The Cult of Mother God is a Gothic Horror Story
Unprecedented amounts of footage is changing the way true crime covers cults
Spoilers for the episodic series follow, so if you really like to be surprised by these things and plan on viewing the doc, perhaps return to this newsletter after you’ve watched!
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God in many ways follows the recognizable beats of a true-crime cult story. We have the humble beginnings (future leader Amy Carlson was a manager at McDonald’s!), the ominous escalation of narcissistic narratives (she gets a little too into New Age philosophy and a little too convinced of her own clairvoyancy) the steady accumulation and physical/financial abuse of traumatized followers (this group is way into colloidal silver, psychic surgery, and sleep and food deprivation), the bewildering catalog of unhinged beliefs (Carlson taught that not only was she god incarnate, but that Donald Trump was her father in a past life, the late Robin Williams was a constant advisor in this one, and that she would not die but be collected by alien spaceships—also, QAnon) and of course the gruesome denouement (Carlson’s slow demise through malnutrition and organ failure and the cult members’ insistence that her body still had “energy readings,” leading them to enshrine her mummified corpse for days to weeks).
It’s this last segment of the docuseries that captured my attention, and added a heretofore, to me, unexamined element of the cult exposé genre: what if the leader wants to get out?
One of the latest developments in true crime properties that investigate cults is the surplus of primary footage created by the cult itself. From NXIVM to the Sarah Lawrence creep, the narcissism of these leaders prompts them to continuously and obliviously film themselves in all sorts of incriminating ways.1 The Love Has Won group is no different. Because of all the footage they created (and posted, and continue to post, on YouTube), the audience is privy to unedited moments that expose cracks in Carlson’s message, i.e., that she is God and all of her suffering is due to humans refusing to accept her divinity.
However, at several moments related in the series, before her escalating ill health renders her nearly mute and paralyzed, she appears to ask for conventional medical treatment. It is her followers who, in interview after interview (the series is also unusual in that most of the subjects are still to varying degrees in the cult), insist that “Mother would never want that” and claim Carlson’s requests to go to the hospital were contradicted by other “Galactics” like Williams, Whitney Houston, and Gene Wilder.
The film’s style is light on editorializing, so these incidents are left unexplored by any narration outside of the members and video of Carlson. But I could not get this dynamic out of my mind. Did Carlson to some extent know that she was peddling bullshit, and did she get scared when she felt her body truly failing? And how did she feel when the followers she had cultivated used her own theology to forbid her from accessing care that would have saved her life?
I’ve been reading a lot of history and criticism about Gothic literature lately (hit me up in the comments to share recs, lit crit heads!), and a prevailing theme of the genre is a woman in peril, trapped in a house and struggling for emancipation from old patriarchal narratives. Watching Amy Carlson ask for a way out of a prison of her own making added a chilling facet to an already disturbing corner of the true crime universe.
You know if Charles Manson or Jim Jones had the tech, they would have done the exact same thing.
Don't forget her addiction to alcohol too. It was truly fascinating to watch and I feel like not enough people are talking about it!
I have been meaning to watch this forever! It sounds batshit crazy and I am here for it.