One of the many great things about the place I work is the chance to see movies, and presented well. Some films go in one eye and out the other. Today’s has the studio in a buzz. Those of us who saw Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple will never forget it.
Producer/Director, Stanley Nelson and Writer, Marcia Smith were there to present it and answer questions afterward. I told them I wasn’t sure I should thank them for making me cry over lunch.
I was living in the Bay Area in the 70’s and remember Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. And of course I recall the shooting of Congressman Ryan and the ensuing mass suicide. I went to the screening expecting only a journeyman effort, since the film was made for PBS and their American Experience series. I was not expecting to be socked in the gut this way. If you can see this film and not cry, check yourself into a morgue.
Nelson and Smith managed to interview several survivors, including two of the small handful who escaped the Jonestown massacre. The interviews were beautifully handled. As Nelson explained, he told each interviewee he was going to ask questions about the whole ride. Each was asked to “be in the moment” and only talk about what they felt then. So we get a picture of the giddy enthusiasm at the start, while they really felt accepted into an integrated community. They speak of an instant sense of belonging and purpose. Many kicked drug habits and got straight.
Then our journey as viewers parallels theirs. Gradually the darkness falls. We learn about Jim Jones who, even as a five year old kid was seriously messed up, and watch a man who starts out crazy just get worse and worse with the drugs, adulation and isolation.
By the time we get to that fateful November 18, we are crying with them, looking into the eyes of men who had their wives die in their arms, and one who watched his infant son being poisoned.
The movie is rich with irony. One member still laments, “Maybe it didn’t work out. But at least we tried.” Even with the benefit of hindsight there’s a fascinating willful blindness to what went on. And what was it that was going on?
I was struck by how Jonestown recounts the history of every attempted socialist utopia in history, only on fast forward. The arc that took the Soviet Union the better part of a century, the People’s Temple managed in just over ten years. From the euphoria of their “we’re changing the world” hubris to children turning in their parents for dangerous speech was only a few short steps. Jones is every Stalin, Hitler and Castro: energetic, beguiling, charismatic, and ultimately a crazy mass murderer. It’s as if the Stalinist purges played out in about an hour.
The filmmakers may not have meant to draw that parallel. It’s not the sort of thing that PBS is noted for, after all. You can also watch this movie, quite correctly, as the story of religious fervor taken to its deadly extreme. Yet the words “socialist” and “utopia” are right there in the interviews. I never knew that Jones had promised them they could move to the Soviet Union until hearing the voice of a woman, arguing that they should be allowed to live, ask “What about Russia?” And Jonestown was a textbook Marxist experiment.
This is an outstanding documentary in terms of source material. Jones obsessively documented himself, and even had a tape recorder rolling on that last day as he urged his followers to first give cyanide-laced Kool-Aid to their children, and then take it themselves. It airs on PBS April 9, 2007. Today (Friday, February 2) it opened in Washington, D.C. and will, I gather, have a limited theatrical release. It is well worth seeing. Note to families with small children: I don’t know if the broadcast version will bleep all the profanity. There isn’t much, and it’s all quite appropriate. But images of dead toddlers are hard enough on adults.
Most stunning of all the ironies, was the hand-lettered sign prominent in the footage of Ryan’s fateful visit. Looming behind him was the warning, “Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.” It was Jones’ most accurate prophecy.