"Powerful"
People's Temple, the activist San Francisco church headed by the Rev. Jim Jones, a charismatic Pentecostal minister, did not begin as a creepazoid apocalyptic cult. People who grew up in the Bay Area in the 1970s (as I did) may understand this already, but most of the world does not. The idea that 909 brainwashed wackos followed their nutjob leader into death in a South American jungle is easier to swallow, perhaps, than the idea that those people were a group of essentially normal, loving, idealistic Americans who tried to build a realm of hope in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and ultimately surrendered to despair. - Review of Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple, Salon, October 19, 2006Just two quick points here:
- I simply don't buy the idea that these people were just regular old normal people. Without doubt, they had vulnerabilities that drew them to a messianic cult, abandon anything else that mattered in their lives for a patch of jungle and a deviant leader with whom they willingly cooperated in their own murders. Some of these vulnerabilities are related to the human condition, but it's a false syllogism to suppose these were in any way typical people.
- From the review, it sounds like what makes this "the year's most powerful documentary" is the filmmakers' willingness to play "an audiotape . . . of Jim Jones telling people to drink the poison, and all around him you hear children, men, women screaming and dying." Nice. Werner Herzog managed to make "Grizzly Man" pretty darned powerful without playing us the audio of the fatal bear attack, which he had in his possession. I'm sure I could make a super powerful documentary about Leonard Lake and Charles Ng if I had access to the right footage and audio, and had the . . . what exactly? . . . to cut it into my film. (This film was produced for PBS's The American Experience and will probably air on PBS at some point.)
posted at 12:38 AM
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