The Call of the Weird : Travels in American Subcultures

Louis Theroux makes documentaries about subjects i find fascinating, though his movies always end up making me feel a little queasy. I don't know if it's my latent journalism muscle or simply the same cringe-twinge that you might get from an average episode of The Office, but there's almost always at least one moment, after he's gone in-depth with his subjects and gotten them to expose more honesty than you'd really expect, that he says something off.

The first time I noticed this was when I watched The Most Hated Family in America, a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church's founding family back before they were individually famous (e.g., People knew the church was full of hateful bigots, but the country wasn't really on a first-name basis with any of them). 90% of the film is intensely interesting, gripping stuff. Then he corners a couple of the younger teens to ask them if they really believed this stuff, and wouldn't they rather just be normal and have boyfriends?

To me, it felt like overstepping the bounds of journalism and into the realm of pop psychologist. Not only was it fairly mean to the kids to put them on the spot like that on camera, it to me sort of undercut the documentary up to that point. Theroux clearly had a point of view; how fair a representation was everything else he'd shown us? I found that almost all of his films have similar points of uncomfortable blurring of the lines, as if he goes around not to document stories but to insert himself in the middle of them as savior.

The Call of the Weird is his book-length re-expoloration of some of his earlier American documentary subjects, in an attempt to ... reconnect with them? His motives don't really matter, as the book is largely a recitation of his films, followed by interviewing the subjects, who have little desire to open up yet again.

Theroux makes a number of reflexively defensive points: in his foreward, he talks about how he hoped the book wouldn't be just another “Look at all the freaks in America!” roadshow, or if it was that it would the purest distillation of the form (as if this is better?). In the book proper, he seems on an eternal journey of enlightenment, realizing that the former subjects have nothing to gain by talking to him, or that it's kind of silly to expect a specific former subject who had never dropped his “persona” to suddenly open up his deepest personal feelings simply because Theroux wants him to.
All that being said, the discussions of the various subcultures are fascinating, because as I said at the top Theroux picks interesting subjects and documents them well. Additionally, the most revealing part of the book came when Theroux mentioned his surprise that the UFO people were so unwilling to look skeptically at their beliefs. He talked of his own tendency toward self-doubt and “logical-mindedness,” and his inability to understand people that wouldn't look so askance at themselves. This for me explains my reactions to his documentaries, though it more suggests that maybe it's just not the best field/format for him.

In all, the book suffers from the primary problem that Theroux's documentaries do: He mapped out an entire story in his head that didn't materialize in the same way once he took it on the road. What we're left with is his attempts to reconcile the two.