In the years since “Serial” and “Making a Murderer,” the limited series true-crime documentary has been booming. “O.J. Made in America” won an Oscar, “The Vietnam War” built a new narrative of America’s ugliest war, and “American Vandals” skewered the whole genre in a delightful comedic send up. But despite the deluge, people still seem to be hooked. It’s this momentum that “Wild Wild Country,” the new Netflix doc series, wants to ride all the way to cult status. And while it’s got all the right ingredients to be the next jaw-dropping TV event, the production, at times, falls short of the mesmerizing and absurd story at its heart.
In broad terms, “Wild Wild Country” is a series about generational divides, religious animosity, and the hate cast upon those who you don’t understand. But what makes the series stand out from others in the genre are the strange and hard-to-believe details that make up this very true story — the inundation of Rolls Royces, the biological attacks, the wild orgies, the violent meditation, the million dollar watches and the central figure, who doesn’t so much as speak for three years.
All of which makes the narrative of the series chaotic and overstuffed — which is hardly a fault of the filmmakers, Chapman and Maclain Way (the excellent “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”), who do good work translating a messy, years-long trainwreck into a compelling and almost-sensible story. Put simply, though, “Wild Wild Country” follows the Rajneesh movement and the utopian city of 10,000 they tried to establish in the early 1980s in rural Oregon.
After fleeing what they called persecution, the followers of Indian guru Rajneesh purchased a vast ranch outside the town of Antelope, which had a population of a few dozen retirees. From the get-go, tensions arose between the people of Antelope and the young Rajneeshees who moved in up the road. Not only were the newcomers free-spirited — the sounds of their orgies could be heard all over town and the entire group wore nothing but an eerie shade of maroon — but they were determined. So much so that when their ranch began running afoul of the local laws they ran their own candidates for city council and won nearly every seat and the mayorship.
At the heart of all this chaos is Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh’s personal secretary who, during Rajneesh’s prolonged silence, was the de facto leader of what became known as Rajneeshpuram (not only did they take over Antelope, they renamed the whole town). And the choices she made and the lengths the government went to stop her, were truly stranger than fiction. As the Rajneeshees upset and unsettled the town and the county and the entire state of Oregon, more and more people took notice and more and more trouble began to brew. To keep themselves afloat, the group put up an impressive legal battle, poisoned several hundred people with salmonella, drugged several thousand homeless people, planned assassinations, and ultimately, became a militarized pseudo-state that teetered for years on the verge of a violent showdown with the FBI.
Amid this chaos is a shocking story of religious persecution, racism, appropriation, and the very short distance we all live from hate and violence. Which is to say that what makes “Wild Wild Country” so compelling is that everybody involved is acting at their worst. The residents of Antelope are quick to devolve into blatant bigotry as they watch their town get overrun. The Rajneeshees scream persecution at every perceived slight (in addition to the above-mentioned actions). And elected officials — in a nearly vindictive state — bend laws to make their case against the group. And each terrible action sparks an equally awful reaction until, finally, the Rajneeshees are bunkering down with assault rifles and poisoning towns.
And it’s exactly this sort of drama that “Wild Wild Country” is interested in serving up. Told from the perspectives of people involved in nearly every side (and there become many, many sides), the series is an impressive feat of documentary journalism. Every nook and cranny of the narrative is explored in detail ad nauseam. But what the series does not do is attempt to make sense of any of the mess that unfolds, nor does it ever really attempt to find a moral heart — at least until the very end in the form of one particular former Rajneeshee.
Unlike, say, “O.J. Made in America,” the Way brothers’ series doesn’t want to examine the culture that led to so many young men and women to flock to Rajneesh — the series won’t even go so far as to truly examine the cult-like nature of the movement. It doesn’t want to scrutinize the bigotry of the people of Antelope or to even investigate what it was about Rajneesh, the man at the center of everything, that made so many thousands draw to him. This lack of inquisition doesn’t delude the sheer magnitude of the story the series has to offer, but it becomes hard to overlook at times. This is in part because there are no easy answers to be had. It would be easy to write off the people of Antelope as racist Christian radicals who simply refused to welcome a persecuted religion into their community. But that would be to ignore the culture of fear the Rajneeshees instilled, the violence they perpetrated or conspired to perpetrate, and their eagerness to label every word of criticism as bigotry. This sort of complex juxtaposition occurs time and again as the six-part series unspools.
Of course, that is not to say that difficult film doesn’t have a place in cinema, and that complicated realities should be explained away with platitudes. But rather, when a society has been crippled with heated division that makes even the most basic conversation untenable, a critical eye is needed, context must be unearthed and the unseemly histories upon which our worst inclinations are built must be examined. “Wild Wild Country,” for all the histrionic pleasure it offers, does little to interrogate the tribal instinct at the core of this division.
Still, while each episode might have been more suited to 40-minute installments instead of hour-long slogs, “Wild Wild Country” is enthralling — a portrait of human fallacy and a thoroughly detailed look at one of the strangest chapters in American history. [B-]
