Adam Curtis: A good political film makes people reflect on themselves. The problem is that over the past 30 or 40 years, the movies that call themselves political have actually been the very opposite. They groom their audiences by saying to them: âYou are right to think and believe the way you do.â In that way, they encourage people to wallow in their self-righteousness and so block any self-reflection. Which means that so many âradical moviesâ are actually reactionary.
There is no way forward unless people actually reflect on the limitations of their own self-righteousness and the possible dangers it has for society.
[...]
Ari Aster: Thereâs a feedback loop of nostalgia. Not just nostalgia and trauma. Weâre always looking back into the past to see why we are here right now. âOh, itâs because this happened to me.â As opposed to â and this is what youâve been talking about for ever â where is the new idea? Where is our vision of the future? Because nobody believes in the future any more. I donât believe in the future, and Iâm desperately looking for it.
Adam Curtis: Youâre right about trauma. Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. Theyâre not only playing back the music or films of the past, theyâre playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely â and itâs given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently itâs been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now youâre doing that to yourself
From "âNobody believes in the future any moreâ: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare" by Adam Curtis and Ari Aster, with Paul MacInnes, from the Guardian, published on 8 August 2025.