Alex Jones is a beautiful woman
Alex Jones is a beautiful woman
Birds of paradise were killed for their feathers, and America is where the beautiful women die.
Reviewed: Blonde (Film, Andrew Dominik, 2022) Alex's War (Film, Alex Lee Moyer, 2022) The United States of America (Nightmare, George Washington et al., 1776)
Alex Jones is a beautiful woman. He is magnetic. He fascinates. When he speaks, everything else disappears: all that matters is contained in the cadences of his beautiful voice, the low grunt rising, heaving, swelling up to that gorgeous thick naked yell. He bares his flesh for the cameras and he is not ashamed to be seen. When he goes outside people beg his name. They reach out their hands to touch him, just to brush for a moment against his rich red leathery skin. Every camera swivels around to face him, like a flower in love with the Sun. Sometimes people will yell obscenities at him on the street, which is also a kind of adoration: they need to see this beautiful woman hurt and humiliated. His beauty is unbearable. This punctum, this rare glory, this bird of paradise.
Most people either have it or they don’t, but Alex Jones managed to create himself as a beautiful woman. You can watch footage of from the 1990s: back then, he was just another conspiracy theorist; pedantic, rambling, self-important, deliberately ordinary-looking in his suit and tie. That white-hot presence isn’t there. But at some point in the second Bush administration, he burst out of what he had been and became something new. Maybe he couldn’t become a beautiful woman until he’d first become a fatter, older, uglier man, closer to death.
You could never hope to do what Alex Jones does. For four or five hours a day, every day, he sits and talks into a camera, without a script, without any ums or ahs or you knows, without losing track of his train of thought or getting tongue-tied and having to start again. Not just that: in those four of five hours Alex Jones cycles through the full range of all possible human emotion. You would bore your listeners to death in ten minutes; so would I. But Alex Jones shines with the light of a more beautiful world, and millions of people bask in its glow. So he sits behind a swooping desk and, like every professionally beautiful woman, he hawks scam health products. Infowars store dot com, he says, new Scrotum Force 12-X ballsack hardening serum. It’s got all natural ingredients, it’s fortified with critical vitamins and amino acids that work on a cellular level… Let me tell you, these globalists, they want you weak! They want you to be—and now his voice jumps up several octaves, and he starts flapping his hands around—hee hee hee, we’re so soft, we’re so dainty, from all the crud you shove down our throats that’s disrupting our hormones, nobody’s coming to castrate us with a cleaver… His voice drops again. THEY’RE COMING! I’ve seen them! Literal demons with cleavers in their hands and fiery eyes, like—a deep Satanic growl now—yeees, yeees, surrender your gonads to the New World Order, you don’t need your guns, you don’t need Infowars store dot com Scrotum Force 12-X ballsack hardening serum, give over your pretty flesh to meee… I’m SICK OF THIS CRAP! My scrotum is RIGID! I’ve got balls jangling around in there like a pair of church bells! I’ve got these HUGE RED BRUISES on the inside of my thighs, because I’m a PATRIOT! Protect yourself! Protect your family! Infowars store dot com! HARDEN YOUR BALLSACK! AAAAH!
Alex Jones is an American and a patriot. But birds of paradise were killed for their feathers, and America is where the beautiful women die.
Most of the things that Alex Jones says are false, but not all of them. He is, in a sense, the last living hippie; he believes in a kind of mushy spiritual cosmic consciousness. I do not. Still, it’s not untrue that chemical pollutants have been disrupting amphibian endocrine systems; it’s not untrue that the interests of rich and powerful people do not always align with the interests of everyone else. At the lowest possible resolution, what Alex Jones claims is this: firstly, that the world is increasingly subject to a total administration that is broadly inimical to the full flowering of human life; and secondly, that everything you experience in our social and political order is a performance, a fiction, a show put on for your amusement, and that this show is killing you. Is he wrong?
The Spanish exterminated, the British enslaved; the American empire entertains. The wig-wearing liberals who founded this country thought they were creating a republic of free citizens, pioneers, enlightened and informed, governing themselves according to the dictates of reason. What they actually built was Disneyland. A total bureaucracy, controlling the flows of vast populations, and keeping them entertained. It couldn’t have gone any other way. Look who they modelled their new society on: the Romans, who put an arena in every city they conquered. The games were the primary instrument of Roman rule: you can keep your local gods, keep your puppet kings, even farm out tax-collection to the highest bidder, but you will enjoy our circus. So America defoliated the jungles and burned people alive with nuclear bombs for a free society in which you could be entertained. In which you’re so exhausted at the end of the day that you just wander glassy-eyed around Whole Foods, shovelling various forms of nutritious slop into your cardboard box to eat alone in front of Netflix and be entertained. And the people you walk past on your way home, hunched and stinking in doorways with track marks up their arms, are also slowly killing themselves with their small enjoyments, are also dying to be entertained.
In Rome, the entertainers died for your amusement. They had the gladius and the fuscina. America has the camera and the screen.
In Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, Ana de Armas plays two characters: the glamorous Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, and Norma Jeane Baker, the detritus left behind when the cameras stop rolling. Marilyn is intensely watchable, but watching Norma Jeane is agony. That breathy, fluttering, voice, that frantic indecision, all her buttery attempts at sanity: like nails on a chalkboard. When she goes to the cinema to see herself in Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, she keeps mumbling: ‘That thing up on the screen, it isn’t me.’
We were not meant to see ourselves like this, from the outside. Our first ancestors would boil the flesh off the bones when one of the tribe died, and rub them with red ochre. They painted vast herds of animals in their caves, flowing and alive, but they never depicted human beings except as scrawny stick-figures: they knew that a depiction can be fatal to the person depicted. Even now, the front-facing camera on your phone automatically flips the image, so it looks like the familiar creature you see in the mirror, and not like the strange uncomfortable thing you actually are.
Everyone I know who became famous, even with the pissy half-fame of social-media notoriety, went insane. It even happened to me. Your sense of self is overwhelmed by the image that your audience sees; eventually it shrivels into nothing. Being insane is the last dying spasm of your inner life; you try to fuck things up in such a way that the thing up on the screen dies, and you can live again. But these days, madness is less effective than it was. The more advanced the technology involved, the bigger the image becomes, and the more easily it consumes you. This monster, this enemy you have to keep building out of your own corpse.
Critics did not like Blonde. It’s not accurate: it invents whole episodes from Marilyn Monroe’s life, and doesn’t even tell you which bits are untrue. A forced abortion, a three-way love affair, domestic violence, abuse. None of it happened the way it’s shown. Why lie? In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis asks why the film doesn’t tell us the truth about ‘Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in—and knowledge of—politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions.’ Only Paul Schrader halfway got it: ‘Dominick made a great film, but it wasn’t about Marilyn Monroe. Critics say he did Marilyn no favours. I think it’s the other way around. MM did him no favours.’ But only halfway. The critics wanted a film about the inner life of Norma Jeane Baker, the real person behind the myth. But Blonde is a film about Marilyn Monroe, and only Marilyn Monroe—and the meaning of Marilyn has changed since her death. She’s no longer a vague carefree sexpot; her story is a tragedy. A beautiful woman who was exploited and killed by Hollywood, all for our entertainment. This is the great American epic, in which the beautiful women die. Norma Jeane, the ‘real person’ behind the scenes, is part of that myth: a hologram, a fiction, a helplessly mediated society’s fantasy of the remnants of unmediated life. She’s only a character played by Marilyn, who is ontologically prior and infinitely more real.
The other complaint critics had was that while the film might look beautiful, while it was all gorgeously shot, it still felt deeply ugly. All we see is a woman being exploited and victimised by everyone she encounters, over and over again. Roll up, roll up! Watch her suffer! Watch her die! Richard Brody in the New Yorker: ‘The character endures an overwhelming series of relentless torments that, far from arousing fear and pity, reflect a special kind of directorial sadism… The very subject of the film is the deformation of Monroe’s personality and artistry by Hollywood studio executives and artists; in order to tell that story, Dominik replicates it in practice.’ Other writers are more succinct. ‘Dull trauma porn,’ ‘misogynistic trauma porn,’ ‘trauma and misery porn,’ ‘thinly veiled trauma porn.’ If Salò were released today, these people would have lynched Pasolini before the fascists even got a chance. Blonde is not particularly subtle with its themes, but they’ve somehow convinced themselves that simply noticing what it’s doing constitutes some kind of incisive critique. This is a film about how the camera is a weapon: when you point it towards someone and shoot, that person dies. To watch a movie for your evening’s entertainment is to participate in a murder. But Blonde is also a movie, also shot on a camera, also playing on a screen. Did you think Dominik was kidding? Why would you expect his camera to be anything other than a weapon? Why would you expect this film to be nice?
Alex Jones and Marilyn Monroe are both beautiful women, they both revealed their naked chest to the cameras, and they are both mad. They both destroyed their own private lives to feed the image of themselves. They both came undone when they got into bed with the President of the United States. The only real difference is that Marilyn had JFK, while Alex Jones got Donald Trump.
The most boring question people ask about Alex Jones is this: does he really mean it? Does he actually believe all the things he says, or is it just an act? There’s a very simple answer if you’re into that sort of thing: no, he doesn’t believe it. This was what his lawyers confirmed in 2017. His ex-wife had sued for custody of their children; she wanted to use footage of his show to demonstrate that he was unstable and an unfit father. The lawyers wanted to prevent this. ‘He’s playing a character. He is a performance artist.’ That thing up on the screen, it isn’t me. Alex Jones described his work as ‘art performance,’ and the court agreed. Infowars would not be shown to jurors; they were judging the ‘real’ Alex Jones, and not the character he played.
If this answer isn’t satisfying, it’s because the question is based on false premises. There is no ‘real’ Alex Jones to believe or not believe the things he says, any more than there was a ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe. There is only the character. He is the beauty of his own image, and nothing more.
In 2012, a single gunman killed twenty schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, all of them under eight years old, along with six school staff, his mother, and himself. Soon afterwards, Alex Jones started claiming that nobody had been killed; the grieving parents were all actors; the whole thing had been a fraud, put on to manufacture consent for tighter gun control. He released the addresses of the murdered children’s families, and some of his listeners started contacting them with insults and accusations and terrible threats. ‘Did you hide your imaginary son in the attic? Are you still fucking him? You fucking Jew bastard. Look behind you. Death is coming to you, real soon.’ Graves were defaced. The survivors had to move from town to town like criminals on the run, hounded all the way by dogbrained lunatics. Alex Jones now publicly accepts that the massacre was real; now his line is that the response was a terrible, isolated mistake. He messed up. He called it wrong. His judgement was impaired. But this was not an isolated mistake; it was the summation of his entire career. In the glowing deadly nexus of entertainment, Alex Jones saw that everything is a show put on for our watching pleasure. This unreal creature made of media and light had gone so deep in its own depthlessness that it became impossible to imagine that anything might actually happen, or that there is anything outside the spectacle, not even the murder of twenty children.
This month, in the most recent round of lawsuits, a court in Connecticut ordered Alex Jones to pay damages of nearly $1 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Maybe you could quibble over the figure, but this strikes me as fair. This is why we have civil courts: so that when this kind of damage occurs, there’s an institution that can try to work things out as objectively as possible, decide who’s at fault and who’s been victimised, and penalise or compensate them accordingly. The system isn’t perfect; nothing is. But it’s the best we have.
Judicial punishments, though, are not the only ones available. The legal system is for ordinary breathing human beings; it’s part of the eighteenth-century fantasy of a liberal society, and not enough to kill a god. On a single day, the 6th of August, 2018, Alex Jones was banned from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. All these supposedly competing firms suddenly acting in concert, as if there were some hidden hand pulling the strings, as if these were all just faces for the faceless NWO Satanic Big Brother corporate state, as if every event were planned, determined in advance by the secret masters of the world… Alex Jones, the last of the hippies, became the first person to meet the full power of this new, abstract, unaccountable system of control. It could only have been him: he was the unacceptable object that forced the system into finding a new way to destroy this beautiful image, tear down every screen on which it appears, and trap it in its ugly prison of flesh and blood. After a lifetime spent screaming about an imaginary New World Order, this might be the final legacy of Alex Jones: he was the man who gave birth to it.
Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary Alex’s War bills itself as a character study. ‘Who is Alex Jones? Is he a dangerous lunatic or a patriotic hero? Does he even believe the things he says?’ Since there is no character to study, it’s setting itself up for failure—but in fact, it doesn’t really attempt to answer any of these questions at all. The film has two strands: one follows Alex Jones from his talk-radio beginnings to his current worldwide infamy; the other follows him from the 2020 US election to the riot on January 6th. There are a few good moments—the scene in which Alex Jones has a kind of prophetic fit in front of the Georgia Guidestones is particularly great—but there’s nothing here that can account for the man’s sheer livid charisma. At the film’s climax, we learn that Alex Jones was not responsible for the storming of the Capitol, that he urged the crowds to protest peacefully and obey the law, but I simply do not care. I am so utterly bored of January 6th, this act of petty trespassing that people will still not feigning horror over nearly two years later. Really, the only thing it reveals is how much shabbier and worse Alex Jones became after he devoted himself to Donald Trump. Now he has to pretend that there’s a good side in American politics; now he has to pretend that while every other US president was a child-eating NWO stooge, this one is somehow ok. In Blonde, with her mouth full of JFK’s dick, Marilyn wonders: ‘Who brought me here, to this place?’ Kennedy groans. ‘Dirty slut. Oh you dirty slut.’
The problem with Alex’s War is that Alex Lee Moyer quite likes her namesake. She doesn’t love him, like some of his followers do; she’s too smart for that. But she’s sympathetic, and she wants her film to be a sympathetic, humanising look at the man and his life. But a camera is a weapon, which destroys human beings and replaces them with something else, and there’s no such thing as a sympathetic look.
Alex’s War is part of the machine that is killing Alex Jones. Lately, his defenders have come up with a new line: what about all the other media lies? Which falsehood caused more human suffering—Alex Jones saying Sandy Hook was staged, or every major American media outlet saying Iraq had WMD? How much should they be fined? And it’s true: Infowars is of a piece with the rest of the American media; it just happens to have a more beautiful woman presenting the show. Alex Jones is an American, speaking America back into itself, emptying his life into this great graveyard, the bonepit of everyone who ever wanted to be a star. This empire is built on entertainment and death, entertainment and death. Death is everywhere. It will come for your children in their schools. It will radiate outwards to every corner of the world. But you will be entertained. You will always, always be entertained.
