By Charles Hubbard, Second Year, Theatre and Performance
Louis Theroux’s most important attribute as a documentarian has always been his unobtrusiveness. The saying goes ‘when your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt them’ and he appears to have taken this to heart more than any of his contemporaries. More than content to sit back and letting his interviewees dig their own graves and then kill them with a long hard stare worthy of Paddington, Theroux never seeks the spotlight in his interviews to the point where some of his harsher critics have even found themselves questioning the extent to which he really disagrees with the subjects of his work.
So how does this characteristic come out in his latest work, Inside the Manosphere (2026), which opened on Netflix last week to decidedly mixed responses, especially with those who were previously unfamiliar with Theroux’s non-confrontational approach to interviews. Unfortunately, I personally found his tactics to be both too passive and too didactic, especially in how and when he chose to question (and not question) the male influencers he was speaking with.
He rarely actively pushes back on their vile rhetoric while spoon-feeding his own viewpoints to the audience in a way that the Theroux of ten years ago probably never would have done. This doc is certainly vital and a far more interesting exploration of the manosphere than last year’s undeservedly lauded Adolescence, which got the lion’s share of credit for starting a conversation that the show itself barely even hinted at. However, Theroux always seems to be at least one step away from really getting to the heart of the issue here.
The main subjects of the documentary are Harrison Sullivan (better known by his online name HStikkytokky), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), Myron Gaines and Justin Waller - all prominent online influencers who use their platform (and their audience of impressionable young men) to spray regressive misogyny, pro-gig economy propaganda and poisonous conspiracy theories all over an unregulated online hive.
These figures range from men in their mid-20s just looking for fame and attention to pseudo life coaches to people with legitimate political sway over the monstrous gargoyles of the current US presidential administration. Andrew Tate, the singlest biggest architect of the manosphere and the figure who most of these influencers fashion themselves off of is little more than a footnote here. Considering Tate and his brother are currently under judicial control due to his recent arrest for human trafficking, Theroux being granted an interview with him was probably out of the question (the far less high-profile men he interviews here were apparently very reluctant to agree to meet with Theroux in the first place). However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed when the doc ended with only a very cursory acknowledgement of Tate’s influence on the next generation of young men.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Theroux is complicit in these influencers’ actions and rhetoric, the lack of pushback he gives them at times is often incredibly frustrating and not exactly in a good way. The influencers constantly reference the film The Matrix (1999) when talking about the ways in which they are allegedly oppressed by the mainstream media.
Could Theroux not have pointed out to these vitriolic homophobes that this film was written and directed by two trans women? In one particularly stomach-churning example, Sullivan launches a ‘sting operation’ on a man who has agreed to go on a date with a member in Sullivan’s entourage. When the man shows up in his car to collect Sullivan’s friend, Sullivan accuses the man of being a sexual predator and encourages his followers to physically assault him. Where is Theroux when all this is happening? Watching the punches and kicks rain down upon a potentially innocent man on a live stream a few streets away.
I know intervening in the attack wasn’t an option for Theroux but if there ever was a time to call the police on his subject, this would have been it. Or at the very least try and discourage Sullivan from assaulting the ‘predator’ before he arrived. And yet Theroux opts for a downright unethical David Attenborough-esque ‘let life run its course’ approach, as if a group of men beating up a gay man is somehow the natural order of things that must be left uninterrupted.
Equally misguided is how little Theroux cedes the microphone to women in this documentary. We see multiple clips of the influencers, especially Myron Gaines, verbally abusing the women they invite on their shows yet always cut away right as the woman in question is about to retort. I’m not suggesting that Theroux is just as misogynistic as his subjects, just that inadvertently muting women’s voices downplays the horrific impact that the manosphere’s rhetoric can have on young women as well as young men.
He spends a good portion of this doc sympathetically detailing how many of these influencers come from broken homes and are the products of a fundamentally sociopathic media environment. Yet he never seems to extend the same bandwidth to his female subjects, instead seeing them as remote, non-intellectual objects of pity rather than real human beings.
However, I do have to give Theroux his flowers when it comes to how eclectic this documentary is when presenting the staggering breadth of the political issues that the manosphere touches. It would have been all too easy to restrict the doc’s focus solely to the hateful misogyny of these influencers and leave it at that but Theroux fully investigates how much this rhetoric extends into the realm of racism, homophobia and anti-semitism.
Many of these influencers seem to be happy saying ‘I just want to give young men purpose’ and ‘the Jews control the world’ in the same sentence and Theroux is incredibly clear-eyed at how quickly these men can swing their viewers from tips on playing to stock market to propagating anti-semitic conspiracy theories. The only real allies in their movement (if you can call it that) are money and hatred, which leaves an awful lot of enemies to push into the firing line.
All in all, I suspect much more prescient docs will be made on this same issue. For a film that is already coming out at least six years into the epidemic of the manosphere (Theroux breezes over how much the pandemic acted as a turbo-charger for these influencers’ viewpoints), it often feels like a blueprint of a much more bracing and startling doc still to come.
Emma Coleman
Tom Forbes
For how much he acknowledges how many prejudices fit into the bigoted soup of the manosphere, he neglects to fully dive into their complicated relationship with capitalism. This is especially disappointing considering I was most interested in how many of these men rail against the 9-5 working system yet fully embrace a gig economy, get-rich-quick mindset.
Theroux’s hard stares still have a little bite to them but I’d appreciate it if someone could nudge him slightly more into confrontation the next time he decided to put the microscope on a community of monsters
Featured Image: Billy Freeman / Unsplash
What did you think of Theroux's latest doc?
