Here's a question:If, as we've been told, we've been wrong, wrong, wrong, and there are no cults (or even cultish thinking) within what's been called "mainstream" society, why is the Sundance Film Festival all of a sudden filled with movies about the phenomena?
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's little sister, Elizabeth, starred in Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene, a nonlinear thriller about a traumatized, voluptuous escapee from a Manson-esque sex cult. It was picked up by Fox Searchlight,...So what's our answer to the question?
The boom-time mania on the ground was matched by a different kind of collective lunacy on screen. Cults and other spiritual rebellions were a big theme this year — not only in Martha and the Lost-like Sound but also in Vera Farmiga's crowd-pleasing women's picture Higher Ground, Kevin Smith's scattered genre-fuck Red State, and Miranda July's spacey-comic The Future, which, like Jeff Nichols' humorless Take Shelter, turns the angst of frustrated 35-year-olds into fodder for surrealism.
When asked about this mystical trend at a Q&A for Sound, Marling noted that "a cult is an instant way to find meaning." Or, to quote the narrator of The Woods, Matthew Lessner's psychedelic satire of hipster back-to-nature idealism, "It felt good to believe in something other than myself. And I figured, at the very least, it would make for a killer blog entry." The only Sundance film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, The Woods has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.
Y'all are in major denial.
How does a boom in mainstream movies about cults prove that the public is in denial about cults?
ReplyDeleteThe question should be "How does a boom in mainstream movies about cults in mainstream society prove that the public is in denial about cults?"
ReplyDeleteBecause there's no discussion, or concern, what-so-ever about cults working in mainstream America - only denial it's happening and the claim people are just being "spiritual". Movies are finally reflecting back on society that which it cares to avoid, but can't any longer.
I'd like to join a cult only I can't find one bent on conquering the Earth by using pods to create soulless human duplicates.
ReplyDeleteBTW, the one on the left has a goodlooking face but she's kind of heavy.
ReplyDeleteHere, I do not actually consider it is likely to have effect.
ReplyDelete