Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

 

Alex Gibney is establishing himself as the documentary filmmaker that lifts the lid on corrupt institutions.  He exposed one of the largest business scandals in US history with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, focused on extrajudicial detention, torture and murder carried out by American soldiers in Taxi to the Dark Side and shed light on one of the Catholic church’s most barbaric clerical sex abuse scandals in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. In his bravest and arguably best film yet, he exposes the cloak-and-dagger lunacy of the Church of Scientology.

The fact that Scientology is batshit might not be breaking new ground for many people, but Gibney doesn’t deal in the familiar broad strokes that we might be familiar with. Instead he dissects the structure of the Church, starting with its founder and messiah, the wonderfully mental L. Ron Hubbard. The film then methodically works its way through the foundations of the Church, its history, practice and key members, discrediting them and removing them one-by-one like blocks from a Jenga tower.

Interview subjects include former members, including Mike Rinder, the subject of John Sweeney’s infamous rant during the filming of his exposé for Panorama. Filmmaker Paul Haggis, a member of the Church for 35 years, is also present and provides some of the most compelling moments. Talking of the control the Church has over its image, he explains that he and other members avoided using the internet, and it wasn’t until he left the Church that he read so much negative publicity. In another of the more human moments of the film, Haggis also talks of his shame at being in the Church so long, particularly when discovering the treatment his two homosexual daughters had suffered. 

Going Clear provides so many chilling moments that, as an audience member, you almost become numb to the insanity of it all. Partly because of programmes like South Park tackling the subject with mockery and humour, it is perhaps easy to forget that countless lives have actually been destroyed by the Church’s quest for power, money and legitimacy. Physical and mental beatings, child abuse, financial swindling, intimidation and blackmail are all shown to be everyday practice at all levels of the organization, and its easy to see why so many people feel unable to leave, even though the Church’s active membership is said to have dwindled to less than 50,000.

Tom Cruise arguably gets the shittiest end of the stick from Gibney - no mean feat in itself, considering a large portion of the film focuses on current leader David Miscavige’s penchant for kicking the shit out of anyone that disagrees with him. Tales of the Mission Impossible star wiretapping former wife Nicole Kidman, verbally abusing a young member assigned to be his new girlfriend and just being an all round ghoul, with that dead-eyed, forced grin perpetually plastered on his face like a hostage recording a final video to his kids. Another famous face of the Church, John Travolta, appears slightly more sympathetically. It is insinuated that Travolta has tried to leave the church in the past, but secrets given up during ‘auditing’ sessions (anyone who saw the paparazzi photos of him kissing his male nanny can probably guess what these secrets are) are being used to keep him in place. Although this doesn’t explain why he apparently covers his head in permanent markers these days, it does explain why Cruise has seemingly replaced him as the most recognizable celebrity figurehead.

The film suffers with a lack of balance in that all current members of the Church refused interviews, meaning that the endless string of accusations do become a little monotonous after a time. But Gibney is a meticulous filmmaker, and the level of detail uncovered on each subject is staggering.

It’s his bravest film because, unlike his others, the Church of Scientology is still very much a potentially career-ending force, particularly in his line of work. Enron was dead, the Catholic church was dying and the American military was no longer the taboo subject of criticism it once was; whereas the Church has shown in the past that it has the ability to break people – most notably shown here with their length battle against the IRS, in which members of the Church undertook countless lawsuits against the agency, including individual staff, in a bid to be recognized under tax-free status. They won.

If Bill Maher’s Religulous was the executioner, mercilessly butchering religions left, right and centre with humour and mockery, Going Clear is the surgeon that chooses one subject and, with meticulous attention to detail, dissects the religion utterly. Gibney is too good of a filmmaker to sensationalise, something that, given the subject matter, would be all too easy to do. Although the Church of Scientology has claimed the accusations made in the film are “entirely false”, they are far too numerous from sources too well placed. Gibney’s film will do a lot for further damaging the Church’s reputation, but, as Going Clear indicates, for Scientology to fall completely, one of the bigger names inside the church needs to speak out. And if we’re waiting for Tom Cruise to do the right thing, we may as well get used to those kooks being around for a little while longer.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief will be shown at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 2 July 2015.

Going Clear - HBO Site