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BEST DOCUMENTARY HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 
About two years ago I interviewed a representative of the 9-11 Truth movement as part of a piece I was doing for this very publication. Although he and I had completely different interpretations of the events of September 11, 2001, we had an interesting conversation and lively debate. I learned a few things in that hour ( whether anything I knew or had to say proved equally enlightening for him, I cannot say) and if nothing else, I appreciated his passion and the diligence with which he trying to expose these perceived injustices. In a society where I often feel surrounded by apathy, including my own, seeing his sort of single-minded engagement, voluminous research, and tireless effort expended in search of the "truth" was refreshing.
That said, passionately working to expose the truth is to some extent only as laudable as said truths. Joseph McCarthy worked tirelessly to expose the threat of communist infiltration into every sector of American life, Lou Dobbs is doggedly working to expose the dangers unchecked illegal immigration poses to American sovereignty and way of life, and Ayman Al Zawahiri has risked life and limb to unveil the Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam and the Muslim world. But I find none of these efforts particularly admirable. Quite the opposite. To agitate for change or to attack the "powers that be" may often be courageous but it can also be misguided, counter-productive, or even dangerous to the very ideals supposedly being defended.
New World Order is the second stellar documentary that I have seen by producer/director team Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. The first was Darkon, an immersion into the world of LARP (live-action roleplaying), specifically through the Darkon Wargaming Club in suburban Maryland. New World Order brings the same no-frills approach and similarly succeeds in allowing the subjects to tell their own story, except this time the subject is the supposed "New World Order." At the center of the film's narrative is Alex Jones, talk show host, filmmaker, and for lack of a better term, one of America's most popular "conspiracy-theorists," but his high-profile bombast is seen alongside the smaller but equally dogged efforts of several other activists, young and old. Meyer and Neel do not tip their hand as to their personal opinions, and in fact, the film seems quite generous in the presentation of it's subjects. There is no attempt to make them appear deluded or buffoonish, so, much like Darkon, it's up to the viewer to decide what they think of the people on the screen. For my part, I often felt as if one could simply change some of the words (globalists to satanists, for example) and this could have been a documentary about Christian evangelicals. The overwrought emotionalism, the doomsday scenarios, the unyielding circular logic of the true believer, and watching Alex Jones on his radio show brought to mind a preacher preparing to catch the holy ghost. I did not for one minute think that these people were putting something on, they were all 100% genuinely attempting to save us all from the forces of evil that are hiding in plain sight. The problem was that I just do not think that the bogeyman of global one world government enslavement is real.
What draws you two as filmmakers to the sort of outsider subcultures that we see in Darkon and New World Order?
Luke Meyer: I guess the reason we are drawn to groups outside the mainstream is exactly that, they are outside the mainstream. They are people in a position where their lives and experiences don't get much attention in the wider cultural dialogue.
Andrew Neel: I think every culture in every time, usually, by and large, can't see itself. I think one of the best ways to navel gaze [laughs] is to find people who have radically different ideas than what the mainstream has and use them as a conduit to understand what our culture is going through. I think that subcultures can be an interesting keyhole into...it's not even about the subculture, it's about the culture at large via the subculture.
How did you guys end up with this subject and how did Alex Jones enter into such a central position in it?
AN: I think it was a confluence of discussions that were going on between me and Luke. Luke and I were talking about globalization and the Internet and the power of the Internet as part of some idea about global sharing. Then films like Loose Change and stuff like that were coming up and Tom Davis, the producer of the film and a member of the company, heard us talking about it and was like, “I know a lot about some of this stuff, have you ever heard of Alex Jones?” He started kinda throwing characters at Luke and I and we started getting into it. We saw this kind of world of information and...I don't even know if you can call it a subculture because there are so many millions of people tuning into it, in different ways and from different contributors, but we just realized there was this world out there and Alex Jones was a focal point in that.
LM: If I could just talk a little bit more about the Internet thing that Andrew touched on...not necessarily for political organizations although that is part of it but also how communities are formed and the idea-sharing that goes on online. All of this discussion was not viable in any popular way fifteen years ago.
AN: It's a two pronged thing, the Internet thing and the globalization thing, although the Internet is a part of the globalization thing. But one of the most...maybe the most powerful force acting on society in a large scale way is globalization and how people are reacting to that is really interesting to us. The potential for the disintegration of national borders, immigration, world government, every day we are hearing about larger organizations being formed out of multiple nation states. So the nation state may be something of the past, y'know, it's certainly something that is being called into question. And how people are reacting to that, whether they like it or not, think it's a good thing or not, we found anthropologically interesting. And we thought these guys offered an interesting study of that reaction to the process of globalization.
You guys take a very spartan approach to this film and much like Darkon, there is little interjection by naysayers or talking heads. Why the preference for that approach?
AN: That's a good question. Experts tend to really bog things down and...it interferes with a direct connection to your subject as a filmmaker and I think that when you are making a film like this, a character study, it's best to stay away from some third party that's analyzing. I think that is always basically [sabotaging] the potential of the audience to see and interpret people for themselves instead of being told what to believe. In documentary film making in the last ten to fifteen years, unfortunately, although the form has exploded it has become much more conservative. Verite documentaries that don't have experts, and don't have a point of view, don't have a thing at the end saying, this is what you are supposed to believe, or don't have a clear implicit message are often criticized for that. Which I think that is too bad because at its core, what is great about the medium, what is magical about it is the ability to just see and watch and think about what you are seeing...
LM: To observe. For the audience to observe and not be run through a very strong filter.
AN: It's something that actually pisses me off about a lot of current doc, it's such a bore. It's like reading a thesis paper, y'know, you get the thesis up front, then they run through a bunch of stuff to prove their point...and people like that because sometimes it is easier, sometimes, to watch those sorts of things. It's not that it doesn't have a place but for us we try to avoid the experts and people commenting...
LM: I think that's how we approach all our films. But also with this film in particular, when you're stepping into it, all the issues that the people in the film are talking about are so controversial that the way they are usually handled by films either trying to prove how the theory is true or debunk it. You can look around and there are plenty of those films about every issue that came up in this film that takes one of those two routes and that simply was not the type of film we wanted to make. We wanted to make a film that showed what it was like to be someone who has dedicated their life to fighting the fight of getting the word out...
Did making this movie in any way change your own lives and opinions about these subjects. I don't know if making Darkon led any of you to become full-time LARP'ers, but did this affect or change your views?
LM: Thinking back, we started shooting this in early 2007 and there was just a different tone of how things felt with the Patriot Act, as far as civil liberties and what you were able to do and what was potentially "suspicious" behavior.
AN: The threat of the infringement of civil liberties was much more in question when we started the doc, in a mass cultural sense, than it is now...
LM:Yeah, with the new President, even though a lot of those things haven't changed yet but, I think we both came out of the process of making this film with a re-fortification of what are actually our rights. Like the right to shoot the world around us, we are legally allowed to do that and its okay to have cameras out and shoot stuff. Which, for a while, people were being told that there were a lot of places you couldn't shoot and that just wasn't true.
AN: Especially in New York, cops would regularly come up to me on the street and say, hey, you can't be shooting here, you need a permit. And you kinda take their word for it but after this film, I kinda got to know my rights better. And I did take another look at the amendments and had to remember what was at the core of the constitution which I think in a decadent, overly comfortable culture, it is easy to forget. That's why, maybe for people who don't necessarily agree with what Alex Jones-or other people in the movie- are saying from point to point...that they walk away to some extent re-evaluating how they interact with the world, what they think about globalization, whether they do think their rights are being impinged on or not. Dissenting voices in a democracy are really important, even if you do not agree with them.
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