Back for a new Netflix documentary about society’s fringes, Louis Theroux tackles the manosphere. But does he expose anything new? Our review: Had Louis Theroux embarked on his journey into the manosphere ecosystem ten or even five years earlier, Inside The Manosphere, could have been revelatory. Instead, his new Netflix documentary provides the latest evidence ... Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere review | A Venn diagram of weaponised toxicity
Back for a new Netflix documentary about society’s fringes, Louis Theroux tackles the manosphere. But does he expose anything new? Our review:
Had Louis Theroux embarked on his journey into the manosphere ecosystem ten or even five years earlier, Inside The Manosphere, could have been revelatory. Instead, his new Netflix documentary provides the latest evidence of a growing social problem in western society: the radicalisation of young men.
Theroux has discussed in recent weeks about how he was unable to land one sizeable fish on this journey: Andrew Tate, without doubt the only household name among the influencers he spends time with here. In many ways, Tate’s refusal to take part (he wanted money to appear) helps the film, given he has increasingly become a larger-than-life bogeyman in recent years.
Instead, Theroux is able to tap into the lives and minds of the men who orbit Tate, many of them holding just as much influence on the extreme fringes of the manosphere: Justin Waller, Myron Gaines and Harrison Sullivan (aka HS Tikky Tokky), who bookends the film. Indeed, Theroux makes the point that much of the manosphere is relatively benign (if still troubling) misogyny. His targets here are the worst exponents of this new normal.
The style is nevertheless familiar if you’ve seen any of Theroux’s previous work. He shows the inner workings of these men, and probes at their beliefs, but largely allows them to hang themselves with their own rhetoric. There is a sense that he’s hardened a touch with age, however, perhaps because he isn’t dealing with quirky outsiders or people he can sympathise with. These are all deeply narcissistic men, most lacking both empathy, any sense of moral core, and whose opinions often veer into racial and biological hatred. They are deeply hard to like and you frequently see Theroux struggling to find any redeeming features in them.
What Theroux manages, in his inimitable style, is to give them the space to reveal their own insecurities, contradictions and neuroses on camera. He pierces their self-made bubble.
The subjects know this going in – most of the people he’s able to talk to after ‘protracted negotiations’ broadcast to their followers that they anticipate a ‘hit piece’ from Louis. There’s also the sense that the representatives who set some of these conversations up know more about Theroux than the subjects themselves. You might frequently marvel at how these toxic men thought talking to Louis was in any way a good idea.
They may have believed that being part of a documentary for Netflix could boost their profile to a ‘mainstream media’ they constantly rail against. As HS repeatedly states, for many it’s about ‘clout’ and ‘exposure’. These influencers seem to know on some level that they’re grifters – even if they do believe the sexist, often racist ideology they peddle. There are two consistent trends among them: the contradictions in those beliefs, which Theroux steadily exposes, and, perhaps even more telling, their daddy issues.
Almost to a man, these influencers lacked (or now lack) a positive male role model, and as Theroux suggests, they have marketed this often subconscious trauma and turned into precisely what they tell their followers to rebel against. As part of how their ideology maps over conspiracy theory and popular culture, they’re obsessed with ‘red pilling’ – encouraging followers to free themselves from the ‘Matrix’ and chase wealth and success through masculine ends, usually at the expense of women.
What on some level they know is that, by weaponising young male disenchantment, they’ve created their own Matrix. They’re shackling young men into a manipulative subscription model which pays for the influencers’ luxurious lifestyles.
At one point, HS says that boys find men like him appealing because they understand that they’re locked in a system which keeps them poor and the elite wealthy. There is truth in this, even if it’s not so much a conspiracy as a natural process of neoliberal politics in the last half century.
Theroux doesn’t explore how this affects schoolboys in the UK or the US – it’s territory recently mined by Adolescence – but we often see groups of teenage men greeting people like HS, Ed Matthews or Sneako like gods. The younger men espouse views which suggest they look up to them as successes who’ve broken free from an elite system. We can at least see why, for them, it’s a powerful and tempting grift.
Sneako, in particular, has extreme views that have seen him banned on more platforms than most other influencers of his type. His messages overlap with the long-held and hateful conspiracy theory about a Zionist plot to rule the world. Another Jewish filmmaker, Jon Ronson, made a documentary series about this in 2000, The Secret Rulers Of The World. Back then, it was David Icke and Alex Jones talking about blood-drinking alien lizards or Satanic cults. Ronson’s point was that when theorists use these terms, they always actually mean Jews.
Now it’s no longer shock jocks or middle-aged men who went on Wogan claiming they were the Son of God espousing these fringe theories in lecture halls; its young influencers like Sneako. Men who lack the intellectual heft or historical awareness to understand how these ideas have been peddled for decades in various forms.
Here, Theroux touches on the fascinating Venn diagram of how the manosphere overlaps with the grift economy, with racist conspiracy theory, and ultimately the far right, though he chooses to ignore that latter strand. He touches on OnlyFans and the sexualisation of women as part of exploring the psychology, but there’s a deeper dive to be had there.
Much less surprising is how infantilised by their mothers most of these men are. Similarly, there’s the dull refrain of “how can I hate women? I love women” (the sexist equivalent of “but I have a black friend”).
Female voices are also side-lined a little. HS has glamorous influencers dotted around, whom he jokingly desribes as “cleaners”. But both Waller and Gaines discuss “one-way monogamy” in front of their girlfriends and wives, all of whom defend the lifestyle and choices of their men while their eyes appear to display a flicker of doubt about where their lives have taken them. There’s a sense that they too have been radicalised and that the men involved know it.
Waller and Gaines are intensely paranoid – indeed, all of these men are – and constantly veer between giving Theroux access and then denying it. There’s quiet satisfaction in seeing that Theroux’s probing of Gaines’ mindset may have allowed a woman to escape his toxic, controlling claws. It’s one of the few points of hope in an unremittingly bleak documentary.
Again, it’s a wonder why these people allowed their views to be opened up to a wider audience who will almost certainly be repulsed by them, or at least find them absurd. More than in any other Theroux documentary, however, Theroux appears to hover dangerously on the edge of a violent world that could turn on him at any point. This does happen online, in how these influencers panic and spiral at his presence (often after the fact). HS tries unsuccessfully to ‘gotcha’ Theroux at the end, but there are times where it feels as though the filmmaker might end up with a black eye here.
Perhaps this is all part of the tough image that these influencers try to project, though. All of them reveal themselves to be con-artists in the manner of a Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. They weaponise the very real problem of disenfranchised male youths crushed by the yawning economic gap between them and the wealthy. They exploit men in their teens and 20s who look to ‘strong men’ who reject tolerance, empathy and gender balance in order to assert control and dominance.
While these influencers believe their bullshit, they also know it is all bullshit – certainly the idea they can empower their bases to any kind of prosperity. Like Trump and Farage, they promise the stars and deliver the gutter.
So Theroux was probably never in real danger. And even if his film doesn’t reveal anything new, it does crystallise the desperate need for positive role models in society. As he says to HS when questioning the self-centered morality of his operation, “Can’t you just be a good person?”
We certainly need more good people now: more people like Louis Theroux, and far fewer like Andrew Tate.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
