“This Place Rules” & the Absent Accusation of American Division

Andrew Callaghan greatly overestimates his journalistic importance in this sly observational documentary that is tired and unilluminating

After gaining success by interviewing inebriated college students on the streets of New Orleans, online documentarian and journalist Andrew Callaghan began traveling around the country by RV, documenting the underbelly of America by attending festivals, protests, and conventions. Under the name All Gas No Brakes, his independent YouTube channel rocketed to almost immediate success. Callaghan held the microphone up to anyone who wanted to speak their mind — those who were enthusiastic to openly debate or occasionally incriminate themselves when discussing intimate, disturbing, and disgusting details about cultural and political subcultures. All Gas No Brakes continued gaining momentum during the pandemic as Callaghan’s content gained an increasingly political edge. Videos that once covered Midwest FurFest and AlienCon began to feature the Portland Protests of summer 2020 and Proud Boys rallies. 

Just over a year ago, Callaghan rebranded the project to Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, a nearly identical enterprise that reached new levels of popularity. Callaghan began appearing at higher-profile events and interviewing the likes of Chet Hanks and Alex Jones. In late 2022, Channel 5 announced their largest undertaking yet: a feature-length HBO documentary titled This Place Rules, exploring the events that caused the January 6th insurrection, as seen by the cameras of Channel 5. However, Andrew Callaghan’s observational glimpses into America’s fringe political and social movements do not translate into cohesive feature filmmaking, making This Place Rules an occasionally shocking but ultimately unilluminating image of America’s far right. 

This Place Rules works when it simply serves as an extension of Callaghan’s YouTube presence. The film is interspersed with small, bite-sized interviews with unusual characters he meets on the road, and he observes them without judgment as they embarrass or expose themselves in front of the camera. Channel 5’s expository work is featured occasionally in This Place Rules, and the film excels when it continues to do what the channel does best. 

However, Callaghan is determined to establish an overarching narrative resolution in This Place Rules that is never present in his YouTube work. He vaguely gestures at “division” and “the media” without ever pinpointing a cause for growing fascist sentiments or public disunity, leaving us with a moral resolution that is nothing other than self-evident. Additionally, Callaghan’s methods occasionally draw false equivalences between left-wing political organization and right-wing militancy, and often frame both as one-off happenings that will dissolve once the amorphous media lets the world return to normalcy. 

This Place Rules makes no effort to place any of its reporting in a historical context or really any moral context (with the exception of one confrontation with a recurring interviewee in the final scenes of the film). Alex Jones (InfoWars owner) and Jeremy Bertino (former Proud Boys leader) spew their far-right conspiracy theories while Callaghan essentially just side-eyes the camera without any comment. This sit-back-and-observe journalistic approach is foundational to Callaghan’s popularity, but it functions very differently when he’s interviewing impoverished rural families than when he’s featured in a guest spot on one of America’s most popular white supremacist propaganda shows. 

Finally, This Place Rules doesn’t even finish what it sets out to do. Advertised as an unseen look at the incitement of the insurrection, the film rushes through the last days leading up to January 6 and subsequently does not cover the event itself at all. After nearly 90 minutes of anticipatory build-up, This Place Rules concludes with Andrew Callaghan getting COVID and sitting in his RV, watching about 30 seconds of news footage of the riots. It’s a completely disappointing conclusion, and after seeing it, one can’t help but wonder why Channel 5 ever thought it would be smart to splice these largely incohesive moments into a feature film, rather then release them as individual YouTube interviews that don’t require fabricated connective tissue to messily unite them. (Money is the obvious answer). 

Don’t get me wrong - I am a proponent of comic documentary filmmaking to unearth the whispers of America’s fascist movements and then point the camera right at them. I’m also a fan of Channel 5’s YouTube work, as well as Borat, Nathan Fielder, and Eric Andre. But This Place Rules (while occasionally funny) is a totally unnecessary film that relies on an awful lot of both-sidesing and false equivalences to formulate a non-conclusion that it doesn’t even seem that interested in stating. 

This Place Rules was released on December 30, 2022 and is currently streaming on HBO Max.