By Alison Lanier | TV | December 21, 2023 |
By Alison Lanier | TV | December 21, 2023 |
Synanon was a utopian community that began as a drug rehab “business” in California—a place that became a safe haven for sobriety and security for many people in desperate need of it. But of course, we’re hearing about Synanon now, not because it was once a successful rehab program. We’re hearing about it in yet another true-crime cult docuseries in the crowded field of cult documentaries because Synanon became a violent, high-control group that abused and tormented a generation of children born into it, among many other horrors.
Cassidy Arkin, the filmmaker behind Born in Synanon, was one of those children. In her four-part docuseries now streaming on Paramount Plus, she examines the rise and fall of the cult dominated by founder Charles E. “Chuck” Dederich. Dederich, himself a recovering alcoholic, became increasingly brutal and aggressive, controlling every aspect of his followers’ lives on his various properties. Eventually he transformed the rehabilitation program into a religion, apparently for primarily financial reasons, creating the Church of Synanon with himself as the head. Can you guess where this is going?
There are all sorts of startling and upsetting revelations unveiled in the course of the series. Attempted murder with a rattlesnake, for one. Forced vasectomies, for another. The true crime genre, grotesque and exploitative as it is, runs on those kinds of shocking details. The fascination of a disaster watched at a distance.
But as opposed to the cookie-cutter true crime content churned out on cults like Twin Flames, Born in Synanon has more in common with Telemarketers: it’s a story told by the people who lived it, and it’s both about the larger news story of the cult and about the experience of the people who are still trying to understand what they went through all those years ago and why it happened.
Born in Synanon is largely about remembering those experiences, looking in the rearview, and sharing memories among a circle of people who remember different facets of the cult. Cassidy’s interviews for the docuseries are recountings between friends and family for the most part rather than a run-of-the-mill documentary-style interview. This is personal and complex, and Cassidy is wrangling with the story on an individual level as she’s trying to tell it to her audience.
Cassidy sets out in 2001 as a young woman looking to talk to family members and acquaintances, to tell the story of growing up—as she says it then—with what “mainstream” America would call a cult. She begins, not exactly defensively, but with a sense of pride. She clearly remembered her youth in the cult as a somewhat idyllic time. She didn’t experience racism or classism, she says, until she left with her mother for the “outside world.”
And that’s where the act of collective memory comes in. Many of the people she interviews over the course of this two-decade-plus project clearly aren’t aware, even decades later, about the things that happened in the group. Child abuse was rampant, and it takes the documentary project to get Cassidy to articulate that realization to herself. Different generations of Synanon members remember different fears, different abuses, and different joys—and also misremember. Cassidy left the cult when she was very young—but the people she grew up with and the people whom her mother knew in her many years inside create a web of memories that link the mother and daughter to the life of the cult from its birth to its bitter end.
One byproduct of the length of production—over two decades—is that the style of filmmaking changes from one moment to the next. Full-screen shaky-frame interviews whose focus wavers off the face of the interviewee. Blank black backgrounds behind harshly lit interview subjects. It feels strange, but the jarring differences in style are also a testimony to the care and honesty that is going into this deeply personal presentation. Cassidy of the mid-2000s says vastly different things from the Cassidy of 2023, as do her family members. The process of making the series is transforming the memory that it’s depicting.
The project is a success in many ways, but it’s unique in its clumsiness and honesty as it tells what is, for everyone involved, a horrifying and murky story. That clumsiness is to its credit. Nothing’s cleaned up or put neatly into a retrospective box. And that’s refreshing in a shock-value industry that feeds on harm. Born in Synanon does the work of investigating that harm from the perspective of those who lived it.
Born in Synanon is now streaming on Paramount Plus.