[CULTS]

The flurry of films about cults kept me busy in the late afternoons, back in the 1980s. First made in the 1970's, the grainy B-films ("SPLIT IMAGE") starred teenagers dressed in something like Indian clothing, who whirled and swooned around a landscape of assorted geodesic domes . The plots centered aroundthe tragic capture of these teens and their restoration to suburban "normality," once the two-parent unit of each innocent hired a deprogrammer to kidnap the child and stuff him/her into a large unmarked van. At this point, your sympathies were torn between the thrashing legs of your symbolic self (these movies were made for you, after all, the parallel child) and the parents who were mid-struggle in the toughest love they had ever administered. Even the parents in the film turned away from "you" when you finally crumpled into a zig-zag shape and surrendered , or continued to kick like a wu-li master against the moving van's walls.

As a sixteen-year-old, I watched these movies greedily. In fact, I wanted the kids to kick and scream and piss on themselves, to rebel but be sorry. We didn't get to pee on ourselves and scream in my suburb; the thrashing kids were my perverse heroes. I wanted them to escape the rigidity of home, but I also bought into the films' central conflict: what if they never come back? And what if escaping, as suggested by these films, is not really an enlightened state but a place that presupposes a hazy, brainwashed existence( the assumption being that you would never adopt new ideas, new friends, new values, new clothes, unless you were crazy and needed to be brought back)? [...]