A good movie

To be honest, I had never watched a documentary by Louis Theroux before but, since the guy had a solid reputation and since this one was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. On top of that, I had seen earlier the same day ‘The Social Reckoning’ so it was pretty cool to go further with the topic of how negative, even toxic, the internet and the social media in particular have become. I had heard about such hyper-masculine guys online but I had never watched or followed their ‘work’ so it was interesting to discover them. Eventually, just as Facebook in ‘The Social Reckoning’, it didn’t matter if these guys were telling what they really thought or if they told some complete lies, the bottom line was how much money they could make and how could they attract more and more views and viewers to reach this goal. Evidently, once again, just like Facebook, it was obvious that the more shocking, the more controversial, the more negative they were, the more attention they were getting and, therefore, in their eyes, the more successful they were. By the way, I thought that it was intriguing that Theroux‘s work was actually much more similar to what these guys were doing than you might expect and it seemed to be a missed opportunity that Theroux never went in this direction. Indeed, even though I had never seen anything from Theroux before, I already knew who he was because, pretty much like all these toxic dudes, he was doing some massive branding as well. Every documentary he made featured his name first and then the actual topic of the documentary and he was always displayed prominently on all the posters. Sure, Theroux might argue that his message was much more positive and that he was not interested in money whatsoever but their approach was strikingly similar and I wonder why he had decided to put himself so much in the forefront (It reminded me of Werner Herzorg who is the only other documentary maker I know who does it so much as well). Eventually, you could blame these guys to create such a negative toxic environment, just like you could blame Facebook and the other social media but, at the end of the day, it seems that that we are attracted by all this negative energy. Even myself I very often end up watching some other true-crime series on Netflix while I could be watching some great classics instead. Anyway, even though it was nothing really mind-blowing, it was definitely a decent watch though.