In the prologue, he writes: "One cold December day in 1996, I met up with an elderly racist leader named Pastor Richard Butler. I was making a documentary about right-wing apocalyptic Christians who have retreated to the American North West, Idaho especially, in preparation for the end times. Butler’s outfit, the Aryan Nations, represented the far end of that spectrum, a strange racist group that styled itself as a church."
After getting his start with controversial filmmaker Michael Moore on his program TV Nation, Theroux started doing documentaries for the BBC in which he would seek out characters inhabiting the fringes of American society and examine their personalities. Filming everyone from porn stars, gangsta rappers, white supremacists and Ike Turner, he played the straight man, setting up his subjects to provide the punch line at their own expense. That’s not to say he does this cruelly; often Theroux admits that he’s as genuinely bewildered as the rest of us, so any attempt to editorialize would be pointless. Unlike his mentor Moore, he is only a minor character in his films. He lets the real stars show their stripes proudly.
Despite a lack of empathy with his subjects, he has indeed developed kinship with a number of them. No doubt the thought that he shares anything in common with anyone like Jerry Gruidl (who believes that "the Jews are occupying this country. Now if Hitler killed ’em all…") surely makes Theroux a bit uneasy. It was while pondering Gruidl that Theroux began to look back at all the people he had featured. A fanatical, paranoid racist, Gruidl was aide-de-camp to Butler, then heading the foremost neo-Nazi organization in the United States. All throughout, Gruidl professed his love for English culture and went on and on about things like obscure British TV programs like Are You Being Served? This puzzled Theroux until he realized that, for all his espousal of race war, Gruidl was trying to make friends with him.
Several years later, Theroux was still intrigued and curious about what became of his favorite subjects. Although he claims he tried to keep in touch, Theroux had lost contact. He decided then to embark on a Reunion Tour and write a book chronicling it.
Spanning six months across America, Theroux’s journey sees him painstakingly retracing his steps as he tries to reconnect with the personalities making up his Greatest Hits. Included on his list are people like a UFO contactee who claims he’s killed 10 aliens, militia types arming themselves against their own government, a sweet-looking girl duo who also happen to write and play pop music that Goebbels would’ve approved of, a former member of the religious cult Heaven’s Gate, Tina Turner’s ex-hubby Ike and, of course, Gruidl.
Always funny, the book is bittersweet and endowed with good insights as well as memorable exchanges. Particularly affecting is his reunion with Gruidl – who’s now ostracized even in his own clique. Living in a small apartment in lower Idaho, the neo-Nazi spends his time playing computer mah-jongg with only his tank of 15-cent guppies for company. Despite his anti-Semitism, Gruidl is described by Theroux as "thoughtful and decent." During one of Gruidl’s rants, Theroux cuts him off and asks him, "What if I was Jewish?" Flabbergasted, Gruidl says, "Are you Jewish? Tell me please you’re not. Lie to me if you have to. Please."
Often, the book exposes the fact that people, despite evidence to the contrary, are willing to overlook the truth to hang on to their dogmas. Theroux’s first show in 1994 featured an Oakland-based Bible scholar who predicted with 99.9 percent certainty that the world was going to end later that year. In 2004, he admits to Theroux that he might’ve made a slight miscalculation; it was now sure to end in 2011.
Theroux hoped that revisiting his old stories without a camera crew might allow him a deeper understanding of his subjects. In reality, he found himself "less susceptible to the call of the weird the second time around." To him, "the Nazis seemed more lamentable; the gangsta rappers more irresponsible; the gurus more manipulative." In short, these Yanks are still barking mad but without losing their humanity.
If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the lives of these denizens of a pop-culture rogues’ gallery, it might well be this: "Why do people believe and do weird things? Because in the end, feeling alive is more important than telling the truth."
Perhaps it’s ironic that, if we recognize that about our own selves, we can someday forgive ourselves for believing in the myth of the American Dream, despite the ruin of shattered glass and blood around us.