(from Penny Arcade:)
Revisiting Rapunzel
It was interesting to see a film about somebody I knew.
I couldn’t believe it when I arrived at Northampton’s Academy of Music for the premiere of UMass professor Bruce Geisler’s new film about the Western Mass commune Brotherhood of the Spirit. There was a line at the box office that was so long it went all the way down the long sidewalk leading to the Academy, around the corner and stretching to the bus stop. I couldn’t remember seeing a line like that for an Academy of Music show since the Ramones played there in the late 1970’s! Later it said in the Collegian that the premiere was the best selling opening for a film (as opposed to a concert) in the modern history of the Academy.
There was no way my friend and I were going to get in the back of that line, despite the flute playing clown which entertained the line as they waited, because it looked likely that the line was long enough to have the show sell out before we could reach the ticket box. So I just made a video of the scene outside the Academy and resolved to return the next day. There was a line on Sunday too, but not nearly as long and I managed to get in.
I guess the huge turnout shows that even after all these years people are still fascinated by the question, “What the hell was going on at that commune up in the hill towns in the 70’s and 80’s?” In fact I would consider the story of the Brotherhood and its controversial leader, the drug-addled mystic Michael Metelica Rapunzel, to be the most important largely untold story in Western Mass history, the only more important one being the fall of Springfield at the hands of a brutal political machine. Both are essential topics for understanding why our Valley is what it is today, and neither story has ever been even half told.
Perhaps I should have predicted the film’s popularity. Shortly after the death of Rapunzel I wrote a brief memoir of my visit to the commune for my website. I was surprised afterward to receive a stream of emails from people who had lived at the commune. This surprised me in part because my account was filled with sarcasm bordering on ridicule and was hardly flattering to Rapunzel or his followers. Yet a Google search showed that my article and another by Stephanie Kraft of The Valley Advocate were practically the only things available on the web about the commune. That supporters of the commune felt compelled to write to me about their experiences, despite my article’s unsympathetic tone, suggested to me that there must be a real hunger out there to sort out what the commune meant, a task made difficult by the fact that there was nearly a total lack of any historical account of what had actually happened at the commune.
Personally I was unqualified to offer anyone that historical perspective. My account of the Brotherhood was based solely upon one visit I made to the commune that lasted only four or five days. I spent most of that time working in a vegetable garden, which was a tremendous culture shock for a street kid from Springfield. The commune members were obviously on some sort of spiritual trip, but in those days my idea of a spiritual quest was making it to the teenage keg parties in the woods next to Saint Michael’s Cemetery. I only spent one evening in the company of Rapunzel, and I left convinced that Rapunzel was a shameless hypocrite and an obvious charlatan.
Interestingly, none of the commune members who contacted me argued much with my appraisal of Rapunzel. In fact several insisted that he was much worse than I had described. But what I found everyone saying was that I had missed something in my brief stay, that there was much going on at the commune that was very positive, very high energy and which had nothing to do with the dark psycho-dramas surrounding Rapunzel and his inner circle. Over and over again I kept reading the same thing in their emails, which was some variation of the phrase “the best time of my life.”
I took going to see the film Free Sprits more seriously than I normally would when seeing a movie. I generally read the Valley Advocate soon after it hits UMass/downtown Amherst late on Wednesday afternoons. But this week I refused to read it because of the front page article by Andrew Varnon, which I didn’t want to prejudice me in any way about what I would see. I wanted to watch the film clean, with no expectations or preconceptions and I also wanted to test my own memory against whatever I saw. I was afraid Varnon’s Advocate article would trigger memories that would feed my biases.
What did I think of the film? At the end of the movie I gladly joined in with the thunderous applause. I was applauding not because the film was good, which it was, but because it had been made at all. I felt that an important missing piece of Valley history had finally been filled in, at least partially, and that it was a film whose importance surpassed its entertainment value. I would go so far as to say it is the one essential film this year that every resident of Western Mass must see.
I was pleased to discover that I saw little that clashed with my own recollections, in fact the film brought to mind things that I had long forgotten. It was strangely nostalgic to see pictures of the inside of the giant dormitory in Warwick (which I more accurately called “a barn”) and the dining area where we ate our dreadfully bland vegan meals.
One scene in particular struck me, the one where everyone is shown running across a field. At one point I spotted among the runners a person being pushed along in a wheelchair, a very disabled spastic person with no control of his body movements. It brought to mind a long forgotten incident involving that very person, who one morning was laid out on a table in the barn. We were instructed to form a line and file past this pathetic person and look directly into his eyes. It was typical of the kind of crazy things we would do that were designed to break down any hang-ups you might have about your body, such as the nude sauna they had outdoors or the arrangement of the toilets in a circle so that you had to pull down your pants and shit in front of your friends. (Many, myself included, preferred to go in the woods rather than use those toilets.) Anyway, I remember looking into the eyes of that spastic and being startled, because I saw such awareness in those eyes that it was clear that there was an intelligent mind trapped inside that body.
I’m sure I’m not unique in feeling that important things were left out of the film. Part of that is inevitable; apparently the original director’s cut was over three hours long, which would be commercial suicide for a documentary. But I found it unfortunate that so much was glossed over in the film about the commune’s beliefs. The truth is there was no great philosophy guiding these people, just some vague altruistic impulses tied to generalizations based on the basic principles of most major religions, particularly Christianity, all mixed up with the cult of personality around Rapunzel.
But it would have expanded viewers insights had it been shown the way they were heavily into reincarnation, and how one of the most bizarre aspects of Rapunzel was his insistence that he was the reincarnation of Saint Peter, the apostle of Christ, and the Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Astute observers will notice in the many posters shown in the film that Confederate icons are everywhere, an aspect that is somewhat politically incorrect these days when the Confederate flag is considered by many as a symbol of racism. Indeed modern lefties will find much to dislike about the commune, especially its insistence on the subservience of women and its unfriendly attitude towards gays.
To its credit, the film is mostly honest about the dark side of the commune. Originally a kind of unstructured democracy, the commune became increasingly socialistic with all wealth eventually centralized in Rapunzel. In that sense the commune presented a microcosm of how socialism devolves into tyranny and of why socialism failed so consistently in the past century whenever it was tried. Once people weren’t allowed to keep the money they earned, it was as much a road to ruin for the commune as it was for places like East Germany.
But fuzzy ideology and bad economics were not the most important reasons the commune failed. There was also the disastrous alliance between Rapunzel and a pair of crackpot mystics who insisted on “guiding” the commune with their magical powers. Once you’re running your life in accordance with someone chanting in a trance about spirit guides, disaster must inevitably follow.
But nothing was more destructive than the drugs. The film insists the commune’s ban on drugs was sincere, and I saw no drug use when I was there except what was offered to me by Rapunzel. Yet I’m inclined to believe those who have told me that the no-drugs rule was just a necessary pose to keep the rest of society at bay. Had the commune ever been seen as a pro-drug environment, that would have been all the authorities would have needed to squash the commune like a bug. The film buys into the notion that the Brotherhood was a sober meditation society, but I’ve spent a lot of time with stoned people and even in the earliest photographs most of these folks look wasted to me.
Interestingly the film says little about the one area where Rapunzel may have been a true visionary – video. He was not the first to embrace the notion that everything should be filmed, photographed, recorded or written about (that would be the Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters) but Rapunzel was certainly one of the early pioneers of that concept, especially in the area of the music video.
The saddest scenes of the film are the last interviews with Rapunzel, which show him in a shocking state of degradation, slurring his words, prematurely aged and cluelessly in denial about what has happened to him. If you want to scare kids away from drugs, just show side by side a picture of Rapunzel as he was at the beginning of the film and what he looked like at the end. Scared straight indeed.
Free Spirits is an important film for many reasons, but mostly because it forms the first real foundation for intelligent discussion of what the commune meant to our Valley. It had an influence far beyond its actual membership, functioning almost like a counter-culture university, sending its graduates out into Western Mass where they profoundly influenced the communities in which they lived. A lot of what makes us “The Happy Valley” was forged in the crucible of The Brotherhood of the Spirit. And say what you will about Rapunzel’s bad end, the commune at its best was a living model of the notion that you can live your life the way you want, as opposed to what society expects of you, and if you will only have the courage to sincerely try, then you can create the life of excitement, spirituality and high adventure we all crave, especially in our youth. In that sense, it’s no surprise that people later described it as the best time of their life.
As I was leaving the theater a giant balloon was hovering over Northampton.
* * * * *
I have not seen the movie. They wouldn’t give me a copy. There is a home movie online from the community that contains a brief glimpse of me… And a wedding photo!
In Freedom,
Frank Moore