Skepticism saves lives
The Vow a chilling look at the power of a modern cult, Hank Stuever writes.
The Vow
Series finale Sunday, HBO
Have you given thanks for your BS detector lately? Has it served you well during this dire age of disinformation?
So with authentic enthusiasm we should applaud filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer for their thoroughly absorbing HBO documentary series, The Vow, an elliptical and haunting journey into the dark heart of a self-help group known as NXIVM (pronounced “nexium”), that was exposed in 2017 as both a cult and a pyramid scheme.
Some of the women drawn into NXIVM's elite circles have described coerced sex, vigilance over their diets and daily routines, blackmailing schemes and secret branding ceremonies at which the initials of NXIVM's founder and self-anointed guru (a remarkably influential little creep named Keith Raniere) were seared on their private areas. Former acolytes talk about how Raniere and NXIVM tried to sue them into oblivion after they left the group, among other intimidation tactics. Still others talk about a broader realization: They'd joined a cult and didn't know it until they were too far in.
The Vow, which premièred in August and concludes this Sunday, may well be this dreadful year's most vital and relevant documentary. And that's saying a lot, since we're currently drowning in top-notch documentaries about voter suppression, Russian hacking, White House corruption, racist policing, a dying planet and culture clashes of every kind — all of which have aired or will air before this apocalyptically approaching U.S. election day. Strong as they are, most of them will be viewed only by people who've already heard the alarm bells.
The Vow strikes a rawer nerve. On its face, it's just another story of how badly people can be deceived, especially when they lack self-confidence or an ability to smell a steaming pile. Sympathy for suckers is in short supply these days, especially as one realizes that NXIVM thrived by preying on a privileged class of mostly well-off, mostly white people, many of them trying to make it in Hollywood.
To watch The Vow is to recognize how faulty our personal radars have become, no thanks to four-plus years of political gaslighting.
NXIVM, at its core a twisted
kind of multi-level marketing scheme, isn't all that different from QAnon's Facebook presence or the anti-vaccine movement, from Trump University or Vladimir Putin's robo-network of online infiltrators.
Aided by NXIVM's thoroughly modern impulse to record everything it did for 20 years (creating a trove of revealing phone calls, videos and manifestos), Noujaim and Amer ingeniously begin their documentary by immersing the viewer in the world of NXIVM's gateway outfit, Executive Success Programs (ESP). This mirrors Noujaim's own experience — she took an ESP self-improvement course more than a decade ago after enthusiastic recommendations from heiress Sara Bronfman and NXIVM executive Mark Vicente, a filmmaker who co-directed the 2004 pseudo-science documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!?
As Noujaim told the Los Angeles Times, she dropped out before completing the course. Another defector was Sarah Edmondson, a TV and film actress who had risen through NXIVM's intricate levels and ran the group's Vancouver outpost, and Edmondson's husband, Anthony (Nippy) Ames, an actor who helped found NXIVM's allmale support group, called the Society of Protectors.
By The Vow's second episode, it's clear the glow they were experiencing was filmed before the organization erupted in scandals that eventually led to an FBI investigation and the arrests of Raniere and several others.
Raniere awaits sentencing this month on federal convictions of sex-trafficking, sexual exploitation of a child, racketeering and wire fraud, among other crimes.