Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright
First Posted on November 2013
What a mystery that goodreads dated my review in 2016. Perhaps I did an edit? I do remember my long hiatus on reading during this book, but June to November? I guess. I am actually quite surprised I went back to it. I must have owned it, which means I must have borrowed it from my job at the time (because I could not afford to buy almost anything in 2013, and libraries were right there). 2013 was an interesting time in my life, to be sure—poor as hell but still occasionally masquerading as an NYC lawyer at fancy events. Reading a big popular hardcover non-fiction book in public was probably a(n imagined) flex.
I took a long break while reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief between section one—the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard—and sections two and three, which dealt more with Scientology as an entity than any specific personal history. Partially because of a glut of library requests that became available and required a timed commitment to read before their scheduled returns, and partially because I was bored after one-hundred-plus pages of biography, the break likely contributed to my increased enjoyment of Going Clear. It gave me nearly a half-year of distance between the rather tedious first third and the fascinating remainder. I’ve never been that interested in biographies, and science fiction has never particularly appealed to me—don’t tell anyone, but I’ve not even read Herbert’s Dune—so I wasn’t particularly impressed with stories of Hubbard cavorting with Robert Heinlein, or details of his prodigious pulp career.
As far as genre fiction goes, I’m a fantasy nerd; the distinction, as I see it, is one of character. Fantasy plots revolve around a person or persons overcoming their circumstance: Frodo burdened with the one ring; Rand al’Thor overcoming the Taint on saidin; Garion accepting his prophetic agency; Richard mastering the Sword of Truth. Untapped personal potential, uncovered legacies, hidden heritages. The Hero’s Journey. Love that crap. Science Fiction—again solely from my perspective—is worried more about the circumstance and setting being its own character, the technical details of why things work or how they happen. The particulars are paramount.
It is why there is a culture-clash between Star Wars and Star Trek. If you’re completely ignorant of both fictions, there’s no reason not to cue off “outer space” signifying science fiction and assume both are of the same genre. But Star Wars, for all its spaceships and aliens, is clearly fantasy. Fantasy set in space, but fantasy. C’mon, Jedi Knights, The Force, Lightsabers? Knights. Magic. Swords. Seriously, it’s a one-to-one overlay. I’m not saying anything new here. Star Trek is all “Dilithium Crystals” and “Photon Torpedoes” and the “warp core” melting down. The split between Star Wars and Star Trek isn’t two sides of the same fandom arguing about what’s better science fiction, it’s a distillation of swords versus lasers. Fantasy vs. SciFi. The Renaissance Fair against the Comic Con. The time traveller vs. the dinosaur.
All right, so I’m devolving into flippancy, but I maintain the point: how many Star Treks have there been where the crew—even the ship—has been changed, but the basic premise remains the same? That’s because in SciFi it’s the setting that matters, not the individuals. Not really. Fantasy, on the other hand, needs the specific characters. Maybe you like Picard better than Kirk, but one needs not be the descendant of the other for the story to continue to grab its audience. Stick Star Wars on the cover of something and omit Luke, Leia, Han, Obi-Wan or their direct descendants and/or ancestors and see how well it sells. Maybe if Wesley Crusher was Captain Kirk’s illegitimate heir, you could have gotten me to care about Next Generation. Maybe Spock built Data when he was a kid! …Sorry. I won’t reference the Star Wars prequels again. But it seemed pretty clear some of the worst mistakes the newest movies made were trying to “SciFi” up the series: Midichlorians? Don’t explain The Force. It’s magic. You already had us. We like magic. It’s cool, man.
That’s the point; Star Wars is about Luke coming to grips with his (magical, destined, prophetic) heritage. Star Trek is about exploring a (fictional) universe. Picard isn’t coming to grips with anything. He’s doing his job. The audience doesn’t need to know how The Force works to be invested in Luke’s journey. The movie didn’t spend five pages of dialogue trying to pin down the BTU output of a Lightsaber. The precise energy signatures of the warp drive engineering bay is probably an integral component to whatever it is that appeals to people that like Star Trek. Probably.
Try setting Star Trek in the nineteenth century, perhaps during the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny inspired westward expansion. What, are they going to “prime directive” the native Shoshone peoples? Are we going to get fifteen minutes of discussion about what type of wood the wagon tongue is made from, and how much torque it can withstand because it is maple instead of oak? It just doesn’t work. Actually, strike that, it kind of sounds awesome. Oh wait, that happened, and it was called SeaQuest and it was terrible. Because, “They live under the sea, it’s Star Trek under the sea” was the whole premise. But it didn’t have the fictional Star Trek universe. That’s what people cared about! Tricorders and the Federation and what have you. Name a character from SeaQuest. Or an antagonist. Or some sort of characteristic of the world. Besides “the ocean.” Without Wikipedia. Maybe you know the name of the ship. I didn’t, but I just looked it up, and it’s “SeaQuest.” Seriously. That’s pretty lame. Check please.
But Star Wars? That story is about a lowly farm boy who finds out that his father is not only a high-ranking lord in the local political landscape, but that he has inherited both the legacy of magical powers and the prophetic destiny of dismantling the existing system. Also known as every fantasy story ever. It is set in space. That’s the twist! Robots and wookies instead of horses and elves. And it is glorious.
So, I’m pretty firmly entrenched in the fantasy side of things. Which is no good, at least from the perspective of trying to sell me personally on L. Ron Hubbard as an author:
Hubbard discovered his greatest talents as a writer in the field of science fiction, a more commodious genre and far more intellectually engaging than westerns or adventure yarns. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common. Some of the most closely guarded secrets of Scientology were originally publishing the other guises in Hubbard’s science fiction.
I haven’t read any of Hubbard’s fiction, because, as I said, I don’t really do SciFi. The biography of an author I’m not particularly interested in, who focused on a genre I don’t particularly like, didn’t do much for me. I put the book down in late June 2013, after the end of section one.
I decided to pick it back up in November, and was glad I did—either the extended break did me well, or sections two and three are simply better. I read it, as I do most of my books, on various NYC subways and busses. It is the absolute first time strangers interrupted me to admit they were “reading over my shoulder” on the train. They boldly interrupted me to ask after the title so they could pick it up themselves. It’s hard to draw any grand conclusions from that limited interaction—perhaps the woman was herself a Scientologist, or worked for the publisher, or was simply bored, or wanted to mug me. But fret not, for I have more anecdotes of people engaging with Going Clear!
Buried near the back is a brief citation to a woman I am on a committee with, and when I mentioned having seen her name in the book, she let me know a number of her colleagues had done the same. It’s a one-off detail, not something you’d notice from skimming, and unless you start non-fiction at the end and go backwards, you would have read the majority of the book by the time you spotted it. So the interest is out there, and the audience is, anecdotally, making their way through the bulk of the book, not just sticking it on the shelf as a conversation piece. Even my mom, based on a quick peruse during my last visit, proposed it to her Oprah-style bookclub of retired ladies. And they agreed, making it the first non-fiction book they have ever selected. Auspicious times, indeed.
But did I like it? Perhaps you’ll allow me to stretch my metaphor into saying that the latter two-thirds of Going Clear is more fantasy in style than science fiction: it deals less in the cold facts of Hubbard’s life but in the legacy of an institution he established. It delves more deeply into the people that have blown from the Church of Scientology, and in greater detail. There is humanity there to latch onto that felt missing from the recitation of facts that propelled the opening hundred pages.
I won’t blame you for thinking that, in the structures and definitions that I’ve proposed, the “hero’s journey” should have been found in Hubbard’s early life: farm boy to prophesied savior. But the foundational story of Scientology as told in Going Clear was all dry technical details of how things happened—the equivalent of describing the exact warp core temperature of a Star Trek ship rather than watching Luke learn to feel The Force. Hubbard as monolith, conduit; his mind as the landscape and the setting.
The final two thirds were about characters and people. Broader strokes. Going Clear was always well-written, a fascinating account of a movement that gets a lot of media attention. I can understand why so much time needed to be dedicated to the founder, even if I personally found it a bit slow: Scientology is a charismatic movement:
Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on.
The story is replete with abrupt digressions, which are appreciated as it keeps the narrative from becoming locked into a steady temporal march of fact. No suffocating, “From foundation to present day, here is what happened,” but instead specialized topics are introduced as they impact the main thrust of the story. Then, you are diverted fully into the immersive details of the current tangent, before the new information is tied back into the central body. For example, that Scientology is tax-exempt is not surprising. Seeing the details of Scientology’s battles with the IRS were a great direction to take the story for a few pages, and tying back in that Hubbard’s science fiction—the stories that were labeled and sold purely as fiction and not demarcated as religious materials—fall under that aegis as well is bold and impactful. It made for great reading, and didn’t force an unsustainable full chapter titled “IRS” or “tax-issues” or whatever bland header a non-fiction book straight-jacketed into purely subject-structured organization might be compelled to pad out.
Because of science fiction’s inherent requirement for excruciating detail, it can support the belief that it is more real than other types of speculative fiction. No one is likely to think the future of technology is pushing us into a Star Wars future, because it is essentially a fairy tale: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” is nothing if not wholeheartedly lifted from centuries of oral folklore beginning with “Once upon a time….”
So this is where each reader of Going Clear needs to pick a side: do they prefer the fantasy genre, with its personal stories of achievement and growth and mild moralizing? Tagging “Frodo Lives” on the walls of the tube stations and realizing, after being presented with Vader sans mask, that he’s just a man with a story arc of his own:
Hubbard was sixty-four years old in 1975, as the Apollo began its circumnavigation of the Caribbean. He weighed 260 pounds. He was still meticulously groomed, but his teeth and fingers were darkly stained from constant smoking. He was on the run from the courts, fearful of being discovered, marked by age, and visibly in decline. In Curaçao, he suffered a small stroke and spent several weeks in a local hospital. It was becoming clear that life at sea posed a real danger for a man in such frail health. His crew rationalized his obvious decline by saying that his body was battered by the research he was undertaking and the volumes of suppression aimed at him. “He’s risking his life for us,” they told each other.
Or science fiction, where the details of the system, not the people involved, are the key:
Scientology’s history of psychiatry holds it responsible for many of the ills that have affected humanity—war, racism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism—all in the pursuit of social control and profit. The church has opened an exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It describes the often grisly and benighted practices that have characterized the evolution of the profession, including madhouses, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs to treat spurious diagnoses. Scientology views this history as a long march by psychiatrists to manipulate human behavior and institute world government.
Although it’s not included in the exhibit, Hubbard’s chronology of psychiatry actually begins “five billion years ago” with the development of a particular technique that was developed “in the Maw Confederation of the Sixty-third Galaxy”...
Going Clear gives you all the information presently available about the Church of Scientology and lets you draw your own conclusions about where the future will take L. Ron Hubbard’s legacy. It’s fascinating, it’s comprehensive, and it is recommended to anyone who has ever heard of Scientology.