Jonestown Documentaries on the Fortieth Anniversary

November 2018 marked the fortieth anniversary of the mass murder-suicides at Jonestown that ended Peoples Temple. This anniversary brought forth a crop of new documentaries on Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, with further documentaries and series still to come. Until the 11 September 2001 attacks, Jonestown represented the largest single mass death event of civilians in U.S. history. The end of Jonestown was highly visual. For the overwhelming number of Americans, their first glimpse of Peoples Temple members was film footage shot from a helicopter as it passed over a large multicolored quilt of human bodies. Over the coming weeks, that footage would be interspersed with both scenes of a celebration at Jonestown on the night of 17 November, an airport ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan's party at Port Kaituma on 18 November, and recovery efforts as the American military began collecting and ferrying bodies out of Guyana. This story and its accompanying visuals kept Americans glued to their television sets for the rest of 1978. Although the deeper story of Peoples Temple is to be found in recordings and documents, its strong visual appeal and gruesomeness keeps it coming back to television.

Every single new documentary on Peoples Temple shows, in at least the first five minutes, that same aerial shot from 1978. While this raises concerns about what Jonathan Z. Smith calls the "pornography of Jonestown," ¹namely the focus on the exploitative details—death, sex, drugs, and so on—most of these new documentaries move past the pornography and give a fuller picture of Peoples Temple. If nothing else, most of these documentaries dispel the notion that the members of Peoples Temple were brainwashed pawns, and instead demonstrate that these were real people who tried to make the world a better place.

It is worth noting the contrast between the Peoples Temple and Jonestown documentaries and the twenty-fifth anniversary documentaries on the Branch Davidian disaster that also aired between 2017 and 2018. Those documentaries, as analyzed by Stuart A. Wright, demonstrate that there are still hard feelings about the Branch Davidian stand-off. ²As Wright points out, there are numerous times when law enforcement personnel either ignored certain facts in the standoff, the post-operation reports that criticized them, or the fact that the surviving Davidians were found not guilty on many of the charges they were tried on. For Peoples Temple, there are no major disagreements and the documentaries present no real controversy about the timeline of events or their causes. This is not to say that there are not people who disagree with the narratives presented, but those people are not getting on television because so many of their counter-narratives fail to stand up under scrutiny. For example, Bo Gritz can claim in his 1991 book Called to Servethat U.S. Special Forces and British SAS killed most of the Jonestown residents, but he offers no proof and his tales contradict multiple eyewitnesses. Dr. David Beter can claim, as he did in Audio Letter no. 40 (30 November 1978) that the deaths at Jonestown provided cover for a U.S. military operation in Guyana to destroy a Soviet missile base and that the real Jim Jones survived and was whisked away to Israel, but again, there is no proof and these stories can live on the Internet, where they belong.

All of the documentaries reviewed here are expository, not investigatory, and since they generally are in agreement, they have to find other ways to...