Product: Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
Rating: 3.0
PBS Documentary About a Very Grim Event
This is a documentary. And because it was made almost 30 years after the massacre in Guyana, it has the perspective it needs. This has authenticity, and in fact one of the survivors interviewed was Deborah Layton, author of "Seductive Poison," which I have read.Photographs and videotape of the actual People's Temple is interspersed with comments from the survivors and from others with knowledge of the events. I lived in San Francisco when all this was going on, and I was a bit spooked to see familiar-looking faces in those pictures. Of course, they were not necessarily people I knew, but people I had passed on the street, or perhaps saw at some public gathering. Mayor Moscone, who was given major support in his campaign by Jim Jones and the Temple members, I had met. He spoke at Hastings College of the Law where I was a student just a week before he was murdered.The survivors are all a good bit older now, and you'd think that nearly 30 years would give them ease from the pain. But at least a couple of the men had their wives die in their arms before they ran into the jungle to live. Congressman Ryan's secretary was injured, and only survived by pretending to be dead, as did one of the cameramen. These are people who were sufficiently traumatized that they cannot talk about that final day even now without wiping tears from their eyes.This movie one goes all the way back to what is known of Jim Jones' early life, the foundation of the People's Temple in Indiana, the move to California first to Redwood Valley near Ukiah and then to San Francisco. It recounts the activities of the Temple in San Francisco that had so many people convinced it was a wholly benevolent organization.Some of the big faith healing scenes were captured on video, and one of the survivors mentions one of the most spectacular healings was of a lady in a wheelchair who was persuaded to get up and walk, and actually ran up and down the aisles of the church. Matter of factly, she relates that she later found out the woman in the wheelchair was actually one of the secretaries of the Temple, and the healing was faked. This is consistent with Deborah Layton's explanation that she and a couple of other young women had the assignment of finding out who had what problems by visiting them at home, asking to use the bathroom, and recording what medications were in the medicine cabinet.The survivors also recount the deterioration of Jones' mind, his raging paranoia, his bizarre attitudes towards sex, and a host of other things that were kept from the public but became much more evident once he moved to Guyana. But at the end, we still don't really understand. "How could one man persuade 900 people to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the jungles of Guyana? . . . this film tries to answer that question . . . " says the cover. Yes, it tries to answer it, but does not altogether succeed. I think only those survivors really know what it felt like to be involved in the social experiment that was People's Temple and Jonestown. "We were there for peace and social justice, for what felt like a family to us." It sounds so hippie but also so inadequate to explain. "Why?" is still an unanswered question for me.