7 - ‘The Usual Utopian Vision’: Contemporary Cult California in The Invitation (2015), 1BR (2019) and The Circle (2013)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
Summary
Karyn Kusama's 2015 film, The Invitation, evokes the August 1969 murders committed by the Manson Family, particularly the brutal massacre of Sharon Tate and her houseguests. The film also incorporates details associated with the 1978 Jonestown Massacre and with the 1997 ‘Heaven's Gate’ mass suicide (which took place just outside San Diego). As such, it presents us with a notably reflective take on the long-standing association between California and potentially dangerous cults and cult-like organisations which promise to bring about a new world that is superior to the old. As Kusama outlines, the setting is key here:
It is incredibly specific to Los Angeles. We had moments where we discussed the possibility of shooting elsewhere, and the more we really investigated all of our driving interests in the film, it just became clear that we had to shoot it in Los Angeles, because even though it is a largely interior space, it just feels like there is something about the mythology of Southern California, the sense of self-reinvention that is promised here to so many people who kind of flock to the city, the sense of spiritual quest and spiritual searching and spiritual dwelling and fringe movements that have been born here in Los Angeles.
Kusama's statement recalls an observation made by Carey McWilliams in 1946:
No single aspect of Southern California has attracted more attention than its fabled addiction to cults and cultists. […] Writing in 1921, John Steven McGroarty said that ‘Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies – no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before. It is a breeding place and a rendezvous of freak religions.’
The Manson killings left an indelible impression upon pop culture perceptions of ‘cults’ associated with the state (even though the vast majority of new religious and ‘human potential’ movements posed no threat to their followers or to the wider community). ‘After Manson’, Joseph Laycock observes, ‘cult brainwashing was no longer a laughing matter but a source of horror. A collective paranoia played out through numerous horror films of the 1970s in which Satanic cults became a “stock character”.’
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- Information
- The California Gothic in Fiction and Film , pp. 224 - 252Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022