Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults

[spaceghostess]

Anybody else watching this on HBO Max? I’m finding it fascinating and a standout in the way it really digs deep into how this bizarro (as if there’s any other kind) cult formed and worked.  An impressive array of interviewees, plenty of video footage, and excellent editing and production design.

Edited December 6, 2020 by spaceghostess
Too long, apparently.

[Guest]

I thought this one was pretty great. I felt really sorry for these folks who all seemed relatively bright but completely misguided. The best part was when they were giving a lecture (perhaps on a college campus?) and one of the attendees was like, "Yeah, you've just spoken for an hour and really didn't say anything at all." 

I felt sorrier though for the children who some of them choose to up and leave behind completely. 

The Ti-inspired haircuts for the women were hate crimes though. 

I did chuckle at the closing music they chose to play over the end credits of the final episode: Aimee Mann's "Save Me." I instantly recognized it and thought to myself, oh god, please don't play the whole thing. And, at first, it was just her singing the "But can you sa-AVE me..." part but then, they finally played the rest and ... cringe-y:

But can you save me
Come on and save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone
Except the freaks 
Who suspect they could never love anyone 

[kathe5133]

I remember when this happened.  I thought they were whack jobs and dismissed the entire thing.  A dear friend, who has since passed on, was obsessed with it.  As fascinated as he was, I was repelled!  Recently I've been down the NXIUM and Scientology wormholes so I gave this a look.  I was right.  They were whack jobs!  I feel bad for those who they left behind.  Children, and family who will miss them forever, but I don't feel bad for them.  They bought into this bullshit and they got what they wanted.  Who knows.  Maybe they are smiling down on all of us from some distant planet.  

[spaceghostess]

 

On 12/6/2020 at 3:23 PM, Giant Misfit said:

I thought this one was pretty great. I felt really sorry for these folks who all seemed relatively bright but completely misguided. The best part was when they were giving a lecture (perhaps on a college campus?) and one of the attendees was like, "Yeah, you've just spoken for an hour and really didn't say anything at all." 

I felt sorrier though for the children who some of them choose to up and leave behind completely. 

The Ti-inspired haircuts for the women were hate crimes though. 

Too true re: the haircuts.

The interviews with the abandoned family members of the cult, especially that poor woman who lost both her parents, were heartbreaking. The people who remain true believers like Sawyer are also really sad. Heaven’s Gate checked most of the boxes, except “money/property for leader.” (Sure, they found nice houses to rent, but it didn’t seem like any of them, including Applewhite, were living high on the hog). This makes it—in my mind, at least—more Manson Family-adjacent than others like Scientology and Nxium, which have/had a pyramid-scheme structure that drained low- to mid-level members of cash while indoctrinating them to constantly bring in more. Of course, the Heaven’s Gaters weren’t hopped up on goofballs and violent like the Mansonites so at least they didn’t take down anyone other than themselves. And there were no children IN the cult, thank god. I found it interesting that Applewhite allowed members to leave and return without punishment (he even bought Sawyer a plane ticket and gave him some money) which is pretty unusual for a cult but also proves how deeply entrenched the members were. Quite a few came back after leaving and some who didn’t still believed in the mission.

The only thing missing was a clear idea of which of the two who founded Heaven’s Gate was really the “leader” and, between the two of them, who had the greater influence on whom. But that’s one of those fly-on-the-wall questions that’s probably unanswerable.

[bilgistic]

I fell asleep during either the second or third episode. It just wasn't holding my attention. It kept showing the stoner hippie musician guy who had been in since the 1970s and he just goes on and on. My boyfriend is finding it compelling, but I'm more bored than I was with The Vow, and I gave up on it. I don't get why people are so mesmerized by mediocre white men.

I remember when the suicides happened. I was in college at the time and was long-distance dating a guy in Long Island (speaking of mediocre white men). I was visiting while on spring break and the news was on when we came in from dinner, maybe.

[pigs-in-space]

This production has to have shared some common producer or art director or something as Starz's Seduced series (on NXIVM) because they not only had two of the same cult experts, but they also had a very similar style of artistic illustrations/animations throughout. Their music choices were also great. I liked how they all matched the time periods they were covering.

I'd listened to the Last Podcast on the Left's episodes on Heaven's Gate, so some of it wasn't new to me, but hearing it from the source packs a punch. I was glad to see that Frank was working to move forward with his life and enjoying it. My heart broke for Kelly, the woman who lost both of her parents to the cult. (Totally off topic but she looked so much like Molly Ringwald that it was almost distracting! She's very pretty.) Although the circumstances were very unusual, I think a lot of people can relate to her description of how their abandonment affected her sense of self-worth. 

You do have to wonder how things would have turned out if Bonnie Nettles hadn't died when she did. Eventually the jig would have been up when one of them passed away, but who knows what would have happened in the intervening years. Over twenty years for some of them of playing spaceship and trying not to masturbate. If being a higher being means having zero fun or pleasure, I'll pass. I had plenty of that as a super-zealous Catholic teen!

[snickers]

On 12/7/2020 at 9:56 AM, kathe5133 said:

I remember when this happened.  I thought they were whack jobs and dismissed the entire thing.  A dear friend, who has since passed on, was obsessed with it.  As fascinated as he was, I was repelled!  Recently I've been down the NXIUM and Scientology wormholes so I gave this a look.  I was right.  They were whack jobs!  I feel bad for those who they left behind.  Children, and family who will miss them forever, but I don't feel bad for them.  They bought into this bullshit and they got what they wanted.  Who knows.  Maybe they are smiling down on all of us from some distant planet.  

I know I'm late to the party, but this has been on my watch list on HBO Max forever but i just got around to watching this yesterday....I watched the whole thing in a day because I could not stop watching....and I had the time

 

I have to say, back in 1997 I get why we were saying they were whack jobs (I had just turned 18 at the time) and I remember thinking, "Why would anyone do such a thing?" .....but to me.....now watching this documentary and learning more about the group, to me their belief system is no different than the groups we know today, i.e. scientology, Q-anon, etc.  So i'm not in agreement with calling them whack jobs.  I do remember even back in 1997 one of things that made what happened so perplexing was that these people were for all intents and purposes, intelligent people in the IT field, medical field, etc. 

 

I didn't know this group had been around for 23 years, or that at one time it had been much larger than what it had dwindled down to....I also didn't know they had such a nomadic lifestyle and while I remember that Applewhite or "Do" castrated himself, I didn't know 6-7 other men did as well 😶

 

And is it just me, or did Applewhite age big time after he castrated himself? On the videos it looked like he and some of the other men aged and lost their hair????? I thought to myself, "Are those some of the guys who castrated themselves?" So disturbing.....

But it could have just been aging due to the passage of time....

 

I also thought it was really tragic, that 3 other people killed themselves to join their classmates...one cannot help but feel for them, I think for all of them, they so desperately wanted to believe....be a part of something....you can't just dismiss it and write them off as whack jobs, I think this was the whole purpose of the documentary