"Martha Marcy' and the truth about cults

I wanted to see Martha Marcy May Marlene for a couple of reasons. The film got good buzz about its star, Elizabeth Olsen. It's the kind of independent film that we Ritz habitués so adore. Above all, I was intrigued by its subject matter— a young woman leaving a cult and having a tough time re-entering society— since a lifetime or two ago I was an expert in American cults, with a Ph.D. in sociology of religion.

Martha Marcy May Marlene wasn't at all what I expected. As a movie, it was an extremely scary thriller; and as an examination of the cult experience, it was a piece of simplistic anti-cult propaganda the likes of which I haven't seen in 30 years.

Cult isn't just a pejorative term; it's actually a technical term describing a particular kind of religious organization. Sociologists categorize religious groups according to how they interact with their society— whether they accept that society and in turn are accepted by it as a legitimate religious choice.

A church is a group with a low degree of tension with its surrounding society, one where no one would think twice about affiliating: Methodists, say, or Catholics or Presbyterians. A sect is a group that has a high level of tension with the surrounding society, and that split off from a church in that society, usually to return to what is understood to be the original teachings of that church: the Amish, say, or Hasidic Jews.

Mormons and Moonies

A cult is a group in high tension with society. It can be a church that has been imported from elsewhere— Buddhism and Hinduism function as cults in the U.S.— but it's most often of independent origin, usually the vision (in whatever sense) of the founder. Most new religions in the U.S. fall into this category: the Shakers in the 18th century, the Mormons and Oneida Society in the 19th, and everyone from the Black Muslims to the Scientologists to the Unification Church (Moonies) in the 20th.

The tension with cults goes both ways and becomes self-perpetuating. The larger society rejects the cult because of its teachings (nothing ticks off mainstream churches like declaring your leader to be the second coming of Christ) and also because of its practices, which often involve redefinition of relationships around sexuality and private property, to name just two hot-button issues.

The cult rejects the larger society because of its obliviousness to the truth, and so the dance begins. The cult withdraws from the larger society to protect its teachings and its processes for socializing new members. This seclusion raises no eyebrows in, say, Catholic orders (though it certainly did in the past). But when it's practiced by a group that's already in high tension with society, it's taken as de facto evidence of the group's bad intentions.

Kidnapping and deprogramming

The families of recruits may become concerned about their loved ones' involvement— especially if they've read the stories spread by the anti-cult movement. This movement in turn comprises a whole array of organizations intent on counteracting what they perceive as the pernicious influence of these minority groups, sometimes by forcibly kidnapping recruits from them and resocializing them back into majority values through "deprogramming."

Once deprogrammed, the apostates often provide additional testimony about the cult. Given their parents' effort and, often, significant expense in extracting their offspring, "Oops" doesn't really cut it as a reaction to the cult experience. Instead, the former members create narratives about how they were tricked or coerced into joining. The details of that story become additional fodder for the anti-cult movement, further perpetuating the cycle of mutual suspicion.

(Of course, there's another [in fact, more common] possibility: Disillusioned members leave the cult without any drama and resume their more traditional life paths. But the anti-cult movement ignores these people because their example undermines the movement's image of cults as centers of indoctrination and mind-control.)

Manson revisited

This isn't to say that no cult group has ever done anything wrong. The Manson family, which committed a series of brutal murders in 1969, and the Peoples Temple, whose 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown shocked the world, are prime examples of why some cults might be dangerous. But in fact both groups are atypical, not only in the destructive paths they took but in the intra-group dynamics that made those paths possible.

I speak with some authority on this point. I wrote about the Manson family for my senior seminar (undergrad), and my doctoral dissertation, on Jonestown, was the first scholarly study published on the subject. (Click here.)

This cult-anti-cult dynamic is the starting point of Martha Marcy May Marlene. The cult portrayed in the film is pretty much point-for-point based on the Manson family. Because filmmaker Sean Durkin relied on anti-cult propaganda— as well as his own lurid imagination— the results, though scary as hell, have nothing to do with plausibility.

[Note: If you haven't seen the movie yet and you're spoiler-sensitive, stop reading now. I'm about to discuss some major plot points.]

Sharing sex partners

The fundamental structure of the Martha Marcy cult is similar to that of the Manson family: a harem of young women centered on Patrick (John Hawkes), a guitar-strumming leader, with a few beta males hanging around for crumbs. Like the Manson family, there is sharing of sexual partners. Manson, however, never drugged and sodomized his female followers as an initiation rite— nor did any other cult leader that I'm aware of.

Durkin based other activities of the Martha Marcy cult on the Manson family as well. Manson's followers performed a series of non-lethal home invasions they called "creepy crawlies," which served two purposes: to provide money (they burgled the homes they entered) and to prepare them for the escalation that would culminate in the "Helter-Skelter" murders of 1969 that killed the actress Sharon Tate, among others.

For the Manson family, those murders took place in the context of an overarching theology: They were intended to set off the race war that would usher in Armageddon, which the members would wait out in the desert before re-emerging to claim their rightful place on the post-apocalyptic new earth. Because of that shared theology, all of the members present on the nights of the murders participated, to a greater or lesser degree, in the murders, and all of them shared a sense of ownership of those actions.

"'Death is beautiful'

In the Martha Marcy cult, however, the first few home entries we see in Martha's flashbacks have no explanation, no context— neither practical nor theological reasons are suggested for the group's actions. Then, when a single member kills a homeowner, her attack seems as surprising to Martha and the others as it does to us in the audience. This isn't an action taken by the group to further the group's aims, however bizarre those aims might be.

Durkin has structured this event for maximum dramatic impact by not suggesting the reasons for it in advance. Not until after the home invasion murder does Patrick provide some kind of rationale for it, telling Martha:

"You know that death is the most beautiful part of life, right? Death is beautiful because we all fear death. And fear is the most amazing emotion of all because it creates complete awareness. It brings you to now, and it makes you truly present. And when you're truly present, that's nirvana. That's pure love. So death is pure love."

Standard propaganda

But there's no indication that this explanation is anything other than an effort to calm down a distraught young woman— no sense that Patrick or anyone else had previously developed a theology of death. In fact, by talking to Martha one-on-one, Patrick neglects the opportunity to use it as a (forgive me) teachable moment for the group as a whole. Like most of the anti-cult movement, Durkin ignores the sociological processes through which a group as a whole creates and maintains its understanding of reality.

So basically Durkin took as his starting place standard anti-cult movement propaganda — cults are evil, they brainwash you and make you do bad things — and made up a story about what those bad things are.

As a thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene is surely successful— it's a truly scary movie. (I finished watching very late one evening, and, fearing nightmares, hopped online and begged my Facebook friends to tell me some jokes before going to bed.) As a portrayal of plausible real-life circumstances, however, it's a total failure.♦


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