Love Has Won, HBO cult documentary

Sorry, clever titles aren’t my expertise.

Only 2 episodes in and already it’s clear all these people are bonkers - maybe even more bonkers than Amy herself. It sounds like she asked to go to a hospital but they wouldn’t take because “that’s not what she really wants” and that she basically admitted before she died that she was full of shit but her disciples are so addicted to this that they wouldn’t believe her.

Erin in particular gives me the creeps (the one who gave up her kids for the cult). There’s something so unhinged and desperate about the way she talks.

The Galactics poster was truly so cringe. The whole spiritual infrastructure actually seems extremely shallow and not thought-out at all. The way Amy talks and the jargon she uses - it just sounds completely off the cuff, like a high school version of cult dogma.

Also just amazed by how willingly they opened up for this doc - I’m curious how the producers sold this idea to them, whether they think the filmmakers are on their side.

Cool! Did Robin tell you to create this thread?

Loool why are they so obsessed with Robin???

Also highly recommend both of the Twin Flames Universe documentaries, much different but very interesting.

Thing totally has a fake documentary feel to it because it’s so on the nose.

lol oh man I saw the first two episodes of this and otm James, hard to believe it’s not fake at times

Erin has big Art the Clown energy.

There are so many cult docs! I thought my wife may have been watching this one, but it turns out she was watching the Twin Flames doc. I watched five minutes but I couldn't really give a shit.

Waiting for the episode where Leo Sayer has had enough and breaks out. #onethread

Loool why are they so obsessed with Robin???

Cult mythos so cheaply and cheesily constructed it could have been one of Zappa’s rejected skit ideas from his infamous SNL hosting gig. #onethreadagain

Watched two episodes, some of the dumbest people I've ever encountered on my TV.

just1n3 otm, the whole thing was so juvenile

also it was funny how they are like "alcohol, weed, and cigarettes are medicine" it basically seemed like a college party house with a thin veneer of spiritualism, they all seemed pretty loaded most of the time

Also the whole colloidal silver as a cure-all - sounds like Amy was drinking liters of it very day? They show that clip of Hope/Ashley on a livestream mocking “morons” who don’t know how to correctly manufacture it, how it turns skin blue when it’s not made right… and then cut to asking that former member if she was still there when Amy’s skin starting changing color.

I wonder how her poor kids are dealing with what happened.

Probably for the best that they are not interviewed although maybe we will find out later

We started this, so sad.

Also, like all these cult drama docs ... who gives a shit. Sigh. People are strange.

Feel like maybe…it may give some insight into the behavior of people who are not technically in cults?

I dunno. I do have trouble watching some of these things, because I know a lot of the participants are coming from places of real pain and trauma, and especially loneliness. But others seems to be insane. And a lot of these people in particular, yeah, seem "like a college party house with a thin veneer of spiritualism."

"I fucking love all all of you, bask in the sunshine of god's love, ignore the haters, woot! Where's my fuckin' chicken tacos?!" (takes long hit from a bong)

I read Will Sommer's excellent QAnon book, and the saddest aspect of it came (I think it's in the book) when he relays all the people who have come to him asking for advice about helping family members, and he admits he's come to the conclusion, after so many years of research and reporting and speaking with experts, that some people can't be helped and at a certain point it's best to just cut ties. Someone upthread asked why anyone would participate in this doc, and the answer seems obvious to me: because they are believers.

Also, like all these cult drama docs ... who gives a shit. Sigh. People are strange.

I do! Part of me just enjoys having my mind boggled at people's gullibility, part of me is frankly just amazed at how these mediocre people are able to posit themselves as leaders. Love Has Won is an outlier as I believe it's a woman, right (I haven't watched it yet). But it's usually men, and frankly, pretty stupid men, who simply repeat themselves ad nauseum because they like to hear themselves talk... it's quite amazing to see this succeed for them.

i mean this is what stands out to me from the wiki article:

late 2007, Carlson left her third husband, her children, and her job as a manager at McDonald's,[4][6] and ceased contact with most members of her family,[4]

so basically someone who made some poor life decisions and hurt people around her and died. that's a success? you call that a success? there are probably millions of people out there like that in america alone right now. to me that's the story.

Also, having seen the two episodes released, she doesn't seem to have much power herself. There is a shadowy guy working in the back who has all the financial power, and then she gets completely steamrolled by this other toxic grifter.

Success presumably meaning that anyone listens to her at all.

It’s not that anything is earthshaking or even particularly surprising, it’s just the Spinal Tap-level perfection of delineating the thin line between clever and stupid.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/11/love-has-won-mother-god-cult-amy-carlson
May contain spoilers for the upcoming third and last episode.

Actually no real spoilers that I could see

Xps that’s what makes this particular cult interesting - the so-called leader doesn’t hold the majority of power. That Wall Street guy holds all the financial power and even her followers seem to have exert quite a lot of control over actions.

it sounds like a sad story for sure, and i could see how people could find it compelling. mostly i watch documentaries to learn things, and i'm not sure what i'd learn from watching this one!

I feel like it is indeed giving me some more insight into or at least more detail about this type of behavior, even though I couldn’t put my finger on anything that is novel about it apart from it being mostly the testimony of the members themselves.

even her followers seem to have exert quite a lot of control over actions

yeah she is an obvious alcoholic who started openly questioning her weird life choices, asking to go to the hospital, etc, and they didn't let her.

That anorexic Erica woman who burned down the place in Oregon, had her kids taken away by her mother, is one of the most deeply traumatized looking people I've ever seen on a show like this. I hope she gets some help she needs years of therapy.

i guess what i would say is... if people are watching this show, try not to generalize. i haven't seen any of these shows, i only know about them secondhand. i remember when "tiger king" was going on and there was a guy in that show and they misgendered him through the whole show. like it kind of reminds me of the whole "outsider art" thing. is it exploitation, or is it giving outsiders a voice? sometimes i feel like i'm on my way to the outside of everything. i don't know if that's true or not. i know a lot of people... i feel like their stories are just as worth telling, just as compelling, as anything you see on these documentaries. they're not my stories to tell.

the challenging thing is how people who have suffered a lot of trauma can tell those stories. how do you tell it without making it trauma porn (or, just as bad, inspiration porn), without centering the suffering, the sadness, the pain. "love has won" seems like a pretty extreme version of a story about someone on the outside. there seem to be a lot of documentaries, lately, that are extreme versions of stories about people on the outside. maybe they're all fine. i haven't seen any of them. i'm just suspicious and distrustful.

Also, like all these cult drama docs ... who gives a shit. Sigh. People are strange.

towards the end of the 2nd ep this sort of made me think of the ending of the Rosselini Louis XIV movie where his standing in court had increased exponentially and he was well on the way to becoming the unassailably powerful Sun King, but he still looked like a prisoner of his own making. Probably a shit comparison because he wasn't drinking his own body weight in vodka every day!

I was expecting this to be amusing and deranged, which it frequently was at the start, but it also became so much more extremely grim.

xpost Fair enough, I was certainly being harsh, but to my mind there are distinctions. Like, some cults have national or international or historic repercussions - Scientology, QAnon, Waco, Jonestown, Manson - but others are just these sad or salacious one-off stories. I think Kate asked how you make something like this something other than torture porn or whatever, and imo one way to attempt to do that is don't serialize it. Don't stretch it out into this edge of your seat, omg what happens next tale. Find a way to support the story with empathy, give it a structure or context. Not saying that this is a particularly egregious example, but the suggestions recommended by the streaming algorithm often reveal the kind of company it keeps.

So you think three episodes is two too many?

Yeah, maybe. I think it might have worked better as a two hour stand alone doc, but this is a problem endemic to all streaming stuff, non-fiction or no. Either things are stretched out too far, or they feel rushed. Like, my family watched that Maya doc, about the family accused of Munchausen, and it felt like it should have been two installments, one about that poor girl and what she went through, and the other about the subsequent legal battle and all the others with similar stories (which felt rushed). But something like Wild Wild Country (which I feel sort of supercharged the cult streaming doc trend) was too much at six episodes.

I think what sometimes happen is that the filmmakers come across a trove of footage, so the temptation is to use as much as they can.

reading the wikipedia article on Love Has Won, there is an extensive amount of other troubling stuff around them that the doc so far hasn't even touched on (and doesn't seem like it will, given there is only one more episode and she's already almost dead). I didn't know they'd been on Dr. Phil; that there were allegations of abuse internally (sleep deprivation; someone was found wandering naked in the woods, etc) and racism and antisemitism. They also kind of skirt around the really troubling right-wing nonsense that peppers a lot of this stuff. These are aspects that are kind of more interesting to me, having just finished reading Naomi Klein's Doppleganger where she talks a bit about diagonalism and how it's infiltrated these 'spritual' communities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Has_Won

xpost Fair enough, I was certainly being harsh, but to my mind there are distinctions. Like, some cults have national or international or historic repercussions - Scientology, QAnon, Waco, Jonestown, Manson - but others are just these sad or salacious one-off stories. I think Kate asked how you make something like this something other than torture porn or whatever, and imo one way to attempt to do that is don't serialize it. Don't stretch it out into this edge of your seat, omg what happens next tale. Find a way to support the story with empathy, give it a structure or context. Not saying that this is a particularly egregious example, but the suggestions recommended by the streaming algorithm often reveal the kind of company it keeps.

― Josh in Chicago

lol i think of torture porn as something different from trauma porn but other than that haha

i'd go the opposite direction! i'd tell a bigger story. one that's not "love has won" but also isn't fucking "hillbilly elegy". this whole word, "precariat", more and more of us are on the edge. there's a lot more precarity in my life than there was five years ago, and that's largely a result of my life choices, but those life choices are largely _good_ life choices, they've made me a _better person_. what better choices did this lady have? in retrospect we can say, sure, she would have been better off being a fucking mcdonalds restaurant manager for her whole life, but one maybe that just wasn't an option, and two, more importantly, it's fucking easy to judge that in retrospect. i don't like change, i don't like risk, but i've changed a lot, i've taken some pretty serious risks. the more desperate one is, the bigger risks one winds up taking.

my impression that she was pretty desperate and she took some pretty fucking big risks. and that those risks didn't pay off too well.

when i look around i see a lot of people falling off the edge in one way or another. you can tell the dramatic stories like the story of _love has won_, but there are other stories. people who quit their jobs because they can't handle the working conditions and are trying to get by without money. people who are going through the process of applying for disability. people who can't keep a steady job. people who get addicted to drugs. people who lose their homes. people who commit suicide. people who don't even know how to _want_ anything more than the return of coal mining jobs.

that's the story, to me, and it... it surprises me the extent to which people aren't _aware_ of that story. who still look at these things and treat them as Other. i feel like most people here... know some version of that story. the extent to which people know that story, can understand that story, kind of determines the extent to which i can even _talk_ to those people. like, i'm looking for a port in a storm here, a lot of people are looking for a port in a storm, but as best i can tell most of the ports have been closed down.

the walled garden i grew up in... it's like a reverse hotel california. you can leave anytime, but nobody's allowed to move in. i commute in for my job, but i don't feel like i really belong there. i feel like an imposter. people don't see me, people don't know me like they used to. i'm just waiting, really, for them to kick me out. the people around me say that it won't happen, that i do great work, that they love and value me, but it's not up to them, really...

i mean, what kind of documentary do you want to make? there's this trans lady that a lot of us know about with... an exceptionally horrific and fucked up story. you could make a documentary about her that's not that different from the documentary on "love has won", except that it would probably be more fucked-up and horrific than "love has won". i'm not going to say her name in public because people are out there looking for her name. none of us talk about her. a lot of us know about her, about what happened to her, about what she did. what would a documentary about her _look_ like? who would you talk to about her? what footage would you use? what kinds of conclusions would people draw from that documentary?

and yet i think it's probably a documentary worth making, a story worth telling, more than "love has won" is. if it's done right, at least.

---

xp yeah akm that stuff actually sounds like the _interesting_ stuff! if you're gonna talk about "love has won" why would you _not_ talk about the through-line from trumpism, as if trumpism has nothing to do with this? it's not just that it's telling a pointless story, it's that it's deliberately ignoring the stuff that would give it any sort of meaning. i do judge that approach, judge it harshly.

It's in the doc isn't it? Trump and QAnon and (iirc) Hitler? Just in passing, though, they certainly don't dwell on it. So yeah, I agree with your broader point, Kate. Maybe this is an example of something that *should* have been longer, given all they've apparently cut out and how, per my point I guess, that stuff does give it a meatier, more complex contemporary/historic/political context.

imagine the word counts if you'd actually watched the thing rush

imagine the word counts if you'd actually watched the thing rush

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

which would you prefer: for me to watch the thing, or for me to stop sharing my opinions about the larger social ramifications of documentaries like "love has won" on this thread?

There is a tension in this show between Amy’s general lack of charisma or coherent spiritual philosophy, and the overwhelming desire of many of the others to believe in it. There definitely seems to be at least some who, if truly pressed, would acknowledge this was mostly a safe space to indulge their drug habits and escape the worst of their “3D Lives.” But I am *fascinated* by the handful of interviewees who, after all this time, still seem fully committed to the idea that Amy was Mother God, absorbing the pain of humanity.

(I haven’t finished the final episode yet)

Click on it E3 and watched a few minutes, not sure if I feel like finishing it right now.

Clicked on

This series was pretty wacked-out and disturbing; but I ended up feeling like they almost "soft-pedeled" it at the end? Like all the interviewees (besides Amy's family) are still true believers, and doing their cult thing online... has no one "gotten out" besides the money guy(?) It felt so soft-edged in the wrap-up, almost like it was just stopping short of "promoting" the whole thing. I dunno how they could left it, I guess. (My wife also looked up the background, and it sounds like there was some big stuff they didn't touch on, like sexual assault allegations against "Father God" by others in the group.)

Also, to the degree everyone seemed to be absolutely tripping balls most the time, there's sort of a lesser degree of inherent interest than when otherwise clear-minded ppl are lured into something outrageous (but I guess no one's "sobered up")

i think a big part of that is because 90% of it was filmed about a month after she died. I was surprised at how into it some of the adherents still are a year later though (though I was relieved that one woman went home to her kids). As a documentary, I think this was a good series, it's scope was narrow and it avoided extrapolating and examining the psyche of what drives people to seek this lifestyle (IMO, massive amounts of unresolved trauma); I think a series that does seek to address that would be good.

Yeah, I hope that one woman got serious help (and glad she was able to reunite with her kids).

We also watched both Twin Flames Universe series (really in our cult docs era, I guess) – those too make the (probably wise) choice of not really trying to analyze how such otherwise stable-seeming folks get pulled into something like that, it's just mind-boggling.

yeah I watched both of those within a few days of each other and then this too. that's.....9 hours of my life I spent this weekend with cults

We started this other Max series, "The Garden"... it's almost a commune-themed reality series or something (like The Real World); not sure we'll stick with that. I think it's from the Discovery side of Max, not the HBO side.

Interview with the director, Hannah Olson (likely paywalled, I don't know if LAT gives a few free reads).

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-11-28/love-has-won-amy-carlson-hbo-director

"Mother said I've stolen her joy by making the worst quesadilla in all of Creation"

That interview was really good and not paywalled for whatever reason, thanks. Maybe now I will watch E3.

It's somewhat telling (maybe) that neither of my family watch-mates have inquired about the third episode.

Many stories trail off in the last act.

A coworker who watched it had the same impression I did; that the series stopped just short of “promoting” the cult in a way, and was somewhat one-sided in mainly talking to true believers.

(That “Father God” guy, in particular, got a lot of screen time for someone who seems like a problematic individual… and I’m not sure that showing him eating pizza or whatever really accomplished what was intended, if that was to “undercut” his
point of view.)

dunno, I didn't watch this and come away from it thinking any of these people were on the right track.

I for one am shocked and stunned that this three part documentary did not solve the general problem of cults once and for all.

xp Yeah “promoting” may be the wrong word, but maybe making them look more “sympathetic”?

This was kind of an illuminating discussion on KQED in the bay area this week, re: cults and our fascination with them: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101895177/why-cults-fascinate-us-with-uc-berkeley-professor-poulomi-saha

Thanks!

But in her highly sought-after class called Cults in Popular Culture, they emphasize that it’s important to look beyond the sensational examples and recognize how cult-like behavior shows up in many facets of our lives and society

Now can’t stop thinking of those famous advisors as Los Galácticos.

King Leo told me to drive to the desert.

the olson interview was interesting! i think... like i think she really does understand this story, to a large extent, the way i do. or close to it.

“I don’t even know if I feel like it’s a cult film,” she said. “It’s an American tragedy about disenchantment with the American dream and a search for a different reality, and the way that snake eats its own tail.”

see, to me, a lot of the time i look at cults, people who look at the world and say "I reject your reality, and substitute my own!", and I say "HEY, ME TOO." Which is hard to communicate. Sometimes people look at me and they look at some right-wing cult and they think we're the same, and we're not. We've both done this one thing, though. We've both chosen to reject the liberal capitalist view of reality.

That's why it hits me when the story starts with this lady quitting her job as a manager at McDonalds. She's quitting a reality that... has nothing to _give_ her. I can't blame anybody from wanting to escape that dogshit reality. She was unlucky. She made some bad choices. It doesn't sound like she had any good choices. She took colloidal silver. I took estrogen. Twenty years ago they were both considered quack science by authorities. I don't know what's right. All I know is what's wrong. All I know is what _isn't_ working for me. And if people will do any goddamn thing, even the stupidest shit imaginable, to get away from that reality... I mean yeah, that is a tragedy. I agree with Olson.

I think liberal capitalist reality is something we _all_ need to run the fuck away from. As fast as we fucking can. I don't recommend running in the direction Mother God did.

I think I'm going to just call her Mother God. Because that's what she called herself when she died, right? "Amy Carlson" is a deadname.