Films > Film Reviews

My Scientology Movie

Cinema City

10/10/16

Louis Theroux, alternative journalist, cultural correspondent, and TV documentarian has for some time now delighted his viewers using an unassuming wit and subtle humour to expose the dark underbelly and hidden truth of his subjects.

In recent years Theroux has probably been best known for his ‘When Louis met...’ series for the BBC, concentrating on British subjects predominantly, the cult of celebrity, and most notoriously, the time he spent with disgraced disc jockey and presenter Jimmy Saville.

My Scientology Movie sees Louis returning to what could be seen as his own personal fascination with marginal subculture America (see his Weird Weekends documentaries from the early 2000's for more compelling viewing). In My Scientology Movie Louis tackles the subject of organised religion in the US and around the world, and in particular, the teachings of pulp Science Fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and his manufactured doctrines and practices.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary at the cinema before. For me, the cinema has always been an environment for adventure and fantasy, so to be faced with the real world is a new experience. I find it almost immediately disorientating, and engenders in me a level of distrust in the narrative that I've never experienced before.

Almost straight away I realise this isn't going to be a return to the mildly humorous days of Louis' Weird Weekends. He's never going to be able to forge the relationships as in previous documentaries, because the Church of Scientology just aren’t going to let him in. Theroux knew this from the very start, which was revealed in the highly informative and entertaining satellite Q and A we were treated to at the end of the movie.

Because of this, the film makers take the creative decision to re-enact notorious moments and stories from Scientology's history, alongside the usual meeting with, and talking to, ex-members of the church . The re-enactments are a stroke of genius, guaranteed to piss off the people they are investigating, but at the same time letting us the viewers invest a bit more rather than just being told what has happened.
However, it's at this staging, along with the involvement of Marty Rathburn, an ex-Scientology enforcer, that I totally start to
distrust anything I'm seeing on the screen. Am I watching a fictional movie, or what's supposed to be a factual presentation? Are the auditions for people playing Scientology luminaries like David Miscavige and Tom Cruise for real, or are they as fake as the golden pillars adorning the stage at a Scientology awards presentation? Much like the ladders you have to climb to become a successful Scientologist, maybe there's more than meets the eye to this documentary, and more to ascend? The movie format in this case does not serve that of investigative journalism, and makes me question everything I’m seeing, much like a real investigation I guess, and maybe that's the point.

The architect of that mistrust is Marty Rathburn himself. Another telling anecdote from the Q and A  is that the filmakers no longer really see eye to eye with him, and it is to its credit that this is the first Scientology documentary that I've seen that raises just as many question about those who have left, and are now ‘suppressive persons’ rather than just concentrating on those still locked in the Thetan state of mind.

The bits that are 'real' are Louis at his best, pushing his subjects buttons, playing with their expectations of him, and as usual, giving his subjects just enough space to damn themselves. However, this is not the movie to watch if you want to learn about Scientology. It doesn’t delve deeply into the processes of ‘auditing’, or how the financial aspects of moving up Scientology's ladder work. It only barely scratches the surface of the religion's ties to both science fiction and celebrity, and whilst Louis and his crew may not thank me for saying it, go watch Going Clear by Alex Gibney as a companion piece.

Like the teachings of the church itself, this movie is all about moving to the next level. What it succeeds in doing, along with being an intriguing experiment in modern documentary movie making, is to sow the seeds of distrust on absolutely anyone who has ever had anything to do with Scientology. There's a telling line by one of the interviewees who says 'Marty knows where the bodies are'. He may well do, and that perhaps, is where these documentarians need to go next.