Is Louis Theroux tired of being Louis Theroux? He is back with a new series, Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America (BBC Two), in which he travels around the US meeting controversial people. He has done this before, many times, and the weariness is showing.
You can hear it in his voiceover, which sounds positively depressed; and you can see it in the fact that he no longer hangs back and lets people dig their own graves. Instead, he’s become a bit more confrontational, a little less patient. “When did you lose your sense of humour?” he demanded of one interviewee who asked Theroux to leave.
The subject of this film was the American far-Right, which is territory that Theroux has covered before. But the focus was fresh: the ways in which the internet and social media are shaping the rise of the movement.
Some of his subjects were easy to mock. “Get the f— out of my house,” said Beardson Beardly, the interviewee mentioned above. “I’m not in your house,” Theroux pointed out, because they were standing in the street. Beardly later recorded a rant that sounded like the boasting of a nine-year-old: “Guess what, Louis? My country is better than yours, my friends are cooler than you, I’m smarter, I’m stronger.” Less hilariously, we saw a video of him making rape threats.
A self-described internet troll nicknamed Baked Alaska spent three hours live-streaming himself unpleasantly pranking passers-by, and left the distinct impression that he would have preferred to be doing Jackass-style stunts that weren’t restricted to a small audience of racists – he just had no talent for anything but this particular grift.
Another interviewee was Nick Fuentes, a slicker operator with political ambitions – although still broadcasting from his parents’ basement. Like some of the others, he played the game of pretending he was not a white supremacist. Theroux found interesting territory here: the ways in which young, Far Right figures are packaging extreme statements as “irony”, co-opting meme culture to appeal to an audience of gamers. Fuentes smirked that he did not believe women should have the vote.
Theroux didn’t address the fact that, by putting Fuentes in a BBC documentary, he was handing him free publicity. We have also reached the stage where a subject met Theroux while wearing a Louis Theroux t-shirt, and this film included footage of people making YouTube videos about being interviewed for this film – all very meta, but perhaps a sign that Theroux should take his documentary-making skills and apply them to something else.
