salon | In America, salvation is big business, and he who dies with the most
souls wins. Plenty of lives are wrecked along the way, but no matter.
When consumer capitalism meets religious yearning, the sky’s the limit
of what can you can get away with. That’s the subtext of Alex Gibney’s
latest film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened on HBO on March 29.
L.
Ron Hubbard, or LRH, as he liked to style himself, was an American of
unprepossessing origins in search of meaning and money. Possibly he
found the first, and is just now cavorting with intergalactic spirits in
the sky. Most definitely he found the second, riding a rocket ship of
wacked-out ambition to create what is now essentially a tax-free shell
company with $3 billion in assets and real estate holdings on six
continents.
Gibney doesn’t give us LRH as a madman, or even a
simple huckster. The penny-a-word pulp fiction writer could have just
been another loser who couldn’t manage to finish college and whose
less-than-stellar naval service went awry when he inadvertently used a
Mexican island for target practice and was deemed unfit for command. Going Clear traces
the young man’s early perambulations through California occultism and
various hare-brained moneymaking schemes to the Jersey Shore, where he
washed up exhausted and plagued by anxiety. Another man might have just
given up. But not LRH.
Instead, he marshaled a smattering of
knowledge from various strains of psychological and philosophical
esoterica to gin up a mental health self-help system he named Dianetics,
which he introduced in a hugely successful book in 1950. For a while it
seemed like LRH had finally found his pot of gold, but alas, the
Dianetics fad faded like the hula-hoop craze, its foundations
disintegrating into debt and disorder.
Then came the epiphany,
shared with his second wife Sara Northrup, who appears in the film as
the shell-shocked survivor of LRH’s dreams. “The only way to make any
real money,” he told her, “was to have a religion.”
