Which is really good. Recommend.
I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects).
I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”.
Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag.
At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
Also the sprawling messiness isn't just the aesthetic, it's the thesis.
In regards to Iraq, his opinion that Gertrude Bell’s influence led NATO to give tribal sheiks disproportionate power in the new Iraq was a hilarious simplification. It’s just an absurd narrative chasm, that ignored so much about what happened then.
An in regards to the civil war in Iraq, that didn’t boil over because NATO stopped paying the militias off. There was so much at play.
The China stuff was interesting, but uncontroversial. That stuff is quite an accessible history. The archive footage was fun though.
It just felt like I was watching a number of different documentaries. One about race relations and trans rights; and one about China.
It all just would have been better as standalone works. He could have even edited things differently, each episode covering a certain subject. He maybe could have had a concluding thesis that was better than “China: it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be”.
Edit: Grammar