Shifty stuff

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest

The latest Adam Curtis film was posted on iplayer yesterday. Called Shifty, its tagline is “When power begins to shift in society, everything becomes unstable, exciting and frightening”, and it’s a continuation of Curtis’s previous style of mashed up footage, all hinting at a deep dark truth (beautifully parodied in The Loving Trap here). The problem is, at least some of it just isn’t true.

Three and a half minutes into the first episode, he tells us a story about Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher was behind in the 1979 election campaign

Then she made a speech attacking immigration

She knew it would appeal to the swing voters in the old industrial towns

Immediately she took the lead in the polls

It’s a powerful story, and it fits with what we “know”. The Tories were racist, people in old industrial towns are racist, the Conservatives’ hold on power was illegitimate because it was based on prejudice. However, as Curtis would say, this was an illusion.

Immediately after those slides, Curtis shows us a clip of Thatcher speaking. He doesn’t tell us when it was filmed, but from her words:

we shall only succeed in maintaining and securing our traditional tolerance and fairness in this country if we cut the number of immigrants coming in now

we can check the archive of Thatcher’s speeches, and locate it. If we do, we’ll discover it was given not during the general election campaign of 1979 as Curtis implies, but rather at the Young Conservatives Conference in Harrogate on 12th February 1978, more than a year previously. Further we can check the opinion polling for the 1979 election and see that there was no discernable change from that speech (nor was Thatcher ever behind during the campaign itself).

There’s a similar timeslip at the start of Episode 2, where he cuts from a shot of penguins (captioned “The Falkland Islands early 1982”) to film of Brunel’s SS Great Britain marooned in the Falklands, strongly implying that they are contemporary. It’s a powerful message about decline of empire. The problem is that again, the chronology doesn’t work: Brunel’s ship was returned to Bristol in 1970.

Most viewers won’t do this level of fact checking. Perhaps I’m absurdly pedantic to do it myself. But for me the issues cast doubt on the whole of Curtis’s endeavours. We are meant to believe that, somewhat like the characters in Foucault’s Pendulum, Curtis has assembled the hidden truth behind our world. Just like them, he’s spotted patterns and truths that ordinary mortals can’t, and brought them together to show us how things really are. But if there’s this kind of sleight of hand going on with verifiable facts like the Thatcher story, what else isn’t true?

Of course the visual style is exhilarating, and the jumps from factories being demolished to elephants visiting psychiatric wards are well tuned for our hypermanic times of frenetically swiping between TikTok and Instagram Reels clips. But Curtis claims to be giving us more than that. He claims to be interpreting the truth.

Actually, I’d make another comparison, because I’ve been watching The Crown lately. It’s fun, it’s soapy, it’s got people we recognise, and it tells us the story of much of the same period that Curtis is working on, even with some of the same characters. But on some level, it’s not true.

Obviously many of the core facts are there. Charles and Diana did get married on that day, she did die in a car crash and so on. But you don’t have to go far on the internet to find lists of ways in which The Crown’s film makers smoothed things over: changing chronologies, merging characters into one, cutting out others altogether.

Again, maybe you’d have to be an absurd pedant to object to that. Just like The Crown, I expect that Shifty will win every award going - and viewed as pure entertainment that would be fine. But as I’ve written before, at a time when the lines between truth and falsehood have never been as blurred

this is where I think people, including nice sensible liberal People Like Us, need to be careful. None of us are immune to the Soft Mandela effect. But if we share things in that spirit and are caught out doing so, then it’s incredibly corrosive to trust in what we might say in the future

At the very least, I think Curtis needs to be clear which of his Malcolms are true, and which are just there as entertainment. If the Thatcher story demonstrably isn’t true, how can I be sure about the rest? And that’s a real shame.