York Review of Books:
Curtis films purport to be about us. But the paranoid writing dominates, and the viewer is left with unknown anxieties projected onto known images, a sort of emotional break-in. Curtis can’t seem to get Curtis out of his head, and I am not sure that his films tell us about anything else. In his 2010 film, Richard Nixon—Paranoia and Moral Panics, Curtis declared his emotional history a universal one:
This is a film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon. Just like him, we have all become paranoid weirdos. It’s the story of how television and newspapers did this and how it has paralyzed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better.… But then, in the 1990s, the journalists became even more like Richard Nixon. Like him, they started to see hidden enemies everywhere.
We know that Curtis always asserts he is a journalist. But as the narrator of his own films, he feels compelled to dismiss journalists. This is pure paranoid fragmentation: a paranoid individual like all other paranoid individuals but insisting on being unlike all others. He is everywhere and nowhere.
For Curtis, all human behavior becomes a monochromatic cloud of intention that can be tracked like a flight. Distinct forces play against distinct forces without the complications of chance or the constraint of specific details. One scientific blunder becomes the failure of science itself. One overeager journalist becomes the field itself. Eras and cohorts and ideas are smooth circles, rounded off by the totalizing buff of power’s sneaky omnipotence.
Notice, in fact, how many times Curtis uses the words “nothing” and “everything” in all of his work. Very little reporting can stand up to those kindergarten words, and by choosing a category that essentially doesn’t exist—can you name an actual everything, an event that does not admit to exception?—Curtis is making clear that reporting means little to him.
The appeal of conspiracizing for Curtis and his followers is exactly this unverifiable fog, this woolen hug of futility. If nothing can be done, inactivity looks normative. Conspiracism is the enemy of collective action. The group takes action and counts its wins and losses after the day. The conspiracist, answers scrawled on his hand, hangs back and cynically tells a story about why it never would have worked anyway. Curtis and his cohort love the idea of a grand story that never needs to be revised or reported out.
The darkest and largest force always wins, has always already won. Curtis simply confirms the bad news.
