If you look at the history of cults, especially the ones that began to flourish in America in the 1970s, when they’d absorbed a lot of the New Age mystical we’re-all-Jesus let-your-primal-feelings-out messianic psychedelic trappings of the ’60s, you’ll see that almost every cult has two things in common. They’re led by snake-oil gurus who end up sucking the wealth out of their followers. And more often than not, the leaders, who set themselves up as deities (deity being a level above rock star), use the followers for sexual favors.
So part of what’s disturbing about “The Leader,” a drama about the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult, is that Marshall Applewhite, the elfin demagogue who ruled the cult for 25 years, ultimately leading 38 of his followers in a suicide pact on March 22 and 23, 1997 (the largest mass suicide ever committed on American soil — though Jonestown, with 900 dead, is still the global champion), did not pursue either of those goals. For a long time, the cult barely had enough cash to get by, and even when the money did start coming in from Applewhite’s acolytes, it wasn’t exorbitant; it just funded their food and housing.
As far as sex goes, Applewhite, born in Texas in 1931, was a gay man who was terrified of his sexuality. He’d lost a teaching job in 1970 after having a relationship with a male student, and though he occasionally gave into temptation, he mostly tried to tamp his desires down into a place where they didn’t exist. And that’s what he asked of his followers. The members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were required to be celibate, and one of the goals of the cult was to eliminate gender. They all wore their hair in this odd asexual pageboy cut, which made them look like nerd aliens. That seemed appropriate, since UFO theology was a big part of their dream. There’s a video of the Heaven’s Gate followers shortly before their suicide (it’s recreated in “The Leader”), where they’re sitting in their dark smock outfits, beaming like schoolchildren who think this is the happiest moment of their lives, and it’s one of the creepiest things you ever saw.
“The Leader,” as a dramatic experience, is creepy as hell, but as written and directed by Michael Gallagher, it’s also authentic and sharply told, and it’s inquiring about the right things — namely, why would people descend to this, and what, if anything, does it have to say about us? It’s clear, from the movie, that the members of the Heaven’s Cult were a bunch of sick puppies, and so was Marshall Applewhite, who’s played by Tim Blake Nelson in a subtle and unnerving performance of insidious wackadoo force. He shows you that this man, known as Herff, did not have all his marbles (he hears voices), but also that he grooved on the power of it all. Nelson, in a shaggy thatch of hair, with a beatific leer, speaks in a drawl that’s more pronounced than the one Applewhite had, and that gives him a huckster-preacher vibe, but his Herff is also a crackpot believer in his own malarkey, which he more or less makes up as he goes along. Why do his followers agree to follow him? Because following is the point. There’s no sex or money-grubbing or anything else worldly on the side. That’s what gets under your skin.
The Heaven’s Gate cult actually had two leaders. Applewhite’s partner in glittery-eyed Pied Piper insanity is Bonnie Nettles (Vera Farmiga), a modest, well-mannered nurse he meets in the early ’70s on a hospital psych ward, shortly after he has swallowed a bottle of pills. He sizes her up as a lost soul (she’s an unhappy homemaker), and the two form a bond that feels sexual in intensity, except that it remains platonic. Herff draws her into his “philosophy” of aiming for the “Next Level” of being, which sounds like the hokum it is, except that everyone in the ’70s was starting to talk this way. It was the jabber of Scientology and est and the Moonies and the Hare Krishna and primal therapy and the human-potential movement. Make yourself a better you. (It has never gone away.) Together, Applewhite and Nettles go on the road, surviving on free dinners rolls at restaurants, skipping out on motel bills, but they believe in something in each other. They seem to both know that they’ve got what it takes to be the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of extraterrestrial New Age fascism.
As they gather followers, most of whom seem as lost and alienated as members of the Manson Family, the two start to call themselves Do and Ti (pronounced “dough” and “tea”), and they evolve a belief system that’s a fractured fairy tale of transcendence, one that fuses the earthly renunciation of Christianity with the loopy utopianism of the UFO faithful. According to Do and Ti, our bodies are mere “vehicles,” and must always be referred to as vehicles. The members of Heaven’s Gate are just waiting to ascend to the Next Level, which will happen when the UFOs arrive, taking them — or, rather, their beings freed from their vehicles — aboard.
“The Leader” is the most potent drama I’ve seen about life inside a cult since “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” Michael Gallagher, who has a following on YouTube, shot it in a documentary-like style, with eerie re-creations of Applewhite’s space-cadet videos, and the drama is rigorous and voyeuristic in a fascinating way. What’s unusual and disquieting about “The Leader” is that it doesn’t tell its story primarily through the eyes of some innocent person who gets drawn into the cult. Our point of identification is the leaders — Do and Ti, united in their crazy power game. The movie asks us to stare at Tim Blake Nelson and his implacable raffish glee, and Vera Farmiga and her “Handmaid’s Tale” sternness, and divine what was going on inside these two imperious broken crackpots.
But we do get to know some of the cult members. Jim Parsons, in an incredibly impressive performance, is Warren, the cult’s most devoted member, who has put his addiction to alcohol and sex behind him by renouncing his very identity. Parsons shows you the fearfully obedient soldier and the wounded car wreck inside. And Simon Rex and Grace Caroline Currey make their mark as two new recruits who don’t know what they’re getting into. They try to be good members, but they fall into a sexual affair, which results in the most horrifying masochistic punishment I have ever seen in a cult drama.
“The Leader” really is a horror movie — a fright film of the soul, or of what’s left of it once you give yourself over to an “ideal” of life that’s really a form of death. The mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which Applewhite timed to the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet (according to his logic, the comet was bringing the alien spaceship with it), is staged with a terrifying matter-of-factness. Each of the cult members went knowingly, eating a container of applesauce spiked with phenobarbital, and Applewhite did too, though the movie stages his suicide as a catharsis of dread. What does all of this have to say about us? Maybe it’s a warning about how the impulse to follow can remove the you from yourself.
Source: variety.com
