Theroux the Rabbit Hole

Louis Theroux. A national treasure, almost impossible to dislike. As a documentary hound and culture wars obsessive, I am a 100% paid-up member of the Louis Theroux fan club, but to be honest, I had found some of his more recent work to be a bit less cutting than his classics. In a way, he was the victim of his own success, in that his schtick of affecting a humble, awkward, borderline-simpleton persona which relaxed his subjects while providing them with “just enough rope to hang themselves on” became too well-known. He became a success, then he became a cult figure, and suddenly, the whole world was on to him.

I also felt like he wasn’t always following the right cultural threads. His more recent documentary series have lacked the sense of Louis having his finger on the cultural pulse. I might be giving him too much credit here, but in his first few shows, it felt like Louis exposed some of the festering breeding grounds of the American far-right and Trumpist ideology more than a decade before it burst into the mainstream. Once it did, Louis’ journalism seemed surplus to requirements.

Then, during lockdown, came his podcast, Grounded. Disappointingly, it took the form of mundane celebrity interviews, and although many celebrities are exactly the kind of addled narcissists Louis normally associates with, he wasn’t really trying to uncover anything about them — there was no underlying theme — and so it became a slightly more awkward version of the standard celebrity podcast. In particular, the Grounded episode with KSI was so painful, as KSI bombastically bragged about his many achievements and then Louis politely asked what the hell he was talking about, that I actually had to turn it off.

Add the above to the pretty naff Christmas-cash-in book, Gotta Get Theroux This, followed by a near-immediate yet-more-cash-grab sequel, I was feeling a little less fond of Louis than I had previously.

Then all of a sudden, with Sunday night’s first episode of Forbidden America, he was back. Back at the cultural frontier, exploring how the far right is regrouping into new forms after the collapse of its original form, post-Charlottesville and post-Insurrection. Back with the first gold-standard iconic Louis Theroux moment that I can remember from the past 10 years.

It came at the hands of Beardson Beardly, who sits, like so many others, at the intersection of gamer, internet troll, and hardened racist. Louis arrives at his house to find him wearing a Louis Theroux T-shirt, which I’m sure the far right crowd would find a knee-slappingly hilarious gesture of irony, and which I’m sure would send my English uni professors into paroxysms of delight at the sheer postmodernism of it all. Either way, this gesture starts off the interview as a fairly amiable encounter, with a handshake and an almost refreshing, “So, why the hell do you want to interview me?”

But don’t be alarmed. Beardly is not going to turn out to be Actually A Pretty Nice Guy. He’s going to turn out to be Actually A Pretty Nice Guy in the way that your friend’s boyfriends turned out to be. Underneath the exterior of Beardson Beardly is a ravenous ego of stunning insecurity, and when I say “underneath”, I mean beneath some of the thinnest skin I have ever witnessed.

The crux comes when Louis brings up the Nazi salute Beardly was filmed doing as he left AFPAC, a gathering of the neo-far right. I described this as an “iconic moment” because it really is a moment. When Louis brings up the salute initially, Beard-man brushes it off with a classic list of denials, excuses, and digressions. Here’s a screen grab from this moment:

You can see in his face that he’s largely unruffled. But then, two things happen. Firstly, Louis brings out his phone and shows Beardly pretty compelling evidence of him getting into a car and doing two Nazi salutes as it drives off. But more importantly, Louis says, “You’re at an event where the entire raison d’etre is to say ‘We’re not the alt right.’ … In a sense, you had one job. And you failed,” and then Louis laughs. Just a snicker. But he laughs at him.

And then Beardly looks like this:

In an instant, all the pretence evaporates. He proceeds to have the mother of all tantrums. I haven’t witnessed anything like this from anyone over the age of 10, with the exception of when friends lose at Xbox games (no coincidence there, I suspect). Beardly tells Louis to “Get the fuck out of my house”, calls him a disingenuous hack with no integrity, and walks back inside with the adage, “Why don’t you fuck off back to England, sit on a dick and spin.” Then he gets straight onto livestream and continues his rant, which spirals into pure insecure-id mode, ending “Guess what, Louis? … I’m cooler than you, I’m tougher than you, I’m stronger, I’m smarter … you’re weak, and you suck. Go fuck yourself.”

This episode has been criticised by a few newspapers as “giving the alt right what they want.” I.e. the oxygen and notoriety of publicity. And there is some truth to that — I’m pretty interested in the far right, I’m a subscriber to several of their most disgusting podcasts out of sadomasochistic perverse interest, and I’d never heard of any of the figures featured in the episode. Their audiences will almost certainly swell as a result of it. But this argument ignores the idea that raising general public awareness of certain ideologies, while critiquing them and exposing their inherent flaws, is probably good for society in general. The argument also stinks of the centrist liberal sentiment of “Let’s just ignore it and hope it goes away, while doing absolutely nothing to rectify the gross inequalities which spawn such hate movements.” Yeah, let’s try that! It’s always worked pretty well in the past, right?

But more than making an argument for why this episode should have been made and should have been aired, I want to draw attention to the laugh. That little chuckle which escaped through a crack in Theroux’s professional persona.

The alt right’s fundamental tactic for gaining new subscribers (literal and figurative) is a fundamentally new phenomenon. It goes like this. Present your bigotry in the form of humour. Shocking, outrageous, taboo humour, which almost all young men find funny. (I am absolutely one of them, by the way.) Flavour the humour with a sauté which appeals to the insecurities felt by young white men in this modern world. Our position at the top of the hierarchies of gender, race and power is no longer secure. We are being questioned, critiqued, deconstructed in a way which hasn’t happened since the onset of modernity. If you can make an edgy joke which also trashes feminism, or critical race theory, or the rich arseholes who run society (read: Jews), that’s even better. Then encourage your audience to do the same, often via a camouflage of memes, catchphrases, and a focus on games and films, rather than politics outright.

And what does all of it have in common? Irony. The beauty of the ironic joke is that it comes with built-in deniability. If people find it funny because it’s outrageous, or because they agree, then you win. If people don’t find it funny because it’s outrageous or because it’s offensive, you can claim you were only joking. You win again. And of course, this only doubles the laughs. What a fool you are! You thought that when I did a Nazi salute from my car, I was being serious?! You think I’m a literal Nazi?!

This is a tactic which has worked extremely well. As in, making-it-to-the-presidency-of-the-United-States well. It’s very difficult to combat. You can’t have a sincere argument with someone who is fundamentally insincere — whose primary argument is fuck you.

But what Louis Theroux did in that moment, in Beardson Beardly’s garden, was turn the tables. When he sniggered, suddenly, Beardly was the one who was being laughed at, and he did not like it. And those same old tactics of irony and trolling stopped working, in an instant. He became a rage machine, lashing out in the most childish way imaginable. “A surprisingly thin-skinned troll,” Louis’s voiceover mumbles. Of course, this was all hilarious for me, but I’m certain that the men who watch Beardly’s livestreams didn’t find his diatribe against Louis all that funny. The joke had turned on him; he had become the joke. Beardly’s own humourous veil had vanished, and what was left was a short, angry man spewing hate from his cold, empty house. Wearing a Louis Theroux T-shirt.