"My wife died in my arms, and my dead baby son was in her arms, and I held her and I said 'I love you, I love you, I love you' because it was all I could say...She died in my arms, man."
"I never believed in Heaven in my whole life, you know, that's not the way I operated. But when I think of Guyana, when I watched the sun rise and stuff, I actually thought there was a Heaven on earth. And now I can't believe in Heaven anymore."
"I ain't never used the term suicide, and I'm not never gonna use the term suicide. That man was killing us."
All three of those quotes are from the closing minutes of Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, and all come from survivors of the Jonestown massacre, where 900 people commited mass suicide (if you can call it that) at the behest of one of modern history's most infamous and diabolical cult leaders.
Stanley Nelson's 2006 documentary on the subject is pretty standard fare in many ways: lots of archival footage and photos, juxtaposed with lots of people talking. It could have been made by Ken Burns.
It's still likely to be among the most horrifying movies you'll ever see. The film takes us through Jones's life, from his beginnings as the cat-murdering, hyper-religious son of an itinerant alcoholic up through his early days as a pentacostal preacher, to the founding of the Peoples Temple and its subsequent relocation from Indiana to Northern California. Along the way Jones transforms himself from a pretty typical revival-tent preacher to a political powerhouse holding court with San Francisco's liberal power elite to something markedly and diabolically different.
What the film accomplishes so well is providing the context for Jones's rise and fall. He was a product of the Civil Rights movement, and the Peoples Temple at first seemed to be a progressive, integrationist utopia. Jones welcomed everyone: black, white, young, old, clean, sober. But as the years went on and Jones's megalomania, paranoia, drug abuse, and personal depravity began to take over, the Peoples Temple became a world unto itself, a little mini North Korea, belligerent and obsessed with their perceived victimization. When San Francisco's major newspaper finally prepared an exposé of the many abuses taking place within the church, Jones uprooted his followers and shipped off to Guyana, where they went about trying to create a true Communist utopia in the jungles and completely went insane.
We all know what happened next. California Congressman Leo Ryan -- accompanied by a bevy of aides and news reporters -- made a trip to Jonestown at the behest of Concerned Relatives, a group of former Peoples Temple members who still had family caught in Jones's spiral of psychosis. Jones and his followers put on a good show for the congressman, singing and dancing and praising Jones, but when people started passing notes to his aides indicating that they wanted to leave, the shit hit the fan. Ryan was stabbed and then he and several others were gunned down on a dirt airstrip while trying to make their escape. That night Jones compelled his followers to drink the Kool-Aid.
The bare facts of the case are terrible enough, but Nelson managed to unearth a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage of Jones and his followers (much of which had been classified by the CIA), and he secured interviews with a number of former Peoples Temple members and survivors of the massacre itself. Their matter-of-fact analysis of what happened -- what drew them into the Temple to begin with, and how it all went wrong -- will make your heart ache and your skin crawl. Jones was a charming but truly depraved individual, and some of the details of what he and his most hardcore followers perpetrated -- both at Jonestown and before -- are absolutely gut-wrenching to hear.
The footage of Ryan's visit and his subsequent murder is equally riveting, and the way Nelson assembles it you'll feel almost as though you're watching the events unfold in real time. After the Jonestown inhabitants throw a massive (show) festival for his delegation on his first (and only night) in Guyana, Ryan addresses the crowd with a big politician's smile and tells them that, from what he has seen, Jonestown appears to be the best thing that has ever happened for them. The crowd erupts in spontaneous cheers and applause that builds in intensity until it resembles one of Hitler's rallies at Nuremberg. Ryan stands there with that smile still plastered as his face, waiting for the din to die down, and the look of horror that slowly fills his eyes the true insanity of what he is witnessing sinks home is absolutely chilling.
The true show-stopper -- and the thing that will likely keep you awake at night -- are the never-before-released audio recordings of the suicide itself. I think most of us probably always assumed that Jones's followers went placidly and lemming-like to their deaths. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many were compelled to do so at gunpoint, and those who resisted were either shot or had the poison injected directly into their mouths.
Really, you don't know horror until you have heard 900 dying people (including children) screaming and crying as Jones intones "Please, please, die with a degree of dignity. Quickly! Quickly! Quickly! Quickly!"
This is the second time I've seen this documentary, and what struck me this time is how skillfully Jones -- an avowed Communist who admitted towards the end that he was using the trappings of religion solely to suck people in -- went about creating a true Stalinist dystopia. Like Orwell's Animal Farm, you could view the rise and fall of The Peoples Temple as a little microcosm of the Soviet Union. His methods -- the literal cult of personality, the purges, the eventual forced collectivisation and church (state) controlled production of goods, the culture of paranoia, and Jones's increasingly militant public broadcasts -- were taken directly from Mao/Pol Pot/Kim Il-Sung playbook.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple is a truly disquieting look at how one charismatic psychopath can turn nearly 1,000 people's good intentions into a slaughterhouse.
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