Toward the end of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, Shifty, we’re given front-row seats to one of New Labour’s more bizarre spectacles. More than two decades ago, as Y2K’s world-historical deadline loomed, Tony Blair’s government planned to mark the occasion by constructing the Millennium Dome, a vast structure that is today parked across the Thames from Whitehall. It was supposed to commemorate the end of one era and the advent of another, Cool Britannia–style. Inside visitors would wander through themed “zones” that promised an immersive encounter with their shared “Island Story:” science, faith, work, play, culture. It was to be an official UK mythology for a posthistorical age. At the center of it all was a stage where the nation might, in theory, gather as one when the clock struck midnight on the final day of the twentieth century.

But as Adam Curtis would say, there was just one problem. No one knew what any of it was for. Committees were formed, disbanded, and reformed. Consultants were hired to provide a story. No one involved could articulate a coherent vision of national identity or shared purpose. Instead they resorted to vague gestures and banalities. “HOW SHALL I LIVE?” appeared in all-caps across the bare wall of the so-called Spirit Zone, with the absence of any real meaning inadvertently creating an immanent critique. A virtual reality experience meant to dazzle with futurism settled instead for pixelated simulations of woodland groves because those in charge simply had no idea what should be shown on the headsets. The Dome became a theater of nonmeaning, the architectural corollary to a politics that had mistaken managerialism for ideology, neoliberalism for inevitability, and private pleasure for collective purpose.

For those unfamiliar, Shifty’s director Adam Curtis is the BBC’s resident montage philosopher, a documentarian of the uncanny who builds sprawling historical narratives out of archival footage, synth scores, and voice-over essays delivered in a register somewhere between bedtime story and Oxford don. Some of his greatest hits include The Century of the Self (2002), where he mapped the psychological architecture of liberalism, tracing how Sigmund Freud’s heirs helped rewire desire into consumption; The Trap (2007), in which he turned to the cold logic of game theory to show how freedom was gradually recoded as self-interest; and HyperNormalisation (2016), which argued that both elites and citizens had retreated into a managed unreality sustained by hollow myths of the past, ambient fear, and the comforting lie that nothing else was possible.

Shifty is Curtis at his most atmospheric, even surrealist. Getting lost in his late-capitalist video collages can feel like a shot to the heart, which is one way of saying his work often resembles the wild detours of Guy Debord and his Dada forebears. While the occasional titles describe what is happening, they feel more like bookends than breadcrumbs. In this, it is very much of a piece with his last documentary, Trauma Zone (2022), which covered post-Soviet Russia’s unhappy drift from communism to Putin. Both series forgo his iconic — and much satirized — narration, choosing instead to leverage an incredible trove of BBC archival footage to tell the story. And the stories, despite coming from very different places, end with similar conclusions: no one trusts anyone, no one believes in anything, and all that’s left is survival among the ruins.

His new five-part documentary is a kind of fairy-tale fever dream of capitalist realism, whose broad contours will be familiar to readers of Mark Fisher and Jacobin. The story begins with the earthquake of Thatcherism. We watch as the Iron Lady attempts to conjure national cohesion from a make-believe version of Britain’s imperial past, even as she elevates self-interest and private ambition to the level of civic virtue. What follows is a slow-motion fragmentation: scandals metastasize into generalized social paranoia, sensationalist media narratives erode institutional trust, and liberal elites, feeling betrayed by the newly Tory-voting working classes, retreat into the cultural capital of biennales, book prizes, and conceptual art. Industrial infrastructure is sold off for pennies on the pound as the government hands the reins of interest rates to unelected bankers. Unemployment, skinheads, check-cashing stores, and Netto discount supermarkets sprout like wild thyme across the English heather. Politicians end up believing the worst about themselves and begin abdicating responsibility. A cash-strapped Gordon Brown attempts early versions of public-private partnerships, indebting the government to private finance for the very services it had only just recently provided. In the background are the twin engines of finance and technology: unaccountable, placeless, and entirely prepared to occupy the vacuum left by political withdrawal.

There’s simply too much here to do it all service, but suffice it to say there are stories within stories and arcs within arcs. One vignette lingers: At the London Zoo, two elephants, Thi and her friend, have formed a bond. But under a new regime of cost-cutting, it’s decided that Thi must be sold off. In the final moments of the episode, titled “The Grinder,” Curtis cuts to unseen BBC footage of Jarvis Cocker singing “Common People,” “the anthem of the Netto generation,” as Thi the elephant lashes out against her keepers in the process of losing the only home she ever knew. It’s a perfect “Curtisian” image: rage, aestheticized; an animal refusing a future devised by accountants; solidarity reduced to sentiment and then stripped away. The keepers try to soothe her. The music swells. The credits roll.

The closest thing Shifty has to a hero is fashion designer Alexander McQueen, the working-class boy turned Givenchy lead whose fashion was less ready-to-wear, more collective psychic exorcism. If Tony Blair’s dome attempted to flatten the New Labour psyche into antiseptic fiberglass, McQueen responded with runway shows that were baroque, perverse, and unspeakably angry. Curtis suggests that McQueen knew he couldn’t fix what the UK had become, but he could at least make its unhealed wounds visible. Nowhere was this clearer than in Voss, McQueen’s legendary Spring/Summer 2001 show. Well-heeled attendees sat for nearly two hours in silence, trapped inside a mirrored cube that reflected their own images back at them. The show did not begin until the audience had stared long enough. When the lights finally rose, the mirrored walls turned transparent to reveal a clinical asylum, where models staggered like patients in a sanatorium, stitched into garments that looked like restraints, autopsy gowns, or demonic armor. At the show’s climax, the walls of a central glass box collapsed, unveiling a woman in a surgical mask reclining on a bed, surrounded by live moths. It was absolutely bonkers, but for Curtis, McQueen’s gothic wreckage dramatized what society had become over the last twenty years. For Shifty’s narrative arc, it was the perfect juxtaposition to the New Labour’s ridiculous millenarian poptimism; unlike the Dome, where no one believed in what they were being shown, McQueen turned the mirror on the audience and showed them to themselves as they were: spectators to collapse, complicit in the decay occurring all around them.

The most common critiques of Curtis — that his narratives are too sweeping, his editing too manipulative, his conclusions more atmospheric than analytical — are not wrong exactly. I’ve made them myself, sometimes mid-episode. It feels, though, like this misses the point. It’s true that Curtis deals in allegory more than argument, in vibes rather than frameworks. But what vibes they are! Others have no patience for what they describe as his conspiratorialism. Fair enough, but it’s a strange species of conspiracy to suggest the problem is that no one is at the wheel rather than this or that cabal of villains is really pulling the strings. He’s on record politically as someone who believes progress is a result of great ideas that animate societies, not the class struggle. You could rebuke him with a line from the Eighteenth Brumaire followed by a discussion of the dialectical relation of the material conditions of society to ideology, but what would be the point, really? Critical viewers ought to allow themselves a little Hegelian idealism, as a treat.

If you’re looking for a thoroughgoing account of British nationalism and its imperial unconscious, you’re better off with Benedict Anderson. If you want a structural history of neoliberalism, start with David Harvey, Wendy Brown, and then keep going. For the psychosexual malaise of individualism at this late hour, there’s Christopher Lasch and Slavoj Žižek. This isn’t to say that the ideas his films explore lack depth or theoretical rigor. Quite the contrary. It’s just that when you translate sprawling political and emotional histories of the world into montages fashioned from forgotten BBC specials — cutting between Muammar Gaddafi, rave flyers, and National Health Service waiting rooms — experts will always object to the connective tissue. But none of them — neither the historians nor the theorists nor the journalists — can score archival footage to ambient synths and spiraling monologues quite like Curtis can. He might not explain the world perfectly, but he may capture how its collapse feels better than anyone.