I’m fascinated by cults–namely what drives people to join them. In high school I remember seeing images on the news of bedrooms full of hooded dead bodies wearing new sneakers in a compound in California. The participants of the Heaven’s Gate cult were instructed to take the “Kool-aid” when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared, thus taking them off the earth before its destruction. Also during my early high school years, the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas went up in flames, killing 75 members. What drives people to join these cults? To forfit reason in service to a madman? To hand over one’s future to someone who values the collective at the violent expense of the individual? For whatever reason, time and time again people are sucked into cults.
It should come as no surprise that I was drawn to the cult element of DeLillo’s novel. The opening scene of Karen’s mass wedding ceremony performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon sets the stage for the many cult references in the play. Even though Karen later leaves the cult, she still is described as a deeply religious person who is fanatically devoted to Bill Gray. “If it’s believers you want, Karen is your person. Unconditional belief” (69). Karen openly and even wistfully describes her past in a community, but appears as though she is still living in one with Bill and Scott. Together, Karen and Scott share the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, and even disciplining Bill. It is unclear to me why Karen is so loyal to Bill. Clearly she trusts what Scott does and says and he brought her to Bill, but why stay? There is something unusual about the part where Karen has sex with Bill on page 86. It isn’t passionate or forbidden, but almost as if there has been agreement in the community that that is what Karen should do for Bill.
“Does Scott know you come up here”
[Karen replies,] “Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?”
“That’s what I thought,” he said (86). Karen’s devotion goes beyond her housekeeping duties and extend into the fanatical.
I understand Karen’s obsessive devotion; it is Bill’s that I don’t understand. The part that I continue to have trouble with is why Bill Gray would go to such great lengths to conceal his whereabouts, curb his media presence and precisely time his release of a new book in the first half of the book, only to wake up one day and be persuaded he should drop everything for a publisher/friend, leave the comforts of his home, and enter into the international spotlight. I understand having a political agenda. I understand doing it to free a fellow writer. I understand doing this for personal gain. But all of these seem out of character for the Bill developed in the first half of the book. I appreciate Osteen’s argument that Bill was modeled after DeLillo, but I don’t think it entirely clears of the question of motives. The best explanation I can come up with is that Bill too was sucked into a cult: a cult of terrorism. He blindly followed Charlie, George and Rashid, when he rationally should have been able to pull away or not get involved in the first place.
I think you’re onto something with the idea that Bill is seduced by the idea of terrorism. This fits in with an earlier novel of DeLillo’s, Players, in which a Wall Street broker gradually becomes involved with a group of domestic terrorists for no other apparent reason than that he’s bored.