On TV: The Horrifying Jonestown
If horror films have lost their sting in recent years, it’s in large part because the easy availability of photographic equipment has put genuine horror so much in front of us that fiction seems tame by comparison. The films we saw on television of actual terrified fleeing peasants will linger in our memories longer than any feature film on the Vietnam War. The footage of tsunami-ravaged Indonesia and Katrina-devastated New Orleans moved the world in a way Hollywood special effects never could. It will be interesting to see how viewers react to Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, airing on PBS’s The American Experience this Monday, April 9. The film contains footage of the Reverend Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre never before seen. It may the most horrifying documentary ever televised.
In November 1978 more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple died by cyanide poisoning at their compound in Guyana, while several more died from gunshots. The world was never sure exactly what to call the event, either the greatest mass suicide in history—Jones himself called it “revolutionary suicide,” a term borrowed from the Black Panther leader Huey Newton—or one of the greatest mass murders ever. Jonestownat least clears that up: It was murder. The only real suicide was Jones himself, who put a gun to his head and fired.
Produced and directed by Stanley Nelson (who’s responsible for two previous superb American Experience documentaries, The Murder of Emmitt Till and Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind) and written by Marcia Smith (who wrote The Murder of Emmitt Till and Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind), Jonestown makes spectacular use of footage of Jones talking and preaching in both the United States and Guyana. One’s first reaction on seeing him is surprise; he doesn’t appear to be in the least charismatic, certainly not compared with Powers Boothe, who portrayed him in a well-made 1980 television movie, Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. Jones didn’t fit the classic American mold of the Elmer Gantry–type demagogue; his appeal was something far more subtle—and far more dangerous.
Born May 13, 1931, in Crete, Indiana, and raised in nearby Richmond, Jones became a preacher in the early 1950s and earned a bachelor’s degree from Butler University in 1961. Estranged from his abusive, alcoholic father, he sometimes found refuge in black churches in his hometown, absorbing their soulful rhythms and the cadences of their preachers. After becoming an ordained minister for the Disciples of Christ, a mainstream denomination, in 1964, he began a brave and lonely struggle as a reformer for racial equality, a mission that put off many locals. (He and his wife Marceline were the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child.) His insistence that social justice depended on economic equality put off many more. Those not alienated by Jones’s “apostolic socialism,” as he called it, became hardcore followers of an increasingly radical cult. Blacks and whites alike believed they were headed for paradise on earth and that Jones, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, Buddha, and Lenin, among others, was taking them there.
The first place he led them was to California. Many of his followers sold their homes and gave themselves over to his will, moving into his commune. As his wealth and power grew, he became an influential political leader in the San Francisco area, and also became increasingly arrogant and reckless. Rumors of sexual abuses—he was bisexual and was once caught propositioning a Los Angeles undercover police detective in a men’s room—and tax evasion prompted an investigation by a magazine reporter; shortly before the article was published, in 1977, Jones took his followers in mass to a utopian settlement in the jungles of Guyana.
Responding to pleas from family members, Congressman Leo Ryan traveled to Guyana in November 1978 to find out what was going on there. Apparently he was placated until frightened church members began to slip him notes begging him to take them away. Gunmen attacked the group at the landing strip, killing Ryan, two NBC journalists, a newspaper photographer, and one disaffected Temple member. Shortly after, the bodies of 914 people lay in and around the compound. Five escaped into the jungle, and two of the survivors provide vivid testimony in Nelson’s film.
What the footage makes clear is that Jones was no rabble-rouser but an emotional predator who knew how to exploit human weakness. His followers called him “Father.” Most demagogic monsters appeal to the worst in people; Jones was far more insidious, appealing to the best in them and then finding a way to pervert that sentiment. He was also a sadist. The accounts by some of the Temple survivors of how he humiliated members for alleged disloyalty are bloodcurdling.
Jonestown is 90 minutes long and contains not a single superfluous scene, though a couple of recreated scenes seem stilted in comparison with the actual footage. One in fact yearns for more information than we’re given. We’re never really told about the infrastructure of Jones’s organization, or how the California and Guyana settlements were financed and built. The Guyana compound, deep in the jungle, appears far too commodious to have been paid for by the savings of its members. For that matter, it is not adequately explained how the Peoples Temple continued to support itself when the Temple members had all quit their jobs to go to Guyana. The men sent by Jones to murder Ryan’s party and to force hundreds to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid at gunpoint are never identified, and it is not clear whether any of them were ever caught and prosecuted. Jones’s wife Marceline is scarcely mentioned, though there is no more intriguing mystery in Jones’s story than that of a woman who would have stuck with him to the end.
It’s a testament to the power of the material and the precision of the filmmakers that we don’t notice Jonestown’s deficiencies until well after the closing credits. It’s a rare film that compels you to watch and avert your eyes at the same time.