Sheela Take a Bow: Wild Wild Country on Netflix

I found this show fascinating for so many reasons, and I'm glad I watched it, but I did myself at something very much like Veg's take above - there needs to be cross-examination of both the ranchers and the Rajneeshees, because everybody lingers only on the parts of the story they want to talk about. Stephen King Lawyer in particular gets to come off very magnanimous and reasonable, talking about the closed-mindedness of the locals and staying focused on the fishier things done by the authorities, but no one ever gets to say to him "um yes but what about the murder plots and poisoning and mass nonconsensual drugging?" I get that juxtaposing all these unreliable narrators is intentional, but I just came away feeling like everybody involved was being allowed to get away with something, and not just the cultists.

The narrative also drops threads constantly. Things get set up as a big deal and never get mentioned again. What was actually in the papers dude found in the trash? Did they feed into the investigation somehow? How? At one point one of the feds is like "for the first few years we couldn't do anything - that all changed at the start of 1983" so you're sitting there waiting to find out what development this is teasing, but it's never explained what he's referring to really. Was it the hotel bombing? If so, why? Wasn't the instigating issue that the land was zoned for ranching, not a new town plan? How did they continue to stay there in blatant violation of this? Did they successfully change this when they took over the government of one nearby town, and if so, why wouldn't it be mentioned? Were they really drugging all those homeless people the entire time? Why weren't they charged for that, instead of immigration fraud?

And - picking up with JiC's reaction: What were they *doing* out there all those years, after the first wave of construction activity? The day-to-day world of Rajneeshpuram never really comes into focus or feels like a real place, and it becomes something of a palace-intrigue story which gets us away from the clash-of-cultures thread even if stuff like the Australian woman jabbing an (apparently ineffective) syringe into the doctor is clearly irresistible drama.

Who the locals really are is also a bit uncleart. At least one is super rich with Nike money.... are the others? How much was this about residents of the town, and how much was it their neighbor ranchers owning thousands of acres or whatever?

For whatever reason tho what I'd most want to change is how every time they use old news footage, they start from the top of the reporter's segment - "The town of Antelope, Oregon used to be a quiet place..." YEAH WE GOT THAT ALREADY, THANKS! Learn to edit!!!

Something I hate about Netflix truecrime docos in general is their tedious over and over reshowing/slow panning/weird pop out effect of the same half a dozen grainy photos they have of the person/story.

So at least this one had much more footage to use!

Garbage documentary. Something about rural Oregon attracts morons.

xxp He is not super rich with Nike money, though

he's not? i recall it specifically coming up that his rich well connected nike-inventor dad was able to move the process forward, call up his old friend the senator, check in with his old friend the US attorney....

iirc, he had enough money to buy a ranch, but I think it was a real ranch, not a hobby ranch. Or maybe he was estranged from his Nike dad? Something like that.

"I'm the only one in the family who doesn't have any Nike stock," he said.

Bowerman says about $1,000 in Nike stock he bought shortly after the company went public in 1980 grew to $25,000 at a time when he needed the money to build his house on his land next to the John Day River.

"If I had not built the house it would have been worth a million or two," he said of the stock.

He says his father left equal amounts of Nike stock to the Oregon Community Foundation in the name of him and his two brothers, Jay and Tom. The three brothers, Bowerman said, consult with the Community Foundation about where their share of money should be donated each year. He said his father also left stock to him. But those shares – valued at nearly $500,000 – went to his second wife in the divorce settlement.

yeah okay but come on, that is a very different background/set of connections than the short-order cook at the shuttered diner.

i just didn't have a strong sense of the economy/lifestyle of the town before rajneesh - we got a vague and cliched cultural snapshot of simple small-town folk but how many of those interviewed lived in the town? worked there? what kinds of jobs? there was a suggestion that there were a lot of retirees just chilling out but then it's also clearly a dying small town that people were moving away from even before a cult (we're told - i believe only by sheela or niren - that a lot of the houses they bought had been sitting on the market for a while, but like everything else this is not contextualized or cross-examined). and some of the people in the file footage were way younger than retirement age. was there some middling local economic base that was slipping? a small tool and die shop that employed ten people but then closed? did they all commute out to the hills to work as ranch hands for the people later interviewed in the doc...? how many people were really left at the end, if so many moved away?

clearly on some level i would just have been better off with a book than with a documentary series, but i do think this one exposes some pitfalls of the "just put them on camera and let all sides tell their version of the truth" format. six hours later, i'm not sure i actually understand anything that happened, nor do i have the tools to sift through and weigh the competing claims in a way i'd trust.

I agree with all the points you made; I kept losing threads and feeling vaguely annoyed that lots of things were getting 'lost' but there was too much 'look at THIS' to remember what was being pushed aside.

I think they tried too much or couldn't resist some of the interview subjects they had. Like for example, if they didn't have Niren and the FBI/US attorney guys, they could get away with "but all along the government had been building a case and then it came down like a hammer." But with so much lawyering sprinkled in, we have the bits and pieces of a procedural, without the... procedure.

This was interesting.

The thing that struck me was the obvious hokiness and cultural crassness of the cult: things like calling the cafe 'Zorba the Buddha', having parts of the commune with ostentatious names like 'Jesus Grove', 'Lao Tzu Annexe' etc. Sheela and Osho's ridiculous presentational style, reaching for gravitas and failing. The fact that he's called Osho because of course he's also a Zen master as well as a Hindu sage; the fact that he's clearly loaded and the 'Bringing spirituality and materialism together' line as a weak cover for that.

The brief flash of the Christian abstinence camp that took over the site was grim also, also crass and hoky, and there again they're advertising their abstinence camp using clips of sexy girls in bikinis diving into swimming pools.

I now think if I was going to start a cult a winning strategy would be to bombard potential recruits with SEX but also SPIRITUALITY and kind of create a cognitive dissonance, I suppose it fries people's brains.

Holy Hell is another very good cult doc, covering a smaller group with more from the escapees.

Back to the whole Jesus plus Zen plus Hinduism plus plus throw it all in 'aesthetic' the Rajneesh lot had going on, I find that really interesting in that they're basically claiming Baghwan has read and digested all these complex, varied and contradictory traditions so you don't have to, now just follow Baghwan's orders and run around with no clothes on.

i could only watch a few episodes of this. just despised the smarmy, oblivious cult fucks too damn much. any people who can come into conflict with PNW conservative hicks and make the latter seem like the good guys are beyond caring about. wish someone would've poisoned them

wish someone would've poisoned them

because turnabout is fair play?

Something about rural Oregon attracts morons.

Late in his career, Les Zaitz, the Oregonian reporter interviewed in the series, did much of the reporting on the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, so, yeah.

Almost none of the occupiers at Malhuer were from Oregon. They may have been attracted, but they came from Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and similar places.