Louis Theroux back on the hunt for society's non-conformists.
By Joanna Mathers
Scientologists, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, porn stars. Nazis, swingers, racists, black separatists. Louis Theroux's televisual canon is populated by non-conformists, radicals, oddballs, and nutters. The edgy, the unhinged, and the downright unpleasant.
It's been nearly 30 years since Theroux's inaugural screen appearance, freshly scrubbed and discombobulated, on Michael Moore's TV Nation. In this first outing he ventured forth to western Montana and interviewed two trailer park neo-Nazis. They believed the world was about to end, Jesus Christ's return was imminent, and each race would be flung to a separate distant planet. (After a late-night cup of tea, Theroux asked if he would be able to visit the black people's planet if he wished. The neo-Nazis didn't answer.)
In his new series, Forbidden America, Theroux is once again exploring the United States' fringe dwellers. But, in 2022, the reach of the marginal has expanded, ad infinitum. In 2022 wacky whims can be shared, via social media, to an audience of millions.
Son of renowned American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, Louis Theroux has long been a liberal icon, with a unique take on the margins of society. Now aged 51, with a wife and three sons, Theroux is slightly more grizzled, but still charming. As a documentarian (and, it turns out, a conversationalist, as we chat over Zoom), he has the rare ability to uncover and articulate the layers and complexities underpinning the extreme.
In the series he seems to have outgrown his trademarked befuddled amusement; the quizzical smiles replaced by mature consideration, even occasional flashes of anger. But there remains the overriding interest in what he calls "the extremes of human psychology, the way humans subscribe to collective madness".
Times have changed since his first televisual outings. "When I started, Facebook was not even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerburg's eye," he laughs. But life at the limits now has no limits, thanks to social media. And the way in which extreme culture has embraced the internet age is fascinating for Theroux.
"One of the first shows I did for Weird Weekends was about survivalists," he explains. "They believed that we were on the edge of a civil war waged by evil satanic globalists trying to take away the rights of freedom-loving Americans.
"So fast forward 25 years to 2021 and you find people cut from the same cloth descending on the Capitol Building protesting what they think was a stolen election and trying to keep Donald Trump in office. It's been so strange to see views, lifestyles, and ways of seeing the world migrate from the fringe to the mainstream, and that's to do with the reach of the internet."
Forbidden America is a three-part documentary series exploring (in turn) the far-right's online influence, the often deadly world of Florida rap, and the way in which porn has been transformed by the internet. In the first episode, "Extreme and Online", Theroux meets far-right political agitator Nicholas Fuentes, whose racist and misogynist livestream is broadcast nightly from the ground floor of his mother's house. Self-described troll/live streamer Baked Alaska and gamer/livestreamer Beardson Beardly also appear. Enmeshed in internet culture and with a following of disaffected "incels", they use "humour" and irony to disseminate messages of hate to an ever-widening audience.
"Rap's Frontline" is located in Florida's violent rap scene. Sited in the poverty and violence of this tempestuous city, "trap" (a subgenre of hip-hop that's achieved worldwide popularity through Drake, Post-Malone et al) is steeped in gang warfare and the extreme lyrical content (drugs, guns, and death) is a mirror of the reality of life among the city's poor. But the availability of streaming means that, for some, trap offers hope, a way out of poverty.
In "Porn's MeToo", we discover an industry transformed by platforms like Only Fans. In an industry formerly dominated by men, whose control of porn led abuses of all kinds, the internet has offered performers a safer, fairer way to work.
"Extreme and Online" is the most troubling of the three episodes. Fuentes, 22, is slick, charismatic, and a talented orator whose obsession with "America past" would be quaint if it wasn't so toxic. ("Racism is the new rock 'n' roll and I'm the biggest rock star of them all," is one of his milder declarations. He also states women shouldn't be allowed to vote.)
"These people are ultra-conservative and want to turn America back to the 20th century. There's a phrase for it: paleoconservative," says Theroux. "They want to turn back the clock, roll back the gains made in social justice and civil rights. We've always had people on the political fringe but as recently as 20 or so years ago, they were isolated communities. Now they have social media through which to share their extreme views."
So toxic is Fuentes' rabid conservatism that he's banned from attending Republican conferences. The episode leads with Fuentes being barred entry from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and launching a diatribe against the guys of the door: "CPAC is gay, they're not conservative," he shouts, cheered on by fan boys. In response to the ban from CPAC, Fuentes set up America First Political Action Conference (CPAC's far-right extremist rival), in which he spits poison from the pulpit.
But while he gathers followers in real life, he's primarily communicating to an online audience. A male audience. Women aren't welcome in Fuentes' world. The only women interviewed who is associated with the scene, Brittany Venti, disavowed it after realising their misogyny wasn't irony.
"When [they said], 'All women are whores,' I thought it was irony. But it's not tongue-in-cheek at all," Venti tells Theroux. "I realised this when I saw how horrible they were to me."
(Venti was viciously targeted by members of the movement after she made jokes about them online. Beardson Beardly, in one of his live streams, proclaims: "Brittany, if I ever see you, I'm going to rape you in person.")
Theroux explains that Fuentes, and his co-conspirators found their ideological zenith in Trump. They lauded Trump's extremes of racism and misogyny, his most troublesome tendencies.
"They actually feel like Trump didn't live up to what he promised [with regard to far-right tendencies]," says Theroux. "They don't think he went far enough."
The terrifying thing about these ideologies is they can lead to real world action. These young men were involved in the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, and the earlier Charlottesville 2017 Unite the Right rally, where a right-wing terrorist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person. The Christchurch massacre is mentioned in both the episode and our Zoom chat: the ultimate evil outworking of such toxic ideologies.
The young men in it are steeped in internet culture, using the art and science of memes, live-streaming and social media to hook new prey. And they do it under the guise of humour.
"I'm not sure if it's the same in New Zealand, but there is this thing in the UK right-wing, as an aspect of culture wards, where people bemoan not being able to say anything anymore. When someone tells a racist or offensive joke, if there is a negative response it's countered by: 'Can't you take a joke?'"
While "Extreme and Online" reveals the unambiguously dark sides of the internet, there's gradations of both negative and positive in the remaining episodes. Theroux is fascinated by the reach of the internet and social media, and how they have impacted different extreme worlds.
In "Rap's Frontline", Florida rappers inhabit a world where social media output couples with extreme lyrical content to create tensions that can boil over into violence. Beefs are shared on SoundCloud for millions to hear.
The genre has had many criminals and many casualties. 9lokkNine, who is interviewed from prison in "Rap's Frontline", was sentenced to seven years inside last December after pleading guilty to identity theft and possession of unregistered firearms. A track he features on, 233's, has been streamed more than 350 million times on Spotify.
One of the scene's most successful artists, XXXtentacian, was gunned down in a Florida parking lot, aged 20, in 2018. His posthumous fame, with more than one billion listens on Spotify, is testament to the power of this scene. And herein lies the problem: trap (encapsulated by one of the scene's stars as "factual pain music") is powerful because it's real. And real life on the impoverished streets of Florida is brutal.
"It's double-edged," says Theroux. "Young artists can build a following and have their music heard, but their success incentivises [violent] behaviour."
He feels that the internet has been unambiguously positive for the porn industry, which appears in the third episode of the series.
"In the past, performers were at the mercy of casting couch. They would get day rates for work they had no control over and didn't always know what they were getting into. Now they can call out predators and be in control of their own content."
While Theroux acknowledges the internet can provide platforms for the toxic and the extreme, he is also aware that the democratising of the media is also positive.
"The days where a few people from Oxford and Cambridge ran the BBC and controlled the narrative have passed," he says.
It would be easy, as a parent, to watch Theroux's new series and despair. The rabbit holes are many and often terrifying, and navigating this brave new world can seem overwhelming. How does he, a father of three, approach the internet when it comes to his children?
"As my children got older what became apparent was the huge extent to which the internet permeated their lives," he says. "Really, I try to steer a very even course between over-worrying and under-worrying.
"I think it's important to take things seriously enough, but not too seriously. I try to talk to them, not let them disappear into the digital ether."
Louis Theroux: Forbidden America premieres on Prime on Wednesday, March 9.
Washington Post: Sweatpants? No. But elastic waistbands? Absolutely.