The revolution will be televised. I'm quite a sucker for films about cults, but the remarkable thing is how many of them were caught on film. But the Peoples Temple was the cult-uber-ales, which ended in the murder-suicide of almost a thousand of its members; and even this is mostly on the record, including live action footage taken as Jones's followers shot and killed a U.S. representative. The documentary thus almost makes itself, although it's well put together, with interviews carried out with some survivors of the massacre. None of these now see any good whatsoever in the Temple (unlike some other cults who still retain some support amonst their ex-members); and they explain their past decisions as a mixture of beguilment and coerction. Founder Jim Jones had a certain charisma, albeit a creepy one; but the take home message is that people see what they need to (or, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, "at the end of every long hard day people find some reason to believe"). The scale of the tragedy makes the story compelling; you'd like to think it couldn't happen again, but you'd probably be wrong.
Review of Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle
