‘THE TALENTS OF A MASTER JOURNALIST […] AND THE HEAVY BALLS OF AN ACTOR’ LOUIS THEROUX AS A NEW JOURNALIST
Word count: 26,827
Luna Willems Student number: 01405175
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens
A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde Duits-Engels”
Academic year: 2017-2018
I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my grandfather Marcel, who passed away a few days prior to the deadline of this thesis. Dear opa, I hope to make you proud.
Acknowledgements
I owe deep gratitude to my supervisor, prof. dr. Gert Buelens, for his ever-valuable advice, his patience with my plentiful questions and all the time he has taken out to support me throughout the writing of this thesis. Thank you for sharing my enthusiasm about my topic — it inspired me to keep going in difficult times. Additionally, I would like to express my gratitude to my cousin Tine, who has been my role model for as long as I remember, for sharing her own experiences with me. Thank you for your encouragement and help throughout the process of this thesis. I would also like to extend my thanks to my closest friends Marie, Lilli, and Aulikki, who support me always and bring joy to my life. Finally, I could not have achieved this without the support of my family. Many thanks to my father, who without any protest underwent my many lively monologues about my thesis and often chipped in to offer his own experiences of the 1960s and 1970s. Many thanks to my mother, who encouraged me in moments of self-doubt and stimulated my interest in Louis Theroux in the first place. And to my brother Milan, who despite my faults has always been a person on whom I could count. Thank you for supporting me during the writing process of this thesis and throughout all the years that came before. I am profoundly grateful.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements...... 5 Table of Contents ...... 7 Introduction...... 9 Chapter 1: New and Gonzo Journalism ...... 13 Chapter 2: Temporal Context ...... 19 2.1 Times of Sociopolitical Unrest ...... 19 2.2 The 1960s ...... 20 2.3 The 1990s ...... 23 Chapter 3: Geographic Context ...... 25 Chapter 4: Motivations ...... 31 Chapter 5: Stylistic and Structural Characteristics ...... 39 5.0 The Visual Aspect of Literary Journalism ...... 39 5.1 On Topic ...... 45 5.1.1 Ethnography ...... 45 5.1.2 Sensationalism ...... 47 5.2 On Construction ...... 53 5.2.1 Acquirement of Information...... 53 5.2.2 Stylistic Structure ...... 55 5.3 On Method ...... 61 5.3.1 Persona ...... 61 5.3.2 Immersion, Participation and Self-Insertion ...... 66 5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment ...... 73 Results...... 81 Conclusion ...... 85 Works Cited ...... 87
Word Count: 26,827 words
Introduction
The field of serious journalism has been standing in the firing line ever since clickbait, fake news, and alternative facts started to enter the public sphere. Objectivity, the concept standing in between the two sides, has been both praised and condemned. Those representing serious journalism have eagerly been trying to restore the prestige of their centerpiece: the objective truth. However, amidst all this boosting of the concept of objectivity, the public has forgotten that objectivity is not a prerequisite for the production of valuable journalism. Little to no attention is being given to the work of a few individuals who did not adhere to the paradigm of objectivity, yet did not present less worthwhile accounts of reality because of it. The 1960s were turbulent times in the west. Despite a promising start, the conservatism of American society in the 1950s quickly dissolved into a time of chaos. War, political assassinations, and polarization ravaged the decade. The Civil Rights Movement exposed the American people to the injustices committed under their flag, which until now had represented the culmination of morality and justness. Worldviews collapsed, and the youth started rebelling. Amidst of this turning point in history, a handful of feature writers and reporters started questioning traditional journalism’s ability to document the times with the techniques it had at its disposal. How could one document changes that were so profound for everyone living through them by only stating the who, what, where, how and why? As a response to this perceived inadequacy, these feature writers started to tell the story of the times through reports utilizing literary devices and an involved approach to their subjects. In 1973, Tom Wolfe categorized them all under the same denominator: The New Journalism. Journalism deviating of the norm of objectivity is often linked to periods of sociocultural unrest, and while the 1970s took over some of the spirit of its preceding decade, the flame of non-conforming journalism slowly faded out until traditional journalism gained ground again. The New Journalism, while having been popular for around two decades, failed in modifying the field of journalism permanently. However, in the mid-1990s the cult of the hands-on, subjective journalist regained popularity. The BBC brought a reporter with a unique on-screen persona and a hands-on approach in the public eye again. Due to his unique
9 reporting style, documentary maker Louis Theroux would build up a cult following over the years. Still active today, he has established an extensive repertoire of documentaries on widely different topics, ranging from the extreme to the emotionally heavy. His following likes to label him as a Gonzo Journalist, but is he, really? Gonzo Journalism, a term coined by its originator Hunter S. Thompson, is often grouped within the larger style of New Journalism. Whereas both styles share aspects and characteristics that are unique to the movement they are included in, there are also substantial differences between them. In this thesis, I will mirror the styles of New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism against Louis Theroux’s style. As Gonzo is often regarded to be a sub-style of the New Journalism, which often results in its figurehead Thompson being named a New Journalist as well. Drawing on this, the main aim of this thesis is to discern if Theroux is truthfully labeled a Gonzo Journalist, and secondly, if this also makes him qualify as a New Journalist. Concretely, I approach this research question by bringing together the theoretical frameworks that Wolfe and Thompson have constructed on their respective styles, which will be structured around each characteristic that is deemed significant for the definition of both styles. This will allow me to observe, per separate characteristic, in how far Theroux conforms to these templates or not. Firstly, I will concern myself with the contextual characteristics, namely temporal context, geographic context, and motivations, to situate the journalists in their respective timeframes and to analyze if these contextual roots are similar in nature. Then, I will identify the characteristics specific to their journalistic techniques, approach and methods, which I will use to determine how each journalist incorporates these into his work. The New Journalism was composed of reporters who were inspired by similar circumstances and responded to them in similar ways. This was, however, the only commonality between them — they were only grouped together posteriorly. Therefore, due to the style being internally diverse, there is no template corresponding to the style in itself. However, there have been attempts to define the common characteristics of the movement, of which Tom Wolfe has developed the most popular one in his 1973 anthology called The New
10 Journalism. Therefore I will use Wolfe’s definition of the New Journalism as a template to contrast against Theroux’s approach to journalism. Additionally, because the New Journalism originated from an influence that translated into a differing interpretation of every one of its members, I have also chosen to use Tom Wolfe’s interpretation as a representative for the entire style, due to his status as one of the frontrunners of the movement. Naturally, Hunter S. Thompson’s work will then serve as the representative for his brainchild Gonzo Journalism. I have opted for poetics as the methodological framework for this thesis. I will analyze the internal and external techniques that come together to create the highly unique prose that flowed from the pens of the New Journalists, which I will subsequently apply to Theroux’s documentaries. A comparison in this manner, however, presents the problem of mixed media, since literary journalism and documentary represent two different media. I will circumvent this issue by determining the techniques present in the works of the New Journalists that are not limited to textuality per se and thus can be applied to all kinds of narratives. As the New Journalistic approach to journalism was decidedly defined by the time in which it originated, overlooking its context would not portray the style and its effects truthfully. The template that will be applied to Theroux’s documentaries will therefore not concern itself with the work of the New Journalists itself, but the techniques and motivations involved in it. In other words, the focus will lie on how and why the desired effects were achieved rather than if they were achieved. The reflections of Wolfe, Thompson, and Theroux on their own works will therefore both serve as guidelines and pieces of evidence for my comparisons. This, however, presents us with the classic problem of the “intentional fallacy”. This can be avoided by admitting that this fallacy is mainly associated with the field of literature. What unites journalists, is their overlapping intention to inform. While both Wolfe’s and Thompson’s works are now considered part of the American literary canon, both authors entered the field as reporters and retained numerous elements of their journalistic experience in their later prose. Until today the inclusion of these works in the American literary canon is discussed or challenged due to their heavy journalistic influence. This thesis will
11 consequently refer to Wolfe and Thompson as journalists rather than authors, without the intent to deny their authorial status. While the New Journalists and the style they introduced have been analyzed extensively in both literary and journalism studies over time, Louis Theroux’s approach to journalism has been left relatively unresearched. Academic sources on his style of journalism are scarce. Most extensive online information concerning Louis Theroux is limited to his interviews. While this provides enough self-reflection on his work, it also solicits a critical reception of these reflections. Where accuracy of the self-reflections of the New Journalists can be supported by other academic works, in Theroux’s case these will be replaced by thorough evidence from his documentary work to ensure their validity. The first chapter in this thesis serves as background information in order to differentiate the New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism from one another before involving Theroux. The three chapters after that, Temporal Context, Geographical Context and Motivations, serve to situate the context of the New Journalists and Theroux. The last chapter, which will deal with the characteristics of the works themselves rather than the authors, will start with a heading in which I elaborate on how I have selected the characteristics that I will discuss. The ensuing headings will concentrate on Topic, on Construction and on Method. Lastly, I will bring together my findings in the Results section and fully answer the research question.
12 Chapter 1: New and Gonzo Journalism
The New Journalism was, at its popularization in the late 1960s, hardly a brand-new phenomenon. It had known many predecessors who had laid out the foundations on which the New Journalists would eventually build. Literary journalism, the umbrella term for the long tradition of journalism deviating from the norm, had some of its roots in the social realist fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tom Wolfe, often regarded as the founder of the New Journalism, likens writers such as Dickens, Balzac, and Fielding to the New Journalists, in that they, too, portray their times in stories that read like fiction. The New Journalism is a variation on this phenomenon, grounded in a different temporal and geographic context. Despite its later popularity, the New Journalism was a school rather than a particular style. In 1973, a few years after several feature writers had started experimenting with the notions of journalism and fiction, Tom Wolfe published an anthology he titled The New Journalism in the introduction of which he “[made] a strong, self-serving argument for the literary supremacy of creative non-fiction over the novel, which he felt had suffered a precipitous status slippage” (Weingarten 9). In the anthology, Wolfe grouped these writers under one denominator: the New Journalists. The common characteristic of those he called the New Journalists was that they did not ascribe to the conventions of journalism, employing literary devices to write their feature stories rather than conforming to the dry, disconnected voice traditional journalism favored. Wolfe identified the reason as to why they wrote in this manner to be a direct consequence of the time in which they lived. The 1960s had ravaged the continent with its turbulence, introducing such chaos that traditional journalism with its detached, factual nature could no longer keep up. The New Journalists attributed this issue to the traditional journalism’s adherence to the ideal of objective truth, which they felt was faulty. The writers grouped in the New Journalism, amongst others Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese and Truman Capote, all responded to these inadequacies in their own ways, each developing an individual, singular style.
13 Although the New Journalists share many similarities, all are known for different personas and style characteristics, all deviating from the standard in differing gradations. Therefore I have decided not to compare the New Journalism as a general style to Theroux’s work. This would only complicate this thesis and deflect from the research question. Instead, I have chosen two writers to represent the style and for what it stood. Tom Wolfe, being the first to have defined the style and the writer of many exemplary new journalistic works, will represent the majority of the writers in the tradition. To simultaneously portray the diversity within the movement, I have chosen Hunter S. Thompson, the writer who deviates most from the standard of New Journalism. An additional reason for choosing Thompson is that in his writings he has defined the ideal of his style, which he has named Gonzo Journalism. By singling an exemplary New Journalist and a more divergent one out, this thesis aims to represent the movement as accurately as possible without compromising comprehensibility. For this reason, it will mirror Theroux’s work against Wolfe’s definition of the New Journalism and Thompson’s definition of Gonzo Journalism. Contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were no strangers to each other’s work, even before Wolfe included Thompson’s writing in The New Journalism. The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, Thompson’s 1970 sports article featured in the anthology, was the first work in the style Thompson defined as Gonzo Journalism. By involving it in his The New Journalism, Wolfe implies Gonzo Journalism was part of the tradition of the New Journalism, which is, especially in hindsight, problematic, as it paints Thompson as a follower than an innovator (Vitullo 31). Thompson, despite being on friendly terms with Wolfe, was likewise not fond of the label and wrote him “You thieving pile of albino warts…. I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with that horrible ‘New Journalism’ shuck you’re promoting” (qtd. in M. Lewis). Wolfe only made a half-hearted attempt at defining New Journalism, describing the phenomenon as a style of journalism that portrays facts through literary devices. The authors he labels the New Journalists operated with a different set of written tools that aligned more with the field of literature than the field of traditional journalism. They attempt to convey
14 topicality and matters of current interest through a literary lens, representing the factual as a narrative. However, it is not always limited to techniques used when writing fiction — techniques inspired by formats such as essays are also used as a reference. If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s,
you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the
techniques of realism […] from scratch. By trial and error, by ‘instinct’ rather
than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic
novel its unique power, variously known as its ‘immediacy’, its ‘concrete
reality’, its ‘emotional involvement’, its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing quality’.
(Wolfe 46)
Typical to traditional journalism is the emphasis on objectivity: “As practically defined, objectivity means customary linguistic usage, structuring information in a rigid pattern sometimes referred to as the “inverted pyramid”, supplying brief clear answers to the questions Who?, What?, Where?, When?, and Why?, using quotations as evidence, and presenting conflicting points of view” (Eason 145). The relationship between reporter and subject, even the reporter and their employer is minimized to the point of suggesting there is none. This clears the way for a complete ban on discussion of objectivity, as it is through its avoidance of the topic almost forcibly implied in just about every medium of traditional journalism. Authors of traditional reports only need to emphasize their objectivity if they are questioned on it, and to them, the idea of ‘the facts speak for themselves’ is the be-all and end-all of the discussion (Eason 145). However, by portraying the journalist as speaker of absolute truth, it minimizes the dangers of unintended and intended falsehoods in reporting, as it should be assumed that no human being is capable of being truly objective. Only one of the many differences between The New Journalism and routine journalism, the New Journalism attempted to question the objectivity discourse in the journalistic world. By reassuring their readers of their personal involvement in the case and claiming a place in the story for their
15 persona, the New Journalists make no claims of being unbiased in their writing. This is also not the primary objective of the style. alism attempted to question the objectivity discourse in the journalistic world. By reassuring their readers of their personal involvement in the case and claiming a place in the story for their persona, the New Journalists make no claims of being unbiased in their writing. This is also not the primary objective of the style. Wolfe identifies four stylistic devices that a story has to feature to qualify as New Journalism: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, third-person point of view, and recording of status-life symbols. (Wolfe 46-7) Scene-by-scene construction is the most standard device. It refers to the avoidance of background information, resorting to the portrayal of information directly within the framework of a particular scene instead. Thus, the story is mainly told through the succession of different scenes rather than through a “historical narrative” (Wolfe 46). To this device, Wolfe connects the tendency of some New Journalists to seek out the information they needed in a more intrusive way than traditional reporters would. They would go out of their way to witness the events that could become relevant to the story, thus almost participate in scenes of their subject’s lives. By working in this manner, they were able to record entire conversations as they occurred, which is the second device, namely extensive dialogue. Wolfe writes, “Magazine writers, like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device. It also establishes and defines character more quickly and effectively than any other device.” (Wolfe 46) The third device, third-person point of view, was also a defining characteristic for New Journalism, as “journalists had often used the first-person point of view — ‘I was there’ — just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had.” (Wolfe 46-7) Third-person point of view introduced multiple perspectives and opinions in the narrative, as opposed to the single one of the reporter. Wolfe argues that a first-person perspective adds nothing to the story and only serves as an irritation to the reader. Particular to the method the New Journalists used in order to collect information was that they would try to get inside others’ heads, as this allowed them to relatively accurately portray the
16 perspective of this person. (Wolfe 47) Finally, the recording of status-life symbols includes all characteristics a particular character in the story displays, such as habits, modes of behavior towards people of different social rankings, non-verbal communication, their aesthetic preferences and other information that might give a character more depth. The four stylistic devices are used to highlight the reliance on primary sources, to create more intimacy between audience and characters and to put the reader right in the middle of the story as opposed to them taking on the role of the on-looker (Wolfe 46-7). The New Journalism had been popular for a decade before Hunter S. Thompson, having followed a less glamorous path to journalistic fame than Wolfe, entered the scene (Hirst 3). While Thompson’s work shows similarities with the standard of the New Journalism, his invented style Gonzo Journalism has a different focus and prioritizes other attitudes to reporting. Thompson stressed the value of the participatory dimension in unconventional journalism in particular: True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an
artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be
a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even
sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a
film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work
and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a
main character. (Thompson 74)
In most aspects, but especially concerning writing style, Gonzo can be regarded as the rebellious younger brother of New Journalism, a sub-genre rather than a variation of: “Thompson’s writings were idiosyncratically subjective, engaging, crazy and extremist, focusing on the feelings of the writer, rather than the facts of the incident being reported.” (Bladen 36) The main objective was not to inform; it was to share the experience of the reporter. The clearest contrast, besides participation, between New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism, thus exists in the handling of objectivity or lack thereof. Where the New
17 Journalism operates with multiple perspectives in the third-person point of view, in order to achieve a relatively objective account of the event, Gonzo presents facts and observations in the first-person point of view. It makes no claims of being or attempting to be objective. Thompson himself considered the difference between gonzo and New Journalism to lie in the (re)construction of their stories: “Thompson [himself] differentiates between Gonzo and New Journalism, a la
Wolfe, in that he (Thompson) never sets out to reconstruct a story. Wolfe is a
better reporter, a re-creator of facts. Thompson says “I like to get right in the
middle of whatever I’m writing about — as personally involved as possible.”
Within the method of pure gonzo is spontaneity… no rewriting allowed… the
first draft screeds must stand.” (Green 206/108)
These differences will be discussed further in the ensuing comparisons, then contrasted against Theroux’s work.
18 Chapter 2: Temporal Context 2.1 Times of Sociopolitical Unrest
The temporal context is perhaps the most responsible variable for the existence of the New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism. Again, it should be considered that neither the New Journalism or Gonzo Journalism are brand new styles. Both had many predecessors on whose foundations they could be built. There was nothing “new” about the New Journalism. A journalist is to be present at the scene in order to record facts. Observing and listening have always been part of the job description. Moreover, ideally, to be able to be an “authority” on the subject, the journalists interrogated their interviewees extensively. Wolfe’s four literary devices (as mentioned before: scene-by-scene construction, focus on dialogue, the third- person point of view, and status-life symbols) are also nothing revolutionary. They have been a common phenomenon throughout literary history (Hough 115/17). George Hough disagrees with Wolfe’s idea that the New Journalism was any sort of “new”: “The New Journalism […] isn’t a sudden arrival of a new style, but rather it is another stage in a long and gradual evolution of journalistic techniques. It is an honest journalistic genre — not just a borrowing from writers of fiction — which can be traced backward generation by generation through recognizable journalistic forebears” (115/17). Wolfe, having had a literary education rather than a journalistic one, did not have enough background knowledge of the format to have a nuanced idea of the development of reporting over the centuries. Therefore he claims in his New Journalism anthology that the 1960s introduced a new style of journalism, while the development was far more gradual than he realized. In fact, the public’s approval of literary journalism fluctuated not in a gradual manner but in cycles. John C. Hartsock notes that these periods of approval for the genre can be linked to “times of extraordinary social and cultural transformation and crisis” (3). The roots of what Tom Wolfe would call the New Journalism first showed up on the American continent during the American civil war, at a time when even the genre of literature as we know it today had not yet been defined in its fullest. The line between the two genres of literary realism and objective journalism was still somewhat blurred, and as soon as these began to emerge in a more shapely way, a third genre, literary journalism, was left an orphan (Hartsock 2).
19 However, as Hough notes, “There is no history of journalistic writing or style, no history of the development of reporting. So the antecedents of today’s New Journalists are not easily traced, and much of their work is obscure or lost” (117/19). It is therefore only possible to measure the popularity of literary journalism through trends or the works of generally long- forgotten journalists. These trends, culminating in, as mentioned before, “times of extraordinary social and cultural transformation and crisis” (Hartsock 3), were usually firmly tied to politics. Considering this, while also staying in the context of the United States of America (which will be further discussed in the chapter Geographic Context), at the time of the New Journalists in the 1960s and 1970s there had been three periods in the last 100 years that had answered to this signifier. These were the Civil War in the 1890s, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the sociopolitical unrest of the 1960s. What happened in the 1890s, according to Alan Trachtenberg, is that American newspapers helped to create a paradox in which they would portray the world to bring it closer to the individual, despite the public’s alienation from everyday life in times of political distress (124-5).The Great Depression, at its beginning point in 1929-1930, generated a new wave of reporters discarding the widely accepted norms of objectivity and factuality, because these “failed to adequately account for the social and economic crisis and transformation” (Hartsock 4). Important to note, however, is that while these were clear trends bound to particular periods of time, the flame of literary journalism never faded out entirely. Particular authors and reporters would, even outside these time frames, concern themselves with the genre. During the Second World War, for instance, literary journalism could be found in the American war reportage, most notably in John Hersey’s Hiroshima (Hartsock 6).
2.2 The 1960s
The New Journalism was thus only the next big thing in a longer tradition than is popularly known. Nevertheless, the New Journalism was unquestionably a child of its time, firmly tied to the zeitgeist of the 1960s. The 1960s were a decade of great sociopolitical upheaval, as were the 1890s and 1930s. Because the memory of the 1960s is indivisibly interwoven with the unique spirit that influenced the decade, there is an ongoing debate about
20 which years represented this spirit most accurately. One of the most popular definitions of the “spirit of the sixties” dates the beginning in 1963 with the assassination of JFK and the end in 1974 with the Watergate Scandal. This time frame essentially corresponds to the lifetime of the counterculture which would become omnipresent during the decade and come to influence later generations’ interpretation of the decade. While the US was still riding out the power and wealth it had acquired during the Second World War, cracks in the “cultural triumphalism” (Hartsock 7), with the US as the strongest nation on earth, it had developed since were starting to show. The Cold War was at its most threatening state in the early sixties, culminating in the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1963. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War, possibly the bloodiest consequence of the conflict, polarized the American nation. Martin Luther King Jr. remarked in his legendary 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York “if America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’” (2). The resolution of domestic political conflicts and dissent repeatedly resulted in assassinations, with the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy at the forefront. However, even despite the collapse of key figures in the movement, minority groups and progressives gained momentum in several ways. The Civil Rights Movement, while already active since the mid-1950s, booked its first successes through fierce protests: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The Feminist movement made way for second-wave feminism in the early 1960s, sparking much debate on women’s tasks and gender roles. In the mid-twentieth century “culture” came to mean “normal”, and the line between “high culture” and “low culture” became blurred: The ‘counterculture’ contained the tension between democratic ideals and
undemocratic practices, a disillusion with a national or ‘official’ culture as
signified by government, the military and ‘the establishment’ — in all its forms
from stifling parents to party politics. It also contained optimism about the idea
21 of renewing that same culture by reinvigorating as well as condemning the
status quo. (Monteith 6)
From the mid-1960s onwards, the counterculture, popularly dubbed the hippies, became an unforeseen public appearance. Whether passionately protesting against the Vietnam War, losing themselves in psychedelic drugs such as LSD or portraying the behavior of their contemporaries in a new pop culture which had more energy than ever before, the hippie movement rebelled against the conservatism that had run rampant in the 1950s. They abhorred the obedience that had been both displayed and imposed by the generation preceding them. Due to this, the 1960s knew an increase of violence and crime rates were up in extreme amounts (Pinker). Something about the post-war American ideal of the 1950s had burst, and it would never be the same again. The civil rights movement had exposed a moral blot on the American
establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains
came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the
pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many
illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the
despoliation of the environment and the oppression of women and
homosexuals. The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained
prestige as it made inroads in third-world ‘liberation’ movements, and it was
increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. (Pinker)
Amidst all of this, Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Mailer, Talese and other feature writers became frustrated with the inadequacies of objective journalism to portray times that were changing so fundamentally. The 1960s brought chaos wherever one turned. How could one portray this tremendous metamorphosis on all levels of ordinary life, merely through stating the facts of one single event at a time? The new generation of journalists understood that this
22 was not only impossible, but it was also not what the ordinary man wanted. The ordinary man did not want to understand the how or why of a phenomenon so complex; they wanted to understand what it was like. So these reporters took it upon themselves to portray the times in which they found themselves. They told the stories ordinary people craved, they attempted to explain the significance of it all and why it mattered: “So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience - the New Journalists” (Weingarten 6). Marc Weingarten, a historian, specialized in the New Journalism of the 1960s, estimates that the “golden age” of the New Journalism started in 1962 and ended in 1977. This roughly corresponds to the time frame which was identified at the start of this chapter to embody the “spirit of the 1960s”, which validates my claim even more. The New Journalism was unmistakably a child of its time.
2.3 The 1990s
Louis Theroux became active in the field of journalism in 1992. The first few years of his career he worked as a print journalist, before eventually, in 1998, he moved on to making documentaries. As this thesis is only concerned with the Louis Theroux documentaries that have been broadcast under his name, I will only discuss his work from 1998 onwards. At the time of the writing of this thesis in 2018, he is still active in the field. Like the New Journalists, Louis Theroux’s approach and style have evolved over the course of his career. Weird Weekends, Theroux’s first own series, is on most accounts more similar to New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism than his later programs and series. As the Weird Weekends ran from 1998 until 2000, I will discuss the 1990s in this subheading, to mirror the 1960s as a catalyst for the work of the New Journalists. (DocVille) There is far less distance between the late 1990s and now than between the 1960s and now, thus long-term social trends are relatively more difficult to pinpoint. However, arguments could be made for the 1990s also being a period of sociopolitical unrest. It could be argued that in the 1990s, the effects of globalization began to set in more than ever. Far right terrorism experienced its golden days, with the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing at the forefront. However, terrorism was carried out by more movements than the Far Right
23 Movement. The 1993 WTC bombing by Al Qaeda was the precursor of its more destructive and devastating ‘sibling’ in 2001 and in the US smaller-scale terrorist attacks were scattered over the latter part of the decade by lone wolves and eco-terrorists. The Yugoslavs wars tore up Eastern Europe and the Gulf War at the beginning of the decade left scars that are still present today. The 1990s in the US were mainly marked by the Clinton presidency. The much-reported-on Lewinsky scandal led to a three-month impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999. Economically, the US in the 1990s knew great prosperity, mainly because of the dawn of the internet and boom of new technologies. Over the decade, use of digital technology boomed. People were first introduced to the internet. While the 1990s certainly knew several violent events and influences, likening it to the sociopolitical unrest of the 1960s would be a poor comparison, as comparing it to the 1930s and 1890s would. Could the 1990s be considered an example of “times of extraordinary social and cultural transformation and crisis” as theorized by Hartsock? They likely could not. The temporal context of the New Journalists and Theroux, therefore, does not seem to match up. However, we can link the (late) 1990s to the start of the Information Age, of which it cannot be denied that it has profoundly impacted the social lives of society. Analysis of this, however, would only amount to guesswork.
24 Chapter 3: Geographic Context
The geographic context is largely dependent on and connected to the temporal context of the 1960s; therefore an amount of the contextual information about 1960s America overlaps with the information given in the former chapter. This chapter elaborates on the Zeitgeist of the 1960s but especially observes it in the context of the United States. I will discuss what made the 1960s especially jarring for the citizens of the United States, in order to further situate the context in which the New Journalists made their first appearances. In particular, I will discuss the involvement of the US in the rest of the world, the legend of JFK and the American dream. To argue that the New Journalism was a phenomenon that exclusively appeared in the United States would be misinformed: “How much influence it had beyond American borders is still being determined by scholars. But just as early practitioners and critics of the from mistakenly believed that what they were doing was ‘new’, it would also be a mistake to suggest that it was a unique manifestation solely in the United States” (Hartsock 1). However, as this thesis limits itself to the United States only, it will not be concerned with this complication. Even if it focuses on New Journalism in the United States, both Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, respectively Virginia and Kentucky natives, were decidedly North-American in both blood and mentality, which means there are no problems to run into. We can, however, argue that the turbulence of the 1960s, even if the sociocultural transformation of the decade arguably took place on a much larger, global scale, was especially tangible in the United States. The United States was, in post-war times, considered the leader of the western world, even if that was in spirit rather than politically. Effects of the US foreign policy were felt over the surface of the earth. It had deep involvement in various global conflicts, from the ever-threatening Cold War and several foreign Civil Wars to the Six-Day War in the Middle East. If the US’ involvement in these wars and conflicts was felt in a relatively unaffected Europe, it unquestionably was deep in the North-American country. Critical in this change in the heart of the average American citizen was the disillusionment with any sort of authority (Monteith 6). It is part of the reason why crime
25 rates in the 1960s were up. For these rates there were many reasons, all of them linked to the profound transformation of society. There was the process of informalizing: The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has
argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was
superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a
flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western
countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly
discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were
leveled. (Pinker)
This transformation was not unique to the American continent and aided in the counterculture of all Western countries, but another factor that contributed to the nation-wide disillusionment with authority was all the more American. It was the Civil Rights Movement that displayed the wrongs of American society more clearly than ever. It had blown the idea of the moral high ground of post-war America to pieces. The mistreatment of black people, Native Americans, and other minority groups, somewhat later the oppression of women and the LGBT community, were protested against: “As critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty […] [and] the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War” (Pinker). Only one of the many American ideals that were broken during the 1960s is one that sparked a legend that still lasts today: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His assassination in November 1963 was one of the events that some argued was the moment that America lost its innocence. Professor of American Studies Sharon Monteith notes: “By his death, having served the country for only 1,037 days, the Kennedy legend had taken shape. It was the image against which subsequent presidents would be measured, and the Kennedy dynasty emerged as the nation’s home-grown aristocracy” (15). With his death, even after a presidency that was less virtuous than his contemporary legend paints it off as, young liberals were left without a
26 role model, and the disillusionment soon followed. They, however, found solace in his memory. Hunter S. Thompson later wrote in The Great Shark Hunt: “Student radicals today may call Kennedy a phony liberal and a glamorous sellout, but only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited enough to want to change the American reality, instead of just quitting it.” A 1980s novel would later describe Kennedy’s death as “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (Monteith 16). Ted Kennedy, brother of JFK, later observed that his brother and Martin Luther King Jr. “appealed to the nobler side of human nature” (qtd. in Witcover 377) and had they both survived their assassinations, they would have been able to bring the American nation together. Instead, they were replaced by Richard Nixon (and Agnew), “who appealed to the darker side of human nature” (qtd. in Witcover 377). Some argue that the dawn of the changes the 1960s brought with them was therefore caused by the weakening belief in the American Dream, the lore that had attracted many people to American soil over the past centuries. The 1960s, with its political assassinations, foreign wars that both scarred and polarized the American people, the new-found power of the civil rights movement and rampant drug culture within the counterculture, took those ideals and let them burst from within. More and more people started to realize that the American people were not all bound by freedom and equality. The happenings of the 1960s created inconsistencies in “what many Americans believed about their time, that it was the ‘American Century’, another idealized construct. […] Americans were discovering the limits of an empire of their ideas, including that over-arching palliative, the American Dream, with its promise and entitlement that all would have a happy ending, like a Hollywood movie” (Hartsock 8). Journalist Jules Witcover describes the effects of the 1960s eloquently in his introduction of The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America: “for so many, the dream of a nobler, optimistic America died, and the reality of a skeptical, conservative America began to fill the void” (Witcover 5). The New Journalists, concerning themselves with cultural and social trends rather than the cold, hard facts of the era, understood that traditional journalism did not possess the techniques or the autonomy to capture a transformation like this:
27 “Whereas routine journalism treats reports and events as parts of a whole
which is distinct from perceptual categories, New Journalism treats events as
symbols of some deeper cultural trend, ideology or mythology. The
significance of an event emerges not from its uniqueness but from its
enactment of cultural paradigms. New Journalism takes as its object the
similarity between a specific event and other social and historical trends. A trip
to Las Vegas is “a savage journey into the heart of the American Dream”, a
counterculture group “the epoch of the psychedelic style,” and a peace march
in Washington “a paradigm of the twentieth century”. While the form reveals
traditional journalistic attention to “new” events, the central concern is with
how these events enact previous cultural patterns.” (Eason 145)
They sensed the American people needed a different source of information, one they could empathize with rather than become (further) disillusioned from. Additionally, amongst the New Journalists, there was the ambition to record every detail about the impact of the crises and transformations ravaging the continent. They sensed more than anyone else that there was history in the making. The bubble had burst, and a new kind of society was arising, and the New Journalists were set out to be the first ones to tell its story: “Everywhere Wolfe turned, he saw the old culture being plowed under and upended by new ways of living, thinking, playing. Wolfe was anxious to chronicle as much of it as he could - to write about all of it and become the authoritative voice of the decade’s new vanguard.” (Weingarten 97) According to David L. Eason, there was a substantial link between the New Journalism, the 1960s, and American culture, indeed: “While New Journalism was probably not new in a formal sense, it did reflect an overriding concern with what was new in society and how this related to what had gone before. The bridge between the new phenomena of the 1960s and the traditions of American society was a specific narrative strategy which created
28 journalism ‘like a novel’” (147). We cannot claim that Wolfe and Thompson “chose” the United States as a subject, as they already found themselves natives of it and did not often cross the borders for stories. We can, however, sense their American spirits in their writings. After Tom Wolfe’s death in May 2018 the media extensively explored his connection to his homeland and was dubbed “the chronicler of America” by magazines such as Economist, Boston Globe and America Magazine. Hunter S. Thompson was, from the 1960s onwards, preoccupied with the fear for his America, a fear that he described as the death of the American Dream (Nuttall 103). Louis Theroux, son of an American father and English mother, already had apparent ties to the US before he ventured to the American continent to film documentaries. Despite his father being born to Italian-American and French-Canadian parents, American by birth, Theroux was brought up in London after spending the first year of his life in Singapore. He went on to receive his education at Magdalen College, Oxford. Only in 1991, at the age of twenty-one, he traveled to America, where his brother and his father Paul Theroux, a well- known travel writer himself, were living at the time. Theroux received a job on a newspaper in San Jose, California, after which he moved on to write for Spy Magazine in New York. After being recommended by his colleagues at Spy Magazine, he was chosen to present a new programme, TV Nation, partly funded by the BBC, which was looking for a British presenter. Two years later, TV Nation ended, and he was presented with a development deal offered by the BBC, out of which Theroux’s first own series, Weird Weekends, originated (Byrne). The context in which Theroux entered the American scene was thus different from that of Wolfe and Thompson, who had lived in the country for their entire lives. However, Theroux’s fascination with his father’s birthplace is undeniable. One indicator is how several titles reference the US: e.g. “The Most Hated Family in America”, “Gambling in Las Vegas”, “Law and Disorder in Philadelphia”, et cetera. He has also made two miniseries with titles also referring to the US: LA Stories (2014) and Dark States (2017). Besides this, many of his documentaries take place in the US. Theroux comments on this perceived interest in the United States:
29 The subjects I'm interested in are quite extreme. […] There’s a sense of cultural
difference between [Britain] and America and part of what I enjoy is being put
into that environment. In Britain, I was doing ones about well-known people.
[…] If I made a programme in Britain about non-famous people, I don't know
if that would work. The subjects tend to be bigger in America.
The similarity between the geographic contexts of Wolfe’s and Thompson’s work and Theroux’s documentaries is undeniably there, even if just in a concrete way. All three journalists are undoubtedly fascinated by the North-American continent, which the majority of their works reflect. Of course, the temporal context remains dissimilar, which affects the total picture. The New Journalists’ US is not the US of Louis Theroux. This has, however, been a given since the beginning of this thesis, and should not form a reason not to consider Louis Theroux a (possible) new journalist.
30 Chapter 4: Motivations
After having discussed the more tangible realities of the phenomenon of the New Journalism at large, such as its temporal and geographic context, we will now move on to a more uncertain, imprecise aspect of the context: the motivations behind it. These are deeply rooted in the temporal and geographic context, hence the order of sequence I have chosen. I have already touched upon them lightly in preceding chapters, but as motivations are more complicated, they demanded more elaboration. To summarize: the question as to why the New Journalists wrote how they wrote, is if asked to give a short explanation, simply because they wanted to portray the 1960s in a way that they felt traditional reporting could not. This is, while it clarifies it to a person not immersed in the subject, a simplistic and superficial clarification. The more suitable answer runs deeper than this. The difference between novelists and journalists, while it is a more complicated matter, can be simply boiled down to the discourse that journalists concern themselves with facts, and novelists do not. Hunter S. Thompson comments on this in his The Great Shark Hunt: [Gonzo Journalism] is a style of ‘reporting’ based on William Faulkner's idea
that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best
journalists have always known this. Which is not to say that Fiction is
necessarily ‘more true’ than Journalism -- or vice versa -- but that both ‘fiction’
and ‘journalism’ are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are
only two different means to the same end. (73)
The New Journalists took this idea, analyzed it analogously and then reorganized both categories. They started playing with the facts as novelists would. Especially of note in this respect is that none of the reporters who are now considered part of the New Journalism wanted to become a reporter originally. The biggest objective of the majority of the authors grouped in this tradition was to publish a novel someday. In Wolfe’s own words:
31 “What [feature writers] had in common was that they all regarded the
newspaper as a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final
triumph. The idea was to get a job on a newspaper, keep body and soul
together, pay the rent, get to know "the world," accumulate "experience,"
perhaps work some of the fat off your style—then, at some point, quit cold, say
goodbye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere, work night and day for
six months, and light up the sky with the final triumph. The final triumph was
known as The Novel.” (17-8)
In the early 1960s, these same feature writers, all aspiring to become novelists one day, realized they could bring that ultimate purpose, the novel, to what they already wrote: feature stories. (Wolfe 21-2) Their desire to produce a novel was the least conceptual motivation behind the work of the New Journalists. A more conceptual motivation was the New Journalists’ aim to discredit the supremacy of objective truth in traditional journalism. They did, however, not attempt to accomplish this aim by explicitly questioning the objective truth as a concept. Instead, they focused on their personal portrayal of the truth. They realized more than anyone else that even the facts are subject to the interpretation of the reader. We have already established that the blurring of journalism with fiction was one of the ways to question the truth as an established phenomenon. By engaging in a more personally involved approach to their stories, they demanded attention for the idea that the truth can be achieved in differing ways. The New Journalists would disagree with the way traditional journalism attempts to assure its readers of its objectivity. Traditional journalism often regarded the journalist as a mere mode of transport for the information rather than a person capable of own interpretation and distortion: Whereas routine journalism tries to reduce the distance between report and
referent in order to make the report appear transparent, New Journalism points
reflexively to its own mode of production. As the attention to technique attests,
32 New Journalism calls attention to itself as both a report of an actual situation
and as a mode of discourse which exists in relation to other modes such as the
classical novel and routine journalism. (Eason 147)
By calling attention to their process and the relationship between the reporter and the subject, the New Journalists assured their readers that they, too, could not be entirely objective. (This will be further elaborated on in 5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment) As suggested in the chapters on the temporal and geographic context of their work, the New Journalists had a fascination with history and the significance of witnessing it. They covered events by visualizing them as smaller components in the larger framework of history. The New Journalists attempted to identify patterns in the chaos of the 1960s that most traditional reporters would not consider, let alone document. Whereas routine journalism treats reports and events as parts of a whole which
is distinct from perceptual categories, New Journalism treats events as symbols
of some deeper cultural trend, ideology or mythology. The significance of an
event emerges not from its uniqueness but from its enactment of cultural
paradigms. New Journalism takes as its object the similarity between a specific
event and other social and historical trends. A trip to Las Vegas is “a savage
journey into the heart of the American Dream”, a counterculture group “the
epoch of the psychedelic style,” and a peace march in Washington “a paradigm
of the twentieth century”. While the form reveals traditional journalistic
attention to “new” events, the central concern is with how these events enact
previous cultural patterns. (Eason 146)
The New Journalists thus operated with the same facts as traditional reporters did, but compared these to the spirit of the time. They were interested in the entire perspective rather
33 than the detailed facts. By considering this, one could argue that the New Journalists were a particular breed of historian, one that attempts to untangle the trends of history at the time they are still taking place. To achieve this purpose, the New Journalists would capture the trends of history in the same fashion one would read or write a novel. As the 1960s were bringing some fundamental changes to the worldview of the American citizen, someone had to be mindful of what this all signified in the bigger picture. At the same time they were to pay close attention to the particular event and how it affected people: The metaphorical impulse of New Journalism was a strategy for locating
bewildering events, writers and a particular public within an ordered
conception of society. By acknowledging the strangeness of reality, the
compendium of emerging world views held by reporter, reportorial subject and
implicit in a mode of discourse, New Journalism transformed not only the
content of reports but the practice of reporting itself into a political issue.
(Eason 148)
Here, the hermeneutic circle can come into play. A literary term conceived by Hans-Georg Gadamer, it is part of the broader discipline of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. The hermeneutic circle suggests that interpretation is a circular concept. Gadamer argues that when one encounters an idea, one recognizes it as analyzable in its own, unique way. However, within a text, a sentence or any other framework, one also has to analyze it as a component of the framework. Therefore the interpretation of the idea refers back to the entirety of the text, but the text is also modified by the encountering and interpretation of a singular idea. The idea and the text thus refer back to each other. (qtd. in Matheson 711-712) As the New Journalists construct their works through a literary lens and they are concerned with history, one could argue they construct the times they document in the shape of a hermeneutic circle. This is how they attempt to make sense of the world in which they live. Aside from their fascination with the novel, the motivations behind the work of the New
34 Journalists are thus the questioning of the concept of the objective truth and the documentation of patterns of history as they occur. In Louis Theroux’s case, there is a substantial lack of profound studies on motivation that the New Journalists have generated over the years. As mentioned before, the interviews on which one can fall back on are scarce. Mainly because the years have not yet put some distance between the subject and the author of this thesis, it is difficult to observe the profound motivations of a journalist who is currently still active in the profession, especially if we want to analyze it more conceptually. There are, however, assumptions we can make. Contrary to the fixation of the New Journalists on time and space as focus, Theroux’s motivations behind his portrayals seem to be rooted in a fascination with his fellow human. He displays little interest in aligning them within the time and space they are situated. His interest in his subjects reflects itself in his respect for the individual, the outcast. He does not observe his subjects in an overarching sense, namely how they are positioned in the bigger picture of time and space, as the New Journalists would. Instead, his work focuses on the interpersonal. He seeks to understand the individual. This interpersonal approach suggests there is an altruistic dimension to the work Theroux performs. In “By Reason of Insanity” (a documentary focusing on mental hospitals) he asks a man who murdered his academic father under schizophrenic delusions if he loved his dad. To this, the man points out that no one in the long time he has spent in therapy has ever thought to ask him that question. In an interview, Theroux comments that “that moment was very encouraging for me. It makes me feel like I’m helping. Which I’m not there to do – I’m there to make TV programmes. But my secret fear is always that not only am I not helping, but that I am impeding their recovery.” In many instances he has expressed feeling responsibility for the people he spends time with, and suggests that he has given deep thought to the limits and ethics of being a journalist: You have to be ethical and straightforward but also make people comfortable
enough to be themselves. If they take issue with the way I portray them - but I
feel that how I portray them is how they are - I don't think there's a problem.
35 Sometimes, people have a different idea of who they are from who they really
are. That's when feelings get hurt. But I don't think being a journalist in any
way absolves you of the obligation to be a decent human being.” (Cooke)
On the subject of intervening in his interviewees' lives, he comments that "it's not a case of anything goes. You are a moral being and that's how you've got to operate. You don't cease to be a human being just because you're making a programme" (qtd. in Townend). Nevertheless, Theroux does not allow this humanistic interest to stand in the way of the job he is supposed to carry out. He assures that the acquisition of the truth is his goal first and foremost: “I go in to tell stories, to reveal the truth and to try to understand. Not to set people straight. I don’t go into this with the agenda of saving the world.” He maintains that he is trying to understand above all. He has argued several times that perhaps there is a therapeutic dimension to the interaction between him and his subjects (Aitkenhead), but that the main aim remains to make an interesting program to allow his audience a glance in the intimate lives of people who live their lives differently than they do. Simultaneously, however, his motivations do seem to line up with Thompson’s reasoning behind his participatory Gonzo Journalism. Speaking about why he dislikes the label of seeking out the “weird people of society”, he reacts with: Because it’s as if we’re all fringe, we’re all grappling with the mysteries of our
own psychology to do with human mortality, our urge to harm ourselves, our
urge to harm others. Anger, hatred, tribalism, resentment, weird sexual
impulses. And so if we’re honest, those impulses reside in all of us. So I try and
choose subjects that will allow us almost to experience some of those
vicariously, and also maybe create a little bit of understanding when you see
how extreme these situations can be for other people. (qtd. in Dixon-Smith)
This quote further suggests there exists another parallelism between the way the New Journalists and Theroux conduct their research. While the concrete motivations behind their
36 works do not mirror each other, Theroux seems to approach his subjects with similar reasoning in mind: he views the groups he documents as components of a larger framework, although contrary to the New Journalists not the framework of history. Theroux attempts to perceive everyone as equally human, and he aims to find the humanity in people who are not often perceived as such — people such as Nazis, religious fanatics and pedophiles: “my films are about attempting to square the fact that it may be someone you like, but it's also someone doing something that may be morally questionable. That's the whole thing — that's what I do. That's my job” (qtd. in Aitkenhead). Instead of situating his subjects in the framework of history, as the New Journalists do, Theroux seeks to understand what the choices of unconventional people signify for the nature of humanity.
37 38 Chapter 5: Stylistic and Structural Characteristics 5.0 The Visual Aspect of Literary Journalism
Now we have discussed the more situational differences and similarities between Theroux’s approach to journalism and that of the New Journalists, I would like to focus on the more substantial objects of comparison: the techniques which they use to deviate from traditional styles of journalism. These are the aspects which are essential in the definition of what constitutes the New Journalism; the methods with which the authors give shape to the New Journalism hold more importance than the intent, the temporal or geographic context of it. However, in an attempt to compare the techniques used by respectively Theroux and the new journalists, we run into a complication. We are comparing two distinct styles of journalism, even two distinct types of media. Literary Journalism is governed by the written word, whereas documentary journalism is supported by audiovisual media. While this does not necessarily present a problem on a theoretical level — they are both governed by the same authorial intent, namely to inform — it does create some obstacles along the way. Firstly, many of the techniques that Tom Wolfe names as essential characteristics of the New Journalism are particular to the written word and hard if not impossible to emulate within the realm of audiovisual media. A single shot of the camera can replace these aspects of written stories and narratives. The second problem situates itself in the word “literary”. The word’s Latin etymological origin, littera, meaning “letters of the alphabet”, highlights a similar limitation. Literary journalism touches ground with the realm of literature, a definition which only lends itself to texts of the written word. The long-discussed question of what constitutes literature is one that I will not touch upon in this thesis, yet it is a popularly held belief that the term literature does not pertain to audiovisual works. Thus, we cannot bring the “literary” to documentary journalism. However, can we bring the “visual” to literary journalism, instead? To answer this question, I will again have to discuss New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism separately, as both styles relate to the visual in different ways. While New Journalism’s characteristics as theorized by Tom Wolfe can be inherently visual in their own right — e.g., scene-by-scene construction and recording of status-life symbols — his work fits this definition even more closely. Richard A. Kallan argues that
39 while Tom Wolfe’s work meets his self-imposed requirements of what constitutes New Journalism, they are not the only characteristics making his work his. Particular to Wolfe’s writing style is an original and in several instances unique use of punctuation. This heavy use of typography serves to create a visual idea of the scene he is trying to emulate. He adjusts his language, employing techniques that are deemed unsuitable for fiction writers — e.g., use of adverbs and particular colloquial structures — to give his writing a more natural sense, as if someone were recounting the story: Wolfe rearranged his words in nonlinear fashion and used punctuation as a
graphic element, like E. E. Cummings on a mescaline bender. He was fond of
ellipses, because his subjects talked in elliptical patterns, even thought in them.
Punctuation, Wolfe discovered, allowed him to control the pace and timing of a
scene, so he could write the way people on hallucinogens actually think. By
subverting his language, he was in effect dosing his prose. (Weingarten 112)
Wolfe’s work reads very much like stream of consciousness, attempting to construct a “televisionistic” (Kallan, Style and the NJ 52) representation of the events he is recounting. Richard A. Kallan argues this is also particular to New Journalism, that it is an “oral, electronic rhetoric” (Kallan, Style and the NJ 53) transferred to the written word rather than to audiovisual images. According to him, the New Journalists are akin to television makers, in that they try to “apply techniques of the visual medium to the printed page” (Kallan, Style and the NJ 53). In this way, he suggests that New Journalists intended to either become a particular breed of television celebrities or visible reporters in the written media, carefully constructing their persona (Kallan, Style and the NJ 53). Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, whilst falling under the same denominator as New Journalism and also emphasizing the televisionistic aspect, prioritizes different story- telling techniques. The definition of his Gonzo Journalism can be easily included within the limits of what Wolfe defined as the new journalism, but it just as much transcends the school in its own right. Therefore it is important also to discuss the distinct characteristics of Gonzo
40 Journalism, which would be glossed over by merely describing the somewhat vague notions of the New Journalism. As we have established, Gonzo Journalism is less concerned with journalism being assigned a more literary dimension. It mostly stresses a participatory approach. In Thompson’s own words: True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an
artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be
a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even
sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a
film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work
and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a
main character. (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, 74)
The focus on the participatory dimension only later became the core of Gonzo Journalism. Gonzo’s complicated relationship with facts also had not been introduced yet. The more subjective and impressionistic approach, however, was central to the style from the beginning. In the initial phase of his defining of Gonzo, Thompson emphasized the connection to the visual media “as being like that of an interpretive photographer in the mold of Cartier-Bresson. Thompson purported that Cartier-Bresson’s work was always taken from the full-frame negative, and Thompson viewed Gonzo as being similarly direct in that it was to be a textual print drawn from the negative of his experience of events” (Vitullo 8). Thompson’s original objective was to capture his observations and personal thoughts on his subject matter in a notebook, which he would then submit as an untouched first draft. In his own words: “My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication -- without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera” (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 74). What is also common ground in the two disciplines, is what I have mentioned earlier: both share the objective to inform their respective audiences. While New Journalism defines itself as “literary”, key is still that it applies literary techniques to non-fictional subjects. It does not
41 value facts as much as conventional journalism tends to do, but it still concerns itself with portraying the truth, be it in a different way. On a narratological level, however, the difference in format does not present a problem. While one could claim that narrative in the audiovisual format is not interchangeable with the textual format due to the stimuli provided by each format, this is an outdated idea. Narrative exists on many levels and is, especially in the field of Cultural Studies, which encompasses the narrative turn, which introduced the idea that many more aspects in widely different fields and disciplines could be interpreted and examined as narratives. (Hyvärinen 450) Through this lens, the formats of audiovisual journalism and textual journalism line up consistently, as they both belong to the field of journalism. We can observe that New Journalism and Documentary Journalism have more common ground than one would assume initially. Both either heavily make use of audiovisual techniques or attempt to apply them to the written field. Touching upon this commonality, however, does not entirely solve the problem of comparing both disciplines. In applying the techniques of New Journalism to documentary journalism, some of the characteristics are lost in the transition from written to audiovisual media. They do not translate between the two disciplines. I will now take a look at the techniques that are theorized as turning journalism into New Journalism and discuss if they are transferable to the audiovisual format. Wolfe himself identifies four stylistic devices which a story has to utilize for it to qualify as New Journalism: third-person point of view, scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, and recording of status-life symbols (Wolfe 30-33). Third-person point of view is one of the stylistic devices most specific to the New Journalism. It lends itself to representing multiple perspectives even besides the one of the journalist, thus shifting in internal focalization. It is to focalize, not necessarily systematically, every scene through a specific character within the journalistic story. Kallan writes in his Style and the New Journalism: A Rhetorical Analysis: “Third-person as contrasted to first-person point of view, at the very least, possesses the texture of objectivity because it portrays the perspectives of all the story’s central characters. The author appears as but a disinterested scribe who reports and posits with the reader the whole of any reality” (Kallan, Style and the NJ 54). While internal focalization
42 does not immediately strike one as transferable to the cinematic format, documentary in particular, it is one attempting to emulate this format. Kallan likens this to Edmund Carpenter’s observations on TV and film: “distance and angle constantly shift. The same scene is shown in multiple perspectives and focus. The viewer sees it from here, there, then over here; finally he is drawn inexorably into it, becomes part of it. He ceases to be a spectator.” (174) Secondly, Scene-by-scene construction can be seen in the same tradition, Wolfe himself defining it as “moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative” (Wolfe 31). There is little time or space for background information, and the reader is ‘dragged’ into the action immediately. This is a device that applies to documentary journalism only in particular ways. This I will discuss in 5.2.2. Structure, in which I will compare the way both the New Journalists and Theroux construct narratives. The third characteristic, extensive dialogue, the emphasizing of dialogue over the description and narration of the scenes, is a characteristic I will also discuss in this chapter. Lastly, the recording of status-life symbols, or observing characters’ diverse communication styles, is mostly replaced by the audiovisual format. It is a device that is mostly rooted in textual descriptions of visual and auditory stimuli, although all five senses can be involved in the description. As many of these symbols are already made visible or audible in the audiovisual format, narrative descriptions become relatively ineffective and superfluous. Therefore I have chosen not to discuss this particular device in my comparison chapters. An additional characteristic that I will discuss in particular regard to the New Journalism is the creating of sensationalism for the reader, which is a tendency of which most New Journalists are accused. In this chapter, I will purposely take a look at the tendencies to distort the facts and aspects of a story in order to make it more enjoyable for the audience. Partly in contrast to Wolfe, Vitullo identifies the three primary elements of Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism as “subjectivity, author involvement, and meta- journalism” (8). He further explains these characteristics as such: “Thompson assumes a subjective stance in his writing that is antithetical to the basic tenets of news reporting and background journalism, assumes a role in the story that makes it difficult to draw clear
43 distinctions between the observer and the observed, and is consistently focused on revealing the process of his writing to the reader” (8). Particular to Thompson’s vision on his Gonzo Journalism is his preoccupation with the idea that Gonzo Journalism should be published straight off the page without any editing. This is how Thompson differentiates Gonzo from Wolfe’s New Journalism in particular: he claims that Wolfe is a better reporter because he re- creates facts, but that he lacks spontaneity, which is what the Gonzo method favors (Green 206/108). However, we will not be able to apply Gonzo’s commendation of recording everything at the moment to documentary journalism, as documentaries are generally constructed by editing separately filmed footage and are challenging to be recorded in one take. Instead, we can easily link Thompson’s meta-journalistic approaches to approaches Theroux might utilize. These characteristics, such as subjectivity and author involvement, are not specific or exclusive to a particular format of journalism. I will describe these characteristics more concretely in their respective chapters. Author involvement will then be addressed in the self-insertion chapter, in which I will compare how the New Journalists and Theroux insert their specific personas into their interviews, observations and final assessments. The final characteristics with which we will compare the New Journalists and Theroux will be ordered under three overarching domains. The first one, On Topic, will discuss ethnography and sensationalism. The second one, On Structure, will discuss focalization, structure, and acquirement of information. Lastly, On Method will discuss personas, participation, and subjectivity.
44 5.1 On Topic 5.1.1 Ethnography
While the New Journalists’ topics do not all correlate and are diverse in nature, Wolfe and Thompson do share a keen interest in subcultures and other smaller groups who represent lifestyles that distance themselves from normal society. This can be derived from both authors’ most popular works: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was centered on the Merry Pranksters, a group of free spirits under the leadership of author Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs told the story of his year-and-a-half-long stay with the eponymous group. Theroux is similarly known for his subcultural interest, which he explores as often as he is able to. While the attraction to subcultural and countercultural groups is common amongst them, it ignites differing interests in them, which are related to their motivations. While the New Journalists regard these groups as a sign of the times and try to situate them within the context of the 1960s, Theroux as established shows interest in the individual and what their often uninhibited behaviors and opinions say about humankind. In a way, he is searching for authenticity. One could argue that the New Journalists do not attempt to portray their subjects as figureheads of 1960s society, either. But there is still a definite difference. As elaborated upon in the temporal and geographic chapters, the 1960s counterculture was a widespread, globalized phenomenon. (Edmunds and Turner 564) Counterculture does not take this shape in the time period in which Theroux operates. The (cultural) globalization that partly originated in the 1960s had already modified the world substantially in the mid-1990s when Louis Theroux started his career. Whilst I will not focus on the why’s this statement evokes, it can be argued that there was no movement after the hippie counterculture of the 1960s that became bigger or more widespread. Possibly a few arguments can be made for the (technically short-lived) punk subculture, but that is all. There has been speculation in the media as to why this is the case. In his 2014 article on youth subculture in the twenty-first century, music critic Alexis Petridis states that “the internet doesn't spawn mass movements, bonded together by a shared taste in music, fashion, and ownership of subcultural capital: it
45 spawns brief, microcosmic ones.” In any case, we can argue that the subcultures Louis Theroux documents are small in scale and relatively unpopular. In most cases the subcultures that the New Journalists document take their own spaces within the counterculture, and allow themselves to represent the subculture as a whole. A clear-cut example of this is Wolfe’s reportage of the Merry Pranksters, the group which went on to inspire hippies everywhere. Due to this interest in other subcultures and their personal approaches to them, all three journalists qualify for the label of the autoethnographer: Autoethnography connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural,
social, political. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an
ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects
of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self
that is moved by and may move through, refract and resist cultural
interpretations. […] Usually written in first-person voice, autoethnographic
texts feature the author, either as a primary participant in a group being studied,
a researcher who interacts with those studied, or as the main subject. Concrete
action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection are
featured and portrayed in dialogue, scenes, character and plot development.
Thus, autoethnography claims the conventions of literary writing. (Ellis 177-8)
It could be argued that due to their differences in intent, the New Journalists are more investigative than Theroux, who is focused on the people rather than what they represent: [Theroux’s] work is perhaps less like investigative journalism and more akin to
what ethnographic researchers would do. Theroux casts most of the ‘spotlight’
on the participants, their experiences, stories, contexts, cultural backgrounds
46 and, in a subtle way, on the audience and their various reactions, both
(il)logical and (counter)intuitive. (Miller 2)
Contrary to Wolfe and Thompson who tend to respectively insert themselves into the experiences of their subjects (Wolfe’s third-person point of view) or only provide them seen from their own point-of-view (Thompson’s objectivity), Theroux seems to be the only one of the three to have the best interests in mind for the representations of his subjects’ opinions. This is, of course, also aided by his format. (This will be discussed more elaborately in the subheadings on Method.) This suggests he is eligible as a genuine ethnographer rather than an autoethnographer. While he still fits the template of the autoethnographer, a genuine “open” ethnographer fits him better, as his priority is to portray his subjects as truthfully as possible. While there is inherently nothing wrong with wanting to display other “cultures” that function differently in society, this approach is in danger of becoming sensationalist. This can be caused by a too extreme us-versus-them-perspective or exoticism.
5.1.2 Sensationalism
Sensationalism, a phenomenon in journalism through which news is presented shockingly or excitingly, often bordering on exaggeration, is one that the New Journalists have been accused of since its feeble beginnings. At the start of his career, Tom Wolfe was given the opportunity to publish two stories in the Herald Tribune criticizing The New Yorker, a long established newspaper that would celebrate its sixtieth birthday that year. Dwight Macdonald, a post-war intellectual and long-term writer for the New Yorker, replied with an even longer two-part piece, refuting Wolfe’s every argument: The first piece was called ‘Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic
Writing Machine’, in which Macdonald skewered Wolfe’s style of writing as
being ‘a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of
journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than
47 information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers’.
(Weingarten 5)
Where there is journalism, there are also notions of what constitutes bad journalism. “Criticism of journalism continues to be based around simple binary oppositions, where emotional is bad and rational-intellectual is good, sensationalism is contrasted with contextualization and tabloid journalism is charged with meeting complexity with dumbing down” (Jönsson and Örnebring 284). Where subjectivity comes into play, the norm of the “factual, objective truth” will be the first argument to be utilized in the attempt to discredit it. (This will be further elaborated on in 5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment) However, when the validity of this argument is disputed, e.g., by questioning if there is any “objective truth”, much of the criticism can be boiled down to classist ideals. Bad journalism is the journalism that invites a different kind of audience, often an audience that enjoys sensationalist, emotionalist and scandalous stories and shows no interest in serious matter. Bad journalism is often known as tabloid journalism, for which Örnebring and Jönsson give an excellent definition: It allegedly panders to the lowest common denominator of public taste, it
simplifies, it personalises, it thrives on sensation and scandal—in short, tabloid
journalism lowers the standards of public discourse. Or, even worse, tabloid
journalism may even actually be a threat to democracy, breeding cynicism and
a lack of interest in politics, while ignoring the real political issues in favour of
superficial political scandal. (Jönsson and Örnebring 283)
What makes this phenomenon a classist one is that what constitutes bad or good journalism is decided by the upper classes. It “came from established power-holders within the media industry, as well as representatives of a pre-industrial, pre-mass society cultural and political elites. Tabloid journalism was damned, in part, for not conforming to the more refined tastes of these elite groups.” (Jönsson and Örnebring 287) That MacDonald
48 responded to Wolfe’s criticism of The New Yorker by insulting the aspects that make Wolfe’s work innovative and expressive, only validates this claim. Wolfe mentioned that he went out of his way to use a style that would offend the crew of the New Yorker, claiming that a parody of the typical New Yorker writing style was not enough, as something “boring” would only be funny for a page. Thus he decided to write the piece in what he called a “hyperbolic” style, which exaggerated many aspects and was lively to read. (Weingarten 2) Therefore, he predicted exactly what, in hindsight, would make the New Yorker crew tick. While sensationalism had been in existence for a decidedly longer time, the 1960s introduced new forms of it in public discussion. The many changes of the decade did not only exert influence over the New Journalists but the profession of the journalist as a whole. Michael Robinson, a political scientist who interviewed journalists, members of Congress and staff between 1977 and 1980, could conclude that during the 1960s the relations between media and Congress had changed in a fundamental way (Fink and Schudson 4). He reported that the press had become “harder, tougher, more cynical” (qtd. in Fink and Schudson 5). This could likely be attributed to the changing political landscape, in which on the American continent citizens of all genders and races had more agency than ever before. With the many political assassinations and the growing disillusionment with politics as an establishment, citizens became distrustful. This was also reflected in the way the media started to treat the political establishment: “The culture of the press was cooperative, even complaisant. ‘Until the
mid-1960s,’ as historian Julian Zelizer writes, ‘the press was generally
respectful of the political establishment’ (2007: 230). The decline of this
respect helped bring more attention to political scandal. Scandal reporting is
frequently decried as a lowering of the standards of the press from serious and
fair-minded coverage of issues to a frivolous and sensational focus on political
sideshows. In this view, scandal reporting encourages citizens’ alienation from
a politics portrayed as terminally tawdry. But scandal reporting is also a
49 symptom of a system that had become more democratic.” (Fink and Schudson
4-5)
Not only in journalism, but on all levels of society this rejection of the establishment could be felt. Marshall Fishwick, an old professor of Tom Wolfe’s, on what connects New Journalism to the popular culture of the 1960s, argues that “Both are subversive, challenging the status quo and ‘Establishment’ in society, government, media, and university. […] And to what end? ENTERTAINMENT. Measured by what standard of success? $.” (6-7) This suggests that the sensationalism the New Journalists were accused of was indeed there. And more, it was a calculated decision. The sensationalism present in the work of the New Journalists served both as an attempt to distance themselves from the establishment and as a way to criticize it. Their introspection into their style reveals their desire to create a journalism that is engaging for the public and reincites the enthusiasm for the happenings in the world. The New Journalists’ sensationalism is thus a move that has been thought through meticulously, which discredits the claims that their endeavors have been undertaken for mere monetary gain. However, their motivations and the actuality of their works do not necessarily line up every time. While it is mostly their writing styles that qualify as sensationalism, Wolfe’s “hyperbolic style” for example, some of the sensationalism is present in their circus-esque verbalization of the groups they document: “A set of terms gets repeated as in a litany throughout the New Journalism: ‘strange’, ‘crazy’, ‘loony’, ‘weird’, ‘eerie’, ‘freaky’.” While the New Journalists would not own up to this, this kind of wording caters to an audience that is attracted to a “us versus them”-perspective. Jacobson further explains that this is what the New Journalism does: It wants to highlight the strangeness in all of humanity through their portrayals of ‘strange’ people. But that is exactly a weakness in their logic: The New Journalists, rarely, if ever, write about ordinary people. They don’t
[…] write about ‘us’. They write about social exotics — movie stars, theatre
directors, killers, generals, mafiosi, politicians, sports heroes, civil rights
50 leaders, Park Avenue types — people whose lives necessarily seem unusual
and remote to most readers. (Jacobson 186/88)
Whereas Wolfe, whose flamboyant, personal and electric prose most qualified as sensationalism, largely kept to this aspect of it, Thompson experimented more eagerly with the notion. While his highly subjective prose cast judgment onto his surroundings that often bordered on shocking just for the sake of it, he also utilized his participatory approach to instill more sensationalism in his prose. While the specific incident will be elaborated on in 5.3.2 Immersion, Participation and Self-Insertion, Thompson has been known to influence his narrative to create a more shocking storyline. During the fieldwork for his book on the Hell’s Angels, he realized he needed a good ending to close off the story. Not much later, he was beaten up by a mob of Angels, after which he left the group for good. While he has not admitted this himself, people standing close to him have suggested he incited the fight himself to create a more sensational story. Louis Theroux has also been confronted with criticism directed at his seriousness. Since the beginning of his career, he has been criticized much the same way as the New Journalists have. Especially on his first few projects, he was accused of only choosing sensationalist topics to cover, e.g., certain extremist subcultures such as survivalists and nazis or dedication lifestyles such as bodybuilders and the world of plastic surgery. Theroux himself admitted that this was indeed the case at the beginning of his career. The concept of Weird Weekends, the first show that was officially “his”, was, of course, concerned with topics and groups of people off the beaten path. It was the entire premise of the show, also suggested in the word “weird” in the title, which of course matches with the New Journalists’ enthusiasm about this term. In a 2009 interview, Theroux argues that he deals more maturely with choosing his subjects later in his career: “While he started out working for Michael Moore on subjects such as the Ku Klux Klan, he says he has 'evolved' a bit since the Weird Weekends: ‘I used to discard stories because they didn't seem too funny - I don't do that any more.’” (qtd. in Townend) He also admits, however, that he does not see the appeal in making documentaries about groups or topics that have been explored in the documentary or journalistic format
51 many times before. He is drawn to people who live their lives by the border of human society. In an interview in The Guardian from 2007, asked if he does not have problems finding subjects for his documentaries when he’s making them for a generation brought up on reality TV, he considers that “The subjects I'm interested in are quite extreme. They're so far beyond the pale of normal human interaction that you're never going to get a reality show on that territory.” In another interview in the Guardian, this time from 2011, he says that a lot of the criticism he gets for not questioning the views of his subjects enough is also focused on the work he did for Weird Weekends: “I think [the critics] are just reacting to my earlier work, Weird Weekends, which hinged on me going, 'Oh look! I'm going to explore this world, it's going to be great being a porn star!' It was a very different tone.” (Aitkenhead) This ties into another common criticism Theroux gets for his early work. In it, Theroux’s subjects are portrayed superficially, due to him rarely attempting to dig underneath the surface. This, paradoxically, also creates a quality in his work that is redeeming of sorts: “If there is a weakness in his work, it is arguably this, for he doesn't explore how his subjects come to hold the views they do. And yet, he still manages to make many of them more sympathetic — or at least engagingly human — than most documentary-makers would, a feat made all the more unusual for not being achieved through a conventionally therapeutic route.” (Aitkenhead) This makes for a clear difference between Theroux’s work and that of the New Journalists — he does not blur the line between fact and fiction in this regard, namely that of the portrayal of his subjects. While his approach might be a superficial one, he makes sure that his interviewees are portrayed as authentically as possible, as authentically as he feels they came across. (Cooke) In this respect, he does not tend to exaggerate or influence the truth like the New Journalists do. He also expresses having thought deeply about how to approach the rendering of a personality through documentary: “Sometimes you have to protect the contributors a little bit. There is a slightly greedy aspect in journalism where you think I'm entitled to everything, and anything they say in an unguarded way is just grist to my mill and fair game. And I think there are limits. You don't stop being a human being when you start being a journalist.” (Aitkenhead)
52 5.2 On Construction 5.2.1 Acquirement of Information
In my comparisons, I mostly focus on the aspects of the works that are specific to the structure or content of the works itself. However, as the acquirement of information is an essential characteristic of the work the New Journalists produced, it is necessary to explore it briefly as well. In this subheading, I will discuss the amount of information the New Journalists would collect, how they would collect it and how they covered this acquirement of information in their works. A distinct feature of the New Journalism was the vast amount of information they would collect and provide in their articles, stories, and novels. This characteristic is represented by the fourth literary device Wolfe describes as being typical for the New Journalism: the recording of status-life symbols. This is one of the most considerable deviations from traditional journalism: they would concentrate on the details of a situation or an interviewee, to sketch the mood of the situation and blow life into the characters they would cover. “The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature” (Wolfe 47). While this device is mostly associated with the New Journalism and less with Gonzo Journalism, Gonzo provided information in a similar amount: “Thompson expended considerable effort in crafting character depictions, mood-colored settings, and evocative dialogue in a format known primarily for biographical summary, matter-of-fact time and location definitions, and clear-cut on-the-record quotations” (Vitullo 9). As I already have argued, the recording of status-life symbols is a literary device that is hard to apply to the audiovisual medium, as much of this information can be given through the medium in itself. Theroux cannot provide his audience with a similar amount of information. Additionally, even if there is information to be given, he mostly avoids doing so and only provides the minimum amount of information that is needed to follow the narrative. (See Stylistic Structure) Wolfe writes in the introduction to his anthology on the New Journalism about the “extraordinary feats of reporting that the New Journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place — and to record the
53 dialogue in full.” (46) This process was what Wolfe called “saturation reporting” (qtd. in Kallan, Entrance 110/12). This is another clear deviation to traditional journalism, which would usually only note the bare minimum and work with that. Presumably, the New Journalists would refuse to cover a story if some of the information would have to be interpreted by themselves. They often spent weeks with their subjects to collect enough information to be able to publish the story. Theroux spends a similar amount of time with his subjects, though likening this to the reasons why the New Journalists did it would be a problematic claim, as a documentary comprises different takes that usually have to be recorded over several days. However, in “Louis and the Brothel”, Theroux mentions that he will spend several weeks on the property of the brothel to note how everyday life in it progresses and to keep an eye on the “personal development” of his interviewees. This means he does have the intention to collect a bright and varied picture of life at the brothel. As I have already mentioned, he provides less background information than the New Journalists, but in this respect, we again have to take the limitations of the documentary into account. Wolfe writes in the introduction to his anthology on the New Journalism about the “extraordinary feats of reporting that the New Journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place — and to record the dialogue in full.” (46) This process was what Wolfe called “saturation reporting” (qtd. in Kallan, Entrance 110/12). This is another clear deviation to traditional journalism, which would usually only note the bare minimum and work with that. Presumably, the New Journalists would refuse to cover a story if some of the information would have to be interpreted by themselves. They often spent weeks with their subjects to collect enough information to be able to publish the story. Theroux spends a similar amount of time with his subjects, though likening this to the reasons why the New Journalists did it would be a problematic claim, as a documentary comprises different takes that usually have to be recorded over several days. However, in “Louis and the Brothel”, Theroux mentions that he will spend several weeks on the property of the brothel to note how everyday life in it progresses and to keep an eye on the “personal development” of his interviewees. This means he does have the intention to collect a bright and varied picture of life at the brothel. As I have
54 already mentioned, he provides less background information than the New Journalists, but in this respect, we again have to take the limitations of the documentary into account. The coverage of the process is a technique of smaller importance for the New Journalism than for Gonzo Journalism. Thompson, in particular, was concerned with the operation of his research and writing, sometimes putting more thought into this than into the story he was supposed to write: “Thompson focused intense scrutiny on the mechanics of the stories being covered. In analyzing his work, it is clear that he was often more interested in how a story was covered and edited than in what was actually being written about” (Vitullo 9). The Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream was supposed to be published with a 3,000-word essay on the writing process of the book, which it never did. Theroux shows a similar interest in the filming process of his documentaries, often highlighting his own mental or even psychological process of collecting information. This is linked to the subjective dimension of his work. Whereas Thompson focuses on the technical or even literary side of the writing process, Theroux’s comments on this process seem to consist mostly of him expressing curiosity regarding a person or an event he encounters. In this way, this thought process is intellectual or psychological rather than technical. However, the preoccupation with the development of the project is the same. Concerning the aspect of acquirement of information, we can observe some similarities between the methods and intentions of the New Journalists and Louis Theroux. Theroux’s acquirement of information corresponds more with Gonzo Journalism than with the New Journalism. Most of the differences that occur between the Gonzo and Theroux can then be ascribed to the transition from one medium to the other. The most significant difference on a motivational level is likely Theroux’s tendency to avoid giving an overload of information. However, this will be addressed in the following subheading on Stylistic Structure.
5.2.2 Stylistic Structure
55 The first aspect of structure that we will discuss is the narrative technique of chronology. We will take a look at the ways the journalists navigate temporally within their storylines — do they adhere to a chronological timeline or are they more content with non- linear storytelling? Tom Wolfe is known for his rambling, confusing and non-linear style. He jumps from one scene to another with barely a notice to the reader. He shifts between time frames often, and leaves many scenes open-ended. Kallan writes: “Wolfe retrieves and reamplifies. His style is to develop one idea partially, to move on to another and another; then, suddenly, to come back to the first idea, to reach again for the third, to embellish the second — as if Wolfe forever were plagued by afterthoughts, never quite willing to concede closure” (61). In this way, his style resembles the manner in which someone would tell a story orally. Despite the many tangents his narrative offers, the storyline still moves on steadily. The nonlinearity does not cause the storyline to collapse. Hunter S. Thompson plays with chronology in a similar manner. Matias Corbett Garcez explains it coherently: “Thompson has a singular yet multifaceted prose. He inserts actual news/media excerpts of the time, his journalistic/factual side, which gives certain credibility to the narrative. He creates huge tangents in the story to contextualize events and rant about disconnected story elements, a nonlinear nonsensical subversion of the great American novel” (197-8). In The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson more concretely shares his thoughts on how a Gonzo piece ideally should be structured. He states that his original idea was to record the whole story in one notebook and send it in for publication without any editing or revising his writing. (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 74) He, however, admits that he failed at carrying out this ideal. (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 75) Nevertheless, considering Thompson values an “in-the-midst-of-the-action” attitude and unedited drafts, it can be argued that he aimed mainly for a chronological approach. What he ended up publishing then resembled Wolfe’s style more, emulating an oral storytelling technique. Despite the availability of the collage technique for documentaries, Theroux makes little use of a non-linear storyline. Often, his documentaries start with a short scene, which is usually pulled out of context and incites curiosity in the audience, e.g., the Weird Weekends
56 episode on Porn starts off with Theroux and an unnamed man reading off a porn film script, which causes the audience wonder if Theroux himself is going to star in a porn movie. This scene then shows up later in the programme, at that point embedded in context. Otherwise, Theroux’s scenes are always ordered chronologically, presumably because a non- chronological order would confuse the audience. Additionally, unlike in literature and written texts, the audiovisual material, of course, cannot be added if it has not been filmed before. This leaves the documentary maker with a limited amount of scenes, as opposed to the author, who can keep adding in scenes or information. Regarding this aspect, we can assume the documentary maker has less freedom of creative expression with his material. However, implementing a chronological order allows the audience to orient itself in the plot of the documentary easily. This creates the possibility for Theroux to narrate the scenes as little as possible and to leave much of the information the scenes provide up to interpretation. An aspect that fits into this is scene-by-scene construction, which Wolfe explains as “moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative” (31). In Wolfe’s work, this can be interpreted in the most literal way. When he is narrating one scene and background information is needed for the reader to understand the scene, he will shift the narrative back to the scene that provides this background information. The purpose of this technique is to immerse the reader in the situation, to make them feel they are as much a part of the story as Wolfe or his characters/subjects are. “It further provides the literary license needed to add significance to events and the relationship between events through the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards” (Vitullo 31). This goes hand-in-hand with Wolfe’s insistence on “getting into the head” of his interviewees. Even if he was not present at the scene himself, he would provide the details as if he actually were. Thompson plays with this technique more than Wolfe does. Thompson inserts his persona (see 5.3.1 Persona) as such that it corresponds to both characterization and narrative technique (Caron 5). Most of his work is tainted by the drug use with which both the author and his persona attribute themselves. This provides an explanation for the disjointed narrative he presents to the reader. The narrative suggests the drug use has affected the narrator’s memory and logical thinking, giving way to all kinds of digressions such as temporal shifts
57 and fantasies instead. “And, once the reader is used to the extremely digressive nature of the narrative, Hunter S. Thompson is free to include his more serious observations on the scene in front of him or on society in general […] without appreciably altering the fast pace essential to his gonzo style” (Caron 5). Louis Theroux makes use of this scene-by-scene technique in an alternative way, as the involvement of audiovisual material can mostly replace the way the New Journalists use the method. We also have already established that he structures his work in a linear fashion. However, as opposed to the “standard documentary” and by utilizing mostly scenes in which he is personally involved (see 5.3.2 Immersion, Participation and Self-Insertion) he broadly avoids background information in the voice-over, and often lets the scenes speak for themselves. The voice-overs are kept brief and only provide the essential information for basic understanding of the scene(s) following. Often, the scenes or takes shift between each other without any further explanation by Theroux. However, this usually does not disrupt the linear order of the documentary, and even then, the chronology is kept in mind. If he provides any background information at all, it is often to locate the audience within the time frame of the scenes1, introducing them to new interviewees2 or more importantly, to make them aware of the process behind the filming of the documentary.3 Even in the beginning of his average film, Theroux provides less than a minute of background information in conjunction with an interesting hook. 4 What all three journalists do have in common, is their firm reliance on dialogue. Wolfe writes that “realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device. It also establishes and defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device.” (46) The New Journalists would record dialogues in their entirety and
1 Using the Weird Weekends episode on Porn, I will illustrate the three occurrences.
2 “[Porn star] John Doe was working with two true veterans of the business — porn star since the '70s, Sharon Mitchell, and performer-turned-director, Paul Thomas.” (Theroux, Porn) 3 “At John Doe's suggestion, I sought out a talent agent and for wannabe porno performers, there is only one — Jim South of World Modeling.” (Theroux, Porn)
4 “The San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles - the acknowledged world capital of pornographic films. It's an industry that revolves around images of women. To immerse myself in the less-well-known subculture of the male performers.” (Theroux, Porn)
58 include the most relevant ones in their works. Theroux has understood this as well. Again, utilizing the medium of the documentary, reliance on dialogue would be highly recommended. However, as we have established before, Theroux spends little time narrating, and often the dialogue guides the audience into understanding, as it is mainly left up for interpretation by the audience itself. If Theroux comments on a piece of dialogue at all, it is often to share an opinion, only rarely attempting to interpret the utterance in question. Of course, as Theroux is mainly known for being an interviewer, the dialogue he includes in his work is often less natural than the dialogue the New Journalists would record as (mostly) observers.
59 60 5.3 On Method 5.3.1 Persona
The writers grouped in the traditions of New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism are not only renowned for the particular style techniques they employ, but they have also made their mark in literary history as iconic personalities. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Truman Capote and others are until today known as influential, vibrant or controversial public figures. This is not in any way a coincidence, part of the New Journalism style comprised creating a unique persona for oneself. Particular to the New Journalists was their insistence on not forgoing their personal identities. They went to great lengths to preserve these in their works. This can be both attributed to the (conscious or unconscious) motivation to become a particular kind of celebrity, more specifically a “televisionistic one” (Kallan, Style and the NJ 53), and their tendency to insert these personas in their works. They attributed importance to making their presence felt in their works. If the personas they would utilize for this target were artificial or genuine is oftentimes unclear and likely dependent on the individual at issue. Under this subheading, I will elaborate on why and how they constructed these personas. I will also discuss the personas associated with and created by Thompson, Wolfe, and Theroux. Wolfe describes that amongst journalists and reporters of all kinds there was one common dream, which was that of the novel. The novel was more than just a story or a book — in the 1960s it was an object of a cult, a cultural phenomenon. Wolfe claims the profession of the journalist itself brought a person nothing but invisibility. To become a novelist was the only way to escape that fate. The competition between journalists and reporters was fierce, but there was no reason for editors to fear for their jobs. The contest only lived amongst the reporters who harbored a dream of writing their own novel. “The Novel seemed like one of the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold or striking oil, through which an American could, overnight, in a flash, utterly transform his destiny.” (Wolfe 20) There were enough examples from the 1930s that only confirmed the legitimacy of this dream. Many journalists considered reporting and writing for magazines as a way to authorhood rather than a goal by itself. Technically, they did not even regard it as a way, more as a temporary stay until they
61 felt they were ready to take the plunge and pursue the profession of the author. However, in most cases, the intellectual dimension of authorhood was not what they dreamed of, it was the prestige associated with it that was most enticing. Wolfe writes that “Reporters didn't want much . . . merely to be stars!” (Wolfe 17) However, there was a considerable problem that presented itself to literature and the written media in the 1960s. The television had largely replaced written media such as magazines and newspapers by becoming the main source of information and excitement in the American household. (Culbert 169/71) The New Journalists realized this and adapted to the situation. They figured out that for television to be successful it had to offer excitement, and much of that excitement was the involvement of visual media: “The dialogue of visual images is what inspires our creativity.” (Culbert 170/72) In his essay on the influence, television has had on the New Journalism, David H. Culbert puts forward a convincing argument on why the New Journalists implemented this reasonably new medium into their writing: The New Journalist really wants to be seen in print — to be a television
celebrity, or at least a visible reporter. Since he cannot be literally seen in print
he does the next best thing: he injects part of a carefully-constructed persona
into his stories so that the reader is tempted to believe he can see the reporter
who has written the story. The illusion is all the more convincing for being but
an illusion of television reality. (171/73)
The New Journalists understood that if one wanted to become a well-known figure, in one way or the other they had to be visible. As suggested in Culbert’s fragment, the New Journalists had to play out a particular and self-invented persona in order to become visible the way they aspired to. Oren Soffer, when discussing the interpersonal nature of television, offers an example of the attitude of the audience towards the persona: An illusion of an intimate dialogue between the audience and the persona was
promoted by the talk style, which appealed to listeners as if they were friends,
62 as well as through the perception of the ‘subjective camera’, where the camera
became the eyes of the audience. Unlike newspaper journalists, who try to
excise their own subjective voice from news texts, the radio or television
persona in most genres is an integral ‘presence’ in the news. (480)
The creation of a persona was thus a way to acquire sympathy from the reader — the main aim was to have their audience take a liking to them. New Journalism’s emphasizing of a personal, unique voice allowed this. The New Journalists would build their own persona by involving themselves in their story thing, insert themselves in situations and voice their opinions. The extent to which they would utilize these personas varied significantly amongst them. Some of them only had one persona which they embraced, one that would give the impression it is their actual identity, whereas others would cultivate multiple of these personas. Norman Mailer, in particular, was notorious for involving many of his personas in his works. After his death in May 2018, Tom Wolfe’s legacy was passionately explored in the media, sparking and resurfacing many long reads about the reputation Wolfe had secured for himself in his lifetime of eighty-eight years. Titles of articles named “How Tom Wolfe Became… Tom Wolfe” (M. Lewis) and “Tom Wolfe wasn't just a writer, he was a brand” (Caesar) leave little room for interpretation: Wolfe had been most successful in his quest to become a unique media personality, even being called the “voice of a journalistic generation” (M. Lewis). It was only after he became well-known that he started to cultivate the image he is now remembered for: “That he had no great ability to attract attention to himself except through his pen proved to be a huge literary advantage. He wanted status and attention as much as anyone else, but to get them he had to write” (M. Lewis). Particular to Wolfe, in contrast to his peers, was the creation of a persona that he did not cultivate in real life. He was most recognizable by the white suits he wore (inspired by his hometown Richmond, Virginia, where the men would wear white suits all throughout summer) and the accessories that he combined with it. This he did without a doubt to create a persona to embrace, but unlike other New Journalists, he did not create new personality traits to adopt in
63 public. He certainly maintained the self-image of being “a normal man in an abnormal world” (M. Lewis). A large part of his persona was present in his writing style, his handwriting and clothing style but other than that, he was and felt perfectly ordinary. Like Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson started cultivating his public persona only after he became famous to mirror the writing he put on the page. His persona undeniably speaks to the imagination, and few individuals familiar with his memory would not know about the image he displayed to the world. Unlike Wolfe however, he did not put limits on this persona. “Thompson has extended the principle [of selective emphasis of the complex traits of his personality] to create a self-caricature. Using a comic, mock-psychotic persona as narrator- protagonist, Thompson has freed his fictive imagination to shape his journalistic works into inventive categories” (Hellmann 17). Thompson, most of the time sporting his yellow aviators, white hat, and ever-present cigarette, built a persona he named Raoul Duke. This character became the narrator and main character of many of his ensuing works. However, he went on to embrace it so readily he eventually could not any longer fathom where Duke ended and Thompson began, resulting in an inability to divide his real self from his fictional self. In a BBC interview from 1978, he admitted: "I'm never sure which one people expect me to be. […] I'm leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to speak at, say, universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be.” (Frankensplean) The most characteristic aspect of the work Louis Theroux has done on his path to fame is perhaps the persona he has constructed during his interviews, whether that happened consciously or unconsciously. In this, he differs from Thompson and Wolfe, who had already acquired a certain amount of fame before they started to implement changes in their public persona. Theroux became known for his persona in the first place, presumably because it reflects his work clearly. His persona is often likened to the curiosity of a child and described as “faux-naif”. This is likely due to his habit of asking simple “why”-questions to which he often already knows the answer. However, when confronted with questions regarding this interviewing style, he denies that it is a carefully constructed persona, claiming not a lot of
64 thought went into it: "It's certainly true I do ask questions where I do know the answer and that's the nature of television. It's not [a put-on persona]. I just try and ask the most obvious questions, and by asking them, and by keeping on asking them, you sometimes get somewhere” (qtd. in Townend). In that way, unlike the New Journalists, he does not cultivate this persona in real life — in fact, he distances himself from it: 'I'm in a professional situation, so that's not me. The everyday me is not
someone who'd say to Debbie McGee [Mrs Paul Daniels], "Why haven't you
had children?" It would be intrusive. I'm trying to do a job and part of that is
asking questions that may seem insensitive and not stepping on the answers. If
that's construed as wide-eyed innocence, so be it. (qtd. in Cooke)
Despite not being willing to embrace his on-screen persona, Theroux prides himself on his ability to get from people exactly what his persona incites. It cannot be denied that his persona causes people to feel at ease with him, which in turn makes them more willing to give him an insight into their lives. A substantial amount of criticism has come his way because of this trait. As he mostly tends to cover people and groups that either reject normal society or distance themselves from it in (sometimes) questionable ways, he has been accused of complicity with his subjects. This is largely due to his non-confrontational attitude towards his subjects. If he attempts to confront them with their views or behavior at all, it is in a subdued and subtle manner. Only on rare occasions he directly criticizes them, though often in brief comments rather than statements. An example is in an episode of Weird Weekends named “Louis and the Nazis”, where Nazi Tom Metzger compares black people to apes and then declares he thinks he is better looking than actor Denzel Washington. Theroux responds with “Do you really believe that? That seems delusional.” but does not dwell on it any further. Confronted with his viewers’ criticism that he should be more argumentative, Theroux comments that "I'm not that comfortable doing polemic or being strident. It's not me. I think what I'm good at is getting to know people, and trying to build a relationship over a few
65 weeks and trying to get to the truth” (Aitkenhead). However, even if he is non- confrontational, claiming he would be complicit is an exaggeration, as he remains detached from his subjects at all times, never getting too close. Tim Lewis, a journalist at the Guardian, notes that it is likely this detachment, “his ability to get close to people without losing his outsider’s edge” (T. Lewis) that explains the success he has known. While the claim that his persona is the only reason for Theroux’s celebrity would be inaccurate, it cannot be denied that it has played a substantial part in it. The public eye focuses on him the same way as it does on the New Journalists: on his persona, and the personality cult it has acquired over time. While it could be argued that he has had an edge over the New Journalists by rising to fame through a medium that already presented him as a visible presence, this does not change anything about the fact that he, too, is most remembered for his persona, much like the New Journalists. Journalist Michael Lewis argues that it is the unique voices and personas of the New Journalists that is the element of their work most specific to them: “When you look at [the] list of New Journalists, what pops to mind is not their common technique. It’s their uncommon voices. […] They didn’t sound like anyone else’s” (M. Lewis). Louis Theroux, ever associated with his aloof, childlike, passive interviewing style, might have accomplished just that.
5.3.2 Immersion, Participation and Self-Insertion
Now we have discussed the particular personas Wolfe, Thompson, and Theroux created for themselves and their motivations behind this, we can address how the more circumstantial aspects of this technique come together. Firstly, it should be noted that the New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism differ on this topic. Moreover, it is likely this technique that forms the most evident and extremest distinction between the two. “Wolfe’s technique points out the crucial distinction between his definition of New Journalism and Thompson’s Gonzo offshoot: The issue of the author participation in the story being covered” (Caron 2). Gonzo Journalism values the participation of the author, as opposed to the New Journalism’s ideal role of the author as the onlooker. Wolfe lists third-person point of view as one of the literary
66 devices that a text has to check off for it to be defined as New Journalism. This illustrates that there is little involvement of a personal perspective: “Wolfe’s non-participatory stance is found in his manner of describing himself “in the third person, usually as a puzzled onlooker…” (Caron 2) Wolfe and most New Journalists thus will immerse themselves in the environment of their subject matter but will still keep their distance, so as not to disturb the peace. They will note everything but still with some detachment, as a traditional reporter is expected to do. By doing this, they uphold the reputation of still being somewhat objective. Wolfe argues that “it seemed all-important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment. The idea was to give the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters.” (35) They wanted to show real life as it presented itself, in its most essential, raw form. To achieve this, the New Journalists, and especially Wolfe, would try to get into the heads of their subjects, but stayed out of their own. (See 5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment) As I have already argued in the subheading on personas, Tom Wolfe adapted his persona to reflect his singular, thrilling prose, because he sensed what his audience wanted from a personality that produced such work. In this way, he did not insert his persona into his prose, but rather himself. It was his unique perspective and the artistry to express that view that he incorporated in his work: What Wolfe has done […] is to eliminate [the] tone of gray condescension with
which more conventional journalism would treat […] a subject; and he has
become involved in the whole scene — its details, the small touches, the
signatures of the whole custom-car mind-set, the style of the environment — to
an extent that allows him to perceive and write about it in an extraordinary way
(Johnson 136/38)
He selects the details and events he wants to show and channels this desire to inform and tell stories through his own personality, choosing what is interesting himself. This is a far
67 cry from the emotional detachment that traditional journalists were taught to cast on the subjects they covered. This is perhaps the most fundamental difference between traditional journalism and New Journalism: “A traditional journalist would never make a point of introducing his own feelings and personality into what he writes whereas this is the heart of the New Journalism” (Culbert 169/71). Where Wolfe is, perhaps, the instigator of the idea, Thompson takes this attachment to a particular subject much further: in his work, it is often hard to predict where the narrator ends and the narrative itself begins. Thompson threw any pretenses of objectivity entirely overboard, implementing an I-perspective and a participatory dimension in his work instead. This is not to say that his work is entirely fictional, however. It still attempts to portray the people in the story the way they are, without putting on the New Journalism’s act of being able to see what goes on inside the heads of their subjects: “This “I” of Thompson’s narratives acquires the three-dimensional solidity of any of the people he writes about; they are all “characters” in the story” (Caron 2). He also collected information the same way Wolfe did, structuring it in an autobiographical rather than a factual way, but providing this information nonetheless. What he does, is blur the line between fact and fiction: Once the conventions of Gonzo Journalism allow for this equal footing
between observer and observed, the persona gains the potential for displacing
the reporter’s assignment. (…) Since what the “I” feels and thinks about the
events or people being covered is necessarily known only to the author,
imagination can replace memory as the only guide for those thoughts and
feelings. (Caron 2)
As we have discussed before in 5.2.2 Stylistic Structure, Thompson would apply the characteristics of his persona as such, that its chronic drug use could explain the reason why the narrative left open specific pieces of information or mixed up the chronological order of the events being covered.
68 As a further distinction from Wolfe, Thompson comments on Wolfe and his New Journalism in his The Great Shark Hunt: “Wolfe's problem is that he's too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous” (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 75). For his novel Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, Thompson spent a year and a half with the Angels to collect enough information to write his book. He bought himself a motorcycle (though not the Harley-Davidson which the Angels favored) and started driving even more violently than the Angels did (Weingarten 134). However, while he liked to preach that he participated in the majority of the Angels’ happenings, he could often not keep up with their wild parties and events. “Thompson was of two minds: he was eager to chronicle the discord, to be right in the thick of it, but careful to distinguish himself as a civilian, lest he get caught in the crossfire” (Weingarten 137). Sonny Barger, a Hell’s Angel and later author, commented that “Hunter was a real stone coward whenever things started heating up, but he always wanted to be part of the action, wherever it was. When things started heating up, Hunter jumped into his trunk” (qtd. in Weingarten 137). Other than that, most of the Hell’s Angels recall him being unassuming and inconspicuous, mostly hanging around and noting his observations. Later on, however, he started to drop his precautions and “violated [his] own rules about staying out all night on a run” (Weingarten 140). He saw an Angel beat his wife during an argument and protested against it with the words “Only punks beat up girls” (qtd. in Weingarten 140). He had pressed his luck a for too long of a time now, and he described the ensuing events in the Postscript of his book: None of those who did me were among the group I considered my friends —
but they were Angels, and that was enough to cause many of the others to
participate after one of the brethren teed off on me. The first blow was
launched with no hint of warning and I thought for a moment that it was just
one of those drunken accidents that a man has to live with in this league. But
69 within seconds I was clubbed from behind by the Angel I’d been talking to just
a moment earlier. Then I was swarmed in a general flail. (Thompson, Hell’s
Angels 183)
As soon as an Angel he was familiar with put an end to the beating, Thompson fled the scene. He never returned. Barger argued that Thompson knew precisely what he was doing: “He was there for a specific reason, to get beat up. Hunter had been around long enough to know that’s what’s gonna happen if you get out of line, how far you could push it” (qtd. in Weingarten 141). Jim Silberman, Thompson’s editor at the time, had similar suspicions, saying that “He wants a story in which something like that will happen. He’s looking for a provocation. He needed that ending, because he was really struggling with an ending for the book” (Weingarten 141). Thompson, however, denied that this was the case, although he quickly knew he would use the incident in the book. Thompson’s ideal practitioner of Gonzo Journalism had to have characteristics of a journalist, a photographer, and an actor (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 75). This likening still implies that there was distance involved. It suggests that the primary objective was to record, not influence the narrative himself. The fight he got in clearly violated that idea and further blurred the line between narrator and narrative. Thompson has a particular and ambitious ideal for the practitioner of his invented Gonzo Journalism: True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an
artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be
a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even
sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a
film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work
and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a
main character. (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, 74)
70 Interestingly, Louis Theroux checks off many of these boxes. He is credited as the writer of his documentaries. While he does not do his camera work himself, in a Masterclass Theroux gave during DocVille in Leuven in 2012, he explains that the crew of his films is kept small so as to heighten the intimacy between him and his subjects. Additionally, expert in media and video journalism Vivien Morgan mentions something called the Louis Theroux style, which she describes as such: “it is all about [Theroux’s] view of things and presenter- led. So the camera shots are from his perspective and from behind him, also filmed in one continuous shot.” (132) He is the presenter and is a significant presence in his documentaries’ narratives, often placing himself in the role of the protagonist. Based on these observations, one could conclude that Louis Theroux is close to the ideal of the Gonzo practitioner, but in practice, this is relatively untrue. Theroux is widely renowned for his willingness to participate in the topics he covers in his documentaries, which, together with his persona, is a significant reason for the cult following he has built over the years. Especially in his earlier work, Weird Weekends in particular, Theroux did not shy away from joining in on the subject he was supposed to cover. He has had a cameo in a gay porn film, had a liposuction and has gambled in Vegas. When promoting his new film on plastic surgery, asked when he decided to have a liposuction, he answered: “I always like to try get involved.” In his Masterclass during DocVille Festival Theroux said that during Weird Weekends, it was always planned out carefully during the process of filming that he would take on a small role. In his documentary on the L.A. porn business, he signs up for a porn agency and pretends to be interested in getting involved in the industry, whilst still stressing his position as a journalist: “Speaking as a guy, I'm a reporter for the BBC, but I'm sort of interested in participating as well, so do you think you can give me any advice?” (Theroux, Porn) A way in which Theroux inserts his persona is asking questions focused on himself and pulling the conversation in his direction.5 However, by doing this, he seems to cast himself as “the average joe”. Not genuinely asking questions about himself specifically, but
5 While talking to a model who has just done a photoshoot with a body-builder: “Hey, in all seriousness, Karen, do you, you as a woman, find that sculpted physique with muscles more attractive than this skinny guy who is a little, like, pale and maybe a tiny bit flappy?” (Theroux, Body-Building)
71 about the average person, he verbalizes questions in the sense of “someone like me” or “a person like me”. Simultaneously, by aligning his own character with that of his subjects, he disintegrates the “us” and “them”-dimension that is often expected of documentary makers. In most documentaries on subcultures or other ethnographic documentaries, viewers are encouraged to regard the journalists or documentary makers as an “avatar” of “us” (Hoskin 125), they represent the audience’s ideals and judgments, which are subsequently contrasted against the divergent views of the subjects. While an argument could be made that this was not yet the case in Theroux’s early work, the majority of Theroux’s work counters this opposition through his participatory method. Journalist Dave Hoskin argues that: Theroux’s willingness to participate helps erase the ugly boundary between ‘us’
and ‘them’. There’s obviously an element of voyeurism in his work, but by
placing himself alongside his subjects he gives them a degree of protection. It’s
not simply one of ‘them’ doing some weird activity, it’s also our avatar, and
thus the usual media sneer is banished. (127)
In this way, Theroux’ participatory method both mirrors and contradicts Thompson’s method. Whereas Thompson’s participation in his works seems to mainly be fueled by the desire to shock his audience, Theroux’s method provokes sympathetic responses from his audience. Another distinction between Thompson and Theroux’s approaches is that Theroux participates but keeps his distance, which would put him somewhere on the same level with Wolfe and other New Journalists. Whereas Thompson, as illustrated before, is so willing to immerse himself in his environment (and persona) that he has oftentimes lost himself there, Theroux will allow for his subjects’ voices to be heard but holds fast to his own opinions. (See 5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment) Journalist Tim Lewis considers that this ability to immerse himself in people’s lives “without losing his outsider’s edge” might the reason for his widespread success. Theroux himself argues this is due to a fear of intimacy: “I have a slight fear of intimacy, and I think, that’s partly why I do the work that I do. It’s a safe form of
72 intimacy in which I’m professionally accountable, but I’m not, in a sense. I mean, obviously, I am personally accountable, but it feels there’s a sort of emotional prophylactic” (qtd. in T. Lewis). While Wolfe and Thompson have explored the interpersonal value to participation (Wolfe, with his “saturation reporting”, surprisingly perhaps even more than Thompson), Theroux emphasizes this quality much more in both his work and reflections on it. By inserting himself in the narrative, joining in on the action and positioning himself as an equal to his subjects, Theroux manages to create a bond between him and his subjects, which in some cases has evolved into friendship. “The trick is to be "interested and polite," [Theroux] said, "It's about forming relationships in a very human way. I can put myself on the same level as my subject — defuse any 'aloofness' — by diving in, getting naked, rapping, working out as a wrestler etc.” (R/IAmA). His immersion, as opposed to that of Wolfe’s and Thompson’s, is thus less directly motivated by the desire to get to know people and bond with them. Of course, his reasoning behind building relationships with his subjects is driven by the desire to discern the truth. But all the more often, this truth is humanistic in nature. In this way, we can regard Theroux’s immersion method as a way to achieve his principal objective, to form a connection with people and, eventually, to have had a conversation with humanity in all its forms.
5.3.3 Subjectivity and Judgment
Tom Wolfe, in the foreword to his anthology the New Journalism, in which he gives his thoughts and interpretations of the phenomenon, does not mention any deviation from objectivity. In fact, he emphasizes the aspect and even goes as far as to argue the New Journalists are, through their extensive listing of details and willingness to immerse themselves in other points of opinion, more objective than traditional journalists. This incited much public criticism; a “controversy centered on the meaning of the term ‘realism’ in relation to journalistic practice.” (Eason 142) Critics contested that the techniques which Wolfe listed (such as scene-by-scene construction and third-person point of view) made for reliable realism, for “they violated the conventions of nonfiction” (Eason 142). The criticism
73 was not unsolicited — when a reporter argues that getting in the head of a bystander and telling the story through their point of view equals objectivity, some skepticism is in order. The New Journalists’ aversion to the detachment which traditional journalism called for also provoked controversy. By immersing oneself in a particular environment there could be no question of any objectivity, could there? However, by reporting the way they did, the New Journalists achieved something that had never been explored on a scale this large before. They created what David L. Eason calls a metalanguage, with which they would question the paradigms of traditional journalism and reflect on why these were constituted in the first place. They took the doctrine on objectivity that conventional journalism had established over the past decades and mirrored it against itself to criticize its own shortcomings. Whereas routine journalism tries to reduce the distance between report and
referent in order to make the report appear transparent, New Journalism points
reflexively to its own mode of production. As the attention to technique attests,
New Journalism calls attention to itself as both a report of an actual situation
and as a mode of discourse which exists in relation to other modes such as the
classical novel and routine journalism. (Eason 147)
This is one of the most distinct characteristics of the New Journalism in contrast to the traditional punishment — the questioning of the notion of objectivity and the absolute truth. The truth with capital T, ironically, is a concept that is not questioned often in popular media. The phenomenon of objectivity as we know it today is a phenomenon that was birthed by the long-lived theoretical movement of positivism, which argued that the truth could only be measured by the senses. (Wien 4) The conception of objectivity as theorized by this movement is made up of a dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. Oren Soffer elaborates on this positivist thought within the context of journalism: Objectivity assumes that journalists can avoid bringing their personality,
values, and inner world into their work. In a manner similar to the I-It
74 relationship, the reporter (I) is expected to remain distanced from the social and
political phenomena and actors observed and reported on. The journalist is
supposed to be an expert, and this expertise reflects the reduction of the I into
the professional sphere, detached from other personal spheres of existence.
(477)
Journalism as a discipline also borrowed from the discipline of history, which around the nineteenth century replaced the chronicle (an exciting telling of history that only selectively adheres to historical facts) with reconstructions wholly based on historical sources. (Wien 6) By taking inspiration from these disciplines, journalism has created its own cobweb of objectivity, which is still commonly adhered to in today’s newspapers. The New Journalists attempted to break away from this cobweb entirely: “Over time and on several occasions, journalism has attempted to break free of its objectivity paradigm, to free itself from positivist thinking, but only in the case of New Journalism was this attempt successful.” (Wien 13) Two techniques of New Journalism contested the notion of objectivity in particular. Two techniques of New Journalism contested the notion of objectivity in particular. The first one, participatory immersion in their subject matter, is one that I have discussed previously in this chapter. The second one is third-person point of view or internal focalization. It is important to note that this is a common thread Wolfe has listed and does not necessarily reflect all of the New Journalists. Wolfe’s mind is very much present in his works, though not as one would expect: “Wolfe […] is present in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as an omniscient authorial voice inhabiting other characters’ points of view, and his writing shifts from dramatic scene to impressionistic description when he flips from observed to researched material” (Agar 81). To be able to write stories in this elaborated manner, Wolfe (and authors such as Capote) would treat their subjects as if they were able to penetrate their minds and write from there. “Instead of the omnipresent third-person voice, Wolfe shifted point of view, using interior monologues when necessary, thus taking the fictional trope of the unreliable narrator to unprecedented extremes: ‘Whomever I had as a source, I would try to be inside
75 their skulls’” (Weingarten 112). He would, therefore, fall back on his observations and if that failed, fill in the rest with what one would suppose is empathy. The New Journalists applied this shifting of focalization to their works to provide some structure to the chaos that the 1960s brought to its contemporaries: The metaphorical impulse of New Journalism was a strategy for locating
bewildering events, writers and a particular public within an ordered
conception of society. By acknowledging the strangeness of reality, the
compendium of emerging world views held by reporter, reportorial subject and
implicit in a mode of discourse, New Journalism transformed not only the
content of reports but the practice of reporting itself into a political issue.
(Eason 148)
Essential to Hunter S. Thompson’s work is his aversion to the concept of objectivity, calling objective journalism a “pompous contradiction of terms” (Green 209/111). However, he did not make any pretenses of wanting to display a truthful image of ordinary life; he wanted to document what it was like. To achieve this, some letting go of the notion of objectivity was, according to him, required. “Thompson isn’t asking you to believe everything he says: some might say he
isn’t asking you to believe anything. Thompson is content to place his trust in
his readers and the editors and critics be damned. Objectivity and credibility
are out the window even if the lack of them get in the way of ‘serious
reporting’. The fantasies and wild tangents are a necessary element in the
cultural sanity derived from the gonzo mode.” (Green 210/112)
It is also important to realize that he considers himself a writer most of all and does not try to group himself within the tradition of routine journalism (Green 208/110). This corresponds to his stance on authority. In the Great Shark Hunt he argued that standard
76 journalism resulted from“William Randolph Heart6 [bending] the spine of American Journalism very badly” (Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 75). Thus, Tom Wolfe’s technique of third-person point of view does not pertain to Thompson’s work, who would passionately and enthusiastically use the I-perspective at all times, adding another ambiguous dimension to it: “Hunter Thompson’s unique solution [to portraying other characters and presenting truthful accounts] is to present himself as a drug- crazed maniac in an insane world; he can write most anything he wants” (Agar 81). He willingly blurred fantasies and facts together, going on tangents that made no logical sense to anyone that did not experience the fantasy he was living and gave his (mostly negative) opinion on everything. Subsequently, he was criticized for his bad taste, though celebrated for his creativity. Theroux is well-known for his subjective take in his work, though simultaneously criticized for this same characteristic. While his documentaries are structured to follow, narrate and display Theroux’s point of view, this is not the only subjective aspect of his documentaries. The relationship between him and his subjects is often a personal one, which he navigates in the role of a curious friend rather than a stern journalist, a characteristic that is often incited by his participatory attitude. His questions are short and structured so that they are easy to understand and come across as relatively informal, despite his polite demeanor. This gives them a child-like quality. Adding to this quality is the subjective tone that is often present in his questions and remarks. He often makes assumptions based on what he has observed, and then voices these assumptions to his subject, with the implication that they are to confirm or deny this claim. An example of this technique is best shown in his work on America’s Most Hated Family, a controversial group that forms the Westboro Baptist Church, on the topic of which he has made two documentaries. In this fragment, Theroux wants to share his ideas with a documentary maker who ended up joining the Westboro Baptist Church:
6 A newspaper publisher from the Gilded Age and early twentieth century, who founded the media company Hearst Communications and was known for his yellow/sensational journalism that went on to deeply influence the American media landscape.
77 “Now that I've come to the end of my time here, are you curious to hear my
thoughts?”
“I'd love to. Go ahead.”
“I spent a little bit of time with the Pastor and I think maybe he's got a lot of
anger. Maybe he's a rage-aholic. But perhaps his ministry is human-focused,
not God-focused. The Bible's a pretty long book, I haven’t read all of it but if
you pick and choose, you can justify almost any behaviour.” (Theroux, The
Most Hated Family in America)
Critics accuse Theroux of asking questions he already knows the answer to, feigning naiveté to upset his subjects into giving him more information7 and using subtlety to implicitly make fun of them. The member of the Westboro Baptist Church from the previous quotation tells Theroux, four years after the first documentary, that “what you do is you kind of pick at us and you kind of in a humanistic way, kind of, you know, make us look kind of clownish and buffoonish and that kind of stuff.” (Theroux, The Most Hated Family in Crisis) The episodes focused on Theroux’s stay with the Westboro Baptist Church are especially loaded with clashing beliefs. At every possible opportunity, Theroux attempts to poke holes in the stories and beliefs of the church members, attempting to impose his beliefs onto his subjects through questioning and shaking theirs. After being told by a female teenage church member that she keeps in contact with two Dutch documentary makers even though they do not hold membership of the church, Theroux remarks: “If you'll forgive me, isn't that a little two-faced? If you sort of are saying you enjoy corresponding […] with them and chatting to them, and exchanging gifts, but at some level, it's all a way of proving how inferior they are?” (Theroux, The Most Hated Family in Crisis) While attempting to shake someone’s beliefs is not inherently subjective, there is usually the implication of a differing ideology behind it. He
7 Theroux: “There’s no good people in the military?” Shirley Phelps-Roper: “This is all very plain and simple. And you will not make me feel bad about this.” (Theroux, The Most Hated Family in America)
78 later remarks in a voice-over: “Try as I might, nothing I said made any impact on her beliefs.” This mode of behavior is an apparent deviation from the New Journalists, who refrain from judging their subjects. This technique also does not line up with Thompson’s demeanor, who abundantly shares his opinions and judgments of the situations he finds himself in but does not attempt to enforce them. While Theroux’s navigation through his narrative is decidedly subjective in tone, casting his opinions on others and inserting himself as an emotional presence in the narrative, explicit showcases of Theroux’s judgment are relatively scarce. To clarify, subjectivity I define as evaluative assessments without aggression involved — they may be positive or negative — and judgment involves evaluative assessments made with some hostility, usually the voicing or expressing of a dislike. While Theroux makes evaluative assessments of a (what I define as) subjective nature continually throughout his documentaries8, showcases of explicit judgment, e.g., stating a dislike, accusing someone of corrupt morals or insulting a person either directly (to their face) or indirectly (in the voice-over), are rare. However, implicit judgments, in contrast, are much more interweaved with the material. Theroux’s judgments are often to be found in the small details of a scene, be it in the montage (e.g., a prolonged focus on his blank face), his non-verbal gestures, or even in his voice or speech. These instances are often so subtle that they are easy to miss. This is perhaps a reason for the common criticism on his work: He is often called a hypocrite because he pretends not to cast judgment on his subjects whereas his documentaries are littered by little aggressions of this kind. As mentioned in the heading on participation, the documentary plot is interlined with short voice-overs from Theroux, either providing more information of the scene that is about to start or Theroux’s narration of his observances or judgments. They are always narrated from Theroux’s focalization, often recounting his own mental processes during the filming. However, while the films are often structured according to his internal observations and opinions on the people he surrounds himself with, letting his shine through in subtle and less
8 E.g. When preparing to gamble €3,000 of his own money in Vegas: “I don't even know if I approve of gambling, Dan.” (Theroux, Gambling in Las Vegas)
79 subtle ways, Theroux allows for the interjection of other points of view. This willingness to listen, Dave Hoskin suggests, is a redeeming quality: “He’s spoken to many people that he clearly disagrees with, but rather than trapping them with ‘gotcha’ questions, he allows them to speak on a variety of topics and grants them that vital third dimension.” (126) This is, of course, less the case in his interactions with the Westboro Baptist Church members, although one could argue he still permits them to speak on behalf of their views rather than attempting to defeat their logic at every turn. While this does not exactly qualify as objectivity, allowance of differing opinions to exist next to one another aligns more with neutrality, which makes Theroux at least less subjective than Thompson, who projected other views through his own. One could argue that Theroux’s immersion method is an accommodation of elements from both Gonzo and New Journalism. The participatory dimension of his work is reminiscent of Thompson’s, especially in the earlier days of Theroux’s career. However, different motives seem to hide behind them, as both figures embrace sensationalism in differing amounts. Contrary to Thompson’s relatively self-centered perspective, Theroux’s willingness to introduce and accommodate alternative opinions resembles Wolfe’s literary device of third-person point of view instead. While Theroux, like Thompson, still inserts his subjective impressions and casts judgment from time to time, his narrative is far from structured around these — he does not attempt to narrate other’s opinions through his own perspective and lets his subjects assert their own views, which corresponds more to the New Journalists’ approach to other’s opinions. His detachment can also be linked more to the New Journalists than to Thompson, who is well-known for his intenser methods. Therefore we can conclude Theroux’s immersive approach comprises of both techniques used by Wolfe and the New Journalists, and Thompson and his Gonzo Journalism.
80 Results
As expected, there was a clear difference between the contextual characteristics (specified in chapters 2-4) and the stylistic characteristics (chapter 5). Even though the contextual chapters were not assumed to show many similarities between Louis Theroux and the New Journalists, there were some correlations. The temporal context is the aspect that least aligned the journalists. While the 1990s could be considered to be a turbulent decade for the people living through it, it lacked the chaos that defined the 1960s. Because the zeitgeist of the 1960s is widely regarded (and admitted) to have been the stimulus behind the New Journalism, this forms a substantial divergence between its representatives and Louis Theroux. However, this divergence is immediately overlapped by their mutual fascination for America and the people it harbors. Moreover, whereas their motivations did not seem to line up at first glance, there is a commonality that is hard to miss. Both the New Journalists and Louis Theroux navigate their world by utilizing an interpretation that attempts to position smaller components within a larger framework in order to come to general conclusions. Whereas the New Journalists use small-scale events and phenomena to situate themselves and their contemporaries in the larger structure of history, Theroux regards the peculiarities of his subjects as intensifications of the general traits of humanity. The structural and stylistic characteristics that this thesis discussed were expected to yield more correlating results, which they did. Both the New Journalists and Theroux, often opting to portray subcultures and socially excluded groups, approach their subjects with an (auto)ethnographic modus operandi. This approach has a exoticist undertone to it, however, which invites criticism about sensationalism, of which they all have not steered clear. This sensationalism is to be found in their choice of topics, the tone of their works and the artistic decisions they make. In this, Theroux sets himself apart from Wolfe and especially Thompson, as the sensationalism in his work has declined over time. The comparison of structure drew several problems as both utilize different media to create their works. There were, however, similarities in their processes. Theroux tends to provide significantly less information, but he spends as much time on the process of his work
81 as Thompson. There was, however, a clear contrast between the rigid linearity of Theroux and the beloved tangents of the New Journalists. All journalists, however, use dialogue extensively in their works. The most important comparison was saved for last: the insertion of personas, immersion and subjectivity are the characteristics most vital to the movement of New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism. Theroux’s approach easily fits in between the techniques of the New Journalists. His on-screen persona, his most well-known attribute, is as well- constructed and unique as that of the New Journalists, even if it lacks the intentional element to it. More like Gonzo Journalism, but what is also a smaller-scale trait of New Journalism, is the immersion in a subject in order to portray it as accurately as possible. While Theroux’s technique shares the participatory dimension, it has a humanistic rather than an investigative motive behind it. Theroux participates with his subjects to build relationships with them and bring them closer to his audience, which unmistakably deviates from Thompson’s participatory approach, which was focused on creating more sensationalism and grasping the atmosphere of the reporter’s surroundings as authentically as possible. The subjectivity Thompson admitted to his style is also an essential element of Theroux’s, who navigates his experiences with his individual, almost judgmental perspective. Thompson’s approach to subjectivity and judgment is however substantially more intense than Theroux’s, and Theroux retains a willingness to listen and accurately portray other people’s points of view, which is an element that aligns more with the New Journalistic technique than Gonzo Journalism. That brings us to the questions that incited this thesis. Firstly, is Theroux’s common label of Gonzo Journalist justified? Let us approach the question using Thompson’s own words: “True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an
artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be
a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even
sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a
film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work
82 and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a
main character.”
We have already established that this visualization is almost entirely represented by Theroux. The visual elements in the quote are represented by the documentary format, and the role of actor, protagonist, and participant are all represented by Theroux’s persona. Vitullo has argued that the three defining elements of Gonzo consist of subjectivity, author involvement, and meta-journalism (8). These elements have all been proved to be part of Theroux’s work in this thesis. Can Louis Theroux thus be regarded as a Gonzo Journalist? The uncomplicated answer is yes, although there are several clear deviances from the form. Secondly, can Louis Theroux be considered a New Journalist as represented by Wolfe? His work displays instances (that are present in differing outlay) of all four literary devices Wolfe defined the New Journalism with scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, third-person point of view, and recording of status-life symbols. Some of the devices are less pronounced in the audiovisual format but are present nonetheless. Does this mean Theroux could be regarded as a New Journalist? Again, the uncomplicated answer is affirmative. As established before, the New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism are children of their time and are firmly rooted in the 1960s. As Theroux lacks this unifying characteristic amongst the New Journalists, it is problematic to label him as a New Journalist or even a Gonzo Journalist. “What-if” scenarios are useless and time-wasting but had Theroux operated within the same temporal context as the New Journalists he would have taken up a rightful place right between Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Mailer, Talese and all the others. However, alas, this is not the case. Therefore I would argue that Theroux is a descendant of the New Journalists rather than one of them. The work of the New Journalists helped clear the path for a type of journalism less bound by the doctrine of objectivity. They helped build the foundations on which Theroux could later continue building. Because the motivations of the New Journalists and Theroux, while structurally similar, are directed at widely different entities, labeling Theroux as a New Journalist or Gonzo Journalist (especially a Gonzo
83 Journalist, as this style is more heavily specific than the New Journalism) would minimize the elements that are unique to his approach, namely his humanistic preoccupation. While the templates of Gonzo Journalism and New Journalism fit Theroux’s model as well, it would whitewash Theroux’s own contribution to journalism. Seeing as Gonzo Journalism is neither the only or first style of journalism that encouraged participation, dubbing Theroux a Gonzo Journalist would paint him as an imitator rather than an individual contributor.
84 Conclusion
During their heyday, the New Journalists briefly broke through the positivist norm of objectivity and highlighted the shortcomings of the ideal. Even though it did not stand the test of time, approaches deviating from the dry, detached style of conventional journalism continued being adopted by small individuals in the decades following them, Louis Theroux being one of these. While the contextual characteristics between the New Journalists and Theroux only match up to some degree, as expected, their techniques and approaches are substantially more interchangeable. These characteristics I have selected through the methodology of poetics, by determining how the elements in the work of the New Journalists come together to produce an inventive new style. The template I obtained from this identification I have applied in order to analyze in how far it can accommodate Theroux’s own approach to journalism. The comparison itself was mostly supported by the journalists’ own reflections on their works, though while conjointly employing academic sources and own critical observations to ensure the veracity of these reflections. From the results that were gathered through this approach, I inferred that Louis Theroux could indeed be considered a Gonzo Journalist and could just as well position himself in the row of well-known New Journalists. However, while his approach considerably fits the template of both New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism, I have also voiced my inhibitions of labeling Theroux as such, there are clear disparities on an intentional level. It also nullifies Theroux’s own achievements and paints him off as a copyist. This does not do justice to the highly individual nature of Theroux’s work. The preferable conclusion we can draw from this thesis is that the New Journalists likely paved the way for upcoming journalists deviating from the norm rather than dictating their further work. They constructed the foundations on which their fellow journalists could depend, which permitted them to follow into their footsteps. The New Journalists contributed to the legitimacy of this approach, which allowed their followers to explore the style with less controversy attached to it.
85 What has been explored less in this thesis is the temporal aspect of Louis Theroux’s career. An evident development takes place throughout the many dozens of documentaries he has produced, which Theroux himself suggests is due to him maturing. It would have been interesting to observe how his techniques evolve over the course of time and if his later work is as eligible to be designated “New Journalistic”. Additionally, Theroux’s context of the 1990s has been delved into only on a superficial level. More attention could have been given to the start of the Information Age in connection to the start of Theroux’s career and if this perhaps proved to be akin to the turbulence of the 1960s. Additionally, it would have been interesting to compare him to his contemporary journalists such as Michael Moore, to observe if Theroux is and was part of a possible trend in unconventional journalism. This would re- open the argument of Theroux being influenced by a similar temporal context as the New Journalists. Another interesting topic less connected to Wolfe, Thompson or Theroux would be to question if the 2010s can be regarded as a period of sociopolitical unrest related to the turbulence of the 1960s. If so, have the 2010s thus far solicited similar deviance from traditional journalism? In a society where the internet and particular political events are increasingly complicating and questioning the supremacy of the absolute truth, it is perhaps an effective strategy to look past this unobtainable ideal. In times of clickbait, fake news and alternative facts, an alternative approach to journalism could provide the grip on reality that people crave. Perhaps it is time to introduce a new notion of truth, and pay more attention to where it comes from.
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