Texas Rangers, charismatic cult leaders, bigamy and child brides. Last weekend law enforcement officers led the mass exodus of 400+ abused women and children from the compound of currently-incarcerated Warren Jeffs, cult-leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I give it two months before one of the networks runs its dramatization.

In the meantime, you can either clear your head and think happy thoughts or you can rent one of these films that explore the inner workings of cults and extremist belief systems:

Ticket to Heaven (1981)
I think it was sci-fi author Orson Scott Card who opined that in fiction dread is far more valuable than terror. I'm inclined to agree. Flipping through the channels late one night several years ago, I happened across this intensely realistic masterpiece about a young man's induction into a California cult. I was riveted to the chair, on the edge of it, filled with silent horror, for the duration. We're not talking devil worship and human sacrifices in this movie, but a consideration of the fragility of the human mind and how easy it is to exploit it. If it's any indication of how impressive this film is, Roger Ebert saw it three times before writing his review, in which he wrote, "What makes the movie absolutely spellbinding is that it shows us not only how he is recruited into the group, but how anyone could be indoctrinated into one of the many cults in America today. This is a movie that has done its research, and it is made with such artistry that we share the experience of the young man."

Big Love Season 1 (2006)
Big Love is the HBO show no one seems to be talking about -- and perhaps will come under a whole lot of fire soon in the wake of the FLDS raid. The critics have been mixed on this show about a Mormon bigamist with a heart of gold (Bill Paxton) and his three wives. Although the plot is certainly intriguing and the cast excellent (including three cult icons: Chloe Sevigny, Harry Dean Stanton and Grace Zabriskie), it does tend to candy-coat what is typically an abusive and oppressive practice.

Holy Smoke (1999)
Researching these recommendations, I realized how Hollywood has typecast Kate Winslet. She's the naive-and-easily-carried-away woman. In Titanic she abandoned everything for a skinny vagabond. In The Life of David Gale she went chasing after a Death Row inmate's long and convoluted deception. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind she gets her brain erased on a lark. Perhaps it all dates back to 1999, when Jane Campion directed her in this film about a cult-deprogrammer (Harvey Keitel) who's hired to find and forcibly rehabilitate a young woman swept up in an Indian cult.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997)
and
Ambush in Waco: In the Line of Duty (1993)
I personally can't think about the success of the FLDS compound raid without remembering the tragedy of the Branch Davidian compound raid, also in Texas, in 1993. These two definitive films came nearly five years apart. First, there was the made-for-TV adaptation, Ambush in Waco, starring Tim Daly as David Koresh, and damn if the Wings star wasn't a spitting image of the charismatic cult leader. The TV version is certainly over-dramatized, its facts bent to serve sensationalist prime-time audiences (and to glorify federal law enforcement officers), but that's what American TV was like in the early '90s.

The documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement came out years later when the facts were in, the interviews on record, and the last phone calls made available to the public. It's even more shocking -- not because of the cult, but because of the the FBI, ATF, and ourselves buying the "official" story offered in Ambush.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us