“Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere” Review
Director: Adrian Choa Cast: Louis Theroux, Harrison Sullivan, Kacey May Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 91 min. MPAA: TV-MA
There’s an awareness and a performance that await Louis Theroux when delving into the vile influencers of the manosphere. When he interviews Harrison Sullivan, aka HSTikkyTokky, at his gym, the subject addresses the camera directly rather than Louis, who is right in front of him. HSTikkyTokky apologizes, having been used to speaking to the camera and the digital audience behind it. HSTikkyTokky is most at home with this type of recording, not when there’s someone else in front of him asking whether there’s any moral incongruity in this figure demonizing OnlyFans while running an OnlyFans management company.
Louis’s many interviews with the manipulators of the manosphere are both routine and revealing. He lays a solid foundation by addressing the appeal that boys and men have to such influential figures, recognizing the power they believe they’re owed and the sacrifices they make for a lifestyle they’ll never achieve. The tantalizing notion of being openly sexist, homophobic, aggressive, anti-semitic, and racist is huge for a young audience watching someone like HSTikkyTokky, openly admitting to being all of that. The best way to dismantle these influencers is not by picking apart their logic, but by humiliating them by revealing a weakness beneath all the bravado. That’s where someone like Louis can be useful with his interview style that gently probes his subjects, but also questions what doesn’t seem right or contradictory in their mindset.
In many ways, Louis is an ideal interviewer for these types of people. While his subjects may resort to insulting this lanky man in glasses with a curious voice, he remains firm in his efforts to peel back the hypocrisy and paranoia lurking beneath a transparent layer of perceived masculinity. Manosphere advocates are pushed on how countintuitive his stunts of degrading women and assaulting perceived pedophiles can be, only to be met with the root of these actions: money and attention. Nothing else matters. Sometimes, however, it’s just naked bigotry, as when Louis brings up how disowning a gay son is homophobia, to which HS disagrees. That lack of understanding of the definition hangs in the air as Louis lets these dorks hang themselves.
For a documentarian who has covered white supremacists and scientologists, Louis has enough experience to cause some easy ripples within this highly fragile framework of masculinity. His meeting with Myron Gaines on the Fresh & Fit podcast leads to a meeting with Myron’s wife. While Myron is open to having multiple wives down the line, his wife is a bit too sheepish to discuss this matter with him in the room. She refused to appear in the rest of the documentary and would later leave Myron. HSTikkyTokky is interviewed in front of his mother, who mostly defends her son but deeply disagrees with his philosophies on women. The interview was conducted after HS crashed his car. He would later be arrested for failing to appear in court.
Conspiracy theories bubble up with ease, as when Sneako believes that the world is run by a Satanic cabal through something as simple as covering an eye for a photoshoot. As Louis hears of this theory, he’s initially intrigued by this mindset, but not above questioning the validity of such wild claims. It’s refreshing to hear him listen to a manosphere influencer claim that all the buildings surrounding them were built by men, then respond with “Do we know that for sure?”
At 90 minutes, Inside the Manosphere still only feels like it’s scratching the surface, despite the many doors to this world Louis Theroux can open with ease. There’s a deeper angle to explore with how these misogynistic morons view everything as recordable content, from feuds they have with family members to the very interviews they have in this documentary. In the movie, there are posts made immediately after interviews in which the influencers mock Louis (often using slurs) and claim he’s going to make a hit piece about them. But did they not know about his other documentarians going into this? Did they not check that his interview targets are usually figures considered to be on the moral fringes and nasty provocateurs? Perhaps they did and only recognized these interviews as a chance for more exposure. For many of them, that’s all that matters, and it creates a very phony lifestyle that deserves to be dragged further into the light, especially with how HS falls back on his chat for asking Louis about the genocide in Gaza. Perhaps the perceptions of how we consume media and become a part of it are too grand a topic for the scope of men with very limited worldviews blasted on social media. That said, it’s still impressive how much Louis can evoke from these masquerading alpha males and how their power diminishes with every hypocritical admission.
