New Scientology Film Shows 'How The Corrupt Use Blind Faith Of Followers Against Them'

going clear: scientology and the prison of belief

With all due respect to Evangelical Christianity and Free Market Fundamentalism, there’s no religion as All-American as Scientology. Built on a buzzwordy rhetoric equal parts marketing cant and self-help seminar, it’s a can-do cult geared towards the aspirational and self-obsessed, using the starry allure of Hollywood celebrity as both solicitation and platform; its vision of global ambition every film in which Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle.

Sometimes, Scientology seems like a parody of organised religion: a bizarre collection of creation tales the basis for an apparatus of specious promises, sweet exploitation, and indentured servitude. As its ultra-affluent celebrity elite live the sweet life in gilded excess, its unseen slave-labour underclass toils in silent, beaten-down anonymity; making Scientology both parody of organised religion and symbol of American society itself.

A documentary exposé on Scientology has been a long-time coming, not least of all because the aggressively-litigious, surveillance-gathering, media-threatening practices of the organisation function as a form of fear-mongering, for both those behind and in front of the camera. But, over time, growing ranks of whistleblowers and dissident dropouts have gone public with their stories of Scientologist life, breaking the codes of secrecy, silencing, and shame. And many of them —filmmaker Paul Haggis, former second-in-command Mark Rathburn, John Travolta’s ex-personal-runner Spanky Taylor— appear in Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief, the definitive cinematic chronicle of the rise and fall of Hollywood’s favourite cult.

It’s the work of Alex Gibney, the workaholic documentarian who’s spent the past decade tackling such All-American subjects as Big Oil/Wall Street (Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room), military occupation (Taxi To The Dark Side), financial inequality (Park Avenue: Money, Power And The American Dream), Catholic sexual abuse (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God), and information-age dissidence (We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks).

Here, he peers beyond the glitter and glitz of Scientology’s celebrity branding, and beneath the veil of secrecy with which it functions. Going Clear is, essentially, a potted history of the religion; from its beginnings as the tax-dodging outlet of one disgruntled science-fiction writer, to its growth into a financial juggernaut ripe with greed, abuses of power, endless nuisance lawsuits, and Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.

Those seeking pure inside-the-hive, creep-you-the-fuck-out scandal may not get all they hope for; would, indeed, be better served by Amy Berg’s unsettling portrait of the inbred, insane, polygamous Fundamentalist Mormons in Prophet’s Prey. The horrors of Going Clear aren’t as wild or shocking, because they feel so familiar. This is largely because of the religion’s notoriety, but also because of how these horrors speak of greater social structures.

Going Clear plays as both absurdist comedy and unsettling thriller; Gibney having the chops to slowly wind the tension. Its most entertaining —if we’re to use that word— stretches come from archival footage of founder L. Ron Hubbard, who, by his death at the end of the second act, starts to play, somehow, as sympathetic figure; a drunk-uncle huckster who lived out the American dream of personal reinvention on a grand, ridiculous scale. He’s the Lenin to David Miscavige’s Stalin; the current Scientology overlord presiding over a closed-doors regime ripe with paranoia, violence, and vanity; a propaganda machine oiled with the blood, sweet, and tears of its teeming, invisible Sea Org masses.

As a self-contained surveillance-state with wild inequality of wealth, some elements of Scientology’s sociological symbolism speak for themselves. But Gibney pushes things further, Going Clear essentially a scathing indictment of what happens when the corrupt use the blind faith of their followers against them. The film takes a big-picture approach both topically and thematically. As overview of Scientology, it’s just as much a mirror on society.

inside out

So far, the ’10s for Pixar has been defined by sequels; the once bullet-proof animation studio starting to resemble its parent company, Disney, in putting proven commodities and merchandising opportunities —seriously, Cars 2— ahead of its once-vaunted originality. To reclaim its crown as the American cinematic brand with the Midas touch, Pixar has turned to... wait, a feature-length version of Herman’s Head?

Yes, it’s that comic set-up as old as an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other. Pete Docter’s latest film (following Monsters, Inc. and Up) takes place inside the mind of an 11-year-old heroine, where her principal emotions —Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger— are manifest as comic caricatures. They see the world through her eyes, peering out from behind an Enterprise console, as if piloting a giant Mecha. These emotions colour her stored memories, which in turn reflect her core values; pop psychology turned into bright, visual animation device.

The comedy of Inside Out, in many ways, writes itself: when characters are the very personification of Fear and Anger, then comic flights of hysterical worry or volcanic rage come naturally. Were it simple a series of in-brain (over)reactions to generic comic situations, then, well, it really would be a feature-length version of Herman’s Head. But Docter —with co-writers Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, and Ronnie del Carmen— comes up with an inventive way of shaking up a seemingly-static sit-com scenario, and, in the process, using the premise to serve a greater raison d’être than, simply, ‘laughs’.

When its heroine moves, with her parents, cross-country from snowy, Ice Hockey-lovin’ Minnesota to San Francisco, from an idyllic country house to a shitty townhouse, emotions are already amped up; change bringing with it anxiety, terror, disappointment, hope. But, then, inside her mind, Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) and Sadness (The Office’s Phyllis Smith) get accidentally sucked into the machinery of the brain; leading them on the kind of epic quest obligatory in children’s entertainments. Only, this time, it’s through Abstract Thought, Imagination Land, Dream Productions, and the Wasteland of Forgotten Memories.

As they travel, there’s some great jokes about the clichés of the mind: fears (stairs to the basement, clowns), dreams (flying, teeth falling out, going to school without pants on), things to be forgotten (phone numbers (they’re in her phone!), every song on piano save Chopsticks and Heart & Soul). And, the carefully-orchestrated machinery of the mind starts to fall apart; adding a sense of gathering drama as Joy and Sadness dodge disaster-movie-esque levels of destruction. On the outside, all this interior tumult is reflected as a coming-of-age story; the emotions in flux a harbinger of imminent adolescence.

The film, at its best, feels like a family-friendly riff on Charlie Kaufman-ism: a quirky, pitch-meeting premise mined, deeply, for both its absurdity and its profundity. And, as always —in cinema as in life— that profundity comes through the passage of time. As both our heroine and her emotions truly step outside the safe bosom of childhood, they must leave the past behind. Inside the brain, there’s a host of things —imaginary friends, the beloved make-believe worlds of soft toys and rocketships— being razed to make room for new memories, new experiences. Which is when Inside Out reveals its true themes; becomes, in that Pixarist way, both a flight into a child’s imagination and an adult’s sad lament.

Inside Out is a film about the loss of childhood innocence; what it means to grow up, and how your emotional core shifts as you grow older. It’s about how the simple emotions of childhood —those terrifying fears, fierce tantrums, giddy joys— become more complex, adult feelings. And how the passage of time means that even the happiest childhood memories become, when fondly recalled, tinged with nostalgia, melancholy, a sense of loss. Its moral is essentially that you must learn to be sad; that no life, no matter how happy, can be —or should be— inured from sadness.

That its protagonist is a pre-adolescent girl serves what’s, nominally, the intended audience; but, at heart, the film isn’t truly for children. When the closing credits read “This film is dedicated to our kids”, that dedication demands a qualification —“Please don’t grow up. Ever.”— that cops to the fact that it’s, really, for parents. Inside Out is about the acceptance that kids do, indeed, grow up; that no child can be sheltered from sadness, hurt, time. Parents need to afford their children the freedom to be sad, but they also need to acknowledge the true sense of loss they feel when their kids are no longer kids.