Cult Cinema: A Personal Exploration of Sects, Brainwashing and Bad Religion in Film and Television by Ingham Howard

Author:Ingham, Howard [Ingham, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cults, cinema, tv, cult studies, television, religion, new religious movements
Publisher: Room 207 Press
Published: 2021-02-25T21:00:00+00:00

Raniere: Authenticity has no additional layers of artifice, no trying to be something that you think you should be. It’s just a pure state of being. So one would say authenticity is being as you are and expressing as you are, at least to some degree. And “as you are” is of course the sum of your whole past. So when someone’s being authentic you get the feeling that not only that there’s a person there in the moment, but somehow you reach into their very essence and you meet the unique individual.

Mack: I don’t know why, that makes me want to cry. That’s beautiful!

On the surface there’s little in that to disagree with. It all makes sense. Of course, there are two problems with it.

First, it’s just shallow. He’s essentially saying, you can be a whole person by being a person. Don’t mock that: this is actually a work of calculated genius, a central part of the con-artist’s playbook. Because getting people to think that really basic stuff they knew already is deep spiritual wisdom makes those people vulnerable to you. They hear what you are saying and go “Holy crap, I see it!” because, how hard is it not to see? Stuff like this is much more effective at getting people on your side than giving them real spiritual wisdom, because real spiritual wisdom is really, really hard to process. Faking it is significantly easier than putting in the work and doing the real thing, and it gets you much faster results.

The second problem is what’s missing. Over the course of a fifteen-minute video where this basic point (namely “in order to be a person, you need to be a person”) is restated in various ways over the whole length of the thing without any significant degree of elaboration, not once is the question of how we relate really touched on. You’d think that in a talk about seeing the real person you’d have some discussion of love, of what we owe each other.

No. That’s entirely absent. About two minutes of internet research leads me to discover that Raniere subscribes to Randian Objectivism, because of course he does. But then, that’s another easy sell for a prospective cult leader, because it just allows you to concentrate on being a selfish little shit and tell yourself that it’s virtuous.

And it worked for Raniere. Although bearing an uncanny resemblance to a slightly more stocky version of Rick Moranis, He ran the NXIVM cult for several years, largely composed of capable and smart professionals, many of them actors and filmmakers. His word was treated as that of a prophet, and his followers were only allowed to call him “Vanguard”. They included many women who Raniere moulded into a harem of hot brainwashed sex-slaves and controlled so absolutely that he convinced them to have his initials branded on their bikini lines. And then the law caught up with him, and he and Mack went on trial for human trafficking.

The point of all

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