When it comes to systems of belief characterised as religions, bearing similarities with science fiction and inciting cult-like devotion in followers, one has become the car crash of theology. Scientology, as both a set of ideas and as an organisation, is something aficionados and the uninitiated alike seem unable to look away from. Some who subscribe to its doctrines have turned its founder’s texts into film, such as John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth. Others not immersed in its teachings have drawn fictionalised parallels, as seen most recently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. And then there’s animated television show South Park, which has found much to parody.
Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney, of Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks and The Armstrong Lie fame, takes the factual approach in examining the self-called church. Using Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief as the basis for his content and for the resulting film’s title, he journeys through the rumours, rhetoric and reality of a group powerful in brand, in its high-profile members and their involvement in the entertainment industry, and in eliciting ongoing societal fascination. With the same studiousness and savvy he applied to his previous dismantlings of Enron in The Smartest Guys in the Room, U.S. military torture strategies in Taxi to the Dark Side and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in Client 9, he scrutinises yet another influential institution.
This time, he’s helped by a cast of former insiders willing to share their stories and express doubts springing from varying degrees of heartbreak and mistreatment. Paul Haggis, writer and producer of the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, as well as the director of the similarly awarded Crash, is the first face seen on screen, telling of his introduction to Scientology as a 21-year-old aspiring filmmaker. Told by a friend of a cult that could make all his dreams come true, he spent 35 years in the fold. That he is no longer associated with the organisation, and that he is willing to explain why, firms up his credentials alongside seven other church veterans turned outspoken opponents.
Their candid recollections – all damning whether relating to mindset manipulation, the quashing of dissent, the courting of celebrities, exploitative labour practises, tax exemptions, ruthless recruiting tactics and questionable financial activities – are intertwined with context-providing interviews with Wright, stepping through Scientology from its inception to its current fortunes. Gibney’s own voice is heard as the feature’s narrator, overlaid upon archival footage, promotional videos, news clippings and personal letters that plumb the depths of the movement arising from one-time pulp novelist L. Ron Hubbard, described as “a man prone to invention”. The relationship to the organisation enjoyed by other key figures, including current leader David Miscavige and famous actors John Travolta and Tom Cruise, is also dissected. Unsurprisingly, all three declined or did not respond to requests to be interviewed.
What emerges is a dense, devastating, detailed and deftly edited portrait of faith at its most manufactured, business-like, insidious and extreme – and an attempt to elucidate its lure to followers seeking nothing more than a source guidance in their lives. Indeed, though little positivity emanates from the exposé, nor could it given the information on display, Gibney does give time to his eight central subjects expanding upon their early good times as well as their latter bad experiences. Of course, any fondness in their remembrances of the uplifting initial indoctrination and auditing process only heightens the contrast with the horrors to come. The latter has prevailed in public discourse and in the continued curiosity in the organisation, and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief will do nothing to dissuade that viewpoint or assuage that interest.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Director: Alex Gibney
USA, 2015, 119 mins
Release date: June 18
Distributor: Madman
Rated: M
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