This paper seeks to understand why cult shows, at the peak of their popularity circa 2020, became a method of self-care. There were dozens of cult-themed podcasts and docuseries released in the wake of Netflix’s 2018 hit Wild Wild Country, including at least two podcasts dedicated solely cults with more than 500 episodes between them and a spate docuseries-style cult shows produced in 2020, among them The Vow, Seduced and Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults. I focus on the narratology shaping these series, beginning with the label “cult.” The discursive freight of the term is well known, but the word also has an affective freight that must be accounted for. From the 1970s onward––but particularly in the wake of the Peoples Temple deaths in 1978––“cult” inspired a particular combination of feelings in anyone who heard it namely, fear and disgust. Affect theorists have noted that disgust is a “sticky” affect, meaning that anything coming into contact with an object of disgust becomes disgusting itself. The word cult, I argue, operates in a similar way: simply applying the word cult to something makes the audience feel certain that what they are witnessing is an object of disgust and something to be feared. The cult show is so stimulating because it produces these feelings by its very subject matter. I then move on to the series’ shared emphasis on brainwashing. Each show relies on the so-called “robot theory” of brainwashing, which suggests that the victim’s mind can be programmed like a computer. The series use this theory to explain why people join a cult in the first place. #TRUMPS ANIMOSITY SHOWS SIGN LETTING SERIES# Anti-cult experts appear in almost all of these docuseries to expound this theory, offering hyperbolic descriptions of the power of the brainwasher and lending credence to the explanation of why people would join such a group. Like “cult,” “brainwashing” also carries affective weight: it carries the sense that something toxic has entered one’s body, triggering a disgust reaction. The connection between sex and brainwashing in the NXIVM documentaries add to this affective weight. Together, “brainwashing” and “cults” inspire a powerful bodily reaction of disgust and fear. #TRUMPS ANIMOSITY SHOWS SIGN LETTING SERIES#.
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