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  Billed as ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World’, Adam Curtis’s new series of films CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD (2021) is his longest and most ambitious yet The six-part, eight-hour series covers themes familiar to long-term followers of Curtis’s documentaries: the tensions between individualist and collective approaches to politics; and the paralysis and paranoia that came with the discrediting of twentieth-century ideologies, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as politicians ceased to offer a better future and instead became tribunes of unaccountable corporate interests, to whom they had outsourced many functions of their increasingly undemocratic states Among the emotions Curtis explores are the feelings of impotence caused by this situation, the anger that motivates political action, the hope that comes with efforts to change the world, and the disappointment and sadness when those efforts fail   As ever, Curtis populates his overarching narrative by cutting between the most significant political figures of the time – Thatcher and Blair, Nixon and Clinton, Putin and Trump, Bannon and Cummings – and a range of marginal or lesser-known individuals, the links between whom are often conceptual rather than concrete Rather than fixating on shadowy male intellectuals or financiers, as in previous series such as THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (2002) or THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES (2004), CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD follows more women than usual, and several historical figures from minority backgrounds who were politically liberal or on the left These include black radical and convicted murderer Michael X; trans woman Julia Grant, star of a BBC documentary about her transition in 1979–80; Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur, mother of Tupac; and Mao Zedong’s fourth wife Jiang Qing, as part of a new focus on communist China   Running parallel to these stories of people who tried to change the world is an exploration of conspiracy theories Curtis takes us from Kerry Thornley’s invention of ‘Operation Mindfuck’ in 1968 – Thornley spread stories about how ‘the Illuminati’ were behind the civil unrest in the US in the 1960s; the intention was to show the absurdity of conspiracy theories, but