Wild Wild Country

If you hover over a show for too long on Netflix, the trailer automatically starts playing before you know what you’ve done with your fat fingers.  If it’s something they’ve bought in, you get an odd array of clips with some incongruous music.  However, Netflix’s own shows have lovingly crafted pieces that leave you in no doubt that your life is now not worth living till you’ve seen every series of the programme in question.  This was how I felt about Wild Wild Country after its sudden appearance in the Recently Added menu.  It had conflict, mystery and maybe some nudity – and it really happened.  On it went, along with a million other things, to the watchlist.  Then, someone at work went and described it as unmissable.  Being easily swayed, it got bumped up the list.  I’ve now sat through all six episodes (just over an hour long each) and now I can write down what I thought about it in this silly little blog.  Let’s read on.  Everyone.  Please.

If, like me, you’re a mid-eighties baby, you might not have heard of the Rajneeshees.  This is the name for followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian spiritual leader whose approach to meditation and rolling around naked with pals and strangers garnered him an international set of followers.  They’re easy to spot in the documentary as they only wear clothes in shades of red, though some daringly branch out into purples, pinks and oranges.  His movement carries on to this day with books, communes and meditation retreats, but back in the early eighties, the organisation acquired land in rural Oregon to found, build and run a whole utopian city based on his teachings.  Now, the only bit of Oregon I’ve been to is Portland, a very liberal city with posters for vegan breastfeeding in its hipster grocery stores, but parts of the state are more conservative and rural.  And they don’t seem to like red clothes.  Thus Wild Wild Country opens by taking us on the journey of how Rajneesh’s movement came to be and how the neighbours responded when thousands of it followers rocked up in smalltown USA.

From then on, we weave our way through a whiplash-inducing storyline of the conflict between the government and the Rajneeshees.  Should they be allowed to overrun the nearby town of Antelope in order to dominate local elections?  Is it ok to build a city in the middle of disused land if you don’t have all the planning permissions?  What do you expect retired conservatives to think about a group of people who have an open-minded (and maybe open-legged) policy to marriage?  The neighbourly love soon runs out, with both sides hunkering down to outstay the other.  But this is very much the beauty of the documentary: you’ll change sides over and over again.  Like Making A Murderer, you’ll never be certain who’s wrong and who’s right.  Part of this comes down to not knowing which side is worse than the other, especially as things get more and more curious with weapons hoarding and alleged food poisoning attacks.  The narrative deliberately creates sympathy with one faction before taking it away and placing it with the other.

This is because the key contributors to the piece are those that lived through it most closely.  Events are told through the eyes of devoted Rajneeshees who themselves rose to the ranks of the organisation’s leadership.  Ma Anand Sheela today comes across like the cheeky grandma who tells it like it is at family events, but in her youth she was a bouffanted hardcase.  As Bhagwan’s personal secretary, she defended her people with devotion.  Despite admiring her fluency in English, you can really enjoy her use of idioms where she skips out the odd the or a, masking the real danger she posed with a bit of cuteness.  It’s through Jane Stork (Ma Shanti Bhadra) and Philip Toelkes (Swami Prem Niren) that you really get a palpable sense of the movement’s power over the individual.  Perhaps these core players’ experiences could have been complemented with perspectives from more incidental contemporaries.  Reams of stock footage show the thousands of followers – who were they and what are they doing now?  In particular, what of the street people who were bussed in from US cities to boost numbers?

Either way, there is a lot of footage of them.  These people seemed to film everything that the news cameras weren’t already covering.  Imagine how annoying their Instagram accounts would be today!  I was incredulous that so much footage could exist of something I’ve never heard of, (but then I’ve never watched Sky Sports and I’m told there’s literally non-stop team ball action on there), and I suspect that some of it has been made to look older to fit in with the sinister tone the documentary sets throughout (almost everything has a distortion line near the top), but plenty of it is a bit creepy in its own right, and not just because of the ill-advised eighties haircuts.

Most creepily portrayed is Bhagwan himself.  He only has himself to blame: he almost never blinks, he matches an array of tinsel-like woolly hats with Star Trek-esque tunics and he insists on sitting on this reclining throne with his legs crossed, making him look like someone’s dad watching daytime telly.  His sleepy and heavily accented speech (his Ts are drawn out more than you’d expect) emphasises the effect.  Either way, it’s clear he had a profound effect on his followers’ lives.  As someone who was born and raised heathen, I’ve never understood the need for organised religion.  If you can’t work out right and wrong for yourself, then there’s really no hope.  Deep.

But, after all, these people obviously needed something in their lives that he provided.  A lot of them really did have bad haircuts, so we can easily imagine the suffering.  Therefore, I urge you, take the journey with this show.  While the narrative avoids some specifics, such as exact dates and times, and numbers of followers and inhabitants, it does artfully cover the movement’s rise to be a focus for international news.  Rather than one individual crisis and crescendo, there are multiple steps in this horrid saga.  When it’s all over, you’ll feel both vindication and sympathy.  Sometimes real life can create the strangest boxset of all.