By Alison Lanier | TV | February 9, 2024 |
By Alison Lanier | TV | February 9, 2024 |
The latest in a glut of true crime cult docuseries landed on Netflix this week: “Raël: The Alien Prophet” … and boy does it have everything. For nearly half a century, a self-styled French prophet with the non-de-cult “Raël” (real name Claude Vorilhon) has been running a self-serving scam in the form of a homegrown religion. In his prophecy, the “elohim” are holy aliens, the creator-gods of humanity, who will arrive on Earth to bless (and have sex with) the faithful in a strangely cheerful and horny apocalyptic prophecy.
The docuseries is a portrait of a strange and powerful egotist, whose vision has captivated and controlled very intelligent people for many decades and will almost certainly outlive him.
Raël has a magpie approach to building his religion. Most notably, he appropriates Jewish prayer and Hebrew terminology, singing Jewish prayers with evidently no understanding of actual ritual or melody. He likes to make claims like “the only reason that Israel exists as a nation is so he could come along and build an embassy there to welcome the aliens when they arrive.
But he ticks the usual boxes in terms of a cult leader. His cult follows the same timeline and promises of Heaven’s Gate, down to Raël’s attempted musical career as a younger man which mimics Applegate’s. He mixes science-heavy science fiction with the UFO craze of the time, promising a faith of science—and that he is the messiah, the link between the divine extraterrestrials and the lowly human life on Earth, which will be elevated by contact with these celestial beings. It isn’t very original. The difference here is that Raël promises that the aliens will come to his followers, rather than his followers having to go to them.
He also ticks the boxes of misogyny and abuse of his female followers. He grants the “most beautiful” of his female followers the title of “angel” and gives them the privilege of dancing naked in front of him and also exclusively having sex with him (and the aliens, when they arrive). Also, posing for Playboy to spread the good word of the alien movement…and to make him a paycheck.
He married a sixteen-year-old follower (with the consent of her mother, another cult member). There are also rampant accusations and accounts of other pedophilia in the cult, sanctioned by a spirit of spiritual freedom and open love. Yeah. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.
And he spends extravagantly—on things like racecars.
The thing that makes Raël’s story so exceptionally strange doesn’t come from the trite cult playbook he’s re-hashing from so many abusive sect leaders before him. It’s how he bounces from nation to nation, culture to culture, retooling and re-adapting his scam for a new audience. In Japan, he aligns himself with the Buddha. In France, Jesus. In Africa, he promises that the power granted by the “elohim” will give people more power than their former colonizers, which is exceptionally ironic considering he was promising ultimate power to the French a few decades earlier.
There’s also the incredibly strange and misguided cloning hoax: Raël preaches that one can live forever through creating clones of yourself, which has its own host of logical pitfalls to navigate around to being with. But he also recruited an actual genetic scientist to orchestrate a hoax, claiming that they’d created the first clone of a human being…a lie that said scientist is still sticking to.
The cult is alive and well, seeking out and thriving on media attention they think will spread the word of the aliens’ arrival…and draw donations for the eventual building of the embassy to welcome them. So far, that money appears to have gone directly into Raël’s extravagant lifestyle. But faith is a powerful thing.
Raël is a figure of casual self-assurance and profound egotism, disconnected from concepts like consequence and accountability. Nothing he does—no pain inflicted, no lies told—weigh on him at all. He’s a macho hedonist with only his own well-being at heart. The docuseries is actually far easier on him than it could be, especially since it interviews so many people who genuinely believe in him and his mission.
There is a single, revealing moment that tells you all you need to know about Raël. As the filmmakers set up for an interview, one of Raël’s new “angels” tries to bring him a drink he asked for—but she approaches too quickly, or in a way that isn’t complimentary to him somehow, and he berates her with an automatic, controlling cruelty that is clearly habitual. The fear of censure and failure in the woman’s eyes is painful, as she struggles to do it “right.”
These kinds of true crime series are, I think, some of the most justifiable of the genre: delving into existing high-control groups in a way that reveals their leader for what he really is and might end up shaking loose some of his current flock, so that they can get their lives back. That’s wildly optimistic of me, I know. But if nothing else, it’s deeply satisfying to spell out, in the words of Raël’s own followers and through his own actions, exactly how artificial this man’s power really is.