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The Cult Imaginary: Fringe Religions and Fan Cultures on American Television

2010; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2010.523989

1465-3451

David Scott Diffrient,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Throughout this essay, I use the terms cult, alternative religion, fringe religion, and new religious movement interchangeably. However, these much-debated expressions are not equal, in terms of the value placed on them in critical communities. A standard, if somewhat problematic, definition of the term ‘cult’ is supplied by the counseling psychologist Michael D. Langone. He describes it as ‘a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.’ Robert L. Snow, a commander of the Indianapolis Homicide division, expands this definition, albeit in an alarmist fashion, stating, ‘Cults, along with being centered around the veneration of a living being, use manipulative techniques in recruiting and fund-raising, use high-pressure thought reform techniques to indoctrinate their members … demand total and complete obedience from all cult members, and manipulate and use cult members (through free work, excessive donations, sexual favors, etc.) for the benefit of cult leaders.’ Robert L. Snow, Deadly Cults: the crimes of true believers (Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003), 6. Although the expression ‘new religious movement’ is generally preferred in academic communities, the term ‘cult’ is more likely to be heard in mainstream media productions, from network television series to commercial motion pictures. As a result, the general public tends to deploy that word as a pejorative term to denote ‘a deviant religious organization with novel beliefs and practices.’ Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, Of churches, sects, and cults: preliminary concepts for a theory of religious movements, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18(2) (1979), 124. 2. Jane Dillon and James T. Richardson, The ‘cult’ concept: a politics of representation analysis, Syzygy: The Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture, 3(3/4) (1994), 186. 3. Lorne L. Dawson, Comprehending Cults: the sociology of new religious movements (Oxford University Press, 2006), 71. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Marc Galanter, Cults: faith, healing, and coercion (Oxford University Press, 1999), 5–7. 6. Dawson, 5. 7. This is not to dispute accurately reported incidences of indoctrination involving authoritarian methods and physical as well as mental abuse, such as sleep-deprivation and general deception. However, as David Barrett, a scholar who prefers the term ‘alternative religion’ to the word ‘cult,’ reminds us, ‘It's all too easy to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from the particular, saying that because one individual youngster has been damaged by one individual cult, then everyone in that movement is in danger, and that it, and all other “peculiar” religious movements, must be destroyed.’ David V. Barrett, Sects, ‘Cults’ and Alternative Religions: a world survey and sourcebook (London, Blandford, 1996), 279. 8. Despite the fact that there have been dozens of significant televisual representations devoted to the Church of Scientology (its belief system, its history, its founder L. Ron Hubbard, and its members), I have opted not to include many of these in my historical overview or in the list of episodes at the end of the essay. A separate, much more detailed study of Scientology's precarious position in American popular culture (as a source of spiritual strength for so many of Hollywood's creative personnel and a source of scripted humor for so many others in the industry) can and should be written. However, is simply too large an undertaking for the current study that I have been conducting in recent years (with an eye toward more general patterns of anti-cultic portrayals in the media). 9. Hillary Robson, Television and the cult audience: a primer, in: Stacey Abbott (ed.), The Cult TV book (London, IB Tauris, 2010), 210. 10. Ibid. Because of its continued notoriety, Heaven's Gate, which Robson alludes to, needs little in the way of contextualizing commentary here. However, it is worth pointing out that the members of this San Diego-based group, led by co-founder Marshall Applewhite (who, years earlier, had launched it as a Book of Revelations-inspired cult with his nurse, Bonnie Nettles, and encouraged his followers to prepare for an Earthly ‘evacuation’ once an assembly of higher beings arrived on the planet), were frequently referred to as ‘Trekkies’ in the mainstream American press. This was in part because of a message worn on its doomed members’ all-black clothing—‘Heaven's Gate Away Team’—as well as reports that they had been avid science-fiction fans prior to their mass suicide in March of 1997. The tragic deaths of these 39 people, including Applewhite himself as well as the brother of actress Nichelle Nichols (one of the stars of the original Star Trek television series), occurred around the time that the Hale–Bopp comet was at its brightest, when it was thought to be accompanied by an alien spacecraft trailing behind it. After police officers arrived on the scene at the group's Rancho Santa Fe mansion (March 26), they not only found the decomposing bodies of those who had overdosed on phenobarbital, but also discovered evidence that these people had been sci-fi cultists, fans of Gene Roddenberry's groundbreaking program about space travel. Details of this connection are provided in Jeffrey Sconce, Star Trek, Heaven's Gate, and textual transcendence, in: Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Cult Television (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 199–220. Moreover, the Heaven's Gate members were revealed to have been avid computer users, using the medium to spread the ‘gospel’ of their 65-year-old leader. Besides integrating ‘all manner of Star Trek lore into their daily lives,’ the Heaven's Gate members thus formed what Paul Virilio has referred to as a ‘cybersect,’ one that was not so different, according to the French cultural theorist, from pan-Islamic terrorist groups steeped in the histories of decolonization and mass immigration. For more information about the relationship between the religious fanaticism of a ‘global subproletariat’ and the irrational drive toward self-annihilation inscribed in this American Away Team's Trek-like beliefs in transcendence, see The Paul Virilio Reader (Columbia University Press, 2004), 250. 11. Barrett, 16. 12. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London, Routledge, 2002), 120–125. 13. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: the mirror of consumption (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005), 41. 14. Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins, Intensities interview with Henry Jenkins, Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 2. http://intensities.org/Essays/Jenkins.pdf, 20. 15. Hills, 122. 16. William S. Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (London, Routledge, 1997), 24. 17. Hills, 121. 18. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: religion and American popular culture (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2005), 17. 19. Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: true believers and charismatic cults (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004), 5. 20. A cult-themed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (‘Lie to Me’) likewise puts emphasis on loneliness as a contributing factor in people's willingness to join shadowy fringe religions or social networks; in this case, ‘the lonely ones,’ a bunch of misunderstood outsiders who worship vampires together. 21. ‘Escape to the House of the Mummies Part II,’ an episode of the Adult Swim program The Venture Bros. (Cartoon Network, 2003–), similarly revolves around Ramar of the Jungle-style exoticism in its depiction of a bloodthirsty Egyptian cult from which the Caucasian heroes must escape. 22. These words in ‘The Howling Man’ recall the opening and closing narrations in ‘The Invisibles,’ an episode of The Outer Limits that features a secret organization whose members ‘have never experienced love or friendship’ and remain unseen by most people. 23. Another important Twilight Zone episode, one that features the interwoven themes of religious zealotry, mass think, individual guilt, and the potential for human obsolescence, is ‘The Old Man in the Cave.’ This entry in the show's fifth season focuses on a community of nuclear holocaust survivors who have been passively accepting advice on how to build a better future from the titular ‘old man,’ which—after a full decade of dispensing information—is revealed to be a computer, not a person. As a narrative that deals with the theme of authoritarianism and the disciplining of citizens into obedient subjects of their government, this episode is significant as a Cold War-era representation of cult-like behavior, culminating with a display of mob mentality that is unleashed once the townspeople discover the truth. Leading up to the moment when they ‘kill’ the machine, we are given an opportunity to reflect on the contradictory impulses of the community, and invited to compare this group of undernourished folks to cult fans, who are similarly sustained by communication technologies yet are believed to be prone to manipulation. 24. It should come as no surprise that many of the fictional cults being spoofed in US sitcoms of the 1970s were lent an Orientalist gloss, given the centrality of Eastern religious traditions in that decade's experimental drug and youth cultures. A distillation of this ongoing motif can be found in ‘Abduction,’ an episode of Barney Miller (ABC, 1975–1982) that aired eight months prior to ‘The De-Programming of Arnold Horshack.’ In one of its first scenes, a mother and father enter the 12th Precinct station, begging the police captain and his men to rescue their daughter from a religious compound masquerading as a health-food restaurant. Although, by the end of the episode, it is revealed that the Light of the East Temple and Herbarium is a legitimate business, the parents’ earlier remarks about this ‘freak joint’ and their formerly ‘normal’ American daughter, Barbara-Lynn (a 22-year-old woman who has been given ‘a new kind of Hindu name you can’t even pronounce’), have likely colored the audience's perceptions of the long-haired cult leader, a robed man who has also been accused of selling ‘pot’ and ‘funny mushrooms’ to the restaurant patrons. 25. In ‘Fun with Jane and Jane,’ an episode of King of the Hill, a cult masquerading as a college sorority (the Omega House) ‘recruits unsuspecting young women from campus, deprives them of protein, bathrooms, and all contact with their families and friends, then ships them off to a ranch for general enslavement.’ These words, spoken by the perpetually paranoid conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble, are an accurate summary of what transpires at the Omega Ranch, where new recruits are forced to make jams and jellies against their will. Similarly, in ‘Marlon Joins a Cult,’ an episode of the sitcom The Wayans Bros., a connection between cult worship and African-American slavery is made. Marlon Wayans, trying to prove to his family that he can be a serious actor (under his new name, Brother Ecstasy), is indoctrinated to behave like an antiquated Black servant in the Infinite Fellowship Institute, a community of comet-watchers who hand over their most valuable possessions (e.g. keys to a Lexus, a Rolex) as ‘sacred offerings.’ 26. Interestingly, the term ‘Apocrypha’ is not only used as the title of this Season Four episode of Law & Order, but is also the name of a fan-created website devoted to the series, one that published fan fiction based on storylines within the Law & Order universe between the years 1997 and 2007. See: http://www.podengo.com/apocrypha/archive.html. 27. Although the characters in many television programs go to great lengths to distinguish between mainstream religions and fringe religions, there have been a few exceptional instances in which such distinctions are problematized, as when, in ‘The Joy of Sect’ episode of The Simpsons, Bart states, ‘Church, cult. Cult, church. So we get bored somewhere else every Sunday.’ This humorous take on the inherent similarities between officially recognized theological traditions and alternative faiths or practices is reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's comment that ‘forty-eight people donning plastic bags and shooting themselves in the head is a “cult,” while a hundred million people bowing before a flesh-hating elderly celibate is obviously a world-class religion.’ See Barbara Ehrenreich, Fun with cults, The Snarling Citizen (Macmillan, 2000), 44. 28. In 1994, an episode of the Detroit-set sitcom Martin paid homage to this cult-themed storyline in What's Happening!! Entitled ‘In Search of … Martin,’ it shows disc jockey Martin Payne adopting the name Shaquille Sunflower once he joins a cult (the Golden Palace) and, as a ‘lost soul,’ begins communing with a rock that is the size of Rerun's head of lettuce. 29. A popular, endlessly repeated chant heard on American television during the 1970s was the ‘Kool-Aid Song,’ which included the lyrics ‘Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, Tastes Great! We Want Kool-Aid, Can’t Wait!’ These lyrics, part of the advertising landscape of popular culture at the time of the Jonestown tragedy, took on grim resonances in its aftermath, forcing parent company Kraft Foods to initiate new commercial ad campaigns to distance the drink from the specter of death. 30. Although cult references largely disappeared from narrative fiction programs during the early 1980s, a few theatrically released feature films from that period did delve into the subject. Examples include Ticket to Heaven (1981) and Split Image (1982), two motion pictures that have both been cited as influences on the writers of ‘The Blank Stare’ episode of Strangers with Candy. http://www.jerriblank.com/swcep209.html#mytop 31. In addition to these militaristic, male-focalized programs of the 1980s, the first season of the daytime soap opera Santa Barbara (NBC, 1984–1993) featured a running storyline concerning a cult. 32. Of the four major destructive cults to gain notoriety during the 1990s, the Aum Shinrikyo (‘Supreme Truth’) group has probably received the least attention, with only passing references to it in a few narrative programs. However, an entire episode of the documentary series Zero Hour, entitled ‘Terror in Tokyo,’ details the events that led up to the 1995 Sarin gas attack staged by some of the members of this Japanese group. 33. The list of televised news reports and talk show episodes concerning Waco alone is long enough to constitute a substantial subgenre under the larger cultic umbrella. Examples include a two-part Maury Povich Show episode (‘Answers in the Ashes’), a Biography Channel installment on David Koresh, a 10th-anniversary special aired on Primetime Live (‘The Children of Waco’), two episodes of Turning Point (‘The Untold Story of Waco’ and ‘The Truth about Waco’), a CourtTV program (‘Mugshots: David Koresh’), and a Frontline special (‘Waco: The Inside Story’), which, despite its title, includes only one interview with a Davidian inside the compound, foregrounding instead the roles played by ‘outside’ players, like the FBI negotiators. These are in addition to the many made-for-TV movies and feature-length documentaries dealing either explicitly or implicitly with the Branch Davidians, including In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco (1993), Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997), and Standoff (1997). For more information about the many cultural productions dealing with this tragic event, see: http://wacocult.tripod.com/video.html. 34. According to Robert L. Snow, an estimated 20 million Americans ‘have been involved in cults at some time in their lives.’ While readers might find this a reasonable estimation, it should be noted that the author provides no explanation as to what ‘involved in’ means. Snow, who marshals forth evidence derived from the work of Margaret Thaler Singer (‘America's foremost authority on cults’), states that ‘the likely number of cults in the United States today [is] about 5,000.’ Snow, 5–7. 35. Emily Edwards, Metaphysical Media: the occult experience in popular culture (Carbondale, IL, Illinois University Press, 2005), 11.