The Sheila Variations

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Allison and I met up last night and saw the documentary Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple. She and I both see a lot of documentaries - and you know, a lot of them suck ... but when you see a good one, you realize just what "good" means. This is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen - just in terms of HOW it told its story. Documentaries are tough ... they can be boring, or pretentious, or unclear ... It's hard to do one well.

First of all: there is no voiceover narration. None. It is a complete oral history. Which ... has got to be SO freakin' difficult - in terms of editing, and putting the whole thing together. But what a difference it makes - in terms of the experience of the audience. Because ... you're just IN it. The story is being told by those who were there. Who either knew him, or escaped, or had family members disappear, or journalists ... There was no omniscent voice, nobody telling us what to think or feel. Amazing. Very hard to do - and it is done nearly seamlessly here.

There are still a ton of questions left unanswered - you know: basically, like: WHAT THE HELL???? Questions like that. You know, you see Jim Jones' journey - his calling to be a minister - his charisma - his move to California - his socialism, his adopting a multi-racial family - his beliefs ... We hear from those who knew him along the way, those who were swept up in his racial harmony message, and those who ... were creeped out.

Even more fascinating were those who had downright WEIRD interactions with him - very early on - and STILL stayed on in the Temple.

There was inCREDIBLE footage of the services at the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. It was like they documented their entire lives - amazing, I had never seen a lot of it before. Apparently, as the filmmakers went out to interview survivors, or defectors ... many of them had stashed roles of film in their closets, stuff they hadn't looked at in years. It wasn't like it was in some public archive - these were people's home movies - but God, they just captured this mania, this ... Well, at one point, early on, I whispered to Allison, "That looks kinda fun." People were laughing, and swaying, and it looked like one of the most exciting church services I'd ever seen. Joyful. Black, white, together. One of the women who happened to be away from Jonestown on the day the suicide took place - said something like, "You know, you don't think you're joining a cult. Nobody decides, 'I'm going to join a cult.' You gather together, with people who seem to feel the same way you do about things ... you think that what you're joining could Never HURT you." And some of that footage from California DEFINITELY speaks to that. I could see that if I had been invited to a service like that, I might go back.

But - and this was left unexplained - then there was a shift. People were selling off their assets, and giving the money to the church. There were these Greyhound bus tours around the country, recruitment drives.

The footage of him doing a "faith healing" at one service - this woman getting up from a wheelchair and basically running around - and the entire place ERUPTING into absolute FRENZY - was so so weird. You just could feel the weirdness of it ... that something was deeply wrong here. Then one of the interviewed people said, "I heard later ... that that woman was actually one of his secretaries, nothing wrong with her at all."

Other impressions:

-- how sleazy he looked at all times. Like - ALWAYS with those skanky 70s porn-star sunglasses. There was one photograph of him sitting on the San Francisco Housing Committee - and they scanned down the table - and suddenly there he was - with the glasses - and the audience just erupted into laughter ... It was like a cartoon of a weirdo, sitting on this panel - with a bunch of people who looked normal. He had a vaguely Kim Jong-Il look to him. The black helmet hair, the eyes ALWAYS hidden ... and in the couple of moments you could see his eyes, they were alarmingly paranoid, gleaming whites, with this fire in them deep down. Insane eyes.

-- the fact that once they all got down to Jonestown - they had tapes of Jim Jones going on and on and on ... playing through loudspeakers ... all day long. So no matter where you were, you could hear him. I hadn't known that. And we heard snippets from those tapes. He was a big conspiracy theorist - convinced that people were coming after him - that the government was coming after him ... so the tapes were a lot about that. But the dulling effect that this would have on you ... and on your ability to remember that there was a big world out there, a world NOT in thrall of Jim Jones ... Classic brainwashing technique.

-- the footage of the kids playing on the swings, and laughing at the camera, in Guyana are almost heart-stoppingly terrible. You could hear people all through the audience just react to the footage, viscerally ... little moans, or gasps, hands over eyes ... Just every time you saw those laughing kids in the jungle. I wanted to scream RUN. They're innocent. They're lambs for the slaughter.

-- also the footage of the little old black ladies was pretty terrible too. You just could see their frailty, and also their hope. Here was a man who accepted them, a man who had created an interracial church, a utopia that so many of these people really believed in ... These little old ladies had handed over their money, their futures, their WILL to someone who turned out to be a psychotic drug-addled madman. But that was not what they signed up for. Little frail 75 year old black ladies, with thick glasses, and housedresses, throwing up their hands at the services, and whooping for joy. Horrible to look at, knowing the end.

-- Me being me - I wanted to get inside everybody's head and see what it was actually LIKE for them. Talk about Sophie's choice! How ... HOW ... do you just follow what this man says and pour cyanide down your baby's throat? What is it like to be that far gone?

-- This one man being interviewed just killed me - he was one of the few that survived - he and 5 others took off into the jungle. Now THAT is a story I also would love to hear. What? Where did they stay? Did they hook up with each other? Did they hide out? Did they go back to Jonestown and walk around? When were they rescued? Was there suspicion placed on them because they had survived? But anyway, this one guy - watched his wife give the baby KoolAid - you saw photographs of her, a beautiful smiling brown-haired woman ... and the baby ... you could barely look at the baby, it was too awful. And he said at one point - and you could tell he was holding back the tears - he said that during the long time when Jim was pouring out the Koolaid to the 900 plus people there - this guy described one of the moments he had as, "Everything was happening so fast ... It was almost like I wanted to shout, 'Just give me a MINUTE, please!'" A minute ... in the middle of this chaos. A minute to process. A minute to evaluate, to step back, to ask yourself, "Do I want to go this way? Is this right?" The fact that he STILL, after everything, was able to have that moment of thought like that was unbelievably terrifying to imagine. Because what that moment was was - his critical mind, his critical thinking jumping into play - after months, perhaps years, of lulling it to sleep. PROCESSING INFORMATION is what the brain does. But when you're in a cult - the mechanisms for that are cut off - the entire atmosphere is designed to STOP you from processing. But inside him, deep inside - he was crying out for a "minute". His humanity, his MIND ... still there. Looking around. Thinking ... NO. Meanwhile, his wife killed their baby and then herself. And he escaped into the jungle. How on earth does one go on.

-- One of the survivors said, "Even though it was a tragedy ... I still am proud that we at least tried to save the world." Okay. The man who said this? Lost his wife, his son and daughter, his mother, his 2 nieces ... He lost the majority of his family, all of whom swilled down the Kool-Aid when Jim Jones told them to - and he STILL seemed vaguely proud of what they tried to do BEFORE that. That is a level of denial that I cannot begin to understand - and this is also one of the keys to how cults work. They create such a web of culpability - that it is nearly impossible to back out of it. Because then you would just have to admit how mistaken you were, and that you were DUPED. And nobody wants to do that - especially when your entire family has committed suicide because some helmet-head wearing porn-star glasses tells them to. Unbelievable.

-- The sound of him urging to drink the Kool-Aid quicker - "Quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly" is something that will haunt me forever. And you can hear screams in the background. The whole thing is on audio tape.

-- The footage of the shootout at the plane was also chilling - something I had never seen before. One of the cameramen filming the guys in the truck - he's obviously crouching under the plane with his camera - and suddenly the camera goes to static. Dead. Dude is shot as he's filming. Filming his own murderers. A couple of stills of all of the dead bodies lying around this rickety plane. And unbelievably - a couple of the people there (a journalist, an aide to the congressman, a sound guy) survived. They all were interviewed. The congressman's aide (who had not wanted to go to Guyana, she had a really bad feeling about it) lay beside the plane pretending to be dead. The gunmen walked around, checking for survivors, and apparently shot her at point blank range. And yet still - she lived. Again, unanswered questions for me: What then?? How did she get out? They were in the middle of the jungle. 900 people were sprawled dead 6 miles away. What happened next?? [Here's an indepth article that tells what happened next. But the film doesn't get into that.]

-- One woman said (and my heart went out to her, it really did) - she was weeping - she said, "When I went down to Guyana - and saw the utopia there - the working together - all families together - I felt like it was heaven on earth. I thought it was heaven. And now I can't believe in heaven anymore." Tears are in my eyes right now as I type this.

It's a wrenching piece of work. Really really well done.

Here's the trailer. Be warned. It's graphic.

Posted by sheila