With occasional Sarah Palin-sized exceptions, political life before the age of Trump followed a discernible pattern. Democrats sent their grotesques into the public square (Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, John Edwards, and on the list goes), while Republicans hid their own freaks and lunatics in church basements, flea markets, and the aisles of the nation’s Walmarts. Among the trends chronicled by Q: Into the Storm, HBO’s depressing and ultimately tedious examination of the QAnon movement, is the flattening of any such distinctions. Having been trapped out of sight for far too long, the wacky Right has at last joined the Left in spilling out of its clown car.
Produced and directed by Cullen Hoback (What Lies Upstream), Q: Into the Storm is a six-part docuseries that explores the ability of a demonstrably ridiculous conspiracy theory to “change the lens through which [its adherents] see the world.” The filmmaker’s sources during his initial inspection of this phenomenon are the bloggers, “Q-Tubers,” and web detectives who float on the periphery of the movement’s universe, scouring the internet for “Q proofs” and spinning hours of commentary from the straw of Q’s cryptic “drops.” Eagerly assisted by these self-deluding connoisseurs, Hoback draws a preliminary sketch that many viewers will recognize on the sheer basis of having followed the news in recent years. Beginning in October 2017, a shadowy figure claiming to possess a high-level security clearance began posting messages on the image board website 4chan. These communiques alleged the existence of a worldwide cabal of child-eating pedophiles, the cresting wave of which could be turned back only by the 45th president of the United States.
Though the series moves with admirable briskness in its dissemination of this basic narrative, its interest quickly shifts to the more intricate story of QAnon’s migration to 8chan, the website with which the conspiracy theory would come to be most closely associated. Wedding Reddit’s democratic board-creation process to 4chan’s ethic of anonymity, 8chan was created by the coder Fred Brennan and later sold to Jim and Ron Watkins, a father-and-son team of American expatriates living in the Philippines. As is often the case with documentaries, one wonders here if Hoback’s narrative focus has been driven by his access rather than the other way around. Had Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, or other QAnon-adjacent figures opened their lives to the filmmaker like Fred, Jim, and Ron do, we might be watching an entirely different production.
Instead, beginning in its second episode, Q: Into the Storm relocates to Manila, the better to investigate its trio of outlandish antiheroes. There, in addition to unpacking the minutiae of QAnon’s progress through the late 2010s, Hoback and company attempt to answer the question — “Who is Q?” — that gives the documentary an ostensible raison d’etre. That the anonymous false prophet could easily be one of the three men who run QAnon’s online home is, of course, a reasonable proposition. Why shouldn’t Q be Fred, the wheelchair-bound cynic whose entire life has unfolded online? Or Jim, whose claims not to follow U.S. politics are laughably disingenuous? Or Ron, the jittery, overblinking tech bro who runs 8chan’s day-to-day operations under the moniker Code Monkey? In any case, what moral distinction exists between Q himself and the administrators who encourage, abet, and profit from his ravings?
That Hoback’s docuseries asks this final question only implicitly while giving unambiguous scrutiny to the matter of Q’s identity is a source of much frustration. So, too, is the program’s insistence on displaying 8chan in all of its demented, NSFW glory. The site is “not a place for soft people,” as one interviewee readily concedes. The consequences of these choices are twofold. First, the program feels both painstakingly literal and crassly sensationalistic, like a witch trial that means to end with a prisoner tied to a stake. Second, and more important, Hoback’s strategy requires him to spend time with three of the least appealing individuals in U.S. documentary history. It is free speech’s particular curse to have among its champions the very scoundrels who give it a bad name. But must the middle-age Jim really rap the N-word while parading around town with a waxed mustache? Must Fred compare his anguish upon losing a minor court motion to the pain he experienced after the El Paso massacre, for which 8chan was at least theoretically culpable?
If Hoback’s fixation on 8chan’s leadership team represents a missed opportunity to do more interesting work, it is also the case that his central storyline fails on its own terms. However fascinating the feud between 4chan and 8chan might be for image board aficionados, regular viewers are likely to declare a pox on both their houses and fast-forward to the next segment. The same is true of the various intrigues among Fred, Jim, and Ron, which unfold like so much inside baseball over the course of the series. By the time Hoback, in a bizarre episode-five sequence, helped a terrified Fred to flee libel prosecution in a Manila court, I was impatient never to lay eyes on any of the trio again. If these are the men who stand between us and a global network of child abusers, I will happily throw in my lot with the pedophiles.
Indeed, the most pronounced effect of Q: Into the Storm may be to cure a certain type of conservative audience member of his or her late regard for populism, one of the chief ingredients in QAnon’s chunky stew. Having suffered through six hours of HBO’s latest, I can confirm that rule by elites no longer sounds so bad.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
