From the outset, in making programmes, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt. I tried to put a generous construction on wrongdoing where I found it: a lack of information; a misguided sense of priorities; an understandable urge to imbue one’s life with a sense of importance. My working practice was to see evil as a side effect of misguidedness or selfishness or woundedness, but only very rarely as an active attempt to do wrong.
I also preferred to believe that people are capable of redemption and change, and that, even when they aren’t, there are positive traits and small compensations in almost everyone. Good and bad are intermixed in people. They are – if I may borrow from the language of gender – non-binary. I don’t even think the terms ‘spectrum’ or ‘grey area’ do justice to the Dulux colour chart of how people behave and make sense of the universe.
If I can make a single observation based on almost everyone I’ve interviewed, it’s that we are complicated. We hate those we love. We feel exalted in being debased. Victims can be bullies. Suffering can feel comfortable. Insanity can make perfect sense.
‘Everything I am I hate,’ a pimp in Mississippi once said to me, quoting St Paul. I looked up the verse. It is from his letter to the Romans. It runs, in the King James version: ‘For that which I do I allow not. For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.’
We feed ourselves lies – about the unconquerable strength of a mother’s love or the ennobling quality of suffering. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Uh-huh. OK. Unless it leaves you in a wheelchair, with PTSD and feeling suicidal.
And so where does that leave us? Just struggling forward, doing the best we can, with no grand answers, making tiny decisions to try to be slightly better.
Early in my career, journalists sometimes asked if I ever worried whether I might run out of weird subjects.
Surely there was an upper limit on the number of UFO cults and sexual fetishes in the world? I can’t recall what I said, probably something to the effect that the carnival of human folly shows no sign of ending, nor does the crooked timber of humanity promise to straighten up any time soon.
Weirdness is built into the human condition. It is an inescapable fact of life. We are born. From somewhere invisible to us our consciousness emerges. It flickers for a few years, lighting up our crania like the flame inside a magic lantern, then sputters out. A once-thinking, once-feeling mass of humanity becomes inanimate. In the passage between those two points, we are slaves to a set of impulses hidden from us, both within us and without. Sex is weird, religion is weird, family is weird. Having sex with multiple partners is weird. Having sex with the same person for seventy years is also weird. Our emotions are weird, and not having emotions is weird.
Death is really weird.
I find it hard to imagine what a rational human would even look like. I am getting a vision of Spock, but he was half-Vulcan.
As someone who struggles with worry and self-doubt, it may seem odd that I fell into a line of work that brings me into contact with humanity at its strangest and most extreme. I tend to think the two things are connected: I enjoy the company of people whose lifestyles are outlandish or who are faced with situations freighted with psychological anguish, because it relieves the tension inside me. It’s a bit like tinnitus: presumably the symptoms are relieved when there is actual ringing going on. I once remarked in an interview, in an uncharacteristic moment of insight, that the qualities that made me good at my job were the same ones that made me bad at life. I’m not too sure but I think I meant that I have a habit of seeing life as though from behind a glass. I allow other people to have emotions.
In my own life, I have tended to avoid living too much. ‘As for life we have our servants to do that for us.’ So says a character in Axël, a French drama famous mainly for that line. A part of me feels the same way about my documentary subjects. Or, if that is overstated, then at the very least that I think whatever angst and self-conflict they are living through convinces me that my own issues are small by comparison. I find relief in the reassurance that others are afflicted by the same turmoil and confusion as I am or by worse. But improvisation is a survival skill, in life as in documentary-making. Everyone is sad and confused and making it up as they go along, walking in their own way on the weird side.
And when I’m not working, when my gaze turns inward, I sometimes probe and doubt and investigate myself to the point of paralysis. To quote Nietzsche a final time, ‘In time of peace the warlike man attacks himself.’ I’d like to think I am getting better. My wife and children have helped me to see that there is life outside work. I am grateful to them for that and so much more.
I have managed to make a career in TV through a singular insight, made through instinct and rationalized after the fact: that the proper subject of documentaries is people doing things they’re not supposed to do. The ‘supposed tos’ may themselves be wrong-headed; the people may be right in what they do. But the feeling of being at loggerheads with certain norms and conventions is always present. That is what I interrogate. That is what I am interested in.
Oddly – or not oddly – I made this the centrepiece of my work because of my own frailties: because I am overly hemmed in by ‘supposed tos’ and ‘alloweds’. My fretted and oppressed wishes emerged in the work, in a kind of fixation with people forced through inclination or circumstance to behave in ways I have not or cannot.
One day in early 2018, while working on a story about rape on American campuses, I did an interview in New York with an artist, Emma Sulkowicz, who had been assaulted while at Columbia by a fellow student. We spoke in Emma’s studio in the area of Brooklyn known as Dumbo. The studio was close to a bridge carrying subway lines and we kept being interrupted by the rumble of passing trains.
After the interview was over, with the afternoon free, I left my crew and, following the map on my iPhone like a dowsing-rod, I walked up to my old neighbourhood in Fort Greene. I had the feeling, being back in New York, of time travel into my past. But it was confusing: nothing was where I remembered it. I lost my bearings, turning around and around, not quite able to figure out from the phone which way I should be going. Then a video call came in from my youngest son, Walter, who was missing me. I turned the camera around to show him video of my surroundings and told him about the tall buildings and details on the street: the yellow taxis, a mail box, a tree that had grown around a metal railing.
A little later, I arrived at the apartment where I’d once lived during one of my break-ups with Sarah, and where I’d hosted the porn performer, the survivalist, the Christian evangelist and the space channel for my ‘Weird Christmas’, and I recalled how one night I’d cycled home over the Brooklyn Bridge and braked too hard, sending myself over the handle bars, and had woken up the next morning, barely able to move. I remembered watching On The Waterfront on my own and the Marlon Brando character had been the same age I was, twenty-eight. And then a memory came to me of visiting Sarah in the apartment in Williamsburg and filming her on a second-hand video camera as she made origami boxes.
I walked to the corner of the park. The old bodegas were now speciality coffee shops and trendy cocktail bars. I continued up to Clinton Hill, and at Clinton and Washington I went down into the subway station, waiting for a G train up to Williamsburg. All this time I’d been looking for a moment of recognition, and it was only here that it came: the smell of the air-conditioned subway was still the same, an indefinable mixture of metal and sweat and cleaning products.
Williamsburg was now forested with high-rises, shiny condo complexes, jarring amid the terraces of brownstones, the low-level thicket of old Brooklyn neighbourhoods. There were European tourists milling around, wearing backpacks. Everything was different and I resented the sight of people who didn’t remember what I remembered. I thought about how awful it would be to live forever and be subjected to an onslaught of perpetual change, nothing ever remaining the way it was – a constant process of adjustment like a wall being ov
erlaid with coat after coat of paint, or an old cassette tape being recorded over until it was crackly and inaudible.
And then I walked back down into the subway.
Picture Credits
All images are from the author’s personal collection, with the exception of the following:
Page 13 © Martyn Goddard / Shutterstock
Page 116 and page 183 © BBC Photo Library
Page 167 © James Bareham
Page 187 © Johnston Press / SWNS
Page 282 © Ian Cook Photography
Page 365 © Antony Armstrong / crudelydrawn.co.uk
Also by Louis Theroux
The Call of the Weird
First published 2019 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2019 by Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-8037-9
Copyright © Scratch Pictures 2019
Front cover photograph © Paul Marc Mitchell
The right of Louis Theroux to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The picture credits on p. 395 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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Gotta Get Theroux This Page 39
