Shifty is, perhaps, the ultimate Adam Curtis film. Eschewing the expansive globetrotting that defines much of his work, it instead dives deep into all he’s ever tried to say about the British state. The result is a grand temporal sweep of UK politics, from the rise of Thatcherism to the present day, in an attempt to chart how, exactly, we got here. The ‘here’ is the very shiftiness of the title: a country coming apart at the seams, its people simmering after the decades-long disintegration of the social state, the lid about to blow off at any moment.1
Curtis paints a stark and often brutal portrait of Britain’s post-imperial twilight: a fractured nation, lost to the world and to itself. We see a deeply racist, spiritually empty society, full of one-dimensional men and women living out their little lives while all the morbid symptoms of late capitalism weigh heavily upon them: post-industrialisation, surveillance, atomisation, and so on.
He does this, of course, with all the classic Curtis aesthetic hallmarks on full display, with one major exception. Building on the style developed in 2022’s Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, Curtis’ own voiced narration is entirely absent, replaced with occasional on-screen text. I’m sure this is partly an effort to make the work ‘smartphone-proof’ – if you want to watch the film you have to actually, you know, watch it – but it mainly serves to allow the imagery to present itself largely uninterrupted.
A major criticism of the bulk of Curtis’ filmography has been his tendency to weave neat little narratives out of the barrage of material he draws from: usually beguiling, sometimes tenuous, but often veering closer to incoherent than dialectical. But that’s not quite the case here, and the result is far more effective. The majority of the captioning is simply to contextualise, where necessary, what the footage is depicting. As a result, it feels as if Curtis has now fully embraced this incoherence, and in doing so has developed something resembling structural unity through sheer critical mass of imagery.
Shifty doesn’t tell a story as such, but rather allows the culture and politics of the material to seep out of the subject matter far more acutely than the grafting-on of a singular narrative would achieve. There is plenty of cognitive room for the viewer to synthesise their own understanding as to what the film is demonstrating, and it’s deeply refreshing to watch a documentary distributed by the BBC in 2025 that respects the intellect and critical capacity of its audience.
What we get, essentially, is Structures of Feeling: The Movie. Rather than a conventional, explanatory cultural history, we are instead presented with the fragments of material that comprised that culture. What does a VHS dating agency tell us about the collapse of the post-war settlement? What does a suburban dinner party tell us about the Age of Thatcher? What does a rather flat daytime TV performance of (the otherwise very good) ‘Push the Button’ by Sugababes tell us about life under New Labour? In isolation perhaps not much, but when inserted into the film’s montage they become indicative of all the cultural and political phenomena that generated them, and all that they generate in turn.
Curtis pilfers the televisual archives to show how the cultural material of everyday life is instructive of the politics of a given era, before the political forms have been codified and historicised. We gain a glimpse into, as Raymond Williams writes, ‘particular [qualities] of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period’2. It’s pleasing to see Curtis himself make this intention clear in his own summation of the series for The Guardian, writing that Shifty ‘is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past.’
In fact, this is so effective that it’s a real shame that Curtis sought to leave any narrative trails at all. Where he does use narration to theorise, the strength of the work begins to wane, because it allows his own attempts at cultural analysis to creep in, which has always been his major weakness.
The key flaw of Curtis’ political analysis lies in his interpretation of these ‘structures of feeling’ not as material components of a political reality, but as evidence of a lack of a common political reality.3 Everything has dissolved into chaos, merely individuals and events, acts and desires, all colliding into each other. The resultant soup of activity is what we know as ‘society’. But this is not quite right. We can still conceptualise order out of disorder, and especially with the retrospect that a historical documentary should afford us.
The ‘story’ that these feelings congeal into – through their interaction with processes of financialisation, deindustrialisation, globalisation, etc – is that of neoliberalism. But the idea that neoliberalism was an engineered political project4 doesn’t quite factor into Curtis’ editorialising. We must read the last 45 years of British politics not as a series of unfortunate events, but as a real and hard-fought class war, one in which the organised working class was resolutely defeated. This is why the UK is the fragmented mess of anxiety and powerless anger today. All of the slices of life and pop culture we see in Shifty form the residue of this political trajectory.
But Curtis never quite captures the cultural logic of the era in a politically useful way. Instead we get a fumbling through politically imprecise terminology – ‘self-interest’, ‘hyper-individualism’, and so on. In this analytical void, political elites are excused as mere individual bad actors, while the masses are never really afforded any political agency or cognisance.
This void is to a great extent defined by the form – a point that Curtis himself does not shy away from. But it’s in this limitation where Shifty really does convey something formally interesting, which in turn does tell us something about the politics of our time.
Due to these constraints – archive footage of half-forgotten consumer affairs programmes, vox-pops, home videos etc – it is not a study of a society, or even of the individual people that comprise it, but of media subjects. We are not watching people: we are watching people behave on camera. People act differently – uncannily, unnaturally – under such circumstances. In this regard, the most significant thread of Curtis’ narrative is the growing familiarity and comfort the subjects seem to obtain with once-emergent, now-ubiquitous media technologies.
This realisation, that we are not watching people but subjects, unlocks something truly interesting in Curtis’ work. In every scene, in every frame, we are confronted with the estrangement effect of now-obsolete information technologies. So, too, the depiction of dead pop culture crazes and youth subcultures. Shifty shows the period it covers as existing in an uncanny valley of culture’s industrialisation: beyond the onset of mass communication, but before the internet age presaged the singularity of global monoculture we are approaching today. Its cultural forms seem quaint and naive compared to those of today, where we are fully sublimated into the logic of capital – the commodity form, the spectacle, whatever you want to call it. This estrangement demonstrates how, concurrent with the disintegration of older social forms, this global mass culture has recongealed us, remade us, de- and re-territorialised us, and interpellated us as subjects in entirely new ways.
But this in itself is another structure of feeling, and the most interesting one that the film demonstrates: that the strangeness of much of the subject matter shows us just how far we have travelled. It’s not that Curtis is a technological determinist – I really don’t think he is – but rather that the technological and cultural shifts the film tracks tell us everything we need to know about the political forms that encode them: namely, the increasingly global (and totalising) flow of capital.
It would be easy to surmise that we’re being confronted here with a ‘post-political’ world, that we are living solely in the aftermath of all these de- and re-constructions, and that a political future has been precluded. But this, again, is a product of the film’s form. When all you have is the archive, nostalgia and retrospect are all that inform your critical vocabulary, and ‘inventing the future’ remains a structural impossibility.
Curtis’ aesthetic is undoubtedly effective at laying out the ills of our recent past, but it cannot account for how, beyond their various subjugations, people are capable of – and indeed already are – fighting back and overcoming these ills in the present day. Yes, they live in a broken society, but they are not broken themselves: the energy of their barely-repressed anger is testament enough to that. The heart of Curtis’ work, its redeeming feature, is that its limitations affirm what the content itself cannot: that the revolution will not be Curtisised.
So let’s briefly have a go at constructing this new political vocabulary – or, rather, reaffirming one that already exists. Each episode begins with the phrase:
‘There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens, things become SHIFTY.’
‘Move’ is the operative word here, yet it’s also the vaguest. Curtis’ work is full of these movements and shifts that are seemingly beyond human control. Shifty in particular is full of ‘insatiable machines’ and ‘unaccountable forces’, and things appear autonomous, supernatural, sentient. Herein lies the unnamed truth at the core of the work. The central ‘flaw’ – the supposition that something, it’s unclear what, has gone wrong – actually reveals its greatest insight.
Because we know what this unnamed motive force is. We have given it a name. It’s capital, the ‘real god with real powers’. It’s the ‘sentience’ of capital that moves everything we see in the film: all the geopolitics, all the riots, all the dance parties, all the oddities and poignancy, all the structures of feeling. I’ve touched upon this already in my earlier essay on ‘vibes’, and I intend to do so much more at some point in the future, so I won’t go into it too much here. But it’s the most interesting seam that Curtis’ work could mine, yet it remains largely under-explored. He doesn’t strictly give it a name, or make it explicit – or, rather, he restricts us from formulating this ourselves. But giving it a name is the first step to organising around, through, and in opposition to it. We know what ails us, what shifts us. It’s all around us.
- ‘there is a very real surge of rage and violence in the UK. There is an understandable conclusion that something in society is driving it, an uncertain agitation in the streets. A feeling that we are living through an age of great aggravation.’
(Clive Martin, ‘Is Britain entering an age of aggravation?’, The Face) ↩︎ - Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’ in Marxism and Literature, p131. ↩︎
- Many reviews corroborate this. Lucy Mangan for The Guardian, for example:
‘It is a rare purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy.’ ↩︎ - Corey Robins’ recent sketch of ‘late capitalism’ for the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog gives a useful encapsulation of the scope of the neoliberal project:
‘There was, however, one other possibility. Why, if there was no more profit to be found in the machine, could employers not get more labour from their workers without paying them more? Labour may have gotten accustomed to the steadily increasing wages and higher living standards of the postwar era, but that was no law of nature. What if capital could persuade, or force, labour to settle for lower wages and standards of living? Unless it was able to ‘break the resistance of wage-earners’ and raise its profit rate, capital would never be spared the long stagnation that was coming. Mandel reassured himself with the thought that declaring war on workers was ‘unthinkable’ without a massive unravelling and reversal of the postwar settlement. Only the fascists had ever been able to break the workers’ movement like that. Born and bred in Keynesian comfort, the working class would never stand for it.
As it happens, they did, and retrenchment is what they got: not a revolution of the workers but the counterrevolution of Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan, along with the introduction of a vast industrial reserve army of poor workers in Asia and elsewhere. The stagnation was long and the fall in real wages longer. That was the late capitalism that Mandel glimpses in stray passages of his work, and that we have all come to live with.’ ↩︎
Disposable Everything 