Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief review – horribly compelling study of a creepy organisation

As a study of group psychopathology and cult abuse, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Scientology is horribly compelling. Using interviews with ex-members such as Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis, Gibney shows how this aggressively paranoid organisation evolved from a postwar evangelical racket by pulp sci-fi author L Ron Hubbard: a cosmic worldview based on his own imaginings, but with Barnumesque genius marketed through quasi-scientific “auditing”.

It involved giving people cod-therapeutic interviews rigged up to a heart-monitor-type contraption which theoretically detected thoughtwaves caused by painful memories from current and past lives. With increasing cash payments, new members would be inducted through an endless number of enlightenment-stages and progressively cleansed of their earthly pain.

Hubbard realised that Hollywood types in the insecure dream factory would be especially susceptible and made this his chief base, although took to travelling by sea to avoid the tax authorities. It’s a part of his bizarre personality reflected in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master, inspired by Hubbard, which Gibney does not in fact mention. To this day, it accounts for the Scientologists’ creepy “Sea Organisation” — the shock-troops with their sinister and ridiculous naval uniforms.

Gibney’s film argues that one of the darkest days in American public life came in 1993, when the Internal Revenue Service caved in to the Scientologists’ demand for tax-exemption, which current leader David Miscavige greeted with a victory rally resembling a Nuremberg Oscar ceremony. Perhaps from a rational viewpoint, the Scientologists’ beliefs are no more bizarre than any other religion, but as one ex-member points out, Christians or Muslims can explain their beliefs in minutes; Scientologists deliberately withhold their revealed visions until you have invested so much time and money that backing out is unthinkable.

Gibney’s film convincingly argues that their methods and practices are exploitative, abusive and dysfunctional on a massive scale. There is also evidence that the scientologists’ most famous believer, Tom Cruise, was icily manipulated and controlled. Could it be time for Mr Cruise to speak out?