Louis Theroux is best known for his television series Weird Weekends, in which the affable interviewer and son of travel writer Paul profiled various would-be porn stars, survivalists, UFO-logists, prostitutes and apocalypse cults – plus Ike Turner – dwelling in the squiggles of America’s marginalia.
Having recorded many of those programmes at the height of the X Files/Dark Skies-addled mid 90s, Theroux had over the last couple of years gotten curious as to what had become of his subjects. Deciding to write a Where Are They Now? account of his findings, he embarked upon an odyssey that was part road trip, part gumshoe assignment. The resulting book, The Call Of The Weird, is a surprisingly melancholic piece of work. Over the course of his investigations Theroux came to realise that most of the people he’d filmed, (JJ the wanna-be adult movie stud, Mike Cain the end-times warrior, Thor Templar, leader of the Alien Resistance Movement) had slumped into relative normality, suffering a sort of post celebrity fallout. In other words, while the subjects themselves remained as strange as ever, their prospects went south. There were no happy endings. No Dirk Diggler porn career; no Armageddon in the wheat fields of the mid-west, and nobody got transported to Venus in a flying saucer.
“There’s sort of a division in the book between people who are motivated by a quasi religious belief, like the UFO people and the survivalists, and those who are motivated by something more worldly, the porn guys and the people in the brothel and the gangsta rappers and Ike Turner," Theroux says. "And I realised my natural interest veers towards the more religious stuff. But there’s a quality of un-reason there that is not as susceptible to rational analysis, and at a certain point that is quite exhausting. For all its flaws, with porn, although the world to me is one of the most depressing ones I’ve seen, you can talk to those guys, or you can agree to disagree, or there’s a sort of moral universe that’s commensurable with yours. Whereas if you’re talking about a deity… I had to be careful to rein in some of the strange religious stuff.”
Consequently, The Call Of The Weird investigates the twin impulses that drive America: money and fundamentalism. The country was, after all, founded by immigrants seeking their fortune, but also a polyglot of pilgrims looking for a New World big enough to contain their respective visions of the apocalypse.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why forms of religious extremism are so rooted over there,” Theroux says. “There’s a culture of the American Taliban almost – people whose beliefs are every bit as extreme as you’d find in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Although one of the surprising things is, even though Bush is of the religious right, he’s not as extreme as being in favour of stoning and branding, but he’s extreme enough, being a Creationist and a born again Christian, and he almost drew the blister of the militia movement by sapping away some of the support. The best thing that happened the militia movement was Bill Clinton, because he was sufficiently of the left that people sort of rallied to them, and now they feel a bit lost.”