Tag Archives: HBO

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

16 Fri Oct 2015

Posted by in Critical Theory, Mindfulness, Organised Religion, Philosophy, Social Theory, Sociology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

324px-Going_Clear_PosterLUMPENPROLETARIAT—Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015) is a must-see film, which forces us to question the nature of belief, i.e., faith, as a form of social organisation by which we may expect healthy outcomes for ourselves, our loved ones, our friends, and society.  Going Clear is based on Lawrence Wright‘s book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (2013).  Produced by HBO, the film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.  Going Clear has received widespread praise from critics and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards, winning three, including Best Documentary.  This mind-blowing documentary film is currently available on HBO Now (i.e., on demand), where I have just viewed it, as well as other digital media, such as Netflix DVD, Amazon, and whatnot.

Trailer:  “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” (2015)

I just finished watching Going Clear, thanks to the recommendation of a good friend with HBO access [1]; and now I recommend it to you.  You can add it to your list of things to see the next time you find yourself channel surfing for something interesting to watch.

Going Clear raises a number of questions.  If one religion has no evidence or proof behind its claims, but it is granted tax exemption and other state privileges, then what does the state do when a new religion is invented by a science fiction/pulp fiction novelist?  By what state criteria is a social grouping deemed a religion?  Must a government grant, for example, the Church of Scientology tax exemption because the church claims that alien “thetans” are possessing the “souls” of human beings and people have a right to their religious beliefs?  The US government, indeed, has granted the Church of Scientology tax exemption since its inception when the first Church of Scientology was opened in December of 1953.  Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s widow is quoted, famously, paraphrasing Hubbard:  If you want to get rich, start a religion.

L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), a George Washington University drop-out who was demoted from his military post for reckless conduct as a Navy captain, took a cue from the cult leader Aleistir Crowley (1875-1947) and a Crowley disciple named Jack Parsons (1914-1952), one of the founders of the jet propulsion laboratory.  Parsons even had a crater on the moon named after him for his accomplishments in his field.  But Parsons was also a boss in the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis, which followed the teachings of Crowley.  Hubbard saw how Crowley and Parsons were able to swindle people out of money by spinning tales of mythology and devising elaborate ceremonies designed to seduce sycophants into obedience.  Hubbard then developed a more accessible model than Crowley’s or Parsons’ models of fraud, by abandoning a narrow reliance on satanic imagery and instead opting for a pseudo-scientific framework for his best-selling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950).

By the 1950s, Hubbard had become a celebrity as a professional charlatan claiming to have found cure-all self-improvement discoveries, commanding hefty fees for speaking engagements.  Later, when the fad around Dianetics started to wane, Hubbard repackaged his Dianetics teachings into a full-blown religion in order to continue his revenue stream.  Various associates, including one of Hubbard’s ex-wives have reported that Hubbard often commented that starting a religion was a good way to make money.  Eventually, Hubbard had to go on the run from state authorities to avoid fines and years in prison, cruising around the world in his Church of Scientology sea vessels until ports around the Mediterranean began refusing Hubbard’s ships to dock in their ports.  Hubbard remained in hiding until his death, as the Church of Scientology grew, with tax emption being granted by the U.S. government, into a $3 billion dollar enterprise.

Going Clear exposes loads of evidence showing the Church of Scientology to be a predatory and exploitative institution narrowly devoted to enriching its executives and silencing its critics, amounting to a greedy and creepy cult-like atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and intimidation.  Ultimately, this film challenges us to question the willingness to have blind faith in our moral leaders; and it forces us to confront the dangers of accepting religious claims, however outlandish they may appear, simply on faith.  [2]

Messina

Actor Tom Cruise On the Church of Scientology

On the Church of Scientology, its Celebrity Centre in Florida, and recruiting celebrities and targeting celebrity defectors, such as Tom Cruise’s ex-wife Nicole Kidman.  A brief list of Celebrity Scientologists includes:  actors Tom Cruise (of course), Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Laura Prepon, Jason Lee (that figures), Priscilla Presley, Kelly Preston, John Travolta, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis (no!), Michael Peña, as well as musicians Chick Corea, Sonny Bono, Beck, Doug E. Fresh (ouch), Isaac Hayes (ouch), et al.

2005:  Matt Lauer vs. Tom Cruise

The Master (2012) is partly based on the Church of Scientology and its creator, L. Ron Hubbard

“Scientology, the CIA, and Miviludes: Cults of Abuse“

***

  1. …as well as the fact that it’s directed by the excellent, and sociopolitically curious film director, Alex Gibney (b. 1953), who has directed acclaimed documentaries, such as We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (the winner of three primetime Emmy awards); Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (nominated in 2005 for Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (short-listed in 2011 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Casino Jack and the United States of Money; and Taxi to the Dark Side (winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed at Bagram Air Force Base in 2002.
  2. This article is under construction…pending full processing of this insane story, like the lyrics to the Bad Religion song, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

[Last modified 21:32 PST  16 OCT 2015]

Show Me A Hero on HBO Analyses Racial Residential Segregation

14 Mon Sep 2015

Posted by in Fiction, urban economics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Show_Me_a_Hero_Poster LUMPENPROLETARIAT—It is, indeed, appalling how large a percentage of our incomes some of us spend on cable television.  But, at least, there are some perks.  Show Me A Hero is one of them.  This new mini-series starring Oscar Isaac with Jim Belushi, Catherine Keener, Winona Ryder and various other notable actors is a fascinating view of urban economics and politics.

—Messina

Show Me A Hero on HBO (start date: August 16, 2015)

***

TAKE ON TELEVISION—(14 AUG 2015) “Welcome to Take On Television. I’m Andy Bienstock with Dave Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun. Dave, starting on Sunday night on HBO, a new series from David Simon.”

DAVID ZURAWIK: “Yeah, Andy. And it’s far and away the best production of the summer. I think it’s one of the best productions I’ve seen in years on television—period. It’s called Show Me a Hero. It’s a six-hour mini-series the next three Sundays on HBO—two hours a night. It’s really outstanding work. It’s written and executive produced by David Simon and Bill Zorzi, both of whom had been [Baltimore] Sun employees. And it’s directed and executive produced by Paul Haggis from [the film] Crash, who’s outstanding—great, great talent.

“It covers a desegregation battle in Yonkers, New York, a city of about 200,000 north of New York in 1987. It started in 1987. This mini-series covers 1987 and 1993. It’s based on a non-fiction book by then-New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin. And it’s a terrific, a really outstanding book. They went and re-reported it. They did the story.

“It follows a young, on-the-rise, elected official in Yonkers named Nick Wasicsko. And he’s played in this by Oscar Isaac. You may not have heard of Oscar Isaac. He is outstanding—honestly. An Emmy doesn’t even seem good enough for the performance he turns in as the city councilman who becomes mayor at 27, the youngest mayor in a mid-to-large American city. But, then, there’s a desegregation lawsuit from the NAACP and the Justice Department, that aims only, really, to build 200 units of low-income housing in the part of Yonkers, that was predominantly white. He is chewed up in this battle. His career is shredded. His life is disrupted. It’s a great story.

“In addition to his story and the desegregation narrative, two of the major story lines, you have stories of four women of colour, who are trying to move out of really bad low-income housing into these new units. They’re hoping to move into these new units. The new units are the promised land for them. The way they juggle these story lines is fantastic. I think a lot of that, of course, is the script. A lot of it is also Haggis. But this is—you know—the title is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous saying: Show me a hero; and I’ll write you a tragedy. I’m not gonna give any spoilers. It’s a tragedy in the end, but it’s one of the richest productions I’ve seen. And it speaks to post-Ferguson, post-Freddie Gray America like nothing else in American art.”

ANDY BIENSTOCK: “Show Me a Hero starts Sunday night on HBO. That’s Dave Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun. And I’m Andy Bienstock for Take On Television on WYPR.”

Transcript of WYPR radio broadcast by Messina

***

THE BALTIMORE SUN—(14 AUG 2015) When David Simon first contacted William F. Zorzi in the fall of 2001 about the book “Show Me a Hero,” Simon’s former Baltimore Sun colleague says he was mainly annoyed.

“I was on the desk and on deadline at The Sun,” said Zorzi, who was then working as an assistant city editor.

“Could you [expletive] call at a more inconvenient time?” he remembers asking Simon, who had already left the paper to write for television. “Clearly, you’ve not been doing this very long or you’ve forgotten what it was like.”

But when Simon called back three weeks later, Zorzi still had not read the book. He couldn’t even remember the title.

“Well, you better read the [expletive] thing,” Zorzi quotes Simon as saying after he repeated the title, “because we’re going out to HBO in three weeks.”

Not only did Zorzi read journalist Lisa Belkin’s non-fiction book about a community-wrenching housing desegregation battle in the late 1980s in Yorkers, N.Y., he came to live it for the next 13 1/2 years.

The veteran political reporter quit The Sun in 2002, went to Yonkers to “re-report” the book, and has been working on the project on and off ever since. Off includes three seasons on Simon’s “The Wire” as a writer, including the final year of episodes in which he also played himself onscreen as a Sun reporter named Bill Zorzi.

The result of that kind of commitment shows in virtually every frame of this six-hour HBO miniseries that speaks to our post-Ferguson-post-Freddie-Gray America like no other work on TV — or in any other form of art so far.

Learn more at THE BALTIMORE SUN.

***

Also see this related Lumpenproletariat.org article:

***

[12:45 PST 17 SEP 2015]

[Last modified 10:25 PST 18 SEP 2015]

[Thanks to brother RDM for screening this for me; and, priorly, to Democracy Now! for sharing this with non-HBO-subscribing people.]