‘The Truth Vs. Alex Jones’; or, The Internet Versus Reality

Plus: A ‘Lousy’ assignment.

Before you watch The Truth vs. Alex Jones, streaming now on HBO, be warned that it’s likely to be one of the most infuriating films you watch all year.

At first, it’s mildly amusing in a “can you believe this?” sort of way. We begin with a brief introduction to Alex Jones and his rise through the ranks of Austin public access cable and radio, through to his explosion in popularity on the Internet following the 9/11 attacks, and right here, where you start to feel despair in your gut, you get a sense of how everything has gone totally wrong. Once upon a time, the cranks were confined to their environs, their reach no greater than a town’s public airwaves, limited to the radius of the AM signal or the local cable system. The combination of the Internet’s a) limitless reach and b) addiction to virality helped turn Jones from an underground star into a genuine phenomenon and a multimillionaire.  

It's one thing to traffic in general conspiratorial thinking about whether or not The Dread Bush Regime allowed (or caused!) 9/11 to happen, or to fearmonger about radiation from Fukushima hitting the California coastline in an effort to boost sales of iodine supplements. It’s another thing entirely when the conspiratorial mind turns its attention to real people and real tragedies.

Enter Sandy Hook. This is where your rage will start to build. First, at the utter, senseless cruelty of it all: the story of the murders of those six- and seven-year-old children will bring tears to your eyes. But that tragedy is compounded by Jones and his immediate dismissal of the attack as a false flag, ginned up by the government as an excuse to grab people’s guns. His call to arms unleashes an onslaught of self-educated experts who argue the shooting never happened or that the kids weren’t real or that no one died and the kids are still alive in their parents’ houses, hidden from the world. Cranks affiliated with Infowars, cranks who found out about it online, cranks who flooded Facebook memorial pages. An overwhelming flood of cranks, each of them determined to make the lives of mourning parents a little worse.

The bulk of the documentary follows efforts by the parents to hold Jones accountable through the courts: defamation lawsuits pegged to false statements about their kids that serve, more broadly, as a way to punish Jones for turning their lives into an ongoing nightmare of harassment and abuse.

On the one hand, you have to try to watch a documentary like this as a dispassionate observer because the stakes for speech are tremendously high: The First Amendment exists to protect speech we don’t like, speech that may make us uncomfortable, and any effort to curtail such speech should meet a very high bar. But knowingly and purposefully lying like this isn’t necessarily protected speech. And anyway, the passion is the point: it’s not just that Jones is a lying liar, and it’s not just that his lying lies led to him making tens of millions of dollars. It's that he did all this in a way that caused direct emotional distress to real people who suffered real tragedies. It’s hard to be dispassionate about this. We probably can’t be dispassionate about it. It’s hard not to be pleased when he loses trials both in Texas and in Connecticut and is ordered to pay out enormous sums of money.

Beyond the righteous desire for retribution, however, you have to wonder what, precisely, the point of any of it was. Jones still hasn’t paid the damages he’s been found liable for, though the courts have rejected efforts to discharge his debts via bankruptcy. His website is still up and it still has headlines like, as I write this, “EXCLUSIVE: Feds Using Total Solar Eclipse To Practice Martial Law Ahead Of Election.” He’s still selling supplements. There’s no evidence he’s lost any real measure of support among the public as a result of the verdicts. Even if he did lose all his money, he’s going to keep doing what he’s always been best at doing: talking like an insane person to other insane people. As best as I can tell, nothing much has really changed.

And maybe that’s the most enraging aspect of this whole sad, maddening affair: in our endlessly interconnected modern world driven by algorithmic incentives to reinforce priors, there’s only so much that can be done to stop the spread of lies when people either aren’t interested in, or actively reject, the truth. There’s always someone out there who’s willing to tell you that your guy or gal really won the election, it was rigged, you’re being cheated, the American people are being cheated. Get angry.

“Alex Jones versus the truth” is a soothing way to look at this because it obscures the real problem. It’s not Alex Jones’s aversion to the truth that is the most troubling aspect of all this. It’s the quarter of the American public willing to join him while he hops down the rabbit hole.

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On a slightly less serious note, I had a lot of fun chatting with Peter and Alyssa about the new Road House and why it doesn’t quite work compared to the original Road House. And on today’s episode, we discussed Patrick Swayze and the evolving ideal of the male action hero. Good times!

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Links!

This week I reviewed Late Night with the Devil, which is a real showcase—and, hopefully, star-making turn—for lead David Dastmalchian.

Had a good time talking to Bilge Ebiri and Brandon Struessnig about Vulture’s second annual stunt awards. Always great having them on the show!

J. Oliver Conroy has a great piece up at The Guardian on the resurgence of folks looking to own movies as a hedge against the vicissitudes of streaming.

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Assigned Viewing: ‘Lousy Carter’ (VOD/Theatrical)

David Krumholtz in ‘Lousy Carter’ (Magnolia)

Lousy Carter is the latest from writer-director Bob Byington, and I’m assigning it for two reasons. Reason the first: I interviewed Byington and star David Krumholtz (Oppenheimer, Numbers) for The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood and that episode is dropping on Saturday at noon. If you rent Lousy Carter on Amazon tonight, you’ll be ready for the show tomorrow. And you don’t want to be unprepared, now do you?

Reason the second: It’s a very good indie from a guy with a track record of making very good indies of a fairly particular sort, namely the dry, slice-of-life comedy. I’ll share slightly lengthier thoughts on these in the newsletter that accompanies tomorrow’s podcast, but Frances Ferguson, Infinity Baby, and Somebody Up There Likes Me are all well worth your time.

Lousy Carter’s eponymous lead is played by Krumholtz; a professor at a liberal arts college teaching a graduate-level seminar on The Great Gatsby. As the film begins, he is diagnosed with a terminal illness and thus has to decide how to spend the rest of his days. Will Lousy make amends with Kaminsky (Starr), a friend and colleague whose wife he has been schtupping? Reconnect with his mother or sister? Attempt to seduce the sardonic, attractive coed Gail (Luxy Banner)? Perhaps most importantly: Should he bother paying his medical bill?

The plot matters less than the characters and their interactions, and those characterizations are keyed to a fairly specific moment in American life: Byington wrote Lousy Carter during the pandemic and shot it in December 2021, when productions were still laboring under rather tight Covid guidelines. From Lousy’s own weariness to the annoyance voiced by a mortician who feels he’s constantly being accused of taking advantage of the bereaved to Kaminsky’s defensive self-declared satisfaction with his own life to the look on young Gail’s face as she encounters death close up, mortality hovers over the proceedings.

Despite the preoccupation with the end, Lousy Carter is not dour. Dry, droll: never dour. And an absolute actor’s showcase. (I haven’t even mentioned the great Stephen Root, who shows up for a few scenes as Lousy’s therapist.) Krumholtz got a lot of love for his performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer this year and it’s nice to see him take center stage here. But I want to give a special word of praise for Luxy Banner, who throws off real “Aubrey Plaza in Damsels in Distress and the first seasons of Parks and Rec” vibes here. One of the joys of scouring indie releases is coming across someone new and unexpected, and Banner delivers a dynamite performance here. Here’s hoping that casting agents in Los Angeles take notice.