The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)

Caption notes

The Century of the Self connects public relations, psychotherapy, consumer segmentation and election strategy through an explicitly argumentative narrative. Its first two parts examine Bernays and psychoanalytic attempts to guide the public; the third follows the absorption of self-liberation into lifestyle marketing; the fourth turns to Clinton and New Labour’s focus-group politics. Compare two tasks: market research can design different products for different desires, while public policy must reconcile competing demands on shared resources. The narration questions whether satisfying individual preferences is a sufficient account of democracy. This causal story is Adam Curtis’s interpretive framework. Interviewees’ recollections, marketers’ effectiveness claims and the narrator’s conclusions should be distinguished, rather than treated as an experiment verifying the account or as settled historical consensus.