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The Cult of The Family
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Cult and Culture
It has been a disquieting experience to follow, across
the various media, the succession of gruesome real-life accounts detailing the
manipulation and abuse of children. For the convicted Cardinal George Pell of
the Catholic Church, the threat of retribution – wielded on choirboys who had
strayed into the wrong room at the wrong moment – was, it seems, a favoured
psychological tool. For pop star Michael Jackson, as retold in the documentary Leaving Neverland (2019), the emotional
blackmail of each of his victims came in the form of a promise of everlasting
love – plus the warning that, if their activity were ever made public, they
would both go down in flames.
For Anne Hamilton-Byrne, leader of the
Australian-based cult known as The Family (most active between the late 1960s
and 1987), the key was domination and control, achieved through any means
deemed necessary: strict discipline, severe punishment, isolation from the
wider society, administration of LSD, sexual abuse, starvation, psychological
double-binds (such as the alternate giving and withdrawing of love) – just to
name a few of her scattergun tactics.
With the rise of films like Wolf Creek (2005) and The Babadook (2014) in
Australian cinema, we hear a lot about the possibilities of a type of national
fiction we might call Bush Gothic: playing on the curiosity and anxiety of city
dwellers as to what really goes in our remote rural areas, small towns and
outback outposts … But who needs imagination once the cold, hard facts about
The Family (with its country houses and acres of real estate) are laid out so
clearly?
In the three-part series The Cult of The Family, writer-director Rosie Jones (The Triangle Wars, 2011) has done a
remarkable job of researching, retrieving, building and organising a vast
archive of documentary material – from home movies and candid interview
segments to police interrogation tapes and newspaper clippings. The series has
been expanded from a previous feature film version, The Family (2016), and I am grateful that Jones and producer Anna
Grieve (director of the memorable 1985 short Skipping Girl) have had the opportunity to pace and unfold such
dense material over a nearly three-hour span.
There is also a discreet use of re-enactments for
dramatic emphasis and narrational clarity, but these never tip over into
sensationalism. Throughout, the sterling contributions of director of
photography Jaems Grant, editor Bill Murphy and composer Amanda Brown help lift
the material well above the level of simple reportage.
Where Leaving
Neverland restricts itself to an interview-based focus that necessarily
excludes any larger speculation on how a phenomenon like a berserk Michael
Jackson comes into existence and is maintained and enabled for decades on end, The Cult of the Family gives itself the
liberty to outline several broader social and cultural contexts that help
explain the rise of this cult. Disturbing indeed is the tracing of connections
between the influential “parapsychologist” Raynor Johnson (1901-1987, author of Nurslings of Immortality) and his
network of pals in government, the medical profession, the police and
University of Melbourne – a network that facilitated the veritable “stealing”
of children for The Family, as well as the inculcation of a demented ideology
among many people sincerely searching for a spiritual path in life. It’s a
genuine Australian Nightmare that, so far, few of our fictions (on screen or in
literature) have tried to encompass and make sense of.
Like in Leaving
Neverland, the hammer of moral judgement and blame inexorably falls, in
part, upon those passive people who either “went along” with the organising
principles of The Family – giving up their own children to the guru and
agreeing to pose as “uncles” and “aunties” – or those who suspected the dark
truth but said nothing. In fact, as the series proceeds to detail (in episode
3) the long aftermath of the arrest and trial of the Hamilton-Byrnes, we grasp
what a slippery slope this type of complicity was – ranging from states of
outright denial in the cult’s central ring of facilitators and supporters, to complicated
feelings of residual loyalty in several of the children.
More than once in The
Cult of the Family, we hear descriptions of Hamilton-Byrne as demonic,
diabolical, the very personification of evil. Pop culture mythology would be
hard-pressed to invent a grander femme
fatale figure than this. The gendering of this evil in the public
imagination is a curious business: at moments during the series, it can seem
odd that Anne’s husband, Bill, is let off rather lightly (by observers and participants
alike), almost excused as himself a (quote unquote) “beglamoured” victim
seduced by a witchy spell. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Anne Hamilton-Byrne
indeed put herself at the centre of the cult by exploiting a heady cocktail of
allure, celebrity (most of it fabricated) and canny manipulation of other
people’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Questions remain concerning what, ultimately, Anne
Hamilton-Byrne was really after. Did she truly entertain the mad fantasy that
her Family would grow and one day inherit the earth, after (as Raynor Johnson fervently
believed) the aliens swept down from outer space? (Her attempted expansion of
the cult via the purchasing of properties in several countries might suggest
so.) How seriously did she take her own patched-together belief-system, with
its grotesque New Age amalgam of yoga (and other Eastern practices), a hint of
British aristocracy, and messianic Christianity (with the leader herself as the
new Christ)? Was it all just a clever subterfuge in order to (as journalist
Marie Mohr suggests) amass as much personal wealth as possible? (A tasty figure
of 50 million dollars is estimated.)
Or – as the account in episode 2 of Hamilton-Byrne’s
own troubled, dysfunctional childhood and her constant drive to “remake”
herself both in looks and personality strongly indicates – was the motivating
fantasy primarily, all along, to create her own isolated little “circle”, a perfectly
adoring, ever-obedient, never-changing, makeshift family of blonde-haired, lookalike
kids? The fleeting shade of the various versions of Village of the Damned here is not suppressed by Jones and her collaborators. But it
not primarily the horror genre to which The
Cult of the Family looks for a dash of hyper-real inspiration.
In the popular genre of the gangster film –
particularly in the hands of a connoisseur like Martin Scorsese – control is always the central question:
control of oneself, control of minions, control of an “empire” … not to mention
the elimination of enemies, turncoats, “weak links” and nosey investigators. The Cult of the Family is, in its own
chilling way, a gangster story. Like in Goodfellas (1990) or the Godfather saga, a key fault-line is the problem of trust
and betrayal – exacerbated by a rising tide of paranoia and delusion swamping
the power-monger at the head of the food chain. As Hamilton-Byrne loses one
accomplice after another, and as her “children” slip out of her control, she
even turns (as documented in one delirious sequence) to casting black magic curses on cops, reporters, lawyers and probably
anyone who stopped believing in her.
But the other fault-line – the one that absolutely
nobody can halt in its inexorable motion – is time itself. Again like Michael
Corleone or the various Mr Big mobsters in Goodfellas,
old age creeps up on Hamilton-Byrne, destroying the bases of her power – and,
in her case, afflicting her with dementia (she is still alive, in that
condition, at age 98). We are left with the strangely satisfying hint that her
former associates are now squabbling to divide up her properties and her
fortune.
In both Leaving
Neverland and here, the crunch moment for some survivors of abuse comes
when they grow into adulthood, struggle to form intimate relationships and
eventually have their own children – only to be faced with the literally
nightmarish thought of this next generation of kids becoming subject to the same
horror. The Cult of the Family gives
us some hope that this infernal cycle can indeed be broken.
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