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.
This becomes obvious very quickly. The documentary opens with Theroux in Marbella, Spain, visiting Harrison Sullivan, a.k.a. HSTikkyTokky, a 24-year-old British manosphere influencer who is documenting his luxurious life on the lam after allegedly fleeing the scene of his wrecked McLaren in Surrey, England.
“Are we filming?” Theroux asks, looking at Sullivan’s cameraman.
“We are. We are indeed,” says Sullivan.
