Jon Ronson’s book ‘The Castle’ (and the accompanying stage show which he brought to York) opens with a message he received in the middle of the night from his son, Joel, in 2023.
By Miles Salter
Joel (who the book is dedicated to) had gone to a ‘party’ in Connecticut at a fake ‘Castle’. The Castle’s owner, Chris Mark, seems to be living a sort of fantasy life. He wants to attract ‘princesses’ to be part of a ‘reality show’. Joel, feeling increasingly anxious about the creepy nature of the place, sends Ronson a photograph and his location. Nothing sinister happens, but Ronson follows the trail to Mark and realises he is onto a story.
Ronson, who has a gift for getting doors to open, gets to meet Mark and have a look around the castle. When Non-Disclosure Agreements are pulled from a drawer, Ronson is instantly wary. Mark gets heavy. He threatens to send two men called Carlos and Brandon to employ violence. Ronson’s stage show cleverly uses slides and bits of video and audio to tell the story. Texts and WhatsApp messages appear on the screen. The audience laughs then sighs in disbelief. There is plenty of comedy here. Ronson has developed a reputation for eye-catching books (he wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats about psychic operations in the U.S. military, and it resulted in a film with George Clooney).
His approach has been called ‘faux naïve’, like Louis Theroux. Ronson often jokes that he and Theroux ‘are like conjoined twins. In order for one of us to get stronger, the other one must die.’ But any past tension seems to be over – at the show in York he was delighted that he and Theroux may be working together soon. Both come on like wide-eyed big kids, staring in bemusement at the world.
He is softly spoken and, live, is very likeable. The audience laughs heartily. I suspect underneath that he is much more steely. I interviewed him once in a beer garden in Hull and he seemed fairly tough. Like all journalists, his raison d’etre is to find a great story and run with it. He can sniff out a story and loves it. ‘These are the days I live for,’ he writes in the book, ‘unearthing improbable stories like this.’ When he investigated a powerful and secretive group of people called The Illuminati, he found himself chased by security men. He called his wife in a moment of panic, worried he might be about to meet a squalid end. ‘Oh Jon, you love it really,’ was her response.
‘The Castle’ focuses on men and the strange landscape modern masculinity finds itself dwelling in. The subtitle is ‘Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men’. Ronson ponders the six million men in America who now seem ‘lost’. These men don’t work and they don’t seem to have a purpose. Instead they watch TV, drink beer and play video games. It’s very sad. Imagine what this army of latent talent could achieve, if it was harnessed in a positive way. To his credit, Ronson admits his insecurities, worrying that he could be one of this huge gang of uninterested males, if it wasn’t for his writing. Men need, he argues, to be busy and productive, to lead constructive and helpful lives. In this regard, I think he is spot on.
Another story (in the book but not in the show) illustrates this perfectly. Brandi Bragg was just fifteen when her grandfather Jack, who helped to raise her, won an eye-watering $314 million on the lottery. Brandi was bought the car she wanted and showered in cash, sometimes as much as $5,000 in a single day. She became paranoid, not knowing if her friends liked her because of the cash. She became a drug addict. By the time she was seventeen, she was dead. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.
The second part of the show focuses on Greg Chism, a YouTuber who made lawn care videos and grew a sudden and niche audience. When Chism turned to making ‘bad baby’ videos with his two daughters, the views exploded. Between January 2016 and June 2017, they were watched thirteen billion times. Greg made lots of money and was assigned his own YouTube assistant. But downfall followed. He was taken apart by suspicious observers and the police came to his house. YouTube scrapped his channel in the ensuing controversy.
Chism’s tale is a modern ‘rise and fall’ story. It’s also pretty depressing – videos playing to ‘lowest common denominator’ human interest involving food fights and vomit get far more attention than thoughtful videos about politics, history or psychology. Ronson’s re-telling of Chism’s rise and fall is engaging, but I am not sure it follows on from the first story particularly well. Chism is clearly well meaning, even if some of his videos got a little gross and strange. Mark, on the other hand, comes across as a deceitful sexual predator. When a young woman arrived at an airport to meet Mark, she was detained by authorities, concerned for her welfare.
The book allows Ronson more room to breathe. There is an excellent passage on Hugh Hefner, the Playboy mogul who enjoyed keeping a harem of beautiful women but behaved like a sadistic control freak. The section on Andrew Gold and his passage to YouTube success, with its divisive tactics, is also compelling. Ronson is very good on the world of new media, YouTube and influencers. He provides some great examples of social media leading people to behave in crazy ways, like Dan Bilzerian, who was at a mass shooting in Las Vegas and tried to ‘help’ the police, capturing his efforts on video.
The show ends with some pointed comments about Trump’s America and how power poisons justice and twists reality. It’s an excellent denouement, turning all the evening’s comedy into something more prescient and powerful. I enjoyed the show a lot, but the book is more thoughtful, a rewarding hike in contrast to the show’s breathless sprint. As readers nearly always say, the show was good, but the book was better.
I would love to talk to Ronson about his decisions. Is it ethical to put Mark, who is bipolar and described in the book as ‘very mentally ill’, into the public domain in this way? Why has he swapped the UK for the USA? What’s the difference between ‘bad baby’ videos and books about unravelling men? How about telling the story of normal men, trying to be good dads and partners, doing their best in a world that is constantly putting them down (take a bow, Woman’s Hour), instead of wading through 453 pages of texts between Chris Mark and his assistant to create something that felt increasingly grubby and salacious?
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of something Val McDermid said about the time she doorstepped somebody in her days as a journalist. It suddenly dawned on her that this was ‘not a fit thing for a person to be doing’. Ronson has considerable talent as a cultural leader. He is a great communicator, perceptive and adept at being persuasive. He also has a moral compass and an outsider’s objectivity. As he now resides in America, is it inconceivable that he could start a movement that helps the untethered men he writes about, instead of sniggering about them? He could lead men towards productive, useful lives, volunteering, helping each other and their communities. That would be a remarkable story. It would also be a profound legacy befitting his drive, talent and vision.
Jon Ronson’s ‘The Castle’ played at Grand Opera House York on Wednesday 16 September 2026.