‘I wouldn’t say that around my mum… I’d get a slap…’
Louis Theroux has made a career out of shining a light on topics that might otherwise have remained in the shadows. His groundbreaking documentaries about topics as varied as pronography, the American penal system and brain injuries are often funny, poignant and heartbreaking, sometimes within the same scene. Inside the Manosphere, Theroux’s inaugural outing for Netflix, has moments of greatness, and is always compelling, but this is a topic that has been covered extensively elsewhere. In the last year alone we have had James Bloodworth’s book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, as well as the BBC’s recent documentary Men of the Manosphere. Too often here, it feels as though Louis is raking over familiar ground…
Focusing on a group of social media influencers with names like HSTikkyTokky and Sneako (who I’d never heard of but, who are, according to the students that I teach, household names amongst their generation), Inside the Manosphere does a good job in pressing these awful men about their ridiculous beliefs. In the film’s best moments, Theroux cracks the thin veneer of confidence that all these men seem to share and forces them to confront how ridiculous they sound. Theroux is, as ever, thoughtful and fearless in his questioning, often goading his subjects into revealing something that they clear didn’t intend to reveal at the start of the interview. My problem with Inside the Manosphere is that these men are not just all very similar, in their outlook, their manner, their beliefs, they’re also really dull. One of the joys of a great Louis Theroux documentary is meeting some of the larger than life characters that he interacts with. It becomes clear very early in this documentary that all the people involved in it are unremarkable and tedious individuals.
Despite the glut of media released about the manosphere in the last 18 months or so, I don’t think any of it has properly demonstrated why it has become so prevalent. Theroux spends too much time here platforming total losers instead of trying to examine what has made them so popular in the first place.