#Trumps cult animosity shows sign up series#

By watching the cult show, the viewer enacts critical distance from disgusting and fearsome cult followers. Anti-cult “experts” and psychiatrists model this form of knowing for the audience. The documentary genre clothes ideologically-informed narratology with an aura of objective historicism, advancing a way of knowing that preferences critical distance over the suspension of disbelief, which is foregrounded in overtly fictional stories. The affective undercurrent of the cult show’s narratology raises an important question: why do audiences intentionally cultivate feelings of disgust and fear to help them relax? The answer begins with the shows’ documentarian approach. Together, “brainwashing” and “cults” inspire a powerful bodily reaction of disgust and fear. The connection between sex and brainwashing in the NXIVM documentaries add to this affective weight. Like “cult,” “brainwashing” also carries affective weight: it carries the sense that something toxic has entered one’s body, triggering a disgust reaction. Anti-cult experts appear in almost all of these docuseries to expound this theory, offering hyperbolic descriptions of the power of the brainwasher and lending credence to the explanation of why people would join such a group.

The series use this theory to explain why people join a cult in the first place. Each show relies on the so-called “robot theory” of brainwashing, which suggests that the victim’s mind can be programmed like a computer. I then move on to the series’ shared emphasis on brainwashing. The cult show is so stimulating because it produces these feelings by its very subject matter. The word cult, I argue, operates in a similar way: simply applying the word cult to something makes the audience feel certain that what they are witnessing is an object of disgust and something to be feared. Affect theorists have noted that disgust is a “sticky” affect, meaning that anything coming into contact with an object of disgust becomes disgusting itself. From the 1970s onward––but particularly in the wake of the Peoples Temple deaths in 1978––“cult” inspired a particular combination of feelings in anyone who heard it namely, fear and disgust. I focus on the narratology shaping these series, beginning with the label “cult.” The discursive freight of the term is well known, but the word also has an affective freight that must be accounted for.

There were dozens of cult-themed podcasts and docuseries released in the wake of Netflix’s 2018 hit Wild Wild Country, including at least two podcasts dedicated solely cults with more than 500 episodes between them and a spate docuseries-style cult shows produced in 2020, among them The Vow, Seduced and Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults. This paper seeks to understand why cult shows, at the peak of their popularity circa 2020, became a method of self-care. “You do realize,” he asked, “there’s a type of show that’s even better than murder shows, right?” The husband, now dressed in Keith Raniere’s trademark tie-dye shirt and volleyball attire––and, of course, sporting Raniere’s ponytail––launched into his own verse about “cult shows.” SNL’s satirical skit pointed to one of the most interesting aspects of the cult show phenomenon: audiences tune in to shows about “murder cults” and “sex cults” (as SNL called them) to relax and engage in “self-care.” A quick Google search yields scores of “listicles” offering the best cult shows to binge, many of them featuring the same kind of advice as quoted in this paper’s title. Until, that is, one woman’s husband caught her bingeing. “I have the whole night to unwind and do a little self-care, the only way I know how.” Thus began a February 2021 Saturday Night Live musical short paying tribute to “murder shows.” Women, cuddled up on their couches and cozy in their blankets, crooned about Netflix true crime series for two minutes.

#Trumps cult animosity shows sign up series#