When I was a kid growing up in the Berkeley flatlands I used to play with a couple of neighbor kids, Tony and his little brother, Mikey. One day in 1979, two men got out of a car, approached Tony and Mikey’s house, and beat another man with a club. The neighborhood buzz was that the assailants were from a group called Synanon, and they were unhappy that their victim had left the group.
I was nine at the time, and none of this made sense. But it all came rushing back as I watched Born in Synanon, a new Paramount + docuseries told from the perspective of a woman, Cassidy Arkin, who spent much of her childhood in the California-based drug rehabilitation community-turned-religious cult. There on the screen was Mikel Jollett, the kid I knew as Mikey, now the leader of the indie rock band Airborne Toxic Event. I learned he is also the author of a memoir about his childhood, Hollywood Park. I had somehow never made these connections. I now know the beating victim was Phil Ritter, who was in fact a defector from Synanon. He was badly injured but survived.
It’s a strange feeling, watching a traumatic (and peripheral) childhood memory play out in a Paramount+ docuseries. But in this case it’s also appropriate. Born in Synanon is actually a story of reconciling childhood experience and memory with the hard light of reality. Arkin’s parents were active members of Synanon, and Arkin was raised to believe in the group’s professed ideals of a utopia untainted by racism and classism. The widely reported stories of abuse and violent intimidation —all were bullied into sharing their innermost secrets via “The Game,” a form of attack therapy; mass beatings were administered by a group called the Imperial Marines for perceived infractions — didn’t really register with her. Then she started doing some of her own reporting, talking to her peers, including Jollett, and her elders, including her mother. And all those scary stories started to make more sense.
A thoughtful series that grows richer with each of its four episodes, Born in Synanon is as much a personal journey as a historical study, although it ultimately manages to be both. In digging through Arkin’s past, and tracing Synanon’s path from communal optimism to dysfunctional hell, director Geeta Gandbhir crafts an open-minded interrogation of why we believe what we believe, and why we remember what we remember. She never takes it easy on Synanon, whose pugnacious leader, Charles Dederich, once had a rattlesnake planted in a lawyer’s mailbox (it bit; the lawyer survived) and reportedly put together a “hit list” of former enemies marked for death or serious injury. But she gives voice to former members with fond memories, who are still slow to condemn a group that went way over the edge.
Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon, and wife Betty, on March 18, 1964.
Gordon Peters/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Like most cults, Synanon chronicled itself obsessively. We see copious archive footage of “The Game,” the group’s version of attack therapy, in which members shout at and curse each other in search of fearless honesty (an activity that takes on a much darker tone when children who don‘t know any better are made to take part). We hear excerpts from “the wire,” the PA system Dederich rigged up to spread his intimidation to his followers. These were Dederich’s tools of control, used to enforce his godhead status. From the time of Synanon’s 1958 founding as a haven for recovering drug addicts, through its Seventies infamy as a quasi-religious organization that forced its male members to have vasectomies, its women to shave their heads and some to get abortions, Dederich appears to have descended into full-blown power madness, and regressed into full-on alcohol abuse.
Born in Synanon is largely about the passage of time, which can obfuscate, but also clarify. Arkin had a buffer from some of Synanon’s madness; her father, Ed Arkin (who has since passed away), was part of the group’s inner circle (composed mostly of white men), and her mother, Sandra Rogers-Hare, a strong presence in the series, was for many years a true believer. “My mother loved Synanon,” Arkin says in the series, “and it’s only now that I’m realizing she was duped.” Arkin’s parents were more present than many of the other Synanon parents, whose children were taken away and left to be raised by the cult community.
Jollett managed to escape, with his mother and older brother, at which point he apparently became my neighbor. Born in Synanon gives voice to the children who didn’t have a choice in the matter of whether to join the cult. It also gives me the joy of seeing Mikey kick ass as an adult, more than four decades after a very frightening day.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
