J. R. "Bob" Dobbs & the Church of the Subgenius--Yet another in the pandemic-era boom of offbeat documentaries has struck a nostalgic autobiographical chord with me: Sandy K. Boone's behind-the-scenes look at the "parody religion" (or is it?) founded by Fort Worth, Texas weirdo Ivan Stang and his friend "Philo Drummond" in the late '70s. In the mid-'80s, my best friend gave me, one Christmas, The Book of the SubGenius, published by McGraw-Hill no less, a compendium of the Church's exhaustingly dense prophecies, teachings and aphorisms ("You'll pay to know what you really think") mingled with hilarious yet unsettling apocalyptic artwork, much of it clip art collage.
The book, my friend said, was too strange for him, but he thought I'd like it. He was right. I had never heard of the Church, but there was something deeply compelling about its scripture; it was like the Tibetan Book of the Dead crossed with a Chick tract, re-edited by Firesign Theater. And it was hard not to reflect, while reading it, that it contained a high degree of self-deprecating good sense. It's still on my bookshelf.
The impossible-to-summarize theology goes something like this: Social misfits and oddballs are really members of a class of person called a SubGenius, distinct from and superior to the "pinks, glorps and mediocretins" that perpetuate conformist society. The state which SubGenii properly seek is "Slack," an undefinable form of well-being. The Church venerates a figure known as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, a stereotypically clean-cut midcentury-style clip art white dude with blazing eyes and a pipe clenched in his grinning teeth. The central prophecy was that eventually (well, in 1998) aliens would come to Earth and liberate the faithful.
Now affable old longhairs who look like veteran Deadheads, Stang and "Philo" rather sheepishly tell Boone's camera how their in-joke pamphlets gradually caught on across the country, spawning "Devivals" and radio hours and selling out live shows; other talking heads include Penn Jillette, Mark Mothersbaugh and Richard Linklater. It's to Boone's credit that she doesn't shirk the potentially dark side of the Church's supercilious, misanthropic outlook, or how closely it's flirted, at times, with being a real creepy cult over the years. But overall, this portrait suggests a positive, even comforting religious experience: The meaning of life and the universe, interpreted by a like-minded community.
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