Why I love Louis Theroux

Louis Ther­oux is the anti­dote to the idea that to be a suc­cess­ful jour­nal­ist you have to go the Jere­my Pax­man route of bark­ing at peo­ple. With his kind­ness, com­pas­sion and light­ness of com­mu­nica­tive touch, he brings out peo­ple who would cow­er or hard­en in con­fronta­tions with old-school inter­roga­tors. He is the Colum­bo of doc­u­men­tar­i­ans, dis­arm­ing sub­jects with his eccen­tric­i­ties and will­ing­ness to let oth­ers wield the upper hand.

Most of all he is curi­ous and moti­vat­ed to expose the truth behind con­tro­ver­sy. And his ​‘truths’ are not nar­row and neat pack­ages. They are the shades of a per­son, who they are and how they feel. He is not out to pin blame or to cry ​‘aha!’ as he unmasks and humil­i­ates. He is out to bring tow­er­ing fig­ures down to a con­ver­sa­tion­al human lev­el. Above all, he is a gift­ed and fear­less conversationalist.

From an audi­ence per­spec­tive he is the ide­al guide to dark or shady mat­ters. His play­ful quirks and dead­pan humour give view­ers a rea­sons to stay as he gets to know pae­dophiles, the crim­i­nal­ly insane or Max Clif­ford. I first saw him in the flesh when he con­duct­ed a Q&A with Joshua Oppen­heimer after a screen­ing of The Look of Silence. It was an event that was beamed across 100 plus cin­e­mas and marked a big push by the dis­trib­u­tor to get this impor­tant film out to a wider audi­ence. Geno­cide isn’t a theme where most main­stream cin­e­ma audi­ences are inclined to con­front. They need an incen­tive, and Ther­oux is just that. It’s hard to con­ceive of a more charm­ing tro­jan horse that could smug­gle heavy doc­u­men­tary sub­jects to audi­ences under the guise of entertainment.

He has shown with his new fea­ture, My Sci­en­tol­ogy Movie, that he is as capa­ble of work­ing at a fea­ture length as he is with­in a TV hour, and that he can play evoca­tive­ly with con­ven­tion­al form. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, no one from The Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy pre­sent­ed them­selves to be psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly explored by Ther­oux. So, inspired by Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, he has used infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by ex-mem­bers to recon­struct the cost­ly ​‘audit­ing’ and ​‘train­ing’ that takes place with­in the organ­i­sa­tion. Most enter­tain­ing­ly, actors are lined up to play Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy leader, David Mis­cav­ige and its most famous mem­ber, Tom Cruise, using exist­ing speech­es as audi­tion scripts.

For­mer inspec­tor gen­er­al of the Reli­gious Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­tre (aka Sci­en­tol­ogy), Mar­ty Rath­bun over­sees and guides the cast­ing, pro­vid­ing insights that are fun­ny because they are star­tling. [“All these guys that you would like, they’re not Mis­cav­ige.”] He and Ther­oux make for an unlike­ly pair of movie-mak­ers. One: lanky, charm­ing and estab­lished. The oth­er: burly, assertive and touched by oth­er-world­li­ness caused by decades of liv­ing a secret life. Togeth­er they pro­duce a trou­bling vision of the mechan­ics of mass brain­wash­ing but, as ever with Ther­oux, the USP is humour.

Lack of humour is the rea­son why the mass­es switch off from issues that it would be in our inter­est to care about. When we’re tired because life has flat­tened us, we don’t want to load up on more sources of sor­row and con­cern. In the press screen­ing of My Sci­en­tol­ogy Movie, laugh­ter bounced around the cin­e­ma at reg­u­lar inter­vals. One gen­tle­man was scis­sor­ing with mirth. It was care­ful­ly earned laugh­ter, only ven­tured as the back­swing of engage­ment with the core beliefs of Scientology.

The ten­sion that fills the production’s encoun­ters with church mem­bers is rich with absurd hilar­i­ty. These mys­te­ri­ous fig­ures appear out of nowhere, using pecu­liar but con­sis­tent tac­tics to under­mine the doc­u­men­tary. Ther­oux con­fronts these sit­u­a­tions with his trade­mark strain of ques­tion­ing. The reac­tions he elic­its – in the con­text of what we have pre­vi­ous­ly been told about Sci­en­tol­o­gist pro­cess­ing – makes a sad kind of sense.

We nev­er see inside the Church, but in the dis­ci­ples it sends out and the way that they shrink from ratio­nal engage­ment, My Sci­en­tol­ogy Movie shows how far they have trav­elled from the out­side world. It’s poignant and frus­trat­ing and creepy and wild. With­out Ther­oux rep­re­sent­ing a pil­lar of earnest, loose human­i­ty, the film would buck­le under the weight of its own tor­tured strangeness.

I love that he doesn’t shy away from being him­self in the most strain­ing of sce­nar­ios. To me, he is our mag­ic bul­let and my hope is that he is fired into ever more-chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions. I want to see him talk­ing to a rapist, prob­ing away at the abhor­rent sur­face misog­y­ny and vio­lence, to find the core beliefs of some­one who has will­ing­ly trau­ma­tised anoth­er. I’d like him to do an epic char­ac­ter study of such a man, stick­ing with him for hun­dreds of hours and turn­ing the result into a fea­ture doc­u­men­tary. I’d like him to inter­view every­one around this crim­i­nal: his fam­i­ly, the vic­tim, the law enforcers at every lev­el. Ther­oux can do this. Ther­oux has the pow­er. This is why I love Louis Theroux.