L-Space- Louis Theroux in LA

After posting some brief thoughts on Orwell and I yesterday, I wasn't intending on writing another post quite so soon, but almost immediately ran into another interesting, albeit far more modern, article that took my attention thanks to its author. Louis Theroux has long been a cult favourite of mine and many others; son of iconic travel writer Paul Theroux (and brother to screenwriter Justin), Louis made his name with the BBC in the mid-90's through a series of investigative documentaries entitled Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. In each show the mild-mannered, amiable and very likable Louis threw himself into a particular sub-culture, usually in the US, and tried to understand what made the strange people he met click. As his popularity grew he began to make increasingly serious shows about more dangerous social issues from across the world; including introducing much of the non-US world to the cult of the Phelps family at the Westborough Baptist Church, in Louis' most famous work. In 2005 he released as yet his only book The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, which I own but unfortunately didn't enjoy as much as his TV work.

Louis Theroux & Friend

The article that I read was written by Louis (I have to always call him by his first name because he's so nice, so nice that my Grandmother named her dog after him) and published on the BBC News website as a preview of his upcoming three-part series of documentaries (the first is airing tomorrow night on BBC2 in Britain). It's entitled Louis Theroux: Moving to Los Angeles and exists as a personal take on the making of these shows (themselves named Louis Theroux's LA Stories), where he writes about the effect of temporarily moving his immediate family to Los Angeles at the time. He refrains from detailing too much of the shows' contents and instead talks about the concepts behind them, all the while assembling his own overall impressions of life in such an apparently strange city, which is really what made the article stand out for me.

One of the main appeals to Theroux's persona is his completely convincing presentation of himself as a such a likable English chap in the face of such oddities as porn stars or pro-wrestlers or genuinely disturbing extremists; and it's also his greatest strength in terms of encouraging his interviewees to open up to him. When you consider his life and career as a whole Louis is probably stretching the truth somewhat with his disbelief at the strangeness of LA (in comparison to his time in Johannesburg, for example), but as a fellow Englander it was easy to understand his point of view. I've never visited LA and I probably never will, but it's existence as the global capital of entertainment production has ensured that I've encountered more fictional versions of it than I can remember (off the top of my head, video game LA Noire and superior Buffy spin-off Angel seem most prominent to me).

Serious Face.

Most of this fiction is likely heavily fake, but the concept of so many different versions of this place, twisted this way and that based on the whims of writers and directors, resonates heavily with the unbelievable aspect of the real city. The philosophy of life imitating art is something I strongly believe in throughout everyday life and human behavior, and so the idea of a city that is largely based around fictional versions of itself is fascinating. It's also a little scary, when briefly thinking about how out of control the human race is in regards to its consumption of various forms of entertainment (especially now that 'reality' TV is clearly anything but and just accentuates the issue). Authors like Paul Auster, who I'm currently beguiled by more than ever thanks to Oracle Night, seem to recognise the surreal nature of our reality and presents fiction that challenges our perceptions of it, which is brilliant in a way but also digs further into the massive, unending black hole of transubstantial reality, where, as the classic scientific idiom goes, it becomes impossible to analyse something without effecting it.

I'm going to wrap this up now because I didn't really intend to start rambling on for so long and I've got no intention of trying to write some sort of lengthy essay on such a hard-to-define subject. Also I'm getting away from the original point of the post, which was to link to a very enjoyable and well-written article by a respected journalist. I'm very much looking forward to the three upcoming documentaries, and they''ll almost certainly turn up in the next installment of Not Books, which I've been occasionally working on and discovering that, for someone who writes a book blog, I watch entirely too much television.