DVD, Blu-ray and TV
Wild Wild Country, The American Friend
In 2014, a curious and lovely documentary, The Battered Bastards
Of Baseball, snuck out on netflix. Its subject – minorleague baseball – meant it barely created a ripple in the UK, but it was an astonishing film, telling the story of how a man called Bing Russell (father of Kurt) set up a team called the Portland Mavericks, the only club in their division not owned by a major-league outfit. The Mavericks lived up to their name, began winning, and became – by the standards of minor-league baseball – phenomenally popular. At which point the majors decided they represented too much of a threat to the farm-team ecosystem of minor league baseball and more or less forced the Mavericks out of business.
That film’s makers, Chapman and Maclain Way, are still in Oregon for their follow-up, a six-part netflix series. And it’s hard not to see some similarities: a charismatic maverick pitches up in the state, attracting thousands of followers and creating fear and rage in the establishment. There the similarities end. Where The Battered Bastards Of Baseball was a love story and charm poured from it, Wild Wild Country is something of a horror tale.
Its subject is the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, which departed its Indian base and in 1981 paid $5.75m for the Big Muddy Ranch, near the hamlet of Antelope in Oregon’s high desert. There Bhagwan’s followers, known as sannyasins (aka the “Orange People”), set about turning a desolate, rocky site into the city of Rajneeshpuram. The Ways tell the story – which, as you might expect, doesn’t end in peace and harmony – through three sets of voices: some of Bhagwan’s senior followers; a handful of the residents of Antelope; and the Oregon law-enforcement officials who – eventually – realised something sinister was afoot in the wilds of Wasco County.
Having riled up their neighbours, the Rajneeshees set about trying to eliminate all opposition – taking over Antelope’s tiny council wasn’t hard, but as both opposition and their own ambitions grew, so did the nature of their scheming (“evil” is a word used by Oregonians): they set up a military operation; they introduced salmonella into the food supply in a nearby town; they planned assassinations. The mastermind behind it all was Ma Anand Sheela, Bhagwan’s personal secretary, and one of the Ways’ main interviewees; there’s no sign of remorse, just regret that things didn’t pan out as she intended. Equally startling is Bhagwan’s US lawyer, Swami Prem niren (Philip Toelkes to his mum and dad), who appears to see the whole affair as a tragedy brought on by the paranoia of the authorities, with the Rajneeshees as the victims.
They certainly were the victims, but Wild Wild Country is a little coy about whose victims they were. By making the confrontation with the authorities the focus of the series – it’s possible even to sympathise as Sheela and niren protest at being victimised – the Ways ignore some of the crucial issues about the cult that make it seem less like an eccentric amalgamation of Eastern mysticism and Western self-actualisation, and more like what the law-enforcement bodies realised it was: a massive criminal conspiracy.
There’s no interest in where the money to run the cult over decades came from – which was not just gifts from wealthy followers, but money from drug trafficking and forced prostitution; there’s very little consideration of what the Rajneeshees viewed as “free love”, but which disillusioned cult members would later reveal to be systematic rape and sexual assault, directed at women and children; there’s no mention at all of how children at Rajneeshpuram were taken away from their parents and completely neglected. All of that has been reliably reported, but the Ways have said they wanted to avoid the sensationalist aspects of the story to concentrate on religious and political aspects they felt resonated more now. And their desire to limit the narrative to a few people’s stories might be sensible in storytelling terms, but it means we never get any understanding of why so many thousands of people – the ones who never got close to Bhagwan, unlike the interviewees in Wild Wild
Country – were willing to subjugate themselves financially, sexually and emotionally to his whims. It’s still a startling and terrifying series, but it turns the story of Rajneeshpuram into one of political intrigue, when above all it was a human tragedy.
By the end of 1985, it was all over. The leadership of Rajneeshpuram had fractured amid recriminations, and its principals fled, though the law did catch up with them. now the place that was to be a new kind of city is a resort park for a Christian youth group. “They’re kind of like a cult too,” says one local. “But they’re much better neighbours than the Rajneeshees. They’re not waving AK47s in your face.”