Of Other Spaces
A Review of Wild Wild Country
FILM REVIEW by JAIRAN GAHAN
The grand experiment of the controversial Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, to build a self-sustained spiritual commune in the 1980s in the United States is a contentious but almost forgotten part of contemporary American history. This thought-provoking and gripping account of the wild life and the subsequent fall of Rajneeshpuram, a utopian city that was built from scratch on remote rugged heaths of Wasco County, Oregon, will keep you on the edge of your seat for six hours. With the unlikely amalgamation of events, including armed struggle, wire-tapping, an FBI raid, a massive bio-attack, collective immigration fraud, and plotted assassinations, you are in for a surreal ride. The strongest element of this six-hour docuseries lies in the skillful unfolding of the story from a multitude of perspectives. The documentary moves against the grains of the archives of collective memories of Americans, and demands the audience to confront their own prejudice. Critics see the series as a timely production, as it exposes the limits of freedom of religion on American soil, and reveals how the fear of the Other drives Americans and their politics.
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Directed by the Way Brothers (“The Battered Bastards of Baseball”), the series follows a linear storyline beginning with Rajneesh’s growing international reach and popularity in India in the context of growing New Age awakening movements across the globe. In the late 1970s, following Indira Gandhi’s coming to power and the subsequent rise of right wing Hindutva politics, Osho decides to leave the country. The promised land of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the freedom of assembly written into its constitution appeals to the unconventional and transgressive life style of the Indian guru and his community. “You have to be given a safe place… A place where all the ordinary things, taboos, inhibitions, are put aside” said Rajneesh as his followers, including Ivy League graduates, top-tier architects, wall street financers, and urban planners were sketching out the logistics of this dreamscape outside of India. They bought sixty-three acres of no man’s land in Oregon and built a massive commune with care and compassion for the land. In a few months-time his committed followers turned the untapped desert into a functional commune with dams, cultivated farm acreage, a massive meditation hall, a shopping center, cafeterias, and townhouses. The Way Brothers commence the drama of Rajneeshpuram with the spectacle of the waves of Rajneeshees, dressed famously in orange, red and maroon, walking on the streets of Antelope, the closest city to the commune, to welcome their leader to their handmade “heaven on earth.” The movie cuts into the shot of a little local boy running into his house and slamming the door behind him. Even without the overdramatizing editing techniques and the ample use of sound and visual effects of the Way Brothers, it is fairly clear that the neighboring town of conservative Christian cowboy ranchers did not welcome the newcomers.
Rajneeshees arrived in Oregon during the height of cult hysteria, just a few years after the Jonestown incident and before the Waco tragedy. The 1980s and the 1990s mark an important phase in late formations of American secularism as a mode of governance that increasingly attempts to shape, regulate, and monitor religion on the basis of racialized Christian values. In a way, Rajneeshpuram became the space through which secularism in the United States realized, exercised, and revealed its Xenophobic nature. The very genealogy of the emergence of the cult-religion dichotomy surfaces in extensive interviews with Antelopeans who legitimize their hostility towards the Rajneeshees through branding them as a sex-crazed Indian cult. Once the conflict snowballs into a massive battle at the national level, with FBI agents at its centerpiece, the series raises broader questions about the role of the state in constituting and policing religion. But there are more layers to the story of the fate of this commune.
Although America does not remember Rajneeshees kindly, the equivocal storytelling of the film demands one to see the other side. On the outset, this “opera” of Rajneeshpuram consists of archetypical characters including the sheriff, the power thirsty femme fetale, the dumb muscle follower, the bureaucrat, and everyman local ranchers. However, extensive interviews with key players has afforded complexity and depth to the development of these characters over the course of six episodes. The racialized Christian discourse of evil that surfaces in the interviews with law enforcement agents and local Antelopeans is confronted with conflicting and irreconcilable viewpoints of the one of a kind members and ex-members of the commune. “Everyone has a dark side. That does not mean that they are evil,” says Swami Prem Niren, the lawyer of Rajneesh, who is still melded in the memory of his late master. Ma Ananad Sheela, the feisty provocateur secretary of Osho who is clearly a bit too obsessed with the spotlight, is perhaps one of the most complicated characters depicted. Public media archives remember her as the face of the Rajneeshees and the mastermind behind the criminal activities in the commune. Yet strikingly, the movie cracks her tough façade and reveals another side of her: “I saw Bhagwan and that was the end of me,” says Sheela as she remembers her very first encounter with Rajneesh. Despite her departure from the community, she now lives in a house in Switzerland, with walls imbued with Rajneesh’s photos. Such intimate expressions of love have afforded the movie a very complicated idea of good and evil.
Ultimately however, “This is a story about the Other,” says Mark Duplass, the executive producer. The Ways’ lack of interest and investment in addressing the question of the spiritual, results in their eventual failure to move beyond reductive mainstream narratives of the commune. They end up reaffirming the Americans as the Self, intolerant as they may be, and the Rajneeshes as the incomprehensible Other. The Rajneeshees were not ordinary people. They wanted to be a part of something revolutionary, radically rejecting comforts of their luxurious and mostly privileged city lives, looking for a greater meaning in life. Rajneeshpuram, was an expression of the collective will of a spiritual community who dared to dream of a world anew. They pushed the limits of human imagination, left their fortune, worked 16 hours a day, and used the most niche technologies of sustainable development and farming to build a meaningful world. The film’s disinterest in the content of Osho’s teachings, as well as in the history of New Age spiritual movements, has reduced him to a populist leader, leaving the followers unintelligible to the viewership. In this film, Osho’s mass appeal can only be explained through Weber’s theory of charisma, itself premised on a peculiar combination of the magical and the socially constructed nature of authority. The featured followers are smart, well-educated, and well-off. Why would they be drawn to the strangely dressed, perpetually smiling guru who likes shiny things? We never hear what was in Osho’s discourses, tapes, and writings that compelled people to seek his presence.
The film tells the story of how a dreamscape turned into a nightmare when materialized. The revisionist touch of the Ways perceives the commune at its best as a failed utopia, leaving the viewer without an alternative way to comprehend the phenomenon of this experiment. But “Utopias are sites with no real space,” the philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us. Rajneeshpuram however, could also be understood as a lived heterotopia, a multiple place of experience and becoming, a site of transformation where not only the Rajneeshees, but also the Antelopeans, and the U.S. government officials discovered and realized their longings, core desires, and aptitudes—both dark and light, good and evil. “The master’s work was to put you on a path,” says Swami Prem Niren. A more radical approach to Rajneeshpuram would entail a serious exploration and an intellectual engagement with this path. Only then would it be possible to fully push back against the cult-religion dichotomy, and explore new ways of thinking about alternative assemblies that are not graspable by political structures of the modern nation-state.
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