Living at the edge

Cults, damaged film, and the shifting nature of perspective

I think of Anchorage as comparatively removed from much of the world. A remote outpost community.

I shared this with a friend who lived in rural Montana before moving here. She chided me. Anchorage is hardly the edge of society, she said.

That’s the perspective many Alaskans take too. People love to say that Anchorage isn’t really Alaska, more like “Seattle North.” They say we have it easy here in the big city, with our box stores, movie theaters, a major airport, and a few mountains to boot.

I’m not denying that I have it easy. Or that others don’t live much more isolated lives. But from my perspective, given what I know, this is the outskirts for me.

I grew up in New York. During my first year in Anchorage, it was legitimately shocking that I couldn’t walk to a bodega late at night and obtain food. It was shocking that a moose could curl up in the snow outside my door and refuse to leave, barring my exit. From that vantage point, Anchorage feels remote.

And it is remote. Many companies won’t ship things here. It’s a three-plus hour, 1,444 mile, and several hundred dollar plane ride to Seattle. It takes a day to drive to Whitehorse, the nearest Canadian city which is itself in the middle of the wild and undeveloped Yukon.

The truth, as I tell it, is that Anchorage is far away from what I used to know.

*

Stewarts Photo, one of the few camera stores in town, recently started developing film. On Saturday, I picked up the roll of black and white Kodak Tri-X I’d dropped off last week to find the following note. “Reticulated!” it read. Although the developer was able to get me my scans, he admitted to having messed up the process. As a result, my film was flawed. I was not charged and instead, was given a new roll for free.

Anchorage photographers, please give Stewarts your business! Just look at this customer service.

I opened the link to the scans. Huh. From far away, the images on my phone looked fine. Great, even. I was pleased.

But when I zoomed in, I saw it. The fractured pattern of bars within the image. Kind of like pointillism, from far away the picture holds. But up close, it’s revealed as something different. A constellation of lines as if the photo was printed on textured paper or beveled glass.

I don’t mind the effect. Photography is wild, after all. An attempt to capture reality through light and shadows chemically transformed. I still don’t understand how it works, I just know that I like the process. Holding the camera to my eye and paying attention to what’s there, here, as I see it.

*

Subjective reality has been on my mind. The same day that I picked up that roll of film, I watched all three episodes of the HBO miniseries Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. It’s a documentary made by Hannah Olson about an ordinary American woman who, after her first ecstasy trip in the early 2000s, convinces others that she is God.

Instead of featuring expert testimony to debunk the cult’s beliefs or practices, Olson’s film consists primarily of footage that the cult recorded and broadcast itself. “Mother God” and her followers were prolific livestreamers. Olson plays the recorded streams alongside interviews of cult members and their families to paint a chilling and oh-so-human portrait of what it looks like to be lost.

I enjoy cult documentaries. I enjoy the terror of realizing how easy it could have been to get swept up in something similar when I was younger and more naive.

Like many cult leaders, Mother God critiques society. Her followers—a veteran, a former addict, someone whose father overdosed on opiates, and someone in serious medical debt—have all been harmed by modern American life. As the documentary unfolds (mild, though very predictable, spoiler), we learn the ways in which Mother God was also harmed. She was subjected to childhood abuse and neglect and later to intimate partner violence, as well as the mundane limits of middle class professionalism as she managed her local McDonalds restaurant. In short, the backstories of everyone profiled are depressing.

Who doesn’t want a better life? I relate. I chose to move across the country and settle in what, to me, is a community with more freedom. A place on the outskirts of the world as I see it, with ample room to play.

What if I hadn’t had the means to attend law school, get a good job, and uproot? What if I was raising multiple children on my own before the age of 30? What if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to find people who allowed me to believe in my worth and in the possibility that I, too, could have more?

In contrast to other cult documentaries, I didn’t come away from this one thinking that Mother God is a sociopath or otherwise mal-intentioned. Instead, she brings to mind the tragic seekers of life and literature both. She’s not unlike the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening who feels the only way to leave her suffocating life of 19th-century motherhood is by walking into the ocean with stones in her pockets.

I can imagine that Mother God needed a powerful justification to leave her life (and three children) behind. What could be more important than being told in a drug-fueled bender that you are God and that the world needs your guidance? Surely that would justify almost anything.

By the end of Love Has Won, I felt compassion. How human it is to seek for what we sense is possible, to want better for ourselves, and to question the perceived order.

But alongside compassion, there’s disgust. A desire to create distance from people who’ve made horrible decisions. When we feel threatened, it’s comforting to be able to label people a certain way. To say “us” as distinct from “them.”

*

One of the most bizarre aspects of Mother God’s universe was that she considered the late Robin Williams to be one of her top spiritual advisors. I tend to group Williams with Philip Seymour Hoffman, about whom I wrote several months ago. Men whose minds led them too close to the edge without enough support to withstand the fall.

Unspooling

As I toe the line of relating to cult devotees, I remember my tethers. The practices that keep me safe and sane within the boundaries of what I know to be real.

Exploring our limits is one of the best parts of having autonomy. I don’t think going on a drug trip in which you believe you’re God necessarily has to mean you’ll never return to a healthy life. I wish things had ended differently for the woman who once called herself that.

I feel compassion for the seekers. For everyone who has looked for more. I’m grateful that my journey led me to safety of my own making. I’m grateful that, in my more vulnerable moments, I did not succumb to the fall.

The thing is, not all of Mother God’s beliefs were ridiculous. Like in a reticulated photo, sometimes the world appears to shatter and reveal itself as interconnected patterns undergirding what we see as real.

But as happens with untreated mental illness and lack of basic support systems, the cult members took it too far. They lost touch with what grounds us to this world. The results are devastating.

There’s a line in the TV series Fleishman Is in Trouble where Claire Danes’ character—a well-off New York mother who has a mental break and abandons her family—says something like, “I never stood a chance.” How different is she, really, from Mother God. Yet how many worlds apart do they seem.

Sometimes the picture appears only when we zoom out.

Thanks for reading. It means a lot to hear when my work resonates, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care what you think. With that, I hope you have a great rest of your week.