Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary

British American filmmaker Louis Theroux has spent much of his long career interviewing people it’s easy to hate: from members of the Westboro Baptist church, to bigoted residents of whites-only communities in South Africa, to openly racist settlers in the West Bank. He has never really “exposed” anyone as an immoral wretch or a political extremist—because he’s chosen subjects who have never pretended to be anything they aren’t. But his relaxed, disarming style did put these various fundamentalists at ease, allowing them to subtly reveal intimate details about themselves: their precise motivations, their internal moral reasoning, their emotional lives, the lies they tell themselves—whatever. The reasonable liberal viewer will be left still hating Theroux’s subjects, but he will also understand them more.