Having already stirred up a hornets nest after its premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival and a brief theatrical run, Oscar winner Alex Gibneys new documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is about to take the sins of Scientology and turn them into Sunday-night appointment viewing. Debuting on HBO on March 29th, the documentarians adaptation of Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wrights 2013 book systematically makes its case against the religion. Delving into accusations of emotional and physical abuse perpetrated by its founder L. Ron Hubbard and Chairman of the Board David Miscavige, as well as the organizations harassment of critics and alleged dirty-ops blackmailing of celebrities, Going Clear assembles its argument from interviews with former members and hard-to-obtain documents and footage from within the Church itself. Its everything you didnt see in Scientologys Super Bowl ads.
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But for all of the damning indictments youd expect from Gibneys takedown of the controversial faith, the film has at least one surprising side effect: Youll never hear Bohemian Rhapsody the same way again. Queens opera-rock masterpiece provides the soundtrack for a stranger-than-fiction scene at the documentarys center: a mandatory game of musical chairs staged by Miscavige, for inmates of a re-education camp for disgraced Church officials called The Hole. The last person sitting, the leader says, can stay. The losers face exile.
This went on for hours, says Wright, who helped produce the film and appears as a talking head. Fights broke out. Chairs were broken. Clothes were torn. But whats so difficult to understand is that these people were fighting to stay. Some of them had been in the Hole for years. Thats the prison of belief.
Its a tough prison to break into. In his award-winning films Mea Maxima Culpa, which examined child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Taxi to the Dark Side, which explored the use of torture by American military and intelligence services, Gibney has taken on some pretty big targets. But despite going through the usual legal precautions at the Sundance premiere, the director said that everyone had definitely lawyered up in anticipation of a counterattack he says hes never been the victim of as much blowback as hes received over Going Clear. The organization took out a full-page ad in the New York Times denouncing the filmmaker as a fraud; an eight-minute YouTube video entitled Alex Gibney: HBOs Propagandist mysteriously started making the rounds a month ago. The amount of vitriolic letters hes received (Theyre handwritten, so it has the appearance of a spontaneous reactionbut the language is so similar) has been staggering.
There are a number of high-profile celebrities I talked to who dont feel they can come clean, because of people they are close to who are in. Its a huge impediment.
The response from Scientology has been much more organized and much more brutal, says the director, who adds that several of the former Church members interviewed in the movie have caught it worse than he has. Some of them have had physical threats, people threatening to take their homes away, private investigators following them. Thats the part thats really heartbreaking.
Its this kind of abuse, not a South Park-style swipe at the religions more far-out beliefs, thats the films focus. Its a mistake to jeer at Scientology because of its absurd creation story, says Wright. People can believe anything they want to believe its the practices that Im focusing on. When Scientology helps people, I say more power to you. But when it harms people and breaks families apart, its time for us to take a closer look.
Gibney says Wrights approach is what attracted him to the subject in the first place. I was so impressed with the empathy toward many of the people in the Church. It wasnt just a kind of freak show; his reporting resonated with the psychological process that can occur in many belief systems how when people are convinced of the nobility of a belief system, they can do the most appalling things.
He builds these priorities right into the films structure. Going Clear begins with first-hand testimonials about Scientologys effectiveness and appeal, centered on the process of auditing, a type of talk therapy aided by an ersatz lie-detector device called an E-meter. Then comes the larger-than-life story of the faiths founder, brilliant but troubled science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard. Only then are the intergalactic secrets of Scientologys creation myth revealed, involving galactic overlord named Xenu and disembodied souls known as thetans. Its bizarre though to Gibney, the details of the religions origin story are largely beside the point. I felt very strongly that [the Xenu] sequence not be present for a long time, the filmmaker says. This form of therapy was solving peoples personal problems. The satisfaction they got out of it, the charisma of Hubbard all that was important to understand before you got to that moment, so that youre empathetic. Youre along with them for the ride.
Its easy to dismiss this as, Look, this is a bunch of crackpots people who were in Scientology for 20 or 30 years and left are all fools,' says Mike Rinder, a former spokesperson for the Church whos now one of its leading critics. I think this documentary changes that perception. Indeed, defectors like Rinder and Crash writer-director Paul Haggis, whose personal stories are prevalent in Going Clear, have emerged as important whistleblowers against the Churchs most controversial and disturbing practices. Many describe beatings doled out by Miscavige against underlings whove displeased him. Others speak first-hand of disconnection, in which family and friends are ordered to have no contact with those who leave the Church; Rinder himself was cut off by his wife, daughter, son, mother, brother, and sister. It may be legal, he says. It is not moral.
And according to Gibney, disconnection can kowtow some of the Churchs most high-profile members. There are a number of high-profile celebrities I talked to who dont feel they can come clean, or come out, because of people they are close to who are in. Its a huge impediment. This policy is just so cruel. The director says that more than anything else he discovered while making the film, the harsh reality of disconnection, as seen in videos Scientology has produced in which members denounce their defecting family members, surprised him. I have a feeling that in five or 10 years, the relatives of the people who were in the film are gonna look at those videos, where they spew hatred against people who were extremely close to them, and think What was I doing? That really did shock me.
Though it helps humanize many current and former believers, Going Clear pulls no punches against Scientologys biggest celebrity megaphones especially its superstar public face, Tom Cruise. Both the book and film allege that Cruise, a close friend of Miscavige (who was the best man at the actors wedding), has benefited for years from a labor force of Sea Org clergy members. Im singling him out, Wright says. More people got interested in Scientology because of Tom Cruise than any other individual, and he knows whats going on. He could effect change, and its on his shoulders that he should.
Gibney is harsher still. For [Cruise] not to denounce, or at least investigate, whats going on seems appalling to me, he says. He gets a lot of money and a lot of privilege from a lot of fans, and the idea that allows the vulnerable to be preyed upon in his name seems reprehensible. In fact, Going Clear claims that Cruises own ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, fell victim to Scientologys excesses herself. According to high-ranking defector Marty Rathbun, the Church wiretapped Kidman as part of a multifaceted campaign to drive the couple apart when Miscavige felt she was pulling him away from his faith. Even to readers of Wrights book, this is breaking news.
That was something Marty told me in my interview, Gibney says. When he spoke to Larry for the book, emotionally, he still had one foot in the Church. [Rathbun] had been a key enforcer for them. To unravel those big lies takes years, and to undo the psychological damage that was done to him by the Church is a slow healing process. He was able to say things now about how aggressive the Church was, in terms of trying to get Cruise back, that he might not have been willing to say before.
Not surprisingly, the Church has been vocal in its objections, telling Us Weekly that the film is propagandato fit their anti-religious agenda, [Gibney and Wright] scraped the bottom of the barrel to cherry-pick a tiny collection of deadbeats. But the famously litigious Church, which wrested First Amendment protection and tax exemption from the IRS in 1993 after filing 2400 lawsuits and took Time magazine all the way to the Supreme Court after a critical article, has not yet sued over the film which Gibney and Wright say is a sign that the chilling effect Scientology once had is starting to thaw. It raises the question: Can a movie motivate the government, or the faithful, to turn on the organization? Will Going Clear do for Scientology whatThe Jinx did for the case against Robert Durst?
If it has the same impact on the IRS, or if the FBI were to further investigate, I would be delighted, Gibney says. One of the great things about The Jinx is that its not about gotcha its saying something profound about human behavior. But now, a wealthy man who seemingly got away with murder is being held to account. The best documentaries are made for the long haul. They say something important. But if they provoke authorities to stop abuses? Good.