Docuseries takes viewers down QAnon’s rabbit hole
You might expect a docuseries on the internet conspiracy network QAnon to dive deep into the psychology of those who have bought in. To wit: How does one come to believe that Donald Trump is fighting a righteous battle against satanic, babyeating liberals and pedophiles and Hollywood elites? What kind of mind is ripe for such horror movie theories and why? How did rightwing Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert get involved?
Yes, we do hear from a former gossip columnist who tells director Cullen Hoback (“Monster Camp”), with a straight face, “I expose people who literally rape and eat babies.” But the series, available on HBO focuses more on grounded matters, namely: Who is Q, the orchestrator of all this mayhem?
To this end, Hoback turns his camera on Ron Watkins, former administrator of 8chan, the imageboard that hosts QAnon. Hoback, onscreen for much of the series, builds a solid case that Watkins is Q, and that his father, 8chan operator Jim Watkins, is closely involved. When confronted with this possibility, father and son fall into
blankfaced, perhaps practiced denial. Politics? We’re not interested. Much of the series’ lowkey drama derives from watching Hoback try to get these guys to say things they’d rather not.
“Q: Into the Storm” also builds a convincing case, if an easy one, that 8chan is a very scary neighborhood, crawling with neoNazis, those who planned the January attack on the U.S. Capitol and mass shooters. Three perpetrators of 2019 mass shootings, including the man who murdered 51 people at two New Zealand mosques, published their manifestos on 8chan.
The board’s creator, Fredrick Brennan, is the most contrite figure in the series. He moved to Manila to work with the Watkinses, then had a fallingout largely over the content permitted on 8chan. There’s a free speech angle here, as Ron Watkins and others try to explain why 8chan’s extreme saturation of hate speech deserves a home. The First Amendment issue bubbles beneath the surface of “Into the Storm,” but it mostly stays there.
In focusing on the “Who is Q?” question, “Into the Storm” creates a sort of “Wizard of Oz” effect. What entity is pulling the strings on this operation and why? Is it mere misinformation warfare taken to gothic extremes? We can marvel that anyone takes such gory missives as gospel truth, or that the need to believe the unbelievable can be so strong. But someone, or multiple someones, knows what buttons to push, which dog whistles to use.
“Into the Storm” could have
used more essayistic touches, some more cultural history and bigpicture perspective to go with its lengthy investigation. That said, it creates its own kind of rabbit hole, a sufficiently dark place to get lost in this mixedup world.