When most people speak of cults today, it seems to be in the past tense, relics of a previous era that seemed foolish, naive, hippie-dippie, and dated.
You also could argue that the heyday for cults was the 1970s - post-'60s hippie but pre-'80s greedy Reagan years. The 1970s were the self-reflective/self-indulgent 'Me Decade' after all (or so the easy tag-line says). Escaping the Vietnam and Watergate aftermaths, some people went off the grid. But that was in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, pre-GPS era. Can people really disappear nowadays?
The 2011 psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene is a smart, sad half-answer to this question. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the former kiddie actors Mary-Kate and Ashley) escapes from the upstate NY farm/compound of an unnamed cult of young people early one morning. She calls her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) to come get her at a roadside diner and then ends up recuperating at Lucy and her husband Ted's (Hugh Dancy) vacation home, also in upstate NY.
The film is a flip-flop between Martha's flashbacks and her current silent, closed-off emotional state while at her sister's home. The plot is a bit aimless (much like Martha) but is based around a series of increasingly paranoid visions and memories of disturbing things she did and/or witnessed during her two-year sojourn with the cult.
One of the smart and scary things that director Sean Durkin did is make the cult nameless and directionless, not a political or anti-establishment drive but a incestuous group of n'er-do-wells who survive by any means necessary, including violence.
So, now that it's harder than ever to officially "vanish" from society because of the aforementioned reasons, is it still possible and desirable for young people to be seduced by the idea of technological rejection, of "back-to-the-land" emphasis of lifestyle?
And is "living off the grid" now more of an escape from Trump American chaos in 2017, then a mere nostalgic hippie fantasy or a seductive escape from the boredom of bourgeoisie life, like when this movie was released in 2011 in Obama's America?
Are people ready to "escape to the forest to survive," en masse, and pretend The Walking Dead is real now?
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