Big Sky Film: “Jonestown”

By Andy Smetanka, 2-17-07

Editor’s Note: “Jonestown” is one of NewWest.Net’s top picks for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. “Jonestown,” which is part of the documentary feature competition at the festival, shows on Monday, Feb. 19 at 10 a.m. in the Wilma. Click here to watch the trailer for the film from Firelight Media and check back to www.newwest.net/bsdff for more NewWest.Net picks this week and coverage of the festival.

You’d think the likelihood of things ending badly would deter more people from joining cults with lots of stockpiled weapons and compounds situated in barren, windswept wildernesses perfectly suited for breeding religious psychosis.

You’d think cult women would see through cheesy pickup lines like “To lie with me is to lie with God” or, “To bear a child with me is the greatest gift a woman could give her God.” And, you’d think their God-fearing menfolk would be wise to religious leaders who drive black Camaros and claim that God doesn’t want them to sleep with their wives—they should hand them over to him instead. That, in a nutshell, is why it’s tempting to suggest that maybe the Branch Davidians—the grown-ups, that is—maybe kinda sorta weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

And that’s why the spectacular, strawberry-flavored demise of Jonestown is way more tragic: The 900-odd people who died by cyanide-laced soft drink had actually come close to a working version of the sort of earthly paradise promised by every compound-building, hellfire-preaching nut job with lots of land in the middle of nowhere. Son of a Klansman, Jim Jones preached a gospel of radical racial integration at a time when few others dared, appealing particularly to African-Americans, establishing the first so-called Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in the late 1950s. Watching Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, you’re struck not by Jones’s legendary charisma, but by the fervor and diversity of his followers and the seemingly guileless simplicity of their aspirations: peace on earth.

In 1963, Jones and his followers migrated en masse from the Midwest to Ukiah, California, one of a handful of spots predicted in a leading men’s magazine (Jones claimed to have seen a vision to the same effect) to still be inhabitable after a nuclear attack. Footage of Peoples Temple 2.0 makes it look like a delightful place to live: honest work, lots of social events, and no bills (Jones reportedly bilked his elderly followers of hundreds of thousands in Social Security checks). Relocating to San Francisco with his flock in 1970, the fetchingly side-burned holy man won several progressive humanitarian awards and became head of that city’s Housing Authority.

But there were rumors: Public paddlings of errant temple members and private diddlings with his male followers, reportedly photographed for blackmail purposes by his many female admirers. On the eve of a damning news feature, Jones packed up himself and his followers and fled to Temple-owned land in Guyana, where his faithful adherents flatteringly, fatefully named their new digs Jonestown.

Jonestown is a fascinating look at the tragic trajectory of the Peoples Temple—rare among cults in that you almost wish it could have worked. Jones himself, despite the rare early biographical information supplied here, essentially remains a cypher, a powerful behind-the-scenes weirdo who almost, almost convinces the viewer of his good intentions.

The end comes when California congressman Leo Ryan and his entourage pop down to Guyana on a fact-finding mission. Though his Jonestown visit gets off to a rough start, he says he’s impressed by what they’ve done with the place; he looks halfway convinced of paradise when Temple members applaud his statements for a full 20 minutes. Then things turn sour. Maybe you’ve seen the pictures, maybe you’ve read the instant pulp bestseller dictated from a hospital bed by one of the survivors, but nothing can really prepare you for seeing the iconic images of bloated, face-down bodies in the proper narrative context. Or the survivor stories, many of them told here for the first time in thirty years. Tragic, ghoulish, and positively spellbinding.