Love Has Won, the latest HBO docuseries, opens with body cam footage of a police officer arming his weapon outside of a ranch property in rural Colorado. As he enters one of the trailers, a man in a ponytail is in the kitchen. The officer asks the man who is in the residence. He indicates multiple adults and children, and as he is being taken out he adds that “Mother” is “at rest.” The officer continues his search, ending up in a bedroom in which one side of the bed is covered in a neatly arranged pile of blankets. Upon closer inspection, the camera light picks up they eyes, nose, and greyed flesh of Mother’s mummified corpse.
Mother is Amy Carlson, who from around 2009 up until her death in 2021 was the leader of Love Has Won. She had gained followers under the chief tenets that she was God on earth, that the present reality in which she and her followers lived was a malicious simulacrum, and only she (so far as I am able to gauge) had the power to ascend them into the fifth dimension, or some such celestial state. Her “resting” was not seen by her followers as being a deviation from that plan, with some claiming that her body never went cold. The authorities didn’t see it that way. The core membership went into self-imposed exile in Vermont while the ponytailed “Father of All Creation,” the last in a succession of several, was culpable for transporting a corpse across multiple state lines and is given an ankle monitor.
Love Has Won is, in the main, a story about one person. An attractive and charismatic woman who went from being a manager at a McDonald’s to leading a spiritual movement whose doctrinal nostrums were as bizarre as its monetizing capacities were unscrupulous. But even with one episode the cultural deja vu sets in. A cycle is starting anew with only the slightest variations from the previous one, and it seems to complete itself and start again at shorter and shorter intervals. In fact the cycles are by this point multiplied and concurrent. Whatever you learn you’ll forget, and what you retain from it is what you retained from all of its predecessors.
Neither cults, documentaries about cults, nor intense public interest in either are new; only their presence and utility have lately shifted. Cult documentaries used to function in tandem with serial killer documentaries, in which many films could be made around a reliable canon of subjects. At any time, there could be several documentaries attached to Peoples Temple, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Church of Scientology. Their supply was contained, or at least obscured, by the limitations of pre-digital media. Their supply was also justified by their, at best, silent acquiescence to public service.
Cult documentaries served the public in a few ways. There was the innocent imperative of reporting on the many eccentric variations by which humans satisfied their need for community. You find this often directed with unstable levels of good faith at groups that aren’t strictly cults, mainly Juggalos but also Satanists and white nationalists. These are less frequent compared to those that take the more skeptical approach that show cults as susceptible to abuse, fanaticism, and criminal enterprising. At their best, the service of these films was to enlighten and to alert the viewer of the fine lines between nonconformity and conformity and between conformity and complicity.
Occasionally, however, these documentaries also imposed questions directly upon the viewer with regard to America’s unique social identity. Cults tested the bounds by which our religious and social tolerance could reasonably extend. The Branch Davidians and the Waco standoff is always relitigated on this question. The Netflix documentary series Wild, Wild Country, about the struggle of Rajneesh disciples to establish a municipality in Oregon, intended to pursue this question as well, and indeed very nearly offered a case where the cult was more in the right than the authorities or the surrounding communities. But its popularity was rooted more in the strangeness, corruption, the Boomer naïvety, and criminal activity (especially with regard to one of its key leaders) that followed the group. To such an extent that Documentary Now! made a two-part episode in which an FBI agent (Michael Keaton) concocts an absurd cult with a drug dealer (Owen Wilson) for investigative purposes only for most involved to become true believers. The parody was brilliantly done, as befitting the underrated series, and solidified the present and unyielding course cult documentaries have taken.
The expansion of digital streaming has enabled an expansion of the documentary as a whole. That this has had benefits for the form isn’t denied, but the tradeoffs are worth examining, particularly in relation to the cult subgenre. Not only has it expanded but it has expanded the canon of subjects along with it, and far beyond that of the serial killer canon which, as indicated by the tragic cancellation of Mindhunter, is not likely to expand anytime soon.
There is a cult problem in modern society. If documentaries are to justify their public service role, it is more harmful to ignore it. So the reasoning goes; and so I’m willing to consider.
The first episode of Love Has Won does focus on the root of recent cult proliferation, starting with its central guru. Amy Carlson was blessed with interpersonal skills that gave her a promising trajectory in the corporate world, having made management scarcely into her 20s. Though she seemed at the same time rather adrift in other aspects of her life, rooted in some generally elaborated trauma. She addressed this in a few ways: taking up and sustaining heavy drug use and spending hours on spirituality message boards and websites. There she met an older man named WhiteEagle who convinced her of her divine status; she left her family (children included) to pursue her new vocation. And it was through her own online videos that she was able to put herself in front of many other likeminded people. People who through a matrix of discontent turned to seeking and in so seeking were thrown into the digital morass of decentralized information.
Many Love Has Won members were drawn to “Mother God,” as Carlson came to be known, through internet-disseminated conspiracy theories and holistic healing, both of which were applied and magnified into the group's thinking and business model. Carlson preached a complex and often ludicrous millenarian vision of society’s, and therefore reality’s, imminent collapse, which involves a (mostly dead) spiritual “A-Team” that includes Bill Hicks, Donald Trump, John Lennon, Count St. Germain, and most importantly in a way that is unclear to me, Robin Williams. This was supplemented by an exceptional marketing strategy based on web metrics and sales. Much is made of the group’s producing their own colloidal silver, a treatment for any number of ailments that Big Pharma is desperate to suppress. And the fact that this sounds awfully like QAnon is not lost on the members. QAnon, in fact, is merely one strand of the reality destabilizing force in which Mother God is the pivotal piece.
The fact that documentaries such as these are uploaded at a near-constant stream, and seem to be always in production has at least gone noticed. Little, I think, has been said about the sameness that comes across if you watch enough of them at a sufficient clip. Not just sameness, but a quality degradation in the cults themselves. There is a kind of Dumb Starbucks effect but where each new version of a cult model appears cruder than the one it followed. Thelema is Dumb Paganism, Scientology is Dumb Thelema, NXIVM is Dumb Scientology, Twin Flames Universe is Dumb NXIVM, and surely a Dumb Twin Flames Universe is somewhere gestating.
These copies of copies certainly indicate that you can amass a following with little, or extremely disorganized, forethought while inflicting the usual level of damage. Twin Flames Universe, for instance, foisted disorienting new age concepts and hypnotherapies upon their many thousand followers that encouraged stalking and somehow cascaded into arranged couplings and coerced gender transitions, all the while destroying their familial relationships and bilking them with exorbitant monthly fees for classes and carb-heavy diet plans. But as with Love Has Won, Twin Flames Universe culled their membership from web-based seeking. Though the simultaneous documentary series—on Netflix and Prime—do not explore that seeking with the same depth as Love Has Won, a pattern is at least established. People struggling with relationships, usually fixated on someone who has rescinded interest or shown none at all, go in search of dating advice on how to process those feelings. Dating advice is a saturated vertical, TFU laid its claim upon it by cleverly recasting the advice you most want to hear (and the last advice you need) in transcendent rhetoric.
This exposes what appears at first to be a tension between the cults and their documenters. The documentaries retain the classical narrative structure in which the guru is at the center, recalling the era of limited media presence and a personal contact-dependent social life wherein the cult leader, being able to mimic more legitimate forms of authority, played a more integral role in cult life. The cult leader found you, and offered a compelling alternative to the authorities they mimicked. Digitized culture and social life inverts that dynamic wherein the cult leader is discovered through their compatibility with your research criteria. That does not make them obsolete but it degrades cult quality still further. The new gurus are uncharismatic, seem less patient when met with even modest resistance, their grasp of information appears tentative and arbitrary, and they have no models of stable, mature authority to imitate outside of Tony Robbins. The TFU couple confuse “tough love” with bullying and are obsessed with material wealth. Amy Carlson maintained a reliable store of mystical truisms amid extended cycles of intoxication. Teal Swan, to add another example, has a sensitivity to criticism that could give David Miscavige pause if she had the power.
If adherence to this narrative framing serves any purpose it may be in retaining the familiar. Audiences need an object on which to focus their interest and keep their moral equilibrium stable. The more or less unchanging conception of the rogue messiah is a comfort compared to the problems posed by their disciples.
The digital cult follower is a paradoxical figure. They’ve come to a state of unquestioning obedience by a process of free inquiry, through means closed off to very few, and based on esoteric knowledge hidden from no one with right keyword searches. They are free from archival excavation, from phantasmagoric vision quests, and from agonizing interlibrary loan wait periods. They recall the early warnings of school librarians against relying on the dog’s dinner of unverified online information for research purposes. If that skepticism seemed overbearing and not a little professionally jealous at the time, it appears after two decades to have been catastrophically hesitant. In that light, the documentaries seek a reinforcement of that skepticism through what can be described, in a crude yet benign sense, as police power.
The habits of the digital cult follower are a confounding, decadent chimera of curiosity, incuriosity, and overall intellectual paralysis. Yet neither are their habits unique in and of themselves. The internet has made autodidacts, not to mention purveyors of propaganda and falsehood, of everyone. It is rather that their habits in isolation take on an acute form by their willingness to push them to unacceptable logical ends. This cannot be said, or at least it is not widely believed, about occult practices, certain Western-tinged variations of “Eastern” spirituality, extreme diet regimens and fitness routines, cosplay and fandoms, whatever Goop is hawking on a given day, among other things. There is little consensus to regard them with anything above occasional ridicule. Even so, documentaries cannot curtail pervasive internet habits, and while some documentaries cover and even aid in investigations against cult subjects they do not take on active vigilante roles. They are there to observe, inquire, and discourage, making moral distinctions but stopping short of enforcement; like an intellectual wellness check.
For the viewer of the cult documentary this suggests that (a) cult activity is pervasive and spreading; (b) that cults are criminal; and (c) that the viewer is immune to cult membership. That this is widely felt suggests an additional layer of paradox to our situation: that every one of us holds a conception of the social norm that everyone else is breaking through intellectual and spiritual thrift-shopping. It does not occur to the cult documentary viewer that even if they do not see eccentricity in their own habits or see themselves as being vulnerable to some sort of hive mind, they have little say in what constitutes adversarial conformity. At a boomerang’s curve, cult documentary viewing or a true crime Discord or a private Bidentology Facebook forum or, God help us, a family holiday group text can assume plausible cultic airs. When cultural forces police and skepticism grows toxic, the imperative to question becomes compulsive and suspicion becomes the default virtue.
A striking weakness of the documentary police power is its limited mandate. With only the power to help avoid and to stigmatize cult-like behavior it cannot prevent cults from happening or stop them from spreading. That could adjust just as the subject criteria can adjust. One documentary’s wellness check is another’s inquisition. Even then the only difference may be that of a much wider scope of what kind of behavior counts as cult-like. If cult prevention is at all possible, it may best be achieved by reducing the incentive to making cult documentaries.
By allowing a cult to form, you allow someone else to make a documentary about that cult. Skepticism is not enough. Personal vigilance must reinforce it along with personal judgment, which must be set free from your mental disappointment room once you’ve refused documentary guidance. I cannot emphasize personal enough. The personal has not only been subsumed in the frenzy to anticipate and cast judgment upon disruptive social elements but willfully set aside in the basic maintenance of a healthy community ostensibly rooted in democratic principles and a respect for individual conscience. There was a point in which even our cult documentaries, in less abundant times, were not only sensitive to that fact but took it as their own guiding principle; lest democracy become a cult-like behavior.