One week it’s a pair of online matchmaking hucksters, the next, a group of zonked-out seekers waiting for the spaceships to arrive. There are sex cults (“The Vow”), and doomsday cults (“Waco: American Apocalypse”), and cults that seem to exist for no obvious reason other than being cults. Turn on a TV or fire up a streaming service and you will encounter a docu-series about a group of desperate people rallying around a charismatic and often deranged leader.
Watch enough of them and certain patterns emerge: the eventual leader’s humble origins and disillusionment with reality; the crystallization of a guiding idea and the gathering of a flock; the ensuing egotism run wild, mass madness and moment of reckoning. But these series don’t all follow the same template, as two new ones demonstrate.
“Born in Synanon,” premiering Tuesday on Paramount+, looks back at the California-based addiction recovery group that turned increasingly abusive as its founder, Charles Dederich, descended into violent paranoia and alcohol abuse. The four-part series is largely a personal reminiscence of a woman who was, in fact, born into Synanon and came to look at the group with rose-tinted glasses.
HBO’s “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God,” currently streaming on Max, is an empathetic if deeply troubling immersion into Love Has Won, whose self-appointed leader, Amy Carlson, created a cosmology built on lots of booze and drugs, conspiracy theories and the guiding spirit of Robin Williams.
Avoiding sensationalism and overt judgment, both series manage to humanize cult members and even leaders, and offer implicit explanations for what might lead someone down a path easily laughed at, scorned and dismissed.
“With cult stories, you can always put yourself in the shoes of another person,” Geeta Gandbhir, who directed “Born in Synanon,” said in a video interview from her home in Brooklyn. “If this could happen to them, then this could happen to you. You could be sucked in, and I think that is fascinating to all of us.”
“Born in Synanon” tells the story of Cassidy Arkin. Her parents were active members of Synanon, which began as a kind of utopian drug rehabilitation community, founded in 1958 as Tender Loving Care, and then devolved in the ’70s into a wealthy quasi-religious group with Dederich as its godhead.
Arkin heard the widespread reports of child abuse, and she was familiar with the group’s violent threats against foes. The group once planted a rattlesnake at a lawyer’s home, and in the series we hear Dederich, in archival footage, say: “I’m quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs, and tell him, ‘The next time I’m going to break your wife’s legs, then I’m going to cut your kid’s arm off.’” But Arkin still had long thought of Synanon as a beautiful alternative to racism, classism and other evils of American society.
Gandbhir mixes archival footage of Synanon, including long sequences of “The Game” — a form of shouting attack therapy that even children were made to engage in — with Arkin’s present-day journey to better understand her past with the group. Particularly telling are her visits with fellow former Synanon kids, most of whom recall a frightening, abusive environment.
However, we also see why Synanon might have been attractive for both self-described “dope fiends” and members without addiction issues who were drawn to the group’s utopian ideals. Much like People’s Temple, Jim Jones’s church that turned into a cult that ended in mass suicide and murder, Synanon took root as a beacon of racial and social equality. This is still what some former members choose to remember.
“They were very much inspired by the freedom struggle and the civil rights movement, which they thought were incredibly important,” Gandbhir said. “A lot of folks who came out of that ’60s time period wanted a rainbow nation, they wanted all those things. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.”
Love Has Won had no such practical ideals. A mishmash of anti-government conspiracy and messianic fervor, the cult was started in the mid-2000s by Carlson, a former McDonald’s manager who came to see herself as Mother God, the deity who would redeem humanity. She used the internet to draw a flock of followers disillusioned with modern life and to build a war chest that enabled her to buy clothes, jewelry, booze and whatever else her heart desired.
Her followers in turn plied her with colloidal silver, a debunked alternative dietary supplement that turned her skin blue, and liquor, which they called “her medicine.” She died in 2021 from a combination of alcohol abuse, chronic colloidal silver ingestion and anorexia. She claimed she would ascend upon death in a spaceship sent by the Galactics, a group of dead luminaries led by Robin Williams.
Hannah Olson, the director of “Love Has Won,” steered clear of outside experts, choosing instead to let the members tell their stories and espouse their beliefs. Their testimony collectively serves as a reminder that cults aren’t created in vacuums: Before they acquired names like Commander Buddha and El Morya, these people grew deeply disenchanted by a society that pushed them to the margins.
“Their beliefs are obviously very out there,” Olson said in a video interview from Los Angeles. “But underneath that I wanted to reveal the widespread and common social circumstances that brought them to those beliefs: lack of access to health care and mental health care; struggling with addiction; having a family member affected by the opioid epidemic; medical debt. These are things that make reality untenable for millions of Americans.”
Such factors help, explain why there is so much grist for cult documentaries. In challenging times, people often turn to charismatic leaders who claim to have the answers. Some look to fiery politicians for such guidance, and others look to the skies.
“When we look at cult films in general, we see that people are looking for community and belonging,” Olson said. “What I wanted to look at was the way our untenable American reality actually pushes people down the wormhole, where the cult is filling a social void.”
Most people have some version of such voids. Perhaps this is the ultimate appeal of these series. Or as Gandbhir asks, rhetorically: “Could that be me?”
Chris Vognar
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