Going Clear
The Church of Scientology has been hit. Hard.
On Sunday night, HBO premiered Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s film on the highly secretive, controversial cult that had already opened to much buzz at film festivals and in a limited theatrical release. The Church, which is notorious for aggressive harassment of its critics, will surely have a lot of work to do responding to Gibney’s jaw-dropping work, a piece that can only be described as a devastating blow for Scientology.
It helps that the film is made by an experienced documentarian. Under Gibney’s direction, Going Clear is mesmerizingly unbelievable, shockingly disturbing and exceptionally crafted. Based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, the doc focuses on the beginnings of the “religion” and how and why it became a twisted world of manipulation, blackmail, brainwashing, abuse (both verbal and physical) and, in some cases, of torture.
Gibney provides intimate detail about the life and aspirations of the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer who developed psychological ideas into a religion he thought could turn a profit without being taxed. Over time, Hubbard started to view himself as a god-like figure, possessing unfathomable influence over those who turned to his ideas out of trust, out of intrigue or out of desperation for something to believe in.
“Whatever was his whim, we did,” said Hana Eltringham Whitfield, a Scientology member for 19 years. “We would have died for the old man.”
The group operates on a ladder system, with constituents working their way to different levels of knowledge through tenure and commitment. It’s not until someone has been involved with Scientology for some time that they learn of the religion’s real beliefs, contained on hand-written documents by Hubbard himself. Only the film can do him justice, but let’s just say the man never truly left his sci-fi roots.
The documentary paints the group as ruthless toward its members, even having a special floor in its Hollywood offices that functioned as a prison camp-type set-up for members who are considering leaving the group. One woman in the film tells of how she had to escape the Church in an actual getaway car, a bodyguard chasing the vehicle down the road as she left Scientology in the rearview mirror.
The tail-end of the film is spent talking about the Church’s aggression against its opponents and its attempts to smear those who have left the cult and now speak out against it. The church has done its best to smear the film itself, releasing multiple videos that function solely as ad-hominem attacks on many of the former members whose interviews make up much of Gibney’s revelatory work.
If you ever want to see what true fear looks like in PR form, check out the video the Church released of Director Paul Haggis’ sister, Kathy. Haggis himself left the church a few years back, after being a member for more than 20 years. But his sister is still a member, so, naturally, she decided to go on video to tell the world why her sad-sack (Oscar-winning) brother shouldn’t be believed.
“Paul had two movies back to back that did well, accidentally,” she says. “Everything he did after that on his own has failed, and has continued to fail. Paul is a desperate man right now because his last film was declared by a UK paper as one of the worst films of the year.”
Haggis and the other former members who escaped the cult speak with nearly the same disbelief as a viewer feels. Many of the interviewees were high-ranking members of the group who took part in unthinkable things and operated on an extreme level of loyalty and commitment. Their participation is just as shocking, the idea that people’s minds can not only be taken so deep into the depths of a set of ideas, but that it can essentially return unscathed as if one had been woken up from a long sleep.
At many points throughout Going Clear, you must remind yourself about the concept that is being operated under when we discuss Scientology, if only because it is so obtuse that it can easily be mistaken for fiction. Footage of celebrity members John Travolta or Tom Cruise talking enthusiastically about the Church look like cameos they’re making as themselves in some sort of hilarious, mockumentary. David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church whom Gibney spends some time exploring, looks and sounds like such a stereotypically slick movie villain that the alleged claims of torture and abuse discussed against him could be mistaken for just a part of a script. Hubbard’s beliefs, the tenants of these people lives, sound like just another one of his sci-fi books, albeit his biggest seller. It’s all one big joke.
But Going Clear kills the laughter, showing us that the joke stops being funny when we remind ourselves that this world actually exists.
