Years ago, Iran went to war against Iraq. Certain wags suggested that it might be a good thing if the war were protracted and deadly with both sides losing. The viewer has a similar response to the Duplass brothers' six part documentary Wild Wild Country (now available on Netflix). On the evidence of the first two episodes, the show is addictive and a sort of guilty pleasure. Wild-eyed cosmopolitan religious fanatics square off against the most narrow-minded Neanderthal bigots that you can imagine. The battle takes place in a remote wilderness somewhere in Oregon. (You can't find the places in the movie on a map.) Both sides are so utterly and viciously idiotic that you can't help that both sides will lose and that the fanatical Cultists and their adversaries, the bigoted local ranchers, will utterly destroy one another. It's like the big gory climax in the shopping mall in George Romero's Day of the Dead -- savage and sadistic bikers in leather take on blood-thirsty brain-eating zombies: it's hard to know which side to root for, but the dust-up is sure worth watching.
Sometime in the late sixties, an Indian guru named Bhagram Shree Rajneesh(sometimes, he's called "Osho") founded an ashram in a small city in India. Rajneesh was a typical specimen of the type of vaguely Hindu holy-man who surfaced in the psychedelic era -- he had big watery eyes and an impressive beard and, in his white robes, he flitted around with a beatific grin hands clasped together in a Namaste greeting. He specialized in telling people what they wanted to hear and gathered about 10,000 followers around him. Mobs of attractive girls formed his bodyguard and he traveled from place-to-place in a armor-plated Rolls Royce. (People were very gullible in the late sixties -- I think this is because that Baby Boomers, who comprised much of the population, were very young. You have to be the victim of a couple of scams to be on the alert for confidence men and most of the Rajneesh followers seem to have been children, dewy-eyed boys and girls enrolled in the cult primarily for the sex. Osho's followers were encouraged to engage in rituals that required a lot of primal screaming, jumping up and down, and groping one another naked.) The Holy Man was regarded as fantastically wise and eloquent -- we are shown a few examples of his sermons and they are incredibly dim-witted and platitudinous, but, then, I suppose you had to be there. The Holy Man came equipped with a scheming and duplicitous consiglieri in the form of a scrawny, bug-eyed girl named Sheela -- she's the real protagonist in the story because, as the narrative progresses, the guru himself, who is deemed frail, "the finest porcelain" Sheela declares, subsides into the background. After some attacks against the guru by Hindu fanatics, Sheela plots to move the entire Ashram to a remote, mountainous valley in Oregon. A 65,000 acre ranch is purchased in the middle of nowhere and the cultists migrate to that place, dam a river to create a lake, and, in a display of true industry, erect a hideous, jerry-rigged city. (The public buildings and the meditation center look like variants on the style of architecture that we now see most prominently in "Big Block" retailers like Walmart and Home Depot.) There's only one problem with the construction of this utopia in backwoods Oregon -- and it's the same problem that beset the Mormons in Nauvoo and the Zionists in Palestine: indigenous people were already living there. The Cultists wear orange jump-suits eerily similar to the garments issued to prisoners in rural county jails and they invade the adjacent town, a tiny and rotting crossroads called Antelope -- footage shows big groups of the orange-clad cultists wandering around the village's dirt alleys and chicken coops and decaying mobile homes pulled up next to even more ruined clapboard houses while the moronic inhabitants cower indoors. The stage is set for the battle between the home-grown bigoted locals and the fanatical cultists. And, soon enough, the struggle ensues, a conflict so strange and surrealistic that you have to credit it all as being true: you couldn't make this stuff up. A prominent man in Oregon is a war hero track coach named Bowersmith who by some accident invents the shoe later sold under the trademark of Nike. Bowersmith forms a group called the "Thousand Friends of Oregon" to lead the battle against Rajneesh and his followers. Lawsuits are filed and the Cult led by the scheming and malign Sheela purchase the town of Antelope -- she shrewdly exploits the venality of the local Rubes by simply buying out the cult's most vehement enemies. Money talks, as we all know and bullshit walks. The resisting members of the town desperately try to avoid being annexed by the cult by dissolving the municipality -- but, by this time, too many cultists live in town and the local yokels are outvoted. The cultists are spiteful and convert the town's one business, a local store and café, into an enterprise painted in day-glow colors and called "Zorba the Buddha". Someone bombs the cult's hotel in Portland, Oregon and a wild-eyed zealot of a State Attorney tells the camera that the cult led by Sheela have committed "literally thousands of felonies" and that they represent "pure evil." Sheela says that her cult is not a follower of Gandhi or Jesus: "Jesus said if you are attacked turn the other cheeks. We believe that if we are attacked we will tear off both of your cheeks." And, so, the cult-members begin arming themselves.
Two factors are obvious to the viewer and make this confrontation deliciously interesting. The cult members are just like the ranchers: they are adamantly opposed to anyone interfering in their life-style, totally bigoted and spiteful, and just as prone to reach for firearms to protect their miserable ideology as their thin-lipped, cowboy-hatted, and dull-eyed Christian fundamentalist adversaries. Second, everyone acts as if the problems arising in rural Oregon are completely unprecedented -- but, any student of American history will immediately see the parallels with the Mormons, particularly in their expulsion from upstate New York and, later, Nauvoo, Illinois -- and recall that the problems between the Mormons and the local folk with whom they clashed resulted in spectacular bloodshed, massacres, and, ultimately, even a war waged by the federal government against Brigham Young and his followers. So it's pretty obvious that none of this is going to end well.
Wild Wild Country is a wee bit repetitious -- long documentaries frequently run out of good footage. But the stand-off between the Bhagreesh's followers and the ranchers seems to have been so spectacular as to be intensively documented. Some shots are repeated a few times too many but the raw stuff here is so jaw-dropping that you can forgive a little bit of monotony in the presentation. The film's format is conventional -- we get ominous drone-shots of the wilderness, "witnesses" now quite elderly (the confrontation happened in the early 80's) who are not afraid to air their idiocy for the camera: Sheela herself, apparently from Switzerland or "an undisclosed location", tells her side of the story and the various cowboys and ranch wives on the other side of the feud are still around to explain and justify their behavior. The landscapes are beautiful and the tale is wickedly amusing, a monument to human viciousness and arrogant stupidity. It's always salutary to be reminded of how stupidly human beings can behave, particularly when motivated by narrow-minded xenophobia or religious fanaticism.
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