Photo courtesy of Netflix
It’s only the second most famous stare in Britain – Paddington is top, of course – but Louis Theroux’s “looks” have still frowned him through one of the more successful 21st-century careers in serious TV. Whereas the bear goes in for pure, chastening intensity, Theroux comes with a facial array of tics and gurns, the better to convey criticism and judgement: one-eye blinks, lib-nibbles, eyebrow-raises and side-eyes. As intrepid and socially conscious he may be, it’s this rictus that has made Theroux a star, the concerned Everyman, greeting and gauging the weirdness of our time.
My problem with Louis’s looks has been that he too often levelled them at some obvious targets. Go looking for Christian fundamentalists or swingers or Neil Hamilton and, yes, you will be shocked and appalled. It always seemed a bourgeois variation upon reality TV rather than its antidote – another circus exploiting its freaks, even if this ringmaster passed through Westminster and Magdalen. But in recent years, Theroux has plumped for subjects of genuine journalistic enormity. His film on the Israeli settler movement last year was excellent, and this year it’s the turn of “the manosphere” – that amorphous, misogynistic, popular digital space that has become one of the moral crises of the moment.
The film opens with a size gag. “We’re the real deal. “We’re not YouTubers,” Theroux tells an influencer interviewee who comments on the scale of his camera rig. And there’s immediately a sense of dominance and display at play here. There’s also a sense of the new confronting the old, the digital meeting the analogue, the sans-culottes squaring up to King Louis himself. Few of the influencers really know who Theroux is (they call him, at different points, “Ther-oh” and “Thur-ucks”). But they sense a challenger. Even while they are being interviewed by Theroux, many of them film the interaction for their own podcasts and videos, unwilling to let him use them as content without a fair trade.
All but one of Theroux’s interviewees, British and American, were unknown to me, and to describe them individually is immediately mystifying, a parade of meaningless handles: Sneako, Myron Gaines, HSTikkyTokky. Fortunately, they’re all playing the same game. These men film themselves leading attractive, opulent lifestyles, mostly filled by gym, money and women. (With small variations: HSTikkyTokky lives like he’s on an endless lads’ holiday, all jet-skis and leg day and blowjobs in toilets, while Theroux’s American subjects are more Ottoman in style, believing in multiple wives and something called “one-way monogamy”.)
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This lifestyle is proof of their “power and status”. It’s then used to justify a dark, gendered and paranoid world-view, broadcast in the form of rants-to-camera. Men are kept down by the forces of “the Matrix” – a primitive conception of a class elite, but one in hock to Western feminism. By swallowing a red pill of hard truths about sexual relations and doing the hard work of becoming strong, unreflecting and resilient, men can overcome this system, achieving their full potential.
It’s not hard to see how this appeals to adolescent audiences: teenagers who are still subject to arbitrary authority (parenting) and who are desperate to achieve an adulthood that they can begin to imagine but still do not know. And there are continuities with the crap this audience have always been interested in. Theroux summarises one influencer’s content as “fitness, online flirting and conspiracy theories” – the classic features run of any Noughties lads’ mag. The supercar, the stallion of meathead masculinity, is predictably ubiquitous.
It’s wrong to blunt the edges of a community that trades in anti-Semitism and some rank interpersonal realities (Justin Waller, one of Theroux’s subjects, doesn’t let his “wife” speak to other men). There is a foul economic foundation to this: some of these characters sustain their lifestyles by flogging shady investment schemes to their kid viewers, or by pimping OnlyFans girls (or both). And to this end, I sometimes felt Theroux frowned at the wrong moments. He’s interested in what led these men here. But these men are nothing without their audience. That’s where our attention might more profitably be turned: to the billions of views, to the playgrounds where these figures are celebrities, to the boys who want to become these men.
[Further reading: Jonathan Ross’s cruel Britannia]
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