Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright: A Review

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Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright: A Review

I’m positive that I have nothing interesting to say about “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief” by Lawrence Wright, but I’m going to write a review because I have nothing else to do. Please god (by which I mean you), give me a suggestion of a fucking television show or movie to watch, or a novel to read, because I am going to lose my eyesight writing things on this computer.

The book, as you know, is about L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology. If you saw the movie “The Master” last year, you probably most of the story of L. Ron, even though PT Anderson won’t admit it’s about him. The film, I think, is far more intellectual; it delves into nuances of human behavior which the book barely skims. I can’t tell that if Wright, by writing an extremely digestible text, sacrificed depth and philosophizing. Because the best way to describe the text is that it reads a little bit like a Vanity Fair article, which means like a long-form tabloid piece.

Scientology, as you know on some level or another, is bonkers nuts. It was created by a man who had a severe personality disorder. If the facts in the book are true—and I’m sure they are, but I say “if” because other people who have written about the religion have had their lives destroyed by the church—then he was an absolutely terrible person. He lied about his military service. He fought a battle against imaginary Japanese submarines a few miles off the coast of the California coast. He beat the shit out of his wives; he kicked them in the stomach so they would miscarry his babies.

He was an inveterate liar and drinker. His followers were less sheep than they were slaves. He kept them in squalid conditions on a ship that he sailed around the Caribbean.

While Hubbard’s behavior will make you nauseous, as a historical character, he’s also quite amusing. He tried to take over the kingdom of Morocco using attractive Scientologist women implanted at the upper levels of society, for instance. He directed the largest domestic espionage effort in the United States, entitled “Operation Snow White,” which collected information on government officials.

More than anything, he was a writer. Over the course of his lifetime, he wrote as much as 100,000 words a month—insanity!—and published over 1,000 books, 245 of them works of fiction. He started his career in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, with the likes of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asminov for Astounding Science Fiction. 

Scientology was basically just a fabrication of his imagination, which he had to constantly build and expand to apply to real life situations—it became nonsensical the more he lost his mind. Heaven, for instance, was the place where we all went 43 trillion years ago when we were implanted with negative information. We came to Earth 75 million years ago because—and this is really me kind of winging it here, because I’m too tired to go back and read the text—there was an evil man named Xanu who wanted to get rid of us.

So he forged a bunch of income tax returns, and shipped us all to a planet where he brainwashed them with bad information by making us watch a 36 day movie. I’m not even kidding. That’s one of the main tenants of the religion. Because we are prisoners on earth—and in our own bodies—our true selves (thetans) are trapped until we go through “auditing” via scientology. Or something like that. The only people who can logically believe in this shit must also reject evolution. In other words, they all magically appeared in Mississippi during the Bush administration.

Once Hubbard died, however, the book kind of lost my interest. At the outset was a great—albeit sort of junky—biography of a fascinating and morbidly obese human being. It reminded me a bit of Robert K. Massie’s biographies—in the sense that it read more like a novel than it did a work of non-fiction. Because all of the footnotes in the back, it seemed less factual than it did a sort of re-enactment of facts.

I got frustrated because Wright then cursorily explores what makes a belief system a cult, a religion, or destined for History channel documentaries. Yes, all religions are crazy—Christians believe in the walking dead, and Hindus believe in…fucking sixteen headed people? (I don’t know anything about Hinduism.) But there are reasons why some religions grow and flourish—I suspect it’s money, as well as clear-headed, cold-hearted leadership after the founder is deceased. People are sheep, and they want to be led. But why do they want to be led by a specific set of beliefs?

The book didn’t give me any new arguments beyond the obvious to work with. Not to mention that it told me barely anything new about Tom Cruise, with whom I am psychotically fascinated. What I did learn a lot about was ex-Scientologist Paul Haggis—who, by the way, in case you don’t know, directed the mediocre movie Crash—and I’m sorry Paul Haggis, but I don’t really give a shit about you. Not in an aggressive way, it’s just that you don’t wear your hair in a flowbee and pay people to marry you. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d love to read a New Yorker profile by Wright on L. Ron Hubbard, but then I would have also liked to read a really well argued, thorough book about why Scientology appeals to people, and if it will stick around like Mormonism—because at this point, no matter how crazy its origins are, it is established enough that it won’t be easily exterminated. Like David Koresh and all of those children.

In any case—this, by the way, is a term that I’ve used to end every review I’ve written this past week, out of pure laziness—it’s an incredibly enjoyable read. Pick it up if you are looking for something to get you through the rest of the winter. Given that the religion is so veiled, Wright did an incredibly good—and thorough—job of laying out the known facts. Oh also, he gave me an appreciation for John Travolta.

And that, for someone who’s never watched Saturday Night Fever, has got to mean something big.