Hammering at the walls

By D.S.K. | NEW YORK

WITH "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God", an investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”, Alex Gibney’s recent film-making history is dominated by crunchy analytical documentaries. His latest film, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screens on HBO on March 29th, delves in similar fashion into the secrets of the Church of Scientology.

It mainly does this by drawing on interviews with former Church members, including Paul Haggis, another film-maker; Mark Rathbun, once the Church's second-highest-ranking official; and Mark Rinder, a former spokesman. The film continues the work done by Lawrence Wright in a book published in 2013, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief”. Though it did not stint in its criticism, Mr Wright’s book strove to maintain a non-judgmental tone; Mr Gibney has sought to emulate this in his documentary, for which the Church apparently refused to be interviewed.

“I really appreciated the idea that Larry didn’t set out to write an exposé,” says Mr Gibney. “It wasn't a kind of freakshow. It was about human behaviour in a more essential way.” Similarly, Mr Gibney does not resort to the emotivism and melodramatics associated with a traditional television exposé because the stories told by the ex-members are enough by themselves to indict the Church.

The film does not dwell too much on Scientology’s spiritual belief system. But then, nor does Scientology. Only the highest-ranking members, the film explains, learn the story of the galactic overlord Xenu and the body-invading alien spirits plaguing the planet—a creation myth that shows the Church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, to be the writer of crass pulp fiction that he was. The documentary makes a compelling case for the idea that Hubbard devised Scientology—thought-reading E-meters and all—as a kind of self-therapy. The portrait of Hubbard that emerges, apart from his menacing anglerfish rictus, is of a man with a messianic sense of self-importance who proved again and again to be all-too human: indulging in paranoid fantasies, abusing his wife and concealing an embarrassing war record.

The viewer gets the sense that, when Hubbard died of a stroke in 1986—or transcended his bodily vessel, depending on whose side you're on—the Church took on all the man’s cruel, paranoid and self-deluding tendencies as if they were its holy duty. “After ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’ and the Wikileaks film, I got very interested in this idea of ‘noble cause corruption’,” says the director. “When people are convinced in the nobility of a belief system they can do the most appalling things.” In fact, Mr Gibney’s film gives the overwhelming impression that, under the control of the Church’s long-time leader, David Miscavige, a central part of its mission is to intimidate would-be defectors and silence detractors.

Scientology has a flair for aggression. Its missionaries—who call their enemies “fair game”—have been accused of slashing tyres and tapping phones. “Going Clear” reveals how a campaign was waged against the Internal Revenue Service, which had stripped the Church of its tax-exempt status. Thousands of lawsuits were brought against the service, and it eventually relented. Now the film, its maker and its subjects have found themselves under attack. Ahead of the Sundance premiere the Church took out a full-page advert in the New York Times denouncing the film, and has since set up a Twitter account, Freedom Media Ethics, which attacks Mr Gibney’s interviewees. The Church issued a statement saying that Mr Gibney had not presented them with evidence for the film’s allegations and, more recently, it has sought to discredit reviewers who have criticised the film, protesting that their writings should include a comment from the Church.

The irony seemingly lost on the Scientologists is that anyone who has sat through “Going Clear” will see this smear campaign for what it is: the behaviour of people with something to hide. “A lot of the reason for that pushback is not [directed at] the audience at large, but the membership that still exists in the Church,” says Mr Gibney. “They're trying to say to them, ‘Don't pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Keep thinking the same old way. Don't believe these liars, these apostates.’”

Mr Gibney devotes much of the latter part of the film to the Church's policy of "disconnection", its Orwellian euphemism for encouraging followers to cut ties with anyone who could be a negative influence on their relationship with the Church. The film’s primary achievement lies in the tender glimpses it provides of the human cost of Scientology, and its destruction of families, friends and relationships.

The director hopes to effect change. He firmly believes that—though Mr Wright’s book was well received—HBO’s audience will inspire closer and more intense scrutiny of the Church, both from outside it and from within, by its own members. “Coming out of Sundance there was a palpable sense that the worm is turning,” says Mr Gibney. “Something is about to change.”