Documentary series ‘The Vow’ takes us inside the Nxivm cult
Above: A scene from the HBO documentary series "The Vow." (HBO)
Miniseries preview: “The Vow,” co-directed by Jehane Noujaim, Karin Amer and Omar Mullick. Streaming through a variety of HBO services and on Netflix. Episode 6 (of 9) available on Sunday.
It’s hard to figure out just what goes on in the minds of people who join cults. The reasons are as varied and sometimes as complex as the individual cult members are themselves.
That much is clear from the number of documentary films that have studied the phenomenon.
One documentary series that I’m watching now is “The Vow,” an HBO production that I’ve been streaming through Netflix. Though as of this writing I’ve seen only the first four of what is supposed to be nine episodes, what’s abundantly clear is that the people whom the film follows have a lot in common with those who have fallen in with any number of similar groups.
They tend to be insecure about themselves, are unhappy with their lives, and this combination causes them to seek some way to better their situations. The difference between them and most of the rest of us is that somewhere along the line, they encounter – and fall pretty to – someone who seems to know “the truth.”
Or who, at least, proclaims to know it.
That someone could be Jim Jones. He (and it almost always is a he, even when he has she assistants) could be Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He could be David Koresh.
In the case of “The Vow,” he was Keith Raniere, the leader of a cult called Nxivm (pronounced Nexium) who last year was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking.
“The Vow” slowly builds its case against Raniere, using a number of former Nxivm members – including the filmmaker Mark Vicente – to outline the story of how Raniere built within the self-help group a secret society of women. Used basically as sex slaves, each of the recruited women – a prominent member of whom was the "Smallville" actor Allison Mack – had been branded with what turned out to be Raniere’s initials.
I’m really curious about where the series will go from here (the first five can be binged, and the sixth premieres on Sunday). But if the first four are any indication, we’re going to find out everything we might want to know – and more.
While what I’ve seen so far pretty much makes it clear why some people gravitate toward cults, it doesn’t make it clear why the filmmakers decided that they needed nine full episodes to flesh out something that might have been accomplished on fewer. Who makes these kinds of decisions, anyway?
I’m hoping that as the series continues, I’ll discover the answers.
By the way, if you’re curious about the three cult figures I mentioned above, each has been the subject of numerous documentaries, prime examples of which include:
“Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle” is a four-episode 2018 documentary detailing the events involving the Rev. Jim Jones and his ill-fated church. Streaming through Amazon Prime.
“Wild Wild Country” is a six-part 2018 series that documents what happened when Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers descended on an Oregon town. Streaming on Netflix.
“Waco: The Rules of Engagement” is a 136-minute 1997 documentary about David Koresh and the group he founded that ended disastrously in a stand-off with federal agents. Streaming through a variety of services including Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Kanopy.
In searching for something, anything, to help me understand not just what attracts people to cults but what keeps them attached, I stumbled onto this quote from Aldous Huxley, author of – among many other things – the novel “Brave New World.”
“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative,” Huxley wrote. “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.”
Huxley, who wrote an essay titled “Brave New World Revisited” in 1958, should be forgiven his gender-limiting use us personal pronouns. He was, as are we all, a man of his time.
Regardless, his pronouncement sounds plausible. It certainly agrees with sentiments expressed in George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which the forces controlling society trumpeted similar kinds of mind-manipulations. You might remember in particular these corruptions of language: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.”
And my favorite: “Ignorance is strength.”