A Documentary About the Church of the SubGenius

From Dark Star Pictures and Uncork’d Entertainment comes the story of a church that’s been called “the most aggressively preposterous theology the world has ever known!”

“Bobs are part of the joke that, once you get over the butt-hurt, you start laughing at it.” Focused on a self-proclaimed cult started in 1981, director/writer Sandy K. Boone and co-writer Jason Wehling look at the religion that hoped always to not quite go full Scientology but never shied away from tricking people just as much.

The film opens in a field populated by an eclectic gaggle of aging new wave, hippie, skeptic absurdists: tattooed, tie-dyed, role-playing. I can very much relate to this group. In the early ‘90s, we had the same: a tight cluster of punks, runaways, mavericks, art room recluses, theater kids and weed-smoking, acid-dropping musicians who read books, spliced movies together from two VCRs and played Tetris while scarfing down Froot Loops. We made up our own rules, languages, code names and handshakes. We named our own deities.

Whether we were operating in parallel to or the wake of the Church of the SubGenius, the ‘90s were the most fecund territorial for waging war against normies, being aggressively bizarre and oddly relishing in the possibility of the fall of society. Was it because of century fatigue, pre-millennial tension, nuclear and Cold War anxiety, the collision of the ‘80s excess with the dawn of the Internet? All of the above? None of the above? Penn Jillette points out that many simply didn’t realize that they were “building on tropes originated from the Church of the SubGenius.” Most certainly, the 2005 rise and free-speech/anti-Creationist movement of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – the Pastafarians – took cues from Dobbs.

Postmodernism, Reaganism, New Wave, punk, MTV, Saturday morning cartoons, fax machines, 2600-baud modems, latchkey kids, underground comics, west coast and east coast pop art, mixtapes, digital sampling, computer-generated art and straight-to-video pulp films were being thrown in a blender and then sawed in half with a chainsaw.

When founder Ivan Stang came up with the notion that they weren’t quite geniuses but sub-geniuses, the whole world clicked and things took off: a sudden combination of robot toys, zines, clip art, and the invention of a cult leader – Bob Dobbs, leader of said cult, represented by a 1950s man’s smiling face, smoking a pipe.

Finding the Freak Frequency

As a film, we have a great collection of nicely shot interviews, a quirky soundtrack, and lots and lots of montages of vintage ‘90s oddities. Arguably we can see the origins of the internet’s belligerent subcultures – the skeptical armchair critic with otaku tastes and “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

In this film, you will hear from the founders, original members and requisite celebrity cameos from the likes of Nick Offerman, Penn Jillette, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, director Richard Linklater…all the expected suspects, raised on Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. The counterculture that came together to form a countercultural society. “We were trolls before they had that term, but CB radios used that term. We didn’t use (the radio) to help others; we used it to confuse strangers.”

Bob Dobbs

They coined the term “Slack,” a lifestyle choice that could loosely be defined as not giving any fucks. “Arch Doctor Saint Margaret,” “Saint Byron Werner,” “Pope Sternodox” all signed up for a dollar via a pamphlet canvassing new disciples. Other members of the cult included Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Repo Man director Alex Cox, and the more you think about it, most of the people who drove the Generation X revolution: David Byrne, The Residents, Pee-Wee Herman.

25 years later, Generation X is often left out of generational comparison statistics. Truly, a lost generation? Or one that has been inoculated by the white blood cells of Capitalism and the ideology of the nuclear family?

Losing My Religion

The film momentarily turns toward how the group is mainly a boys’ club – “the patriarchy strained through a cheese-cloth’ – but with the qualification that “Heck, I wanted to meet all the boys.” You can hear echoes of outlaw artist Robert Williams everywhere. Their first convention took place in Dallas and was billed as “the fastest-growing cult” on Channel 4 news. It also turned out to be a financial disaster.

Linklater comments on how often the “slacker” is attacked by society for being a drop-out, an outlier, a weirdo – all of which represent threats to the industrial complex. Of course, Linklater’s seminal work Slacker is a virtual manifesto of Bob Dobb’s dogma as well as a film that dismantled edited structures in much the same self-conscious or ironically laissez-faire way as the ‘60s New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and François Truffaut and such Italian works as Fellini’s 8 ½ or Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy on modernity and its discontents: L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse.

By act two, the film begins to address the rising fame of the cult, growing egos and a publishing deal. Bookstores didn’t sell it in the comic book section but rather alongside other religious texts. As Offerman points out, it was “older, wiser miscreants telling us that human-made organizational systems are as flawed as you’d suspect, because…they’re made by us.”

We look back at the horrors and manias of cults like Jonestown, Waco, the “pinks,” the megachurches, the snake oil salesmen that pervaded the era. In so many ways, the precursors to the mania that has infected America in the second decade of the 2000s: a bonfire doused in the gasoline of algorithm-driven social media machines, commandeered by political operatives, corporations and lobbyists to incite partisanship with all the lunacy of religious fervor.

In the film’s third act, we explore the effects of playing with fire. You see, to suspend one’s lifestyle in a suspension of disbelief that walks the tightrope between community, satire and allegiance to the tribe is a slippery path.

“If you can’t take the joke,” Offerman explains of the cult’s catchphrase, “then please go fuck yourself.” Yet, mix this idea of giving community to outcasts who are emotionally driven by resentment, anger and disenfranchisement, and you have the potential for aggressive toxicity. Such cultures invariably fracture between those who take the words literally and those who use it as a guideline.

“The internet did so much to kill the old ways of doing things…people exposed to it can longer distinguish between fantasies and tripe.” As the documentary moves into the Columbine era, it becomes frighteningly clear that things can come back to haunt you. There were promotional missteps. There were prompts. Bomb threats to their conventions. Being added to national security watchlists.

“In the end, it is about confronting the dark things, pulling the fangs out of them, and making them a joke.”

“The internet did so much to kill the old ways of doing things,” – “people exposed to it can longer distinguish between fantasies and tripe.” As the documentary moves into the Columbine era, it becomes frighteningly clear that things can come back to haunt you. There were promotional missteps. There were prompts. Bomb threats to their conventions. Being added to national security watchlists.

“In the end, it is about confronting the dark things, pulling the fangs out of them, and making them a joke.”

This Is the End

Then 9/11 comes and marks the end of times. Indeed, it was the end of innocence. I will leave the rest of the film for you to discover. Needless to say, it offers a fascinating story about a time that seems both irretrievably lost and paradoxically now surrounds us to the degree that, as Douglas Rushkoff states, makes the Alternative the normie and the normies the outsiders.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the ‘90s were just a giant cult of Bob Dobbs. Shit got real weird, and sometimes it was hard to separate from reality. “Bob is great in reasonably sensible doses,” reflects one of the Church’s most staunch long-term members.

I recently listened to the reading of disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen’s book about his life as Donald Trump’s consiglieri. He lays down one damning, scandalous bombshell after another, confirming every suspicion and every accusation that has been leveled at the infamous President. And yet, no one is talking about the book. The revelations, scandals, conspiracy theories and transgressions have all become so commonplace that society’s outrage has been fatigued and these gross indecencies, injustices, and flat-out crimes have been normalized.

“It’s very easy to slice the world up, and pit everyone against each other,” cautions Linklater. As the film turns to the present, one can only wonder at the movement’s prescience, its role as a harbinger, and how that may have sown important roots in forming an intellectual bulwark against contemporary propaganda. In the very way that the group played with its own wobbly margin between reality and satire, it highlights how easy schadenfreude, the desire for inclusion and spectacle, focused through the lens of fear, can transform into a dangerous cocktail of unconditional devotion to demagogues.

The film’s coda addresses the hyper-socialized world we now inhabit. A world in which no moment is lived offline, where every act is captured and posted, every meal, joke, exchange, passing thought, emotional ripple. A world that will not have time to watch this movie or read this article.

But if you somehow do, J.R. Bob Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius can be viewed from the comfort of your pandemic-driven social isolation, while the cult of Donald Trump doubles down across North America. Regardless of his place in office, the new cult of the SubGenius has been birthed.

Check out the trailer below

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius is available in virtual theaters October 16 and available on Demand October 20, 2020.