Catching Hell

Principally 2011’s “Catching Hell” is a re-telling of the Steve Bartman story. You know the guy – Cubs ball cap, green turtleneck, glasses, rickety old headphones, interfering with a foul ball that Cubs outfielder Moises Alou might’ve caught when his perennially cursed franchise was an improbable five outs from reaching the World Series in 2003. When Alou turned on Bartman in the immediate aftermath, so did Wrigley Field, so did the city of Chicago, so did the world. The Cubs lost that game not because of the comedy of playing errors that followed, they’d tell you, but because of Bartman’s intrusion. Director Alex Gibney, however, is not content simply to limit his story to the Friendly Confines and this event’s prelude and aftermath. No, he welcomingly broadens his scope, transforming his film into a ruminating on the meaning and need of sports scapegoats.

The film opens not with Bartman but with Buckner, as in Bill, as in the former Boston Red Sox first baseman who infamously had the ball go between his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series when his squad was but one out away from breaking The Curse of the Bambino and winning the World Series. Even after suffering defeat, a Game 7 remained, sure, but that was beside the point and Buckner was metaphorically strung up in effigy, the Goat of Goats, a man remembered not for a batting title and Gold Gloves but for one single play. For nearly twenty years he and his family were forced to endure abuse from a public mob that put the onus squarely on him for an entire team’s familiar and, frankly, for their own failings as human beings. Gibney sees Buckner’s tale as tantamount to Bartman’s. “I hope you rot in hell!” an amateur camera catches some unnamed Cubs fan hollering at Bartman. “Bill Buckner can rot in hell,” says an unnamed irate caller to some radio show in the aftermath of 1986’s Game 6. Bartman and Buckner, bless their put upon souls, were one in the same, unintentionally exposing the dark side of fandom.

Gibney scores a number of interviews, with players, reporters and fans (but not Bartman who has, rightfully, respectfully, wonderfully, turned down every single interview and public appearance and moneymaking scheme since that fateful night); but his biggest coup might be the fan who hurled a beer at Bartman and was ejected from the stadium. On camera, he appears a mild-mannered regular joe, but also, oddly (or not), unapologetic. His face is twisted into a smile the entire interview, and while it might be tinged with a teensy bit of embarrassment, mostly it’s without contrition. It’s actually kind of terrifying. And more than anything, “Catching Hell” captures the terror of a place where fans can go when they unite in the common interest of vengeance.

“Catching Hell” is about us, about fans, and our need for scapegoats; it’s about the incredible dangers of mass and instantaneous hysteria. Reams of amateur footage showing Bartman attempting to flee Wrigley Field with security elicit not simply sickness for the fate of humanity but deserved pangs of guilt for your own despicable moments as a fan. (I have a few.) A freeze-frame of Bartman that captures him in the moment when he’s suddenly made to realize the ferocious Cub-blue colossus he’s up against, is a split-second that should echo for an eternity, the fear a flash mob enraged members of a flash mob screaming and threatening to attack from all angles. A freeze-frame of Bartman that captures him in the moment when he’s suddenly made to realize the ferocious Cub-blue colossus he’s up against, is a split-second that should echo for an eternity, the fear a flash mob enraged members of a flash mob screaming and threatening to attack from all angles. I don’t mean to belittle police and military members who truly put their lives on the line day in and day out when I say the following, but the look in Bartman’s eyes in that instant is unmistakable – it is the look of a man internally thinking, “Oh my God, these people might actually kill me.”

Late in the film Gibney interviews Kathleen Rolenz, a Unitarian minister, one who knew nothing of the Cubs’ curse or of Bartman but came upon the story in researching a sermon on the nature of scapegoats. She eloquently describes the term in a religious context, how on the day of atonement a goat was chosen, and a priest took the goat into the temple in order to confer the sins of the people onto that animal.

Gibney offers a visual aid in the form of a historical painting rendering this ritual, but the truth is that we don’t really need it. He’s already caught this ritual in action, served up in the terror of that freeze frame, the most infamous baseball fan in the sport’s long history. He’s the scapegoat and you can see – literally see – incredibly sad human beings conferring their sins onto Bartman.

Going Clear

When Lawrence Wright, author of “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief”, the text that gives Alex Gibney’s documentary its title and backbone, is asked why he wrote the book, he explains it was not so much to offer an argument for or against Scientology so much as reach a greater understanding of it. In a world of whippet-quick judgment, that’s admirable. Gibney, on the other hand, enters his film already having passed harsh judgment against Scientology. Oh, he presents an overview of L. Ron Hubbard’s transnational cult – er, religion, sure, but he provides it in the manner of, say, Robert Christgau providing an overview of Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” as “music” – that is, in a tone so snide you can sense his eye rolls without ever seeing them. This is not an examination of Scientology but an attack, upfront and out loud. And that’s not necessarily wrong. After all, we learn that one of Scientology’s tenets is to attack dissenters. Boy, do they, as the evidence suggests. And like the old basketball strategy that goes “attack an attacking team”, Gibney simply gives as good as so many dissenters have gotten.

Any conversation about Scientology must begin with its founder and Gibney does, tracking LRH from his bungling days in the US Navy to a wandering life that included excursions in the occult and fiction writing before conjuring The Modern Science of Mental Health, a science that he eventually transformed into a religion. Is it really a religion? Who’s to say, though Gibney, rest assured, has little use for the notion that it is, so much so that he hardly wastes time giving thought to what might make someone want to sign up for one of those infamous billion year contracts in the first place.

An interview separate from the film with a younger John Travolta, one of Hollywood’s poster boys, along with Tom Cruise, for the movement, indicates he was drawn in on account of its “joy”. But where exactly is this “joy” of which he speaks? It’s never shown. We are never presented with joyful testaments of faith. Of course, such testaments might have been unfeasible. Current members might be executed for high treason if they talk won’t talk and so all Gibney has are ex-members who want to bash the LRH liturgical formula. The closest we get is infamous ex-son Paul Haggis, the Academy Award winning screenwriter, who recounts his origin story with earnestness, though it remains difficult to detect what kept him in.

Yet what the film lacks in pledges of modern mental health allegiance only to works to embolden Gibney’s overriding argument, one succinctly summarized in the recurring image of Scientology’s Los Angeles headquarters, looking less like The Vatican than Trump Tower, a shiny beacon to capitalism. As the film tells us, Scientology is worth a cool 3 billion despite having less than 50,000 members. In other words, its focus seems to be padding its bank account rather than ministry, and shouldn’t ministry be any religious organization’s foremost aim? Say what you want about Mormonism but they have the chutzpah to go on missions to spread the gospel as they see it. Scientology, on the other hand, is completely cloak and dagger, keeping its apparent belief system under tight wraps, preferring to angrily respond to all accusations against its mission with bristled statements rather salutations of gospel, behavior which inevitably raises red flags which prompts inflammatory documentaries just like this one.

It leads to the sense that anger rather than joy, as Ambassador Travolta would tell us, is Scientology’s governing principal. Look no further than the moment that made it famous, the one that functions as “Going Clear’s” crux, when Scientology was able to goad the IRS into officially deeming it a religion by badgering it with lawsuits. It’s a fascinating moment – the eternally despised Internal Revenue Service actually, improbably becoming likable in the face of LRH's genesis. And it’s the moment that sent Scientology into the financial stratosphere and the moment that Gibney reckons changed the game.

The back half of “Going Clear” deliberately jettisons any sense of Scientology as some sort of spiritual balm, railing against its tax exempt status, contending with a furious anger that LRH’s successor, David Miscavige, has no aim aside from exploiting his followers for cheap wage labor to accentuate his own wealth and maximize his power. None of the information throughout is necessarily new but Gibney isn’t seeking to break ground. Instead he marshals all the information at our disposal to put forth a lawsuit in the court of public opinion, to rattle the cages, to stir things up. It’s a cinematic act of aggression. “They fear freedom,” Mr. Hubbard wrote of those who would challenge his pseudo-philosophical baby. “They fear we are growing. Why? Because they have too much to hide.” Yet, if “Going Clear” proves anything, it’s that Scientology fears freedom, that it’s not growing, and that it has a whole helluva lot to hide.

The Armstrong Lie

If we took all the dialogue from “The Armstrong Lie”, typed it up in a Word document and then performed a comprehensive search for the most-repeated phrase, it would have to be, hands down, “At the time”, a phrase spoken exclusively by its subject, seven-time Tour de France champion, cancer survivor and notorious liar and cheat Lance Armstrong. The story is beyond well-documented. For more than a decade, Armstrong vigorously denied all accusations that he utilized illegal means to win the most prestigious of all bike races more than anyone in history, until he finally reversed course in 2013 and confessed. “At the time,” he says, “it didn’t feel wrong.” “At the time,” he recounts, “I didn’t lose sleep over it.” “I know that now,” he advises relating to some spectacular fib. “I didn’t at the time.” In other words, he was so deep down the rabbit hole of lies, he could not – at the time – tell fact from fiction in his own mind. Now, he does. But does he?

At the time, however, is a phrase that could also be applied to director Alex Gibney’s overall project. He began the documentary in 2009 to chronicle Armstrong’s attempts to come back after a four-year layoff and win his eighth Tour de France. This was a point when Armstrong was often accused of wrongdoing but before he had admitted to it, and in advance of both the Federal and US Anti-Doping Agency Investigations in the ensuing years that led to his downfall. Gibney openly roots for an Armstrong win, as much in the capacity of a fan as a filmmaker, seeking the perfect capstone to his movie. Eventually, after Armstrong’s interview with Oprah in which he confessed (mostly) to his maelstrom of falsities, Gibney returned to the film, re-crafting it from the viewpoint of someone who had been duped.

In that way, Gibney, heard in voiceover throughout, questioning himself almost as much as his subject, comes to represent the general public and the way it (we?) bought into the lie. Gibney lays out the substantial amount of evidence against Armstrong, though ultimately the intent is not so much to prove Armstrong’s guilt as to portray him as dishonest. Again and again, Gibney and his editors cut from Armstrong in the past toeing the company line about how he has never once tested positive to Armstrong in the present discussing how he doped and got away with it. The Armstrong Lie was not a one-time deal, the film is saying, but perpetual……fiercely perpetual. He browbeat reporters, slandered teammates, shunned friends, leaving virtually no line uncrossed in ensuring his lie was furthered. He went so far as to falsely call his former masseuse Emma O’Reilly an “alcoholic” and a “prostitute” when she alleged he lied. He has since apologized but, of course, we are left to assume that “at the time” it seemed completely logical in his own mind to grossly slander an innocent woman.

His contrition is also undercut by the typical athlete copout, the same refrain you hear from petulant pre-schoolers, the one that goes “Everybody was doing it!” Well, to be fair, everybody was doing it. Sort of. Armstrong and his teammates were not doing it – at least, not at first, not in the early 90’s. And because they weren’t doing it, they weren’t winning, and in order to begin winning, they had to do it and they did. Go EPO or Go Home. Indeed, Gibney takes care in portraying the sport as one that breeds cheating on account of heads conveniently looking the other way and its necessity The nomenclature of the sport, as with so many sports, is often revolting, such as the Michele Ferrari, a doctor infamous for his ties to cheating who becomes Armstrong’s foremost ally. He refers unironically to Armstrong’s “engine”, how powerful it was and what was needed to increase that power even more, reducing the human cyclist to race car terminology, a commodity.

The gravest irony, of course, and the one that can so easily get lost, is that Armstrong is a cancer survivor. It’s incredible and commendable, and yet certain evidence points toward Armstrong’s doping being the actual cause of the cancer he defeated. Simultaneously, “The Armstrong Lie” makes clear that his Livestrong campaign was a roaring success in earning money for victims of cancer and cancer research. One shot finds Armstrong reclining in a private plane in a Panama hat perusing the “Marketplace” section of a newspaper. His tee shirt, though? It’s for Livestrong. It’s like a cinematic portrait of The Good Thief.

Which is why it’s not a stretch to believe the public might have forgiven Armstrong if he hadn’t been such a bully. The majority of the public and the media, Gibney seems to be saying, wanted to embrace Armstrong, which is why it let itself be strung along. It’s why Gibney intended to chronicle the 2009 comeback and why he found himself so swept up in rooting for his subject to win. The story is irresistible. It was so irresistible that Armstrong did everything in his power to maintain its fiction as reality. He may have acknowledged the truth but his ruthless tactics, willful defamation of those he once called friends and even his defiance today seem to leave him beyond forgiveness.

We like our heroes flawed. We don’t like our heroes to be assholes.