Yet someone I thought I was qualified to roll my eyes at him.
I don't know why this is, but I do have a few theories.
One is that I resent new people. I'm phrasing that in an intentionally broad way to poke fun at myself. But I notice this tendency in myself when a new celebrity of any sort pops on the scene, and then is treated as some sort of stratospheric riser whose fame and popularity we are meant to incorporate into our lives as a serious and justified thing.
I wrote about this in a post about Ariana Grande back when Wicked came out, which you can read here, as young pop musicians particularly fall into this category. Even without hearing their music, I instantly feel annoyed by them because I reject the human weakness of become infatuated with what seems like a flash in the pan person who will never get more than 15 minutes of fame. When they exceed that 15 minutes, usually I welcome them into the fold. However, a few in the Grande mold who are still in my celebrity jail: Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter.
But you'll be glad to know this is not just some mildly misogynistic tendency that applies only to twentysomething female pop stars. It also applies to 56-year-old men like Louis Theroux.
The thing is, Louis Theroux is not "new." He may be new to me, but he has been around for 25 years, doing his thing. Just because I haven't sampled any of that thing doesn't make that Theroux's fault, though I'm just trying to be honest here and describe my perceptions, however irrational they may be.
I guess when we explore it a little deeper, I am opposed to people who declare themselves a brand. I feel like branding is what goes on with young pop stars who are fed to us by the publicity machine, but it is no less true for a man who goes around trying to expose injustices in the name of journalism. It's especially strange for me to find fault with that because that's the sort of mission that I, a former journalist, fully support.
But you've got to earn it. Michael Moore earned it. He took a unique approach to documentary filmmaking that showed him as unafraid to hold up a mirror to people at the highest levels of power. Sure, at some point his theatrics wore thin, but by then he was already entrenched. He had passed my personal relevance test that allowed me to welcome him in, kind of like Ariana Grande did.
Louis Theroux? What test had he passed? Who was this johnny-come-lately who had only been around for ... cough cough ... 25 years?
You can see the problem with this line of thinking. Instead of rolling my eyes when I saw the name Louis Theroux attached to something, I should, you know, actually watch it to see what I thought of it.
And so finally I did. And now I'm on board.
What I liked about the way Theroux exposes the shortcomings of influencers in the manosphere -- "shortcomings" being a pretty hilarious way to categorize their toxicity -- is that it lacks the finger wagging of someone like Moore. While it's clear that Theroux would never have made a movie with the aim of celebrating these men, neither is what he's doing "gotcha journalism."
His manner of interviewing about a dozen of these truly awful men is to "just ask questions." Now I know that phrase is a bit problematic and is actually used by men like these influencers, and right-wingers in general like Charlie Kirk, to attack the left. To say racist and homophobic things while externalizing it from their own brains.
But Theroux, to me, is asking the sorts of questions that you would ask any person you were interviewing while meaningfully engaging with their core identity. Your original series of questions are mild, encouraging enough of their world view without actually supporting it, and then you logically follow up on things they say to attack the veracity of it or to point out its internal inconsistencies. You don't appear to have an agenda and you continue in a very mild manner the whole time.
The thinking is that in order to "ensnare" a man who talks about his philosophies, when they surround "one-way monogamy" (his partners are monogamous to him but he isn't to them) and other problematic views on the acquisition of wealth and the laying of fault against groups who don't deserve it, is that you have to trick the person into thinking you endorse these things. You have to encourage them to incriminate themselves through your own comments that, at the very least, do not indictment them for those views, and may even suggest your complicity with them.
Theroux does not do that. Any time he has the opportunity to tell one of these men that he believes they're wrong, he does, even if it results in an awkward silence, even if it risks ending the interview then and there. But he also phrases it carefully, not telling them they are wrong, but telling them that he thinks they are wrong, that he thinks the things they are saying are untrue. It's a subtle difference between telling someone they are categorically wrong and telling someone that you differ with their opinion.
Still, this approach should have ended a lot of interviews before they began, or before they got far enough to be worth including in a documentary. And who knows, maybe there were some interviews like that and they just ended up on the cutting room floor. Surely, these men would do the research necessary to figure out the perspective Theroux is likely to have on them, and never even allow themselves to be across from him in the first place.
Or would they?
The other brilliant thing about his approach to this material is that he knows many of these men can't help themselves. They are so addicted to the sounds of their own voices, and the cameras that bring those voices to their followers, that they are willing to go before said cameras, to sound off said voices, under almost any circumstances.
He also knows how confident they are. He knows that even if these men know Theroux is out to do a hit piece on them, they believe they have the ability to turn that agenda against him. They believe they have the ability to beat him. Or perhaps even more to the point, they believe so much in the things they are saying that they believe it is impervious to hit pieces. If they feared being raked over the coals for their views, they probably wouldn't even spout them in the first place -- and their millions of followers are proof enough that everything they say reflects a viable and profitable truth. Which, sadly, may be true for their core audiences.
But Theroux still "gets them" in Inside the Manosphere, because after having dozens of these mild-mannered interactions with Theroux in which he calmly tells them he does not agree with what they're saying and tries to carefully show them the limitations of their words, each subject ultimately feels triggered, and then ultimately burned, by Theroux. In fact, there's significant footage in this film of the subjects bad-mouthing Theroux to their followers, and even seeming pushed to the point of wanting to punch Theroux in the face if they ever shared the same room together ... which at this point they probably would not.
And yet this is not because Theroux violated their trust. It is not because he did anything differently than the exact thing he said he would do. After watching one Theroux movie, I am of the opinion that Theroux would rather abandon a project than to lie to one of his subjects in order to extract the material from them that he wants to extract.
And proving just how little of a coward he is -- though that's certainly one of the things they accuse him of -- he does return to speak to one of these men, in the presence of his own mother, even after the man has shown such frustration with Theroux that you worry it will spill over into violence. And certainly, this guy is jacked enough that he could put Theroux in the hospital without much effort.
Perhaps his mother being present ensures this kind of thing won't happen. But that is to a point by Theroux too. If you truly believe these things about women, surely you should be just as happy to say them in front of your own mother, a woman who worked six days a week as a solo parent just to feed you.
The real reason these men are so triggered by Theroux is that some part of his mild-mannered inquisition has caused them to question their own core beliefs. Or, if not question the beliefs themselves, at least question whether they can hold them and still consider themselves a good person. And isn't that the ultimate goal of any film like this?
If I haven't mention the names of any of these denizens of the manosphere, it isn't because I've forgotten them or am too lazy to look them up. It's because these cretins already have too much of a platform, and I don't need to contribute to their names appearing on the internet even one more time. Louis Theroux is the one I want to give a platform, however belatedly I've reached that point.
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