Jonestown: The Life and Death of The People's Temple (2007)

For this evening's fare, I watched a fantastic documentary on the tragedy of Jonestown. For those not in the know, Jonestown was a commune set up outside the United States by a fuckin' loon by the name of Jim Jones. He started as a small-town minister who happened to have a bond with the oppressed (ie, black people) and started up a church known as People's Temple. Throughout the years, People's Temple became more and more popular and Jones used that clout to get himself appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority as the Chairman.

All is not as it seems in the People's Temple, and as 10 of his former followers come forward to the city newspapers with allegations of all kinds of control-freak behavior and other deviances, Jones flees the country to Guayana, where he has begun construction on his own utopia, dubbed Jonestown. I don't want to spoil the ending, because it is ultimately tragic and for someone like my wife, who really didn't know too much about Jonestown before watching, it strikes a very strong chord deep down and poses many questions that you don't want answered.

This is where I think the documentary is the strongest. There is a build-up of dread from minute one. Having read up on the tragedy, I knew where it was all leading, but I was still surprised by the last twenty minutes. The documentary crew used actual footage taken from People's Temple proceedings and you could see and hear Jim Jones as his own followers could, which was haunting. At first you think, "this guy is nothing more than a Roy Orbison look-a-like!" But as Jones becomes more demented, he becomes the stuff of nightmares.

I don't know if the original PBS airing was edited for content, but the DVD I watched had profanity, but it was not for profanity's sake. Some of the actual Jonestown survivors don't utter one single curseword until the last five minutes, and it is because of that fact that their raw emotional response are given an extra, heartbreaking resonance. This documentary will haunt you long after it is over. You will question how something like that could happen to so many people. You will probably ask yourself if you yourself would have fallen victim. Personally, I find many allegories to our current political climate, and how we have all been lining up to receive our Kool-Aid for the last seven years. But that is neither here nor there. Check this film out.