BBC’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ Exposes the Poison of Individualism

During the last century in the Western world, our culture has become glutted with self-discovery tools, personality profiles, and individual preferences for self-optimization. We love the self. As Carl Trueman has argued, the self has not only risen in stature; it has triumphed. 

But as the self reigns, what are the effects of its administration? Though Christians have frequently spoken against the cultural bent toward individualism, one is hard-pressed to find a specific, direct refutation of individualism by filmmakers, novelists, and artists outside the church.

Until now.

Adam Curtis, renowned British documentary filmmaker, recently released a sprawling and brave six-part series on the BBC, which inspects the rotten fruits (and some diseased roots) of individualism. The series is Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (available to watch on Thought Maybe), and I am not sure I have seen anything quite like it. Curtis, whose work has long criticized self-actualization and individualism, has, in my mind, created his best work.

Aesthetic and Intellectual Triumph

This series is aesthetically a delight and intellectually demanding in the best of ways. Curtis weaves dozens of stories of political and cultural history (everything from Mao Zedong’s wife to Tupac Shakur to Michael de Freitas) as he assembles clips from the treasure trove of BBC archives, alongside impeccable musical selections. It’s captivating.

Second to his aesthetic achievements is his intellectual prowess. Curtis sees something most have ignored in various histories of the world. As its subtitle indicates, the series is an “emotional history” of our last century or so. Curtis tells an untold tale: we are where we are, not primarily due to rational decision-making and historical data, but due to massive psychological forces that have manifested in current events through the celebration of the self. 

We are where we are, not primarily due to rational decision-making and historical data, but due to massive psychological forces that have manifested in current events through the celebration of the self.

Curtis argues that it was the twisted fantasies and expressive individualism of characters like Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s vengeful and violent wife) or Kerry Thornley (who founded Discordianism and proliferated infamous conspiracy theories) that primarily contributed to the evil that surrounded them. The all-too-celebrated rational mind did not get us here; an emotional pull to the self did.

For Curtis, the root of the problem is deeper than politics and economics. It’s even deeper than behavioral psychology (something he critiques). The root is inside the twisted nature of human beings that has been celebrated and multiplied in the past century. It’s individualism. But it’s also a manifestation of something Curtis is unable to pinpoint or name: sin. 

Missing Piece: Theology of Sin

As beautiful and fascinating as this series is, it completely ignores theology. This isn’t surprising from a filmmaker like Curtis. But God’s relationship to the self should loom large in any account of Western history. Nevertheless, its absence here presents an opportunity for believers. As the age of the individual—or what Charles Taylor calls “the Age of Authenticity”—begins to reveal its massive shortfalls, might Christians be set up to present the gospel more clearly? 

It’s wonderful to see a series like this capture much of the first half of this gospel: our fallen nature and complete inability to access a saving power. Curtis looks unflinchingly at our helpless brains and twisted hearts. It is, strangely, a gift. 

The film encouraged me, as a pastor, to develop and preach the doctrine of sin. Fleming Rutledge describes “capital ‘S’ Sin” as disease, pollution, or warfare—the cosmic power that has poisoned our world through rebellion against the true God. Lowercase “sin” encompasses moral misdeeds, financial decision-making, sexual immorality. Sin is the fractured universe we cannot escape.

Both are biblical understandings of sin, both are egregious, and both are increasingly obvious and pervasive in our world (as well as in Curtis’s film). Open your social-media feed or turn on the news. It’s obvious. For secular individuals steeped in the logic of sacrosanct individualism, Sin might be easier to acknowledge first, before they own their sin. But films like this make clear that sin of all kinds is everywhere, unavoidable, and must be called what it is: the most damaging element in our existence. 

Individualistic Critiques of Individualism

Can’t Get You Out of My Head only tells half the story. Even in a surprising turn of optimism at the end, viewers are left with too little too late. Curtis’s primary aim is to reject individualistic pursuits for collective political action. His earlier film, HyperNormalization (also worthwhile), examined the damaging cultural shift of the 1970s; it shows how self-expression replaced collective action and led to a kind of nihilism about the future and any sort of change. In the new series he dreams of banding together to solve issues. But what could possibly unite millions of people still under the spell of individualism? 

Curtis seems to understand some of the irony inherent in his film. As much as he can critique the individual, he cannot escape, well, himself. And is that so bad? Without some aspect of a singular vision and a particular willingness to go against the collective herd, we wouldn’t have bold artists like Curtis, willing to say bold things. 

This, to me, is the ironic refutation of his jeremiad against individualism. How does one make such a singular film without the freedom that comes from individualism? Art like this is great in large part because it’s individualistic. But if individualism is a sickness in the modern world, how can something as inherently individualistic as one particular artist’s account of the modern world offer solutions? Isn’t that just like one infected patient trying to heal another? 

Without a theological imagination—and a framework for something that truly transcends the self—all cures for individualism come up wanting. 

Without a theological imagination—and a framework for something that truly transcends the self—all cures for individualism come up wanting.

Herein lies the profound announcement of the gospel, and its radical call to lose your life in order to save it (Luke 9:24), to “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires . . . and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22, 24). 

In the gospel we can have what no artist or individual can offer: a new person to replace us. Life in Christ is a life of replacement: our self dies through a crucifixion of the flesh. What lives in us is the very life of Jesus Christ.

No level of expression or indulgence will save a world of corrupt selves. Only repentance and replacement will save us. The answer to individualism is not just saying no to individualism as an idea. It’s saying no to yourself and yes to Christ, who alone offers new life.