Hardly a month goes by without the premiere of a new TV docuseries about a grandiose, self-serving leader, usually a man, who demands unquestioning loyalty from his followers as he exploits them. Megalomaniacs gonna maniac, and viewers now study them obsessively, fascinated by how and why so many individuals fall prey to these power mongers, giving up their freedoms, their money, their dignity, and, often, their families, in the name of a malignant con artist.
The hunger for these stories has only grown since the mid-2010s, judging by the number of portraits of cults available, so many of them on Netflix, Max, and Amazon Prime. Clearly there’s a strong desire to watch ordinary people succumb to despotic leaders and be dehumanized, brainwashed, sexually coerced, robbed, and more, their often-sympathetic efforts to find some kind of utopia flying right in their face. The alien wannabes of Heaven’s Gate, the looking-for-love followers of Twin Flames, the New Age hopefuls of Buddhafield, the self-help seekers of NXIVM, they’ve all been examined under the TV microscope, as well as on countless podcasts and in books.
The latest addition to the cult trend on TV — which is adjacent to the serial killer trend — reaches back to a staple of the genre, and one of the most dramatic and disastrous examples: Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. Called “Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown,” the Hulu three-parter chronicles, once again, the nightmare that was Jonestown in the South American country of Guyana and the 918 who died there in November of 1978. People followed the tyrannical Jones for his promises of free housing, racial equality, and communal sharing, but found the reality — families split up, too little food, media censorship — to be quite different. The show includes interviews with former members, reporters, and Jones’s son, Stephan, who was away the day of the deaths.
The particular spin of this take, filled with footage and audio of Jim Jones pushing followers to “die with dignity” and kill themselves, is to expose the victimhood of those who perished that day. “Cult Massacre” works to change the common narrative that all the Jonestown victims agreed to die, that they “drank the Kool-Aid,” according to the phrase that has come to define their actions. As Stephan Jones puts it, “That night was murder.”
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By focusing on the victims, “Cult Massacre” zeroes in on what is certainly a huge factor in the popularity of these cult stories. How do seemingly sane people wind up in a cult? Yes, watching a despot work his cruel magic has a twisted rubbernecking appeal — sociopaths are de rigueur on most scripted dramas these days — and the likes of David Koresh of the Branch Davidians and Keith Raniere of NXIVM have oddly become cheap celebrities for their crimes. We’ve always had a taste for looking into the darkest sides of human nature, pressing our noses up against, say, the fearful reign of some oppressor who can’t tolerate being wrong, observing the bleakness from the safety of our couches.
But the cult victims, they are the ones we recognize as our friends, our family, and, most of all, ourselves. They’re the ones who are looking for love, answers, or healing — what many religions are offering — when, unfortunately, they stumble into the trap of a calculating narcissist who wants to be worshiped. It’s hard to get your head around the fact that any half-intelligent person can become sucked into a mind control situation, lured in by hope and kept there by indoctrination and fear, even blackmail. But there it is, in archival footage of them figuratively bending the knee.
We tend to think we’re individualistic to the core, that we’d never submit to harmful groupthink, especially as Americans who came here for religious freedom. We’d never become an extension of someone else’s ego. The moral high horse gallops by. But anyone who has ever felt fanaticism for a musician, or a social media figure, or an actor, or a politician, understands belonging to a cult — a nondestructive cult, perhaps, but still. These cult docuseries — along with scripted fictional ones such as “The Path,” “The Following,” and “American Horror Story: Cult” — speak to us as cautionary tales, and they speak particularly loudly to those looking for meaning or a cause in their lives, i.e. most of us.
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They’re inviting us to be aware of whom we pledge our loyalty to. While we gawk at these poor people who lost their souls, and their lives, to a malevolent person, watching them get lured into a kind of self-defeating prison, we need to be taking notes.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.
