Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Tomorrow at 2 PM, the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library (at 1210 West Elmdale) will screen selected moments from The Century of the Self, the 2002 documentary series that first brought Adam Curtis to international attention. This free event is part of the branch library’s “Modern Lives & Movements” program, an ongoing series of lectures and discussions on various topics. Through the end of the year, the subject under consideration is “The Science of Sex,” with further programs devoted to a new biography of Masters and Johnson (on December 5) and “the current state of insight into sexuality, gender, and orientation” (on December 14). The Century of the Self relates to this subject only tangentially. It’s a characteristically diffuse meditation on the concept of individualism, arguing that Sigmund Freud’s breakthroughs in psychoanalysis led to the rise of the public relations industry, among other dubious phenomena of the 20th century.
