"The Century of the Self," a four-part series produced for BBC television that is being shown in two separate two-hour installments beginning today at Cinema Village, is that rare documentary that has not only a subject, but also a thesis -- a complex and ambitious argument that it manages to sustain over its four-hour running time.

In essence, the film argues that Sigmund Freud's seminal theory of the subconscious has been successfully deployed over the past century as an instrument of consumer manipulation and social control. The primary engineer of this transformation, according to the film, was Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew, who was responsible for coining the term "public relations" in the 1920's. Bernays managed to pull off a number of impressive marketing coups in his long career, including the popularization of smoking among women, by tapping into the tenets of psychoanalysis to predict and shape consumer behavior.

The series' first episode, titled "Happiness Machines," takes its name from a line in a speech President Herbert Hoover made to a group of advertising executives shortly after taking office. "You have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines," he said, ones "that have become the key to economic progress." Hoover's formulation was to prove chillingly prescient as the century progressed and Bernays's ideas about the malleability of consumer desire were adapted by political propagandists, including Hitler's minister of culture, Joseph Goebbels.

Episode 2, "The Engineering of Consent," follows the development of Bernays's tactics in the postwar period, when a burst of industrial production and consumption created new outlets for previously unheard-of goods, including convenience foods. A segment on the early marketing of Betty Crocker cake mix is particularly illustrative: when housewives failed to respond to the concept of cake from a box, marketing researchers were puzzled. Finally it became clear that the women felt guilty about baking a cake to which they had contributed so little, so the recipe was changed to require the addition of an egg.