In 1962, the girl group the Crystals recorded a Gerry Goffin and Carole King
song. It was produced by Phil Spector. Nothing, on the face of it, could go
wrong for the Crystals; Goffin, King and Spector were the best in the
business. But this track sank almost with trace. King had been inspired to
write it when she discovered that her baby-sitter, Eva, was being beaten by
her boyfriend. It was about the abuse of women, and it was years ahead of
its time. Punk rockers or the Velvet Underground would have happily embraced
the song’s sinister combination of eroticism and violence.
It was too much, however, for the America of the early 1960s. There were
protests. Some thought it was a defence of abuse. The song barely got any
airtime. Eva was okay. She went on to become Little Eva and had a huge hit
with another Goffin-King song, The Loco-Motion. Goffin and King were also
okay, although Spector, as we now know, fatally indulged in the very
violence his arrangement of the song evoked. Almost 50 years later, the
title of the lost song still feels shocking: He Hit Me (It Felt Like a
Kiss). It wears the mask of pop romanticism, but beneath the features are
brutal and contorted. Yet it feels like a kiss, something we want.
This is exactly the kind of story that seems to lie dormant in some dark
interstice of the culture, waiting for Adam Curtis to bring it to life. And
he has. His latest work is called It Felt Like a Kiss. But it’s like nothing
he’s ever done before, and he’s nervous, not least because its first
appearance will be not on television, but on the internet and at the
Manchester International Festival, in a production by the immersive theatre
group Punchdrunk, with music by Damon Albarn. Curtis asked Albarn for a
combination of Stockhausen and pop, and that’s apparently what he’s got.
Curtis, 54 is the BBC documentary-maker behind series such as The Century of
the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Living Dead, The Mayfair Set and The
Trap. I first met him in 1992, when, coincidentally, I produced a book and
he produced a series — Pandora’s Box — about scientific misconceptions.
Paranoid in some wine bar, we compared notes. He went on to win multiple
awards and to create a unique space for himself within the BBC. As far as I
can make out, he does what he likes and gets love-bombed daily. Our paths
evidently diverged somewhat.
There are two big themes in all of Curtis’s work. First, ideas matter.
Marxists, who have dominated cultural history for decades, say they don’t:
only great historical trends determine events. Curtis says they are wrong,
and I say he’s right. Second, these ideas mediate reality, making it
bearable to the human mind. Yet, although they may keep us sane, they all
fail. Reality is ultimately unbearable, indecipherable. “Ideas are like
stories about the world,” he says, “and when the stories fail,
reality becomes very difficult to understand. We sort of need stories, and
they work for a time because they correspond to reality. And then, possibly
like now, the stories don’t work any longer.”
Indulged by the BBC, Curtis nevertheless feels that many of his employer’s
ideas — notably its obsession with “multi-platform”, involving the internet,
mobiles, podcasts and so on — fail to correspond with reality. He’s a web
sceptic, and the ideology of the internet is the subject of a future series.
It occurred to him, though, that the BBC’s neophilia did suggest an
entirely new way of making documentaries. Thanks to the iPlayer and other
technologies, people can now watch programmes many times. Yet all Curtis’s
training was based on one prime directive — keep it simple, they’ll only see
it once. Now, why not let it be as complex as it needs to be?
“I was marching round the BBC saying, ‘If we can watch films over again on
iPlayer, then the form is going to change. We can start making more
complicated, more involving films, of different lengths.’” So he suggested a
series of experimental films, dispensing with most of the conventions of
documentary-making. This being Curtis, they said yes, but then, when he
delivered, they got jumpy and gave him his own website instead. It’s just
opened: bbc.co.uk/adamcurtis. There you can see his first, 40-minute version
of It Felt Like a Kiss, which will be expanded to 75 minutes for the
Manchester performances.
“It was an attempt to do history as if it was from the point of view of living
through it. From the future, we can see things that happened out in the
world have consequences with which we live, but at the time it is just
fragmented.”
The film is an exquisitely edited montage of clips from the vast BBC archive.
(Curtis is very pale because he spends so much time in the dark bowels of
television’s past.) It is set in the period 1958-65. “It is the period
when radical individualism emerged. America was creating a cocooned world at
the time, saying, ‘We’re going to keep you safe, but you can also be a free
individual.’ The contradiction eventually began to corrode the whole idea.”
Opening credits announce that the film stars Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Lee
Harvey Oswald and Doris Day — a name-checking celebration of hits and
kisses. We then embark on a weird, wild ride of pop and paranoia. Using news
footage, film clips, even the Saddam Hussein-produced film of the coup that
brought him to power, Curtis adopts a variety of styles, from TV ads to
underground movies.
The film employs captions rather than voiceover. So, for example, we are told
that Lou Reed once had electroshock therapy, the horrible, supposedly
high-tech treatment of the day for mental disturbance. He said it made him
feel dead.
To illustrate this deadness, Curtis uses Reed’s psychotically detached I’ll Be
Your Mirror, sung by the psychotically detached Nico. On a grander scale,
the CIA’s overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and his replacement by
one of the vilest dictators of modern times, Mobutu Sese Seko, is linked to
the quiet progress of the transfer of HIV from chimps to humans in the
Congolese jungles, and that, in turn, is linked to the chimps America sent
circling the earth in space capsules.
