Mike reviews: Louis Theroux's Call of the Weird

Michael Moorcock · Tweet this Post! #1 10-16-2005, 06:53 PM

Odd and odder

Michael Moorcock enjoys Louis Theroux's sideways look at the underside of the States in Call of the Weird

Saturday October 15, 2005
The Guardian

Buy Call of the Weird at the Guardian bookshop

Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures
by Louis Theroux
280pp, Macmillan, Â£17.99

In central Texas I belong to a Bill of Rights defence group, one of thousands across America opposing potential abuses of the Patriot Act. My colleagues include Laura Ashley liberals, media professionals, insurance salesmen, musicians, cowboys, survivalists, farmers and anarcho-socialists. Their range of beliefs covers atheism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, Sufism, Buddhism, Zionism, pantheism and, of course, Christian fundamentalism. Some want to ban all guns, some want their own WMDs so they can be on a par with Washington and the UN, whom they believe are plotting to set up US concentration camps. Not a few, including one of my best friends, are convinced the truth about flying saucers and Kennedy's assassination is being obscured by the CIA. In order to demonstrate that his bizarre conspiracy theories weren't new, I gave my friend an 1870s book proving that the Pope had killed Lincoln. Impressed, he told me it made a lot of sense.

What unites my group's environmentalists, gay activists and anti-abortionists is the conviction that George W Bush represents a self-interested elite threatening the Constitution. Their combination of political activism, practical common sense and nutty idealism has its roots in Puritanism, Tom Paine, Transcendentalism and the simple beliefs of desperate, often ignorant, immigrants. Like Louis Theroux I'm charmed by them, yet they are so ill-informed and essentially disenfranchised that I'm also frustrated. Too often they rely on myth, prejudice and folk wisdom as remedies for social ills, inevitably choosing the barmiest, least effective solutions. It's a form of self-destruction.

The essays in this book were written after Theroux decided to return to the US and revisit the people and scenes of his TV documentaries. Some subjects, like Ike Turner (who pulled out halfway through) never made it to the screen at all. Other films explored the fringes of rightwing politics, flying saucer cults, prostitution, porn movies and black music, mostly in the West and Midwest.

Actually the weirdos aren't for me the most interesting people in Call of the Weird. Anyone involved in British popular culture since the 1950s knows the mind-set of racists and cultists from our home-grown examples (the BNP has many more members than Aryan Nation, one of the white supremacist groups Theroux filmed). I was more intrigued by his quest for Hayley, a prostitute he had interviewed (and in the line of duty patronised), through the legal brothel circuit of Nevada, or the scam artists who sell already impoverished punters a dream of wealth and power; his own attempts to form relationships with ambivalent gangsta rappers or his mixed feelings towards avuncular racists who wanted to know if he was Jewish as much as he wanted to know the realities of Ike and Tina's relationship. Another theme of the essays is his constant inability to connect with people he hoped to know more intimately once the film crew wasn't with him, but who proved as wary of him as ever.

In fact these failures to connect ultimately form a conscious part of Theroux's narrative. Nobody fully trusts an English, middle-class white liberal. Why should they? He's too honest. His questions are too direct. Theroux wonders about why he wants to develop relationships with sex workers, the survivors of the Heaven's Gate cult or the woman who trained her pretty little blonde twins to sing viciously racist songs and pose sexily in support of the neo-Nazi cause. What, he asks, if we're not all fictional characters writing ourselves with our beliefs?

Call of the Weird is crammed with original insights, including Ike Turner's understanding that Clinton was "the first black president", the author's conclusion that racism is a kind of addiction, sharing something in common with crack and crank, a guru's observation that "they don't care if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel".

Theroux's TV documentaries reveal a fine journalist whose unassuming objectivity and curiosity are almost innocent, whose strengths frequently lie in his very lack of empathy for people with whom he attempts to strike a rapport and yet with whom he has a subtle affinity. Like them, he harbours very few preconceptions and is prepared to take people on their own terms, musing that microcosms often have as much validity and as many hypocrites and heroes as the larger world. In the end, to his great credit, without avoiding the sleaze and the ignorance or questioning his own fascination, Theroux leaves us wondering just how attractive and superior our normality really is.

Michael Moorcock's The Vengeance of Rome will be published by Cape next year.

Azariel · Tweet this Post! #2 10-16-2005, 08:09 PM

Was this suppose to be a review to Rome?! :?

Someone shoot the editor for bad journalism if so. . . :(

Typhoid_Mary · Tweet this Post! #3 10-16-2005, 11:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Azariel

Was this suppose to be a review to Rome?! :?

No, it's Mike's review of Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux.

Nice review, Mike. I'll pick this up when it comes out in paperback.

Azariel · Tweet this Post! #4 10-17-2005, 02:07 AM

Ah, I see. . . so lost :D

Michael Moorcock · Tweet this Post! #5 10-17-2005, 06:14 PM

Theroux has done some very original documentaries, both in the UK and US. I really enjoyed this, his first book.
We all get confused, pard. Vengeance isn't out until Feb. I should be going to England to tour it a bit, with luck, in January.

Poetgrrl · Tweet this Post! #6 10-17-2005, 08:08 PM

another piece i need to be on the lookout for, to keep the horizons open.

thank you.

Typhoid_Mary · Tweet this Post! #7 10-18-2005, 04:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Moorcock

Vengeance isn't out until Feb. I should be going to England to tour it a bit, with luck, in January.

Cool! I look forward to meeting you! :)

DeeCrowSeer · Tweet this Post! #8 10-19-2005, 02:57 AM

And I look forward to hiding in a corner, being too shy to say anything! :(

I didn't get to see the whole of Channel 4's recent 50 Greatest Documentaries run-down, but I think Theroux was well-represented, both as a documentarist (?) and as a "talking head". Always been a fan of his, since the early TV Nation days (if my memory isn't playing tricks on me), so I'll have to put this book on my list to Santa.

Michael Moorcock · Tweet this Post! #9 10-19-2005, 09:16 AM

Yes, you're right about TV Nation. I recently caught a glimpse, with the sound off, of a PBS trailer which looked as if it was for the documentary he did featuring the two little 'Nazi' girls who sing hate songs. Coming up on KLRU, Texas, at any rate.

manmiles · Tweet this Post! #10 10-19-2005, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Moorcock

Theroux has done some very original documentaries, both in the UK and US. I really enjoyed this, his first book.
We all get confused, pard. Vengeance isn't out until Feb. I should be going to England to tour it a bit, with luck, in January.

*Bangs head against desk* Damn, I'm off on Holiday to America to see my girlfriend. Ah well, I know what my priorities are. Although would have really loved to have met a literary hero of mine.

DeeCrowSeer · Tweet this Post! #11 10-19-2005, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Moorcock

I recently caught a glimpse, with the sound off, of a PBS trailer which looked as if it was for the documentary he did featuring the two little 'Nazi' girls who sing hate songs.

That's a very strange one, watching the mother drive along in the truck, with her car stereo blaring that

out... and then the "concerts" they go to! Eeesh. :( He always seems like such an affable chap, but to spend so much time with people I would find genuinely scary, he must also have quite a pair on him. As it were.

He can't rap for toffee though! :)

Michael Moorcock · Tweet this Post! #12 10-19-2005, 11:30 AM

As I say in my review, I think he's sort of switched off in a way -- that is, he has difficulty empathising with people. I've known other people like that and they ask the 'naive' questions most of us don't think to ask or are too sensitive to ask. It's his great strength.

manmiles · Tweet this Post! #13 10-19-2005, 11:42 AM

I saw these documentaries a few months back when I borrowed them from the library. They're definatly showing of the more screwed up side of humanity. Especially the one about the UFO Hunters and the survivalists, which involved a visit to an Aryan Settlement...that was sickening to watch. It's sad to believe that people still think like that.

Michael Moorcock · Tweet this Post! #14 10-19-2005, 12:31 PM

There's no doubt, too, that antisemitism is on the increase at the moment. Still in the margins, I think, but Israel's policies as regards Palestine have not improved the stituation and have allowed people to air their antisemitism in a new way.

manmiles · Tweet this Post! #15 10-19-2005, 12:48 PM

After the Holocaust, it seems almost shocking that people would let Antiscemetism sway their beliefs.

Kalessin · Tweet this Post! #16 10-19-2005, 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Moorcock

There's no doubt, too, that antisemitism is on the increase at the moment. Still in the margins, I think, but Israel's policies as regards Palestine have not improved the stituation and have allowed people to air their antisemitism in a new way.

Aye - 'I'm not anti-semitic, I'm anti-Israeli' is an oft-heard phrase at the moment. The Spectator printed a deservedly vicious attack recently on La Monde's tendency to cloak clear anti-semitism under a pretense of merely opposing Israeli policies. Interestingly, when La Monde was convicted of anti-semitism recently by a French court, only The Guardian of all the British newspapers commented on it - and they only did so after a major American newspaper had commented on the lack of response in the European press.

Kalessin · Tweet this Post! #17 10-19-2005, 04:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by manmiles

After the Holocaust, it seems almost shocking that people would let Antiscemetism sway their beliefs.

But then, we do live in a world where the British government is seriously considering renaming Holocaust day "Genocide day", due to complaints from Muslim leaders.