A thorough examination of the infamous UFO cult through the eyes of its former members and loved ones. What started in 1975 with the disappearance of 20 people from a small town in Oregon, ended in 1997 with the largest suicide on US soil and changed the face of modern new age religion forever.
Clay Tweel recently embarked on a journey to exploring the history and context of the largest mass suicide ever recorded in America, involving 39 individuals representing the Heaven’s Gate Cult. Heaven’s Gate didn’t gain its notoriety until that moment in March 1997 and soon, the media began to gobble up every tangible detail of the cult’s abnormalities. There was much to be explored in the documentary with surprisingly a plethora of primary sources as content, and it all starts with “Do” and “Ti”.
“Do” (Marshall Applewhite), an opera singer with certain mental reservations, and “Ti” (Bonnie Nettles), a morally-confused nurse, joined forces in 1975, indulging each other’s philosophies with humble beginnings. However, their humble beginnings turned ambitious as it culminated in a religious belief system that chosen ones were meant to be taken away on UFOs and given the opportunity to explore space before going en route to heaven.
Together, they formed Heaven’s Gate, which resembled much of the various cults that were being birthed in the 1980s. The cult combined a vague outline of Christianity and the concept of a second-coming with an outlandish finale for redemption and beyond in space, recruiting more followers with the same tactics of normalization and reward systems as questionable worship often does.
Tweel utilizes the first two episodes of his four-part documentary to create a grounded narrative that lures the audience into seemingly tame waters before going for the kill in his latter two episodes. However, rather than shock, the documentary is bonded together by a consistent increase in momentum that even the craziest characteristics of the cult don’t seem as crazy over time. Instead, there is an ambiguous sense of empathy for all the speakers in the documentary, even to the most primary of sources because underneath the media fanatics, there is an element of humanity that is misunderstood by its disturbing surroundings.
“Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults” isn’t the most in-depth delve into cults and its origins, but it succeeds in establishing personalization to the stories that are often exchanged as ‘fun facts’ rather than as relatable narratives. There is repressed homosexuality, a desire for spirituality beyond the human vessel, desperation for a collective, and a strange synergy between the spirituality and science of acquiring heaven through aliens.
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