I’m from NYC, and I regularly go into Boston or Harvard Square so I casually encounter a fair number of proselytizing Scientologists. As a child of the 80s, I repeatedly saw the commercial for Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard with the exploding volcano, but instinctually knew that it wasn’t about geology. I’m one of those people who watched the two hour Jason Beghe expose video or the accidentally widely released Tom Cruise’s Scientology promotional video on YouTube so when I watched Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, it was not my first encounter with the group.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is a great documentary for anyone curious about the hubbub surrounding Scientology, The Master or why Germany detests Tom Cruise, but I was disappointed that it did not elaborate on the actual tenets of Hubbard’s version of the religion. If there is overpopulation, and you successfully kill your population, why go to the trouble of capturing their souls and brainwashing them? And people being born here-different people from the overpopulated worlds, right?
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief emphasizes the actual lives, not the beliefs, of the founder and his followers, but I would have preferred a documentary that did both. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is primarily concerned with the abuses which stem from the inception of the religion and showing the disillusionment of its members. I think that it left too much room for people to use the excuse, “Of course every religion becomes corrupted, but the actual tenets are great.” To be fair, I encountered a lot of technical difficulties when I watched Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief so by the time that I got to see it, I probably wasn’t as focused as I wanted to be. Kudos goes to my mom who explained Hubbard to me, “The thetans being thrown into a volcano and tortured is just his version of hell.” I wouldn’t mind watching Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief again to see if I could glean more than I did during my initial screening.