"He's a total dork talking to these hypomasculine influencers... He makes them all look like idiots, and he's not even doing much...."

"There's something about 'the Louis touch' that makes it compelling. It's kind of how dorky John Wilson can make a documentary about scaffolding in New York City and I'm riveted...."

So said a TikTokker I love — Touré — and because I am John Wilson's biggest fan (I think), I watched the Netflix documentary "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere":

With the comparison to John Wilson, I went into this Netflix experience with really high hopes, and these were not met. But it's not as if Theroux and Netflix had promised to be like John Wilson. Compared to John Wilson, Theroux is ferocious and macho. And Wilson doesn't go after people to take them down. He seems ready to love anybody and seems mostly to want to open up quirky new paths and to whimsically pursue them. By contrast, Theroux has locked onto some people he loathes and intends to take down. He's using a standard journalistic technique of seeming low-key and neutral. He's lying in wait. That's how you lie in wait. Now, that can be good, but I came away from the documentary disappointed.

So I went looking for some writing that would help me explore my disappointment. I chose "Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary" by River Page in The Free Press.

British American filmmaker Louis Theroux has spent much of his long career interviewing people it’s easy to hate: from members of the Westboro Baptist church, to bigoted residents of whites-only communities in South Africa, to openly racist settlers in the West Bank. He has never really “exposed” anyone as an immoral wretch or a political extremist—because he’s chosen subjects who have never pretended to be anything they aren’t. But his relaxed, disarming style did put these various fundamentalists at ease, allowing them to subtly reveal intimate details about themselves: their precise motivations, their internal moral reasoning, their emotional lives, the lies they tell themselves—whatever. The reasonable liberal viewer will be left still hating Theroux’s subjects, but he will also understand them more.

Not so with his latest documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, which premiered on Netflix on Wednesday. In it, Theroux cavorts with a cacophony of misogynistic internet influencers to practically no effect. Theroux’s subjects are people who spend multiple hours a day in a profitable panopticon of their own making, livestreaming every thought, opinion, and personal detail for public consumption. If nothing is concealed, nothing can be revealed....

So the subjects of Theroux's documentary make him the subject of their documentary. They're as self-aware and in control of the edit as he is, but they are on live stream with live commenters and they have people who clip out highlights very quickly and post them on TikTok. So to their audience they are making Theroux look like an idiot even as he's trying to amass enough footage to cut into an hour of finished product that might make them look like idiots on Netflix. It's a 2-way process, a man-on-man confrontation. We can see that on Netflix. I wish the edit had concentrated more on how these scrappy men reacted to the Netflix bullies and tried to get the upper hand. That's an interesting story about how social media works these days. 

When it comes to manosphere influencers, there’s... no contradiction they’re unaware of or embarrassed to confront, because... the name of the game is attention, clicks, and views—something most of them freely admitted long before Louis Theroux showed up to play the heel for some of the most egregious grifters slouching through the world today....

So did Theroux "play the heel" or act like "a total dork"? Heels and dorks are very different!

***

Writing this post, I stumbled upon this: "'The History of Concrete' Review: John Wilson Ponders Permanence and Immortality in Hilarious and Poignant Feature-Length ‘How To’ Follow-Up/The creator of HBO's 'How To with John Wilson' learns about a building material, Italian wax sculptures, New York City housing initiatives and more in this Sundance-bowing doc" (Hollywood Reporter).

For some readers, describing The History of Concrete as a 101-minute episode of How To with John Wilson will be cause for celebration; for others, it will be absolutely meaningless....

Count me among the celebrators. 

John Wilson is the Werner Herzog of the mundane, the lo-fi poet laureate of New York City. He’s half puckish prankster, half earnest documentarian, all inquisitive wanderer. Once you tap into his vibe, carefully written and edited to seem stream-of-consciousness, the viewing experience is like the most laconic roller coaster imaginable....

You know, I hate roller coasters. I know it's a metaphor and it's Wilson, not a roller coaster, that the writer meant to call "laconic," but if a roller coaster could be laconic and still be a roller coaster, I would give it a try.