The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s. The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone. They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine. Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together. Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville. Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration. Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period. The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.
Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work. Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.
Milos Forman, a director of films about the recent past (minus Amadeus), created this 1979 film based on a 1967 musical of the same name , written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. The film focuses on the friendship of two archetypes of the American 1960s: the free-spirited flower-child and the conservative army recruit. Clean-cut country-boy Claude Bukowski, on his way to army army training, stops in Central Park in New York City (for some reason), where he meets John Burger and his group of hippie friends who end up becoming his surrogate family while he stays in the city. Shortly after Bukowsky befriends Burger and company, they meet Shelia, a debutante from an upper-crust family who becomes another unlikely associate to the hippie gang.
This is what Bukowski sees when he arrives at Central Park:
The film explores a number of hippie tropes, mostly through the songs that now echo through various appropriations in other forms of popular culture, for example this:
And this:
These songs cover topics such as new age spirituality, destruction of racial boundaries, hallucinogenics, free love, war, sunshine, and non-conformity - which is symbolized by hair:
John Burger is a tough NY hippie, recalling Abbie Hoffman in his attitude and appearance and fast-talking demeanor. Here's Burger singing "I Got Life" as he ruins dinner:
He might also be a prefiguration of Ferris Bueller, whose antics bring his his friends to unlikely places where they are unwelcome (such as a posh garden party hosted by Sheila’s family) and, following Bukowski’s enlistment, into the army base. Ultimately, Bukowski and Burger essentially switch places, as Burger is inadvertently sent to Vietnam while posing as Bukowski on the army base so that Claude can visit his hippie friends off-base. The final turn of the film shows Burger’s headstone as Let the Sun Shine blasts. This final scene includes the most visually striking (and haunting) shot of the film (seen from 2:32 in the video clip below), a show which shows the perspective of the soldiers walking in pairs into the absolutely dark interior of the cargo-plane that carries Burger into oblivion. The shot provides the viewer with the perspective of being just above the soldiers of shoulders, giving the viewer the point of view of a protective spirit about to abandon its ward.
Apparently the film adaptation was disappointing to Rando and Ragni for its great reduction of the anti-war stance of the stage musical, rather placing the bulk of its emphasis on the free-spirited lifestyle of the whole hippie thing (“...man”). Who knows why this happened? Government-Hollywood conspiracy? A loss of the sense of urgency as the film production followed the end of the war by a few years? That there was a deemphasizing of the anti-war aspect of the ‘60s in Forman’s Hair, is surprising, because in the more recent Taking Woodstock, the anti-war attitude of the era is absent, even though the more recent film includes a character that is a Vietnam-vet turned long-haired hippie. Compared to Taking Woodstock, the final scenes of Hair appear forcefully radical.
Some of the songs have been heavily sampled for music of the 1990s rave culture - here’s one example:
