The Century of the Self (2005)

It's rare to see a documentary that bursts your mind right open, exploding your perceptions of the world we live in. That's the surging level of intellectual artistry achieved in The Century of the Self, a four-hour BBC mini-series, made in 2002, that is now being released theatrically in the U.S. The writer-director, Adam Curtis, crafts a vast and searching essay-mosaic to explore how the consumer culture recoded the nature of who we are inside. His film takes us back to the primal seed of modern marketing: the creation of public relations in the 1920s by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who drew on his uncle's theories to envision a new kind of human being — not a rational citizen but an irrational consumer, enslaved by unconscious desires. Curtis uncovers how the 1939 World's Fair, with its famous ''futurama'' visions, was in fact a propaganda stunt of American business; how Joseph Goebbels drew on Bernays' techniques to inspire the masses of the Third Reich; how the psychiatric elite, led by Anna Freud, were co-opted in secret by the corporate boardroom to create a homogenized vision of suburban normalcy.

All of this is eye-opening, yet a mere backdrop to the film's most potent chapter, a metaphysical dissection of the Me Decade that reveals how the human-potential movement, with its impulse to strip people down to their core selves, paved the way for a world in which ''individuality'' would become the ultimate conformist desire. The Century of the Self is rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.