At one point during the documentary Jonestown, I caught myself thinking, wow, this Jim Jones is a cool guy. There's this one line he tells his parish that's stuck with me (at 9:30 mark): "Now my home is stoneblock and there’s not a new piece of furniture in it, but our senior citizen homes -- they're elegant." There's something so seductive in the way he fires off that last word, elegant. It's such a perfect word-choice, common enough that everyone knows what it means, but uncommon and old-fashioned enough that it still has hefty meaning. Before dropping it, he does this little brow-twitch. He tilts his head the way you would when you're telling some good gossip or a punchline. And he delivers those three syllables like a rapper, first two like machine-gun fire before trailing off to a semi-whisper on the third. There's no blaming his followers, really, seduced into kool-aid.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is a movie about a cult so there's already some built-in sinister. The movie opens with a few quiet shots of a farm. A couple men drive nails into one segment of a rusted fence, another segment covered with an itchy blanket. Women giggle as they work a clothesline. A young boy plays in the growth, between permanent tire-paths, of the driveway. Later that night, we watch as the men eat meatballs, soak the red sauce up with crusty bread. The women wait, on the stairwell in the other room, for their turn at dinner. "Y'all fed?" a woman asks. They only get porridge, runny and pale. This is world far outside the margins that looks just a little bit different from normal. It's from this world that our protagonist Martha escapes to her sister, 2-years estranged, and her summer home in Connecticut.
The world Martha escapes from is one of systematic brain-washing, rape, and brutal violence. The one she escapes to is one of fresh-squeezed orange juice, furnished guest-rooms, and motorboats. There's a sense throughout the film, that, in lots of ways, the rape-world is better than the orange-juice world. Among the cultists, there's a kind of tenderness. "I'm a leader and a teacher," Martha tells her sister at one point. It's weirdo cult-speak that she repeats, but it's positive reinforcement, a kind of empowerment (though this empowerment paradoxically arises only alongside a destruction of individuality). Martha does good work at the cult. She sweeps the porch, prepares the vegetables, and helps care for the many children, by many, many mothers, of the cult-leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). "Are all of Patrick's kids boys?" a new recruit asks Martha. "Patrick only has sons," she answers.
Here at the cult, Martha's loved, or something like it. "For once in her life," Patrick says about Martha, "she needs some real care." Even at first sight, Patrick knows her. "You look like a Marcy May," he says on their first meeting, re-christening her. "My grandmother's name was Marcy," Marcy May, nee Martha, replies. Receiving Patrick's love -- he's fickle and the object of his love always changes -- is quite the experience. He sees right into his followers and builds them up. He expresses affection better than anyone in the film. At a guitar-circle, he takes his turn and premieres Marcy's Song: "A smile so inviting / a body so tall." The first verse we hear from off-frame, Marcy May's face in close-up. We know who she's staring at, a goofy half smile on her face. There's a cut to a medium-shot of Patrick looking almost directly at the camera and at us the audience. He sings to us, loves us, too. We're seduced.
Life at the Connecticut vacation home, on the other hand, only looks like a refuge. Sure, it's safe. But, there's almost an inverse relation between safety and love. Here, Marcy May is plain old Martha. Her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), says she's happy to have her long-lost sister back, though, there's an air of imposition. Lucy's life is pretty typically full with her husband's architect salary and their SUV. Their vacation house is all floor-to-celing windows overlooking the lake and the woods. If there's one thing that would be a hair in Lucy's soup, it would be the return of a shell-shocked, broken cultist sister. One night, when Lucy and her husband have sex, Martha (“I was lonely”) climbs on to their bed, though over the sheets and on the corner farthest from them. Sex for Martha is not the missionary-stuff of married life. It's of crowded-rooms, of drug-addled waking as Patrick, no vaseline, climbs on. "I can't do it anymore," Lucy tells her sister when sisterly-love becomes too hard, "I'm trying to have a family and I don't feel safe having you around." Martha calls Lucy out on her (Lucy's) coldness, on her politeness-masquerading-as-tender-love-and-care: "You'd make a shitty mother."
Martha's mind is busted after two years of Patrick. Throughout her time at her sister's, she's afraid that Patrick will track her down and bring her back. "Do you ever wonder what's dreams and what's memories?" Director Sean Durkin (29-years-old!) cuts back and forth between the vacation home and the farm to create a sense of disorientation and dread. The shots of the trees, the naked bodies swimming, often don't definitively belong to one world or the other because they’re so similar. The Connecticut vacation home is a mere 3-hour drive from the Catskills cult, we learn. Durkin knows his Polanski as many of the shots, voices coming from somewhere unseen, people walking and ducking into frame, recall Rosemary's Baby. Like Rosemary, Marcy May’s / Martha’s a priori is paranoia and confusion. Marcy May / Martha is searching for love and companionship wherever it might exist, in her old family and in a new one. And anyone looking for love in this world needs to be at least a little paranoid and confused.
