How, in the name of the Holy Virgin Mary, did Michelle Remembers—the book that started the Satanic Panic—come to be written? Who was Lawrence Pazder really? Did he encourage and exaggerate Michelle Smith’s recovered memories of ritual abuse? Did Smith tell him what he wanted to hear? Or was it a little of both?
Canadian filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve Adams have a new documentary out called “Satan Wants You,” and it fills in a lot of the blanks in our prior “Swan Song Series” reporting with incredible archival footage and brave interviews from friends and family members.
Today it opens at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, which means the reviews embargo is lifted… and our review is: “Incredible work. Must see.”
PS! If you haven't pre-ordered our fabulously interesting book, Barnes and Noble are running a 25% off pre-order promo. You can use "PREORDER25" as the discount code at checkout. Good from now till Friday!
Show Notes
Satan Wants You
Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 4 | Michelle Remembers: Context & History
Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 5 | Michelle Remembers: Themes & Framing
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: Michelle Remembers: Literal Symbols
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: The Courage to Heal Pt. 1 on Stitcher
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: The Courage to Heal Pt. 2 on Stitcher
The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can follow us on Instagram and you can subscribe at Apple Podcasts and on Patreon where we have some really great stuff.
I just did our first Ask Me Anything live stream and I fielded some difficult questions about what the fuck is up with RFK Jr.' 's run for president.
About whether there's any part of the woo world that I still value.
And also, like, things like managing cynicism while swimming through all of this shitty content.
And, Julian, I side-kicked for your thorough report that you prepared on how George Soros lives rent-free in the brains of so many right-wingers, right?
Yeah, thanks for being part of my rundown on who exactly George Soros is and how his influence stacks up against the Christian nationalist dark money machine that has actually taken over our Supreme Court.
And on the RFK Jr.
topic, I actually have a brief coming up in which I interviewed Eric Garcia about RFK's anti-vax impact on autistic people.
Oh, great.
Yeah, good.
So that's a great interview.
I'm excited to share it.
Everyone, please, if you can, pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
It really helps us.
And check out this endorsement we got from Anna Merlin, author of Republic of Lies.
The author, too, of her most recent piece in, it's in Vice, but she's got a great rundown of how many of the influencers that we follow in the wellness space have actually pivoted to anti-trans rhetoric.
Anyway, this is what she very kindly said about our book.
She said, "...a thoughtful, deeply empathetic exploration of an often disturbing convergence.
as fear, paranoia, and suspicion continue to seep into the new age health and wellness
worlds, Remsky, Barris, and Walker are uniquely well-positioned to be our guides into what
they call the sparkling but flimsy answers that conspirituality represents.
The 151. Satan wants you. Watch party.
There will be spoilers.
Yes, Julian, very excited for this.
Canadian filmmakers Sean Horler and Steve Adams have a new documentary out called Satan Wants You and it opened at South by Southwest.
To glowing notices, and today, the 27th, it's opening at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival, and that means that the review embargo is now lifted.
We initially tried to book Sean and Steve for this episode to discuss it all, but, you know, they were very busy with all of the promotion, so the timing didn't work out.
And instead of waiting until the theatrical release in July to have them on and to discuss it then, we wanted to review the film today and really talk it up, really encourage everyone to look out for it and to see it when you can.
So as I said, we will be dropping spoilers amidst our setup and comments.
We're sorry, we can't avoid it.
Some of them will be too nerdy for a lot of listeners to care.
Yeah.
But none of them, in our opinions, will detract from the immersive atmospheric punch of this great film.
Yeah.
There's so much here.
I don't think we're going to spoil much of it at all.
And we've waited a long time for this and we didn't even know it was coming.
Julian, what's your top line thought?
I think you just said that this was the satanic panic documentary we didn't know we were waiting for.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, you know, quite early on in conspirituality, I knew that we had to dig, like, just I had this intuition in the back of my mind.
Oh, yeah, there's that satanic panic thing that happened in the late 80s, early 90s, because it's clearly an antecedent to QAnon.
And then, you know, you have the Salem witch trials kind of hovering behind all of this.
Right.
But anyone who looks into the satanic panic is definitely going to find, as we did, that Michelle remembers is the seminal text.
And to have done all of the in-depth work that you and I did together on it last year for the Swan Song series, we really looked into Michelle Remembers and the Satanic Panic in a lot of depth, as well as the West Memphis Three.
There's so many connected stories that link to this.
To have done all of that and then Find out unexpectedly that this excellent documentary has revisited it with such incredible primary resources and interviews.
It's validating and I have to say I was intrigued and salivating to get to it.
Yeah.
And primary sources is key.
Their access to interview subjects is key.
We'll talk about all of that.
And as promised, this is a watch party and we've got popcorn for it.
But it also wouldn't be our podcast if we didn't start with a stroll through some background.
And in this case, we'll follow the breadcrumbs of the archival stuff that Julian has mentioned.
Patreon subscribers first heard our 10-part Swan Song series before we dripped them out individually from behind the paywall.
So you can find those episodes in your regular feed.
And numbers four, five, and six were devoted to Michelle Remembers, the subject of this film.
And in our series, first of all, we paid homage to Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs and their five-part series on Michelle Remembers.
And we also took a number of different angles from the ones that they took.
And what's really cool is that Sarah Marshall is in the film as the book's tour guide, and that's really cool.
And maybe, Julian, someday some documentary filmmaker will make a film about our wonderful, somber, and heartbreaking work.
And I'm wondering if you know what you would wear if they came over to your place to shoot.
What kind of room would you like to be sitting in as they film B-roll of your brooding concentration?
I just heard in my head our wonderful, somber, heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
Yeah, right.
You know, as you can tell, but most people will not know, I mostly only wear black anyway, so that should work just fine.
I just pick anything that's clean on that particular day.
Probably the front room in our house has the best light.
I think I'd be on the sort of burnt orange little sofa we have in there that mostly the dog uses these days.
But my yellow Stratocaster would be hanging on the wall behind just for a little, you know, extra spice.
Hmm, so let's talk a little bit about self-perception, because I think outsourcing your color palette to the couch and the guitar, it just seems a little, I don't know, emotionally guarded, avoidant, maybe retiring.
Maybe it's just minimalist and Buddhist.
What do you think?
I have absolutely no idea.
There we are.
We argued in our series, as many of the experts in this documentary argue, that Michelle Remembers is at the heart of the Satanic Panic.
Pazder and Smith not only sell millions of copies, so Lawrence Pazder is the therapist and Michelle Smith is his, let's just say patient for now.
They not only sell millions of copies, but they're also All over the media for years after and they end up giving lectures to cops and consulting on cases like the infamous McMartin preschool or is it preschool?
Yeah.
Or daycare?
Yeah preschool.
Marshall calls the book patient zero of what became a pandemic.
And I think the short answer for how the Satanic Panic fits in with our beat here on the podcast is that, as you mentioned, in form and function, it's the precursor to QAnon.
And in terms of form, the Satanic Panic invented a whole class of pedophilic vampires kidnapping and sacrificing children.
But in terms of function, the Satanic Panic made it clear that a mass This anxious, panicky event could be generated from absolutely nothing, although it's not really nothing if we see it as the eruption of several intersecting anxieties about things like changing gender roles, the growing awareness around the extent of child sexual abuse in the culture, and also the secularization of the world and the status of institutional Christianity
Especially in the shadow of the Cold War.
Yeah, as the documentary points out in its chilling denouement, without the satanic panic, there is no Pizzagate.
Without Pizzagate, there's no QAnon.
Without QAnon, there's no January 6th.
Without January 6th, there's no freedom movement to exonerate them as DeSantis stumbles his way towards perhaps coming to power.
The documentary doesn't take that next step, the last one, but we could add that without the satanic panic, there isn't the queue-adjacent panic about trans people, quote-unquote, groomers, that's able to become a super efficient organizing principle for today's reactionary politics.
Yes, and as Bo Brink pointed out in my interview with him for episode 143, the knock-on effects for queer people are ongoing because in the Michelle Remembers universe, every debauched disaster can only ever resolve through a return to God-sanctioned and religiously imposed normalcy.
Now, we'll talk about how, as if the book didn't make this clear enough, the doc shows it in all of these strange and wonderful ways, and sometimes in very plain ways, such as giving us this archival footage of Lawrence and Michelle in their Yeah, all of that.
The telling on themselves that all of this archival footage does as well is really, it shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness in terms of how others might perceive what was going on.
Yeah, as we're watching them being interviewed, like I'm looking at Valerie Pringle and that Scottish guy, and I'm going, I'm going, you're, you're, I know you have to, your editor has asked you to take these people seriously, but you're really going for it.
And, and you're not Geraldo.
You're not like, you're not juicing them.
You are really, anyway, we'll get into the interviewers in a moment, but, but, but the credulity is really incredible.
Another thing that, The doc touches on, but we go long on in our coverage, is that Michelle remembers had a very toxic effect on psychotherapy.
So not only on the FBI and their sense of like how you can tell when there's been satanic ritual abuse, but also on the process of psychotherapy and how therapists related to trauma.
So it encouraged many altruistic and often feminist therapists to believe it was their mission in life to draw out Testimonies of satanic ritual abuse from every client exhibiting symptoms of anything.
And this is, this is how the satanic panic got drawn into the more respectable lane of trauma research and therapy.
And as we discovered, I was kind of surprised to discover it never really went away.
And there's, there's overlap with like, The more sort of embodiment, somatic psychology, yoga, trauma-informed, there's still echoes of this.
And the seeds of all of that were planted by Lawrence Pastor's own credentials as a legit psychiatrist.
You know, he worked in a big office building, for God's sake, that had the rod of Asclepius on the side with the serpent.
It's not only planted by his credentials, but also his rejection of his credentials, because he really breaks the mold.
He's always alluding to, you know, the training is not sufficient to what he's actually encountering.
And so he also carves for himself this place as a kind of maverick, bucking the sort of conventional training and, you know, everything that's actually, well, evidence-based for as good as that was at the time.
But he really cuts this path of somebody who's going to not be bound by his education.
Yeah, he's a Catholic-pilled psychiatric influencer, right?
Exactly, right.
Yeah, so and then there are all of these other pathways towards the normalization of the satanic panic.
Those pathways could also feel progressive and feminist.
So, for instance, in our Swan Song series, we did two episodes on a book called The Courage to Heal, which is a book of creative writing prompts that promised readers to help them uncover the reality and the truth of child sexual abuse in their pasts.
And so the basic premise of this book is that memories of child sexual abuse can be recovered and articulated by survivors who are given creative writing journals and writing cues.
And in the words of one reviewer who's writing in the APA Journal in 1991, They say, quote, as the Bible for many recovering alcoholics is one day at a time, I believe that one or both of these books, because there's also a workbook that Bass and Davis produce, will become the Bible for recovering child sexual abuse survivors.
Perhaps the book already has.
And even today, this book, The Courage to Heal, occupies this tender and ambivalent space because thousands of people, women especially, credit it with saving their lives by giving them transparent access to memories that were harming them.
During a time when therapy for child sexual abuse was quite limited, but Bass and Davis also created a doorway between the needed and legitimate psychotherapy of recovery and the stressful and feverish realm of exaggeration that can lead to moral panics.
In all of the feedback that we received over those episodes, I think that that was the point that people who didn't like our position said most often, which was that you have to realize, or I think the criticism was you're not acknowledging how at that time there was nothing available for survivors of child sexual abuse. There were no tools.
And so this book really sort of fell into a practical and I would say like a gap of care, right?
But they were writing instructors, not mental health practitioners.
They weren't forensic psychologists.
They weren't experts in sex trafficking.
In fact, throughout their book, they misquote or they quote inflated numbers around the numbers of children who are actually sex trafficked.
So that's where we get things like, you know, 800,000 children in the U.S.
are sex trafficked every year.
And I think in one instance, two million is quoted.
Just, like, bizarre.
Yeah, over the top numbers that have nothing to do with the actual reality.
So, these are people who are not the people who do the jobs in the thing that they love to write about because it's very moving and dramatic.
And the problem with aestheticizing a real issue is that if you're looking for Or you're helping as an instructor to develop the most impactful story or poetry, you might find yourself promoting versions of events that reflect your desires more than they reflect reality.
Yeah, it's a better story if you keep leaning in that particular direction.
Right.
And yeah, that's very well said.
These are not the people who do the work, and yet this is what they love writing about.
And it's the It is that very sort of populist, do your own research, fuck the experts, we're going to go into our own direct experience and trust that most fully.
It's that very alluring, I relate to finding that very appealing as a younger person, especially as a younger person without credentials.
And I want to just note, though, that to their credit, they don't spend any time in that book badmouthing conventional psychotherapy.
So it's not really fuck the experts, which is our current milieu, for sure.
But what they do, I think, strongly encourage throughout the book is, you know, if you're going to get therapeutic support, make sure you find somebody who knows this book.
Right, like somebody who's in this discourse already.
Yeah, so even a really good point, and thank you for correcting me there, even though they're not saying fuck the experts, they are nonetheless presenting themselves as having a kind of cutting edge, complementary piece of the puzzle that's largely missing from conventional therapy.
Right, totally.
So it's worth leaning for a moment on what their central premise is and that we can connect that to the technique of Pazdur and Smith.
It's the notion that every disquieting sensation that you have in your body invariably points back to the fact that you have endured child sexual abuse and you just can't remember it yet.
It amounts to a kind of Kafka trap that Bass and Davis set for their readers.
Yes, so there's a passage here from the book that we put into that previous episode, but I want to put it back into rotation here because it's quite stunning and haunting.
They write, If you have unfamiliar or uncomfortable feelings as you read this book, don't be alarmed.
Strong feelings are part of the healing process.
On the other hand, if you breeze through these chapters, you probably aren't feeling safe enough to confront these issues.
Or, you may be coping with the book the same way you coped with the abuse, by separating your intellect from your feelings.
If that's the case, stop, take a break, talk to someone for support, and come back to it later.
It's important that you don't bear this book the way you bore the abuse, numb and alone.
If you come to a part that stops you, you may be having a hard time with the material in that section.
Don't force yourself to read it.
Try a different chapter.
Often the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling, an intuition.
It's important to trust that inner voice and work from there.
Assume your feelings are valid.
So far, no one we've talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn't been.
The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation.
If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.
Okay, so maybe, Julian, some listeners can hear in this passage the influence and later the echo of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk to speak to your earlier point about how this stuff has never really left.
I think it's been normalized, it's been laundered somewhat, it's been disconnected with its more sort of difficult implications but I mean I think the fact that it is a prominent sort of premise within one of the New York Times bestselling books on psychology by Van Der Kolk who enthusiastically endorsed The Courage to Heal.
That's really notable because the continued idea is that you can and must ultimately trust your feelings above all else.
Because they will prove for you how abject your personal history actually is.
If it wasn't clear enough, let's recall a key passage from Michelle Remembers.
We read it in the initial series, and this speaks to the appeal to bodily sensations as the master key to the truth of reality.
Okay, so this is Michelle Smith quoted within Michelle Remembers, and she says, she writes, I tried not to have it happen, but this process I am realizing more and more is not consciously controllable.
I kind of think it is me inside trying to come out and be whole.
It's funny how it starts.
It's the same every time.
First of all, I get really cold.
Nothing keeps me warm.
My whole body is cold.
I turn up the heat, put on an extra pair of socks, pull the afghan over me.
Warmth helps.
I need the warmth.
Then comes the wrenching in my stomach and chest.
My insides just keep grinding away.
That's what surprises me.
This is such a physical thing.
And if it weren't for the physical signs, I wouldn't have a clue.
There's the rash.
So itchy, I can't help wondering what it is trying to say.
I used to put ointments on, cover it up, hide it, pretend it wasn't there, make excuses or ignore it.
But now I want to scratch.
Now I know if I don't work through the rash it will always bother me.
I'm so inflamed, swollen, incredibly itchy, I feel tormented, angry, guilty, unclean, and definitely like something is wrong with me.
The other thing I've realized is there is no possible way my rashes could have been any other than the way they look, and here I just have to associate inflamed, anger, red, blood, ooze, where they show up and their patterns all explain something to me.
My body is my only clue.
It's the one thing I couldn't compromise or rationalize.
It was there.
My mind and feelings could go away, but my body was there and had to be there the whole time.
I could shut my eyes, but my body could see what was happening.
You see, my inside me could shut everything off, but there was still my body and it had its own life outside of me inside.
It is my outside that really knows.
It's my eyes that saw, my mouth that felt, spoke, and took in.
My arms, they have memories too.
Before I can let my inside me remember, My body's memories have to come out.
The reason the connections don't always seem to fit together is because my arms don't have the same experience my mouth had, and my eyes didn't feel what my stomach felt.
I have felt like I was fractured into so many pieces, but it was the different parts of me remembering.
I had to fracture that way.
You see, me could not look after it all at once.
And then it's so hard putting the body memories together.
That's why they came out separately.
So that when my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms have all told their versions, that is when I will understand me.
That is when I will be whole again.
Remember all those times, she's asking Lawrence, I've begged you to help me put it all together.
Well, it's not just understanding and putting things together that way.
I'm beginning to realize that it is a much more literal request.
Help put me, my body, the parts of my body, my memories, and my body memories, or imprints, back together.
That is just harrowing.
You know, it's so poignant and it's so clearly the testimony, if you will, of someone really struggling to make sense of a set of experiences.
And there's all of these built-in kind of circular arguments and places where you can tell like, oh, here's why it doesn't always seem to make sense because these different parts of me remember it in different ways.
And she's a great writer.
She's a great writer.
I mean, to the extent that this is being transcribed or it's being edited, we don't know.
I mean, there's some light that the documentary sheds on that.
But like, it is no wonder to me.
Actually, we were laughing earlier about the credulity of the interviewers.
But I think with passages like this, there's something both so poignant but also so tangible About the mystery of memory and the strangeness of remembering childhood things that is just so incredibly compelling.
And so I actually it actually makes me feel better to read this passage because I'm like, oh, we weren't people weren't entirely fooled by this book.
It really spoke to something.
Yeah.
So there's this is fascinating because I think it relates very much to our kind of The background that we have as well, right?
Because there's something going on here, which is that you can't help but empathize with and respect the experiential process that's being described.
Right.
I think unless you're a very, very, very skeptical person or someone who's completely shut down to anything that has to do with psychology or body awareness or emotions, there's an appeal here to like, The hero's journey, or the heroine's journey in this case, right?
Penetrating into the mystery, discovering it's the Freudian unconscious, what you don't know about yourself.
Yeah.
And you can see an anchor maybe turning to a skeptical friend and saying, oh, so you think you don't have an unconscious, right?
You think we know everything that's ever, all of our motivations and our thoughts and our drives and our experiences.
You know, I believe that people have traumas that they've forgotten, don't you?
Haven't you had that experience of realizing something?
What I'm trying to get at here is that the step, the leap in between, let me use a less charged example, meditation.
You can describe, anyone can describe their experience of meditation in glowing terms, in terms of how revelatory it was, how helpful it was in terms of calming their nervous system, how they realized, oh wow, I'm constantly judging myself and now I have this moment of realizing I don't have to judge myself.
It felt as if I had left my body and I was floating in the cosmos, right?
And in that state, I understood that death is not real and that time is an illusion and that I've never been separate from God.
And it's like, you can follow them all the way, but then there's that leap.
And it's like, well, yes, you actually did have an experience that you then interpreted, you interpreted those metaphors, or what that felt like as being literally now the truth of meditation.
And unless you're being very careful, if you're sympathetic to any of the language being used, it's easy to just go along with the whole thing and think that the well-described experiential process is evidence for the claims that are made about what the process revealed, or supposedly revealed.
It's so good.
You know, we did not discuss this beforehand.
I'm so glad that you brought up this analogy.
It makes me think that when we're talking about peak and ultimately relevant human experiences, the experiential kind of description, to the extent that you're able to make it, kind of leaves you stranded somewhere.
And you probably We are probably all kind of encouraged in some way to then make something more out of it, or to endow it with a kind of explanation, just on a kind of structural level, whether we're talking about, oh, these strange sensations as I remembered things from my childhood must have meant that I was engaged in a satanic cult, or these sensations that I had in meditation must
There's a dissatisfaction, I think, we get to when we describe an ultimately meaningful experience that we can't actually attribute a meaning to in the end.
It's like we have to make one up or something.
Isn't that wild?
Well, and it's like, it can just be a therapy session.
It can just be little old me sitting in my room meditating.
It doesn't have to be the single biggest discovery in the history of humanity, right?
That we've somehow broken through.
And also, part of the problem...
You mean it could just be mundane?
It could just be me and my little old experience, right?
But then the Virgin Mary wouldn't come at the end of your meditation session and tell you that the world was going to be redeemed because you remembered things so well, right?
Or she might, and it could just be my imagination, and that's okay!
That's okay too!
So if you, if you start from a, I don't know where Michelle started, maybe you have a little more clarity on that, but we, I think we have a good hunch as to where Larry Pazder started.
And so he has a metaphysic and he has, I would, what I would characterize as a kind of grandiose longing to, to pierce the veil and to be part of something really, really important.
And if anything, Michelle is that veil.
Yeah, and we'll get into this, but there's also the question of, you know, she's not just a veil here.
She knows what his discourse is.
She knows what he values in his life.
She knows that he's very, very Catholic.
And there's a question of how much she's actually sort of reaching out to him to kind of stimulate a connection.
Anyway, we'll get to that.
Yeah, so in the quote that you chose, which was so poignant, we hear Smith or Pasteur, whoever's really writing this, as kind of telegraphing the basics of what someone like Bessel van der Kolk and other trauma-aware thinkers talk about and have popularized.
To some extent, right?
There's variation here.
It's quite chilling to realize that the basic language of somatic intelligence is being appealed to, to drive what turn out to be completely cursed and inaccurate outcomes.
Yeah.
But I think we can see how this sets up a whole demographic to trust the body.
And I really relate to this, even if it's not the body talking at all, but a complex of cultural anxieties, because that's the naivete, right?
The naivete is there's the mainstream rigid square world In which you deny your feelings and then there's trusting the body and everything that comes out of that is true.
And it's like, well, what about other layers of analysis?
Right.
So we're pinging this here because it's precisely the same Kafka trap.
If you don't believe that your symptoms are the result of satanic ritual abuse, well, that's your shame proving that they really are.
This is the same kind of thing that got sprung on skeptics of Michelle Remembers and of the satanic panic in general.
Okay, so the last thing that we have to say in this, it's a little bit longer than we expected, but I think it's good.
This is the section where we explain why we're so into Michelle Remembers.
We have to ping the most influential inheritor of the Michelle Smith legacy, and that is Teal Swan.
Yeah, so we have a whole chapter in our forthcoming book called The Barbara Snow job in which we track how Michelle remembers leads to a cascade of satanic panic therapists and the Utah based Barbara Snow who wrote the white paper on the subject specifically for that demographic of therapists and she was famous for saying.
That if a child denied that they'd been subjected to satanic ritual abuse, that she didn't believe them.
And she was specifically talking about children that she was interviewing in relation to court cases in which there had been, you know, outlandish accusations leveled.
She said it in court.
She said it in court.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the early 2000s, turns out Barbara Snow treated a young woman named Mary Bosworth, who later became Teal Swan, And she wrote her origin story into influencer gold.
So, without Michelle Remembers, there's no Satanic Panic, and without Satanic Panic, there's no Teal Swan, with millions of downloads of YouTube videos about how you too can recover from ritual child abuse that may never have happened.
So Julian, in our prior coverage, we really leaned maybe a little bit too hard into something that's, you know, maybe my personal hobby horse, which is just how fucking Catholic revanchist this book and its whole scene is.
And the documentary, Satan Wants You, picks this up really nicely.
With Pastor's daughter, who they get on film!
This is Teresa, and Teresa, if you're listening, extremely brave of you to be interviewed, by the way, and we really send you a lot of thanks and respect for doing that.
You shed a lot of light on something that is Just extremely influential and that's a real service.
Anyway, we hear Teresa saying that her dad was extremely religious and that it felt like he was on a religious mission and that for her this swirled into the respect that she had for his role as a psychiatrist which she viewed as a kind of a role of great wisdom and power until And maybe we didn't overemphasize the Catholic connection, which I would say maybe not given that it shows up in this other document, right?
Yeah, right.
Because the document turns up evidence that the local parish, this was Mind-blowing to discover.
Incredible.
They actually funded Pazder for work done for the church to the tune of $10,000.
This is part of what goes into writing the book.
And the documentary adds a nice visual touch that spotlights this whole holy alliance in the theatrical recreations of the therapy sessions.
Yeah, it was interesting.
I mean, I'm sometimes ambivalent about recreations, but I thought that these were really tastefully done, and they added to this immersive quality, and they also really got the aesthetics right.
Yeah, so on the back wall of Pastor's office, we see a church-sized, three-foot-tall Virgin Mary icon in glazed plaster or ceramic, standing beside a big old reel-to-reel tape recorder.
It's really well done.
This might be a little on the nose, but we cannot overstate what a church boy Pastor was.
Also, we can see it more clearly in the shameful or repressed way in which he ends up leaving his wife for his client.
With everything shrouded at first in secrecy, but also piety and blamelessness.
Yeah, this was so uncomfortable for me to watch, especially because we haven't mentioned yet, but Marilyn Pazder is also in this documentary.
Incredible for her to sit for this, and Marilyn, if you are listening, thank you as well, because it was so good to hear from your experience what this was like.
We'll talk a little bit more about that arc, but that whole thing felt like a thousand percent like this Catholic dishonest bypassing cheater dude story.
A very pious guy, you know, who looks and dresses like a like a silver fox but also a choir boy who has this obviously extremely defended self-image and he gets himself into a huge pile of shit because he starts fucking a patient who's having visions of the Virgin Mary.
And it's really complex because maybe the visions are wrapped up in their own transgressions, in their own bloody desires and spiritual rationalizations.
It's so confusing, but also so hot!
What a dark night of the soul for Lawrence Pazder.
So what does he do?
He, Julian, he fucking keeps it together.
He keeps secrets, he goes radio silent with his actual family, he tells them nothing,
he convinces himself he's on a religious quest, but he's also driven to make his patient,
now also his business partner, an honest woman, and so Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith
marry.
And for years he maintains this beatific smile.
But I also get the sense, especially as I got the rest of the story at the end part
of the documentary, you know, I can't unsee him on TV with his kind of smile, looking
a little distant, a little vacant, maybe with the stress of a kind of inner conflict and
guilt that eventually gives him a massive heart attack.
In 2004, he dies.
Yeah, it's that smack in the face incongruity between the secret life inside their intensely captivating, horrifying, and trauma bonding Narnia, right?
They found this hidden world, they found a doorway into.
somewhere sort of magical and terrifying and obviously deeply meaningful
on the one hand and then the demands on the other and the rules
of the very real world outside and I love what you said I mean I feel like
I feel like there I can only imagine a building intensity a parallel building
intensity that's heading towards oh the version Mary's gonna appear
at the end because ultimately this is all about Satan that's the inevitable
place we're going and parallel to that
oh yeah we're gonna end up getting married because that's inevitably where
this is going and the two somehow justify yeah one another right there
they they unfold in parallel because they're necessary in parallel somehow in a
way that's probably much simpler than we might. How else are you gonna
how else are you gonna resolve this disaster? Yeah. Right? You have you have
fallen in love with and started having sex with your patient.
How are you going to resolve that except by folding that whole narrative that you have with her into your vision of religious salvation?
What else would justify it?
Anyway, you know, we, in our naivety, I think, because we know a lot more now with this documentary, we did frame this book, and the satanic panic in general, as a reactionary response to Vatican II.
So, we'll get into those details a bit in a moment, but on a personal level, we also knew that Pazdra's faith was just bread on the bone.
And as we explained in our previous series, at one point in the sessions with Michel, he starts imagining that the abominations she's recounting from the age of five in 1955 Have some kind of reverse correspondence with the liturgical calendar for that year, right?
Because if it's Satan's world, it's going to be upside down.
So if Michelle describes some kind of ritual, it will be more comprehensible if it's viewed as the direct desecration of whatever's happening in the Catholic calendar.
But in order to check the dates, he needs a church calendar from 1955.
So who has one?
Well, his mom has one, which is something that, like, you would only keep hold on to and have.
You'd, like, file away if you were super, super Catholic.
So, you know, Pazder accordingly describes coming from a large Polish Catholic family in Edmonton and, you know, very devout.
Yeah, I think your instinct to look at the What was going on in the culture at the time, right?
And to have Vatican II be a relevant reference point, I think it's a really good instinct.
For anyone who doesn't know, this was the three year long conference of the church elite initiated by Paul XXIII in the hope of reforming the church.
for engagement with the modern world.
The aims were to make the Catholic liturgy more accessible and participatory for the everyday faithful, to increase dialogue between the denominations, and to heal historical schisms.
It was to tone down the antisemitism.
If they could, yeah.
That would be good.
And to renew a kind of popular interest in biblical studies.
Remember, and about toning down the antisemitism, this is actually post-Holocaust, right?
So there is soul-searching, there's also the reflection going on about Vichy and Papal complicity.
So, it was a huge deal, this conference.
It was the first meeting like this in modern history, and yeah, it came in the shadow of centuries of Protestant revolt, secularization, increasing scientific literacy amongst the clerical class, the recent horrors of the war, and most of all, the Cold War as well.
Yeah, yeah, the Cold War as the godless atheist threat to religious decency.
But the conference drove a wedge between those who believed they were freeing the church from its medieval BS and those who believed they were bearing witness to a final desacralization of the world.
The latter formed a reactionary Catholic movement, or several, like the Pius X movement and the set of Encantus, who literally believe that the seat of Peter is now empty, and the current church has no authority.
You know, Matthew, I sent you a little YouTube short of Mel Gibson ranting to this effect just this week.
This is why he's so angry, because there's no Pope.
If somebody put a Pope into Rome and onto that seat and Mel Gibson will calm down,
probably not.
So this is the broad context for this volatile cocktail of 1970s Catholic progressive aspirations
and the reactionary anxieties that they elicited.
Now the liturgical changes involved folk music, they involved moving away from the high Latin
mass and that by the way is making a huge comeback amongst the traditional Catholic
or the trad calf movement because they believe that Latin is a magical language and if you
don't use it for the consecration of the mass then Jesus doesn't appear in the host.
They've obviously never heard of Sanskrit.
Right, yeah, because they could use that too.
So, my strong bet is that Pazder, you know, witnessed all of these changes in the zeitgeist.
You know, there's strumming guitars, there's frankincense being replaced by pot smoke, and he's witnessing the, you know, the presence of Jesus just evaporating into clouds of love and light.
So, for Catholic conservatives in the 70s, the burning question was, Yeah, and part of how we can see these anxieties ripple out in popular culture because, you know, we've done enough nerdery here, you know, there's also these broader effects.
And they're really visible in horror movies.
And, you know, the documentary doesn't really go into this larger cultural context, but I think it's good to ping a few details as we did before.
We used this essay by Bernard Doherty called The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen, the Catholic horror film Vatican II and the Revival of Demonology.
And just to be clear, you're talking here about one of the segments of the Swan Song series, right?
That's right, yeah.
Now, his title, The Smoke of Satan, comes from this speech made by Pope Paul VI in 1972 in which he noted, this was the quote, Satan's smoke has made its way into the temple of God through some And this was repeated over and over again in conservative Catholic circles and it really indicated the anxieties that a lot of Catholics experienced in the wake of these changes set in motion by Vatican II.
The Pope's speech also goes on to say that something preternatural has come into the world to destroy and strangle the very fruits of the ecumenical council and to stop the Church from breaking out into a hymn of joy by sowing doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, and discontent.
Now, this is not academic because if we go to the frontispiece of Michelle Remembers, we have Pope Paul VI Giving his blessing to the book, or at least being quoted in the frontispiece of the book from November 15th of 72.
Evil is an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting, a terrible reality.
One of the greatest needs is defense from the evil which is called the devil.
The question of the devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons as well as on communities, whole societies, or events is very important.
It should be studied again.
Yeah.
So, Dorothy says that Catholic horror films, as he calls them, have five meaning-making themes.
If there's going to be horror, at least let's get some religion out of it, as we'll see all of these track with Michelle Remembers.
So, first he pings traditional Marian devotion and piety, where ma mère is the saving apparition at the end, you know, first appearing about two-thirds of the way in.
Now, we thought that, I mean, it's not clear in the book why Michel, you know, says this in French.
Although, there is this close relationship between French Catholicism and Marian devotion, and that peaks in the 19th century with the events at Lourdes.
Now, we're not going to totally spoil this particular aspect of the documentary, but we can point towards one slam dunk that it uncovers, which is that when the Virgin Mary appears at the end of the book, She speaks to Michelle in French, Michelle understands and responds, and then she tells the CBC in a 1980s interview that she doesn't know French.
But is that true?
Dorothy also flags preternatural phenomena surrounding the manifestations of evil.
The Exorcist, for example, famously traffics in green vomit and the writhing tongue of Regan.
There's a lot of green exudate in Amityville as well as also there's like shit smells throughout the house and then Michelle remembers there's snakes in cages, bugs under the skin, also lots of poop.
Dorothy talks about the theology of vicarious suffering.
This is really interesting, this one to me, because I think Michelle remembers works because people identify with her in her innocence.
And he uses the term the victim soul to describe this position.
Somebody who kind of mirrors the sadomasochism of the crucifixion by redeeming others and the world because their suffering is voluntary.
Now, Like with Michelle, it's not voluntary when she's a child, but the recovering of the memories is a kind of voluntary journey that she's undertaking for the good of the world, as Mary predicts at the end of the book.
Yeah, I would just add here that The Exorcist prefigures a whole wave we've had just in the last like 10 or 15 years of all of these exorcism movies, and it's always the young, innocent, all-American girl Who is going through this horrific thing and then that becomes the center for the sort of central chalice of a vast battle between good and evil.
Yes, right.
Yeah, and then Doherty tags the vocational insecurity of the Catholic priest.
Yes, you mentioned the Exorcist.
Well, Damian Karras, the main character, is a psychiatrist who, like Pazdur, doubts psychiatry, but he has the advantage of being a priest.
You know, so I think there's a little bit of, I mean, they're moving in the same direction, except that Karras has his seminarian training to fall back on.
And, you know, Pazdur doesn't quite have that.
He's got to turn to church officials himself in real life.
Yeah, he does have his anthropological years of research in terms of what pagan savages are doing with their rituals.
There is the existence of a satanic conspiracy that's usually part of this horror movie oeuvre.
So this is Doherty's last point, and we should just note again that Marshall and Hobbes point out in their five-part series how funny and strange it is that the Satanists in Michelle Remembers, they seem to be the real Like, believers, the real squares, they're pedantic.
They follow these rituals down to the last detail, you know, and if they didn't really believe in things, they wouldn't go to such lengths to get everything right.
So, they display these enviable levels of faith by recreating these rituals in reverse, and I think that's kind of inspirational to the traditional Catholic.
It's like, you can kind of feel a fetishization of satanic ritual as
being the ritual of people who actually believe in something when what Catholics are actually
anxious about is that they don't believe in anything anymore.
Okay, finally, watch party time.
It opens with this stunning interview between Larry and Michelle in their Victoria home.
They're sitting at their kitchen table.
The television program is Morningside.
No, not Morningside.
I can't remember what the name of the show is, but the host, it's on CTV and her name is Valerie Pringle.
This is September of 1980, probably just weeks after the book is out.
And the kitchen looks very twee, very neat and tidy.
There's a lovely collection of teapots on the shelves behind them.
And, you know, Julian, you're not Canadian, but Valerie Pringle is like an iconic figure here.
She's an image of Canadian wholesomeness and liberal common sense.
And in the opening frames of the doc, she really represents the startled and credulous normie world coming to grips with the horror of what these strangely blank people are saying to her.
And then we see them in the next shot in another TV studio, but we don't know where, with this older dude, TV host, who has a Welsh or a Scottish accent.
I don't know.
But what strikes me about both of the scenes, and they're repeated through the doc, is that the affect of Lawrence and Michelle is incredibly flat.
They have the personality of like glasses of milk.
And Julian, What did you make of that?
Just a quick note, as someone from the British Isles originally, that's a straight Glasgow accent, I believe.
Okay, all right.
The Welsh are a lot more sing-songy and soft.
Right, okay.
And yeah, they are so flat, Pazder and Smith.
They could be describing, as they're talking, the many uses of a new set of Tupperware.
Except that they're bored.
I mean, it's not like the Shopping Network.
They're very unexcited.
And there's something, I don't know, it just, I guess I was struck by all of the 80s archival footage about how stiff everybody feels.
Like everybody.
Everybody who's interviewed.
There's almost an echo of the 1950s, and as though everybody's wearing a tight collar, and everybody has to get to work on time.
And all of this has happened in response to, you know, what Sam Binkley calls the getting loose of the 1970s, right?
Like, somehow there's been a bounce back, the rubber band has snapped back into place.
Oh, and then we meet Sarah Marshall as the narrative guide, and I love that she's sitting in what looks like the upstairs study of a darkened and minimalist century home, and she just, she does her thing.
Yeah.
Very slow, very deliberate, very ironic, but barely smiling.
Yeah.
Such a great commentator.
That intro I just found so fascinating because there's this establishing shot of what looks like this, you know, really kind of epic house.
And I don't know if that's really where she's sitting, but then they show her in the dark and study with like the dim light coming in.
Yeah, she's amazing.
Yeah, like she bought and fixed up the Amityville home or something like that.
Yeah, exactly.
And maybe used a lot of sage or something.
Central casting.
We're also introduced to the theatrical recreation setup where actors play out the convulsions of Michelle and the brooding care of Lawrence.
And we've got that three foot standing Virgin Mary icon on the back wall of Pastor's office.
We've got the reel to reel tape player, which, you know, we know that everything was done
through recordings.
It's all very 70s interiors.
Wood paneling, there's a chunky knit Afghan on the couch.
Did you have those?
Because I remember the Afghans really well.
They were very heavy and I think the deal was that they were very easy to knit.
Like it was a very crafting type thing to do because you made them in smallish squares and they could be hooked together.
And I think there was even like some kind of knitting device that you popped that you, I don't know, it was kind of like a low skill thing.
Maybe, I hope I'm not insulting a lot of knitters here, but I just remember it was a very DIY thing.
You're knitting history definitely.
I will defer to your knowledge of knitting history.
You know, I think there's probably a, you're wrong about episode about the history of knitting.
Anyway, with this opening, the first mystery is upon us because we start to hear the first of a number of excerpts
from an interview that they did with Don Heron on a famous national show called,
this was the one called Morningside.
This is on the CBC, the interview took place September 19th, 1980.
And this is at the beginning of their publicity tour.
And just like speaking to Valerie Pringle, speaking to Don Heron in that time
is like speaking to all of Canada, or at least white Canada.
And I don't know who to compare them to because.
He was like an actor and a comedian and a satirist, and then he took a stint in broadcast journalism.
He's kind of like a Garrison Keillor character.
But this Don Heron episode is pinged throughout the doc, and it's the interview where we hear Pazder say that all of the tapes he recorded of Michelle are being studied by the Vatican, which I believe is bullshit.
It's amazing to think that this is a publicity tour for a book.
Yeah.
But how are the interviews framed?
They're framed as if it's a really important news story.
Yes.
Or at the very least, like a human interest story that affects everyone that we all should be very much aware of.
Yes, it's well-cited, well-resourced non-fiction telling about a historical event that everybody should understand.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you get to go on the CBC now.
What we do know is that the damn tapes were studied by Sean Horler and Steve Adams, who somehow got access to them.
Yeah, incredible.
Maybe we're speculating through their interviewee named Chidi, who is still friends with Michelle and who describes her as a Puritan.
Yeah, an interesting kind of Puritan, we have to say.
Sheedy did, as it turns out, all of the transcribing for the book, and so she's very intimate with the material.
To this day, she remains a true believer in Michelle's story, although she blames Lawrence for ruining Michelle's life.
It's a very complex and human relationship there, but about the tapes, one of the most important questions that we could not answer was, Did Lawrence Paster hypnotize Michelle Smith?
Well, this is what he tells Don Heron.
What went on in your childhood that you discovered?
What basically I began to remember was a series of events that stretched out over about a 14-month period in my life.
Is this through hypnosis, Doctor?
Actually, it's beyond hypnosis.
It's a method that Michelle had devised to go deep into her depths.
How had you devised this technique yourself, Michelle?
It just came about in the atmosphere of Dr. Pastor saying to me, just go where you have to go.
I'll be there with you.
I could then shut my eyes, and through breathing very deeply, go way down inside.
It felt very much like falling over backwards into the dark.
And that's where I began to find the memories.
Julian, a process way deeper than hypnosis?
Is that what he said?
Well, it's beyond hypnosis because she was able to go deep into her depths.
And then what came out?
from her depth.
So the next spoiler is just a teeny bit of the voice that gave rise to this book and a whole era.
Now, we're not going to play much because you have to go and see this and hear her in full.
There's lots of incredible tape in this documentary and there's some real bangers, but here's just a bit.
yet.
Oh No one was going to be there.
They didn't take care.
I didn't leave them standing there.
I remember, I tried to crawl inside the mirror.
There are captions for all of those excerpts in the doc.
She's saying, I tried to crawl inside the mirror, I couldn't get away.
He's saying, let it come, let it be what it is.
Don't judge it.
Don't judge it.
Right.
So we hear Michelle throughout this documentary through these tapes.
What's your general take, Julian, on what you hear?
She sounds terrified.
She sounds like a little girl.
She sounds like she is riding sort of a wave of some sort of combination of An experiential process and a kind of improvised script?
I don't know.
Yeah, I feel like I want to be so careful here because I hear all of those things.
And with regard to the improvised script, knowing what we know of the entire book and from what the documentary has now added, it's hard not to hear her reaching for things, not only in terms of detail, but in terms of affect.
Like, what would it have There's stress definitely involved that I think is more complicated than the stress of remembering something.
And of course, articulating something that you're remembering is also an additional stress, but I don't know.
I feel like there's something reaching about it.
Yeah.
Now that you say that, especially thinking of other moments in the film as well where they're playing They're playing recordings like this.
It strikes me now as it's almost like an inverted kind of cold reading.
Yeah, well, we have some thoughts about that later, right?
I mean, it's so.
But tell me what you mean about that.
Well, in a more conventional sense, the cold reading would be the person
who is doing the cold reading has the power and is saying, you know, for whatever
the financial exchange might be or whatever kind of prestige
I might gain through this performance, I am going to use a set of techniques that sort of,
based on your reactions, gradually make my sort of proclamations about what's
going on in your life or what your dead uncle, you know, wished he could have said to you before he died.
Right.
And you're going to have a very emotional response to this as if I've really hit the nail on the head, but the whole process is going to be through me actually responding to nonverbal cues and, you know, various things that happen in the interaction.
Yeah, so complex.
I mean, the other thing about cold reading or not cold reading or the process being inverted is that in these excerpts, I was surprised because you do not hear that, at least in these excerpts, Lawrence is leading her on.
We're not hearing everything, as I'm mentioning, by a long shot, but the documentary provides excellent evidence that I don't think anybody has had before.
That Michelle is definitely an active, if not driving force, in the storytelling.
Yeah, so in terms of the inversion that I was intuiting there, it's like if I went to see A psychic or a medium.
And I then did an elaborate performance of making contact with the dead in which I was the one who was feeling all of the intense emotions, but I was doing it so as to have an effect on the medium and so as to confirm certain beliefs that they have about the nature of reality.
Right.
And maybe and if we could frame that in, you know, I'm not trying to trick the person, but I'm trying to reach out to them.
Yes, that's that.
That is a good way of saying it.
I'm trying to reach out to them because as we hear from a number of people in this documentary, just straight out, we hear from Chidi, I think we hear from Teresa.
They say it in different ways.
We hear it from Marilyn as well.
We hear that she was in love with him.
She was in love with him.
But this whole question of like, is she reaching?
Is she producing more than is there?
Is she trying to have an effect?
It brings up this Kaiser Soze, you know, usual suspects thing that we talked about in that recent bonus about George Soros.
Because, you know, in a way, conspiracists improvise these fake data points about him in the same way that Verbal Kent, you know, played by Kevin Spacey, creates this whole villain during his police questioning.
And of course, Police questioning is also dyadic, like therapy is, especially if it's trying to uncover the past or what really happened.
And so as I'm listening to the clips, I get this feeling that, as you're saying, Michel could be picking up on cues from Pazder about what might be of interest to him.
You know, referring to events or scenes that might ring a bell with, you know, either his racist, you know, memories of West African tribal rituals, you know, or his default to the Virgin Mary as a core reality principle.
And so, I think that we both started looking at this book as though he's doing the leading, I think there's a lot of evidence now that this is truly a love story in the sense that it's much more of a two-way street, you know?
Like, did he impose his Catholicism on her?
Or did she appeal to it to win his attention?
Or is the answer, like, yes to both?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, for me, it underlines a sort of aspect of falling in love anyway as being this heightened
altered state in which the feeling is that something of immense importance is happening
between the- Cosmic importance!
And goddammit, Julian, if you're Catholic and have a certain kind of intensity or perhaps like neuro-atypicality or if you're really bookish, like I was like this.
It felt like my first relationships as a young Catholic boy in an all-boys school, I don't know if he went to an all-boys school, But they were certainly cosmically important.
And then that pings back to, you know, where we've come from and what we've covered in the podcast, because I think for people who are very engaged by New Age metaphysics, that touches absolutely everything, but especially the idea of soulmates and the synchronistic meeting and how we formed this connection many lifetimes ago and we're here to help one another wake up to enlightenment.
Oh yes, but actually what really happened is that you slammed into each other semi-consciously and you're breaking a whole bunch of taboos and you feel really shitty about it, but goddamn, you need another story.
Yep.
Yep.
Another essential insight that we get from Satan Wants You really comes through the family access, which is incredible.
Totally.
Sean and Steve did a fantastic job in tracking down Michelle's youngest sister, Cheryl, who gives us a straightforward account of Victoria was very small in the 1950s.
I mean, the population was 70,000.
That's it.
It was safe.
It was quiet.
Patricia's the oldest.
And then Michelle is the middle child.
to nine times in 10 years.
Victoria was very small in the 1950s.
I mean, the population was 70,000. That's it.
It was safe. It was quiet.
Tertia's the oldest, and then Michelle is the middle child, and I came along five years later.
Tertia was pretty.
Michelle was kind of funny-duddy.
I was gorgeous.
No, I'm just joking.
But Michelle and I were always getting into trouble.
I think that's because we had such an up-and-down childhood.
My mom, she didn't have an easy life.
Raising three girls on her own.
I mean, Dad was in and out.
You know, he was an alcoholic.
And he had a gambling problem, so... And you have a husband that's an alcoholic.
You don't have friends.
You just don't.
So, mom spent a very lonely life.
My sisters talk about it now.
They always say, well, she always, she would drink.
And I said, you know, if I had three young girls and I sat down in the evening and had a cold beer, you know, I wouldn't classify that as drinking.
You know, she just, she had a lot on her plate.
We moved eight or nine times in ten years because of Dad.
Dad was quite violent.
It always happened, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving.
We would all end up in a hotel somewhere because the police would have to come and take us because Dad would start to terrorize and destroy the house, beat my mum up.
That was my childhood.
I just assumed that's what everybody did.
Got drunk and Had fights, yeah.
So again, Cheryl, if you happen to be listening, even if you're not, geez, I mean, thank you so much for sitting for that interview.
Again, an amazing act of service in helping everybody figure out what exactly has happened here.
And Julie and I had such a mixture of things, feelings hearing this, because, you know, the story is so common, so human, like it's such a great candidate for basic therapy.
And instead we get this like zombie of a book that terrorizes a generation instead of just like focusing like on how do we deal with broken and abusive fathers.
Yeah, it's very poignant and I think one of the things we haven't really touched on here yet is how...
You know, we can talk about all of this from multiple levels of analysis and it's all very fascinating stuff, but at the center of it all is a mother who is accused of turning her five-year-old daughter over to a satanic cult who does the most unspeakable things to her, which will all be spoken in lurid detail.
And none of it is true.
And real therapy would have actually gone in the exact opposite direction.
One of the things I really found fascinating with the family members and Marilyn, Pastor's former wife, is how down to earth they were.
How like just everything they said was just like, yeah.
It was this, you know, there's not a lot of, it's not elaborate, it's not overly emotional, it's not fantastical, unlike everything else we're hearing, it's just very blunt, and like, here's what happened, and you know, yeah.
Yeah, and you know, it also, I think, I haven't thought about this till now, but it also gives an indication of how far And how high Larry jumped off the shark, because those are the people that he came from, right?
Like, unless he was always kind of a daydreamer, unless he was always on his own, unless he was always sort of the odd one out or given to fantasies or things like that or uncommunicative, he comes from this really grounded family.
And Yeah, and what you're saying about at the center of it is the mother, her name is Valerie Proby.
Incredibly strange and misogynistic that she takes the hit for the family in this book.
Yeah, I mean it is something I've heard talked about in some psychological theory as that often the parent that you have less Intense content around will be the one that you go to first in terms of like, you know, initially wanting to understand what went wrong in that relationship in therapy.
And often the parent.
Because the other one isn't available.
Because the other one isn't available.
And also because the the intensity of the emotion might be too much initially in the early stages of therapy as you're realizing, oh, I have actually more complex relationship with my family with my parents than I realized.
Right.
Often it's the it's the the more available parent who bears the initial brunt.
Yeah, well, and then there's also this issue of the family disasters and the domestic violence happening on religious holidays.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
So, we have an inversion of the kind of religious calendar that's playing out in the family over eight or nine years where they're moving and moving and moving.
But it couldn't have been dad.
It couldn't have been dad.
It must have been Satan.
Couldn't have been dad.
It must have been Satan.
Right.
So, yeah, how incredible it is.
to hear and see Marilyn Pazder, Larry's first wife.
She met Larry when she was 13, and he was 17.
She's a nurse, he's a doctor.
And I'm imagining that Sean and Steve get access to Larry's film footage from Nigeria in 1954 from her.
It's this 16mm film footage.
He's there doing medical missionary work.
And yeah, and Cheryl says, this is weird, did you hear this?
He had run-ins with nuns who told him he was full of voodoo.
That's amazing.
Yeah, so he was fascinated with those particular themes.
Oh, that's what the implication is.
So he's working in a mission and there are Catholic nuns.
Who are perhaps, they're Nigerian converts, but there are also tribespeople and people, you know, living their indigenous faith around.
And she's saying that, oh yeah, they're saying that, oh yeah, he's more interested in them than in hanging out with the church people.
Okay, that makes more sense.
He did tell Don Heron on the CBC that he was, listen to this, he was doing work in the transcultural psychiatry of cults.
Which sounds totally legit and not racist at all.
So this is where we get this footage of Larry filming a tribal ritual dance with these beautiful wooden masks.
And he kind of obsessed over these images for years.
It looks like part of that ritual involved slaughtering a chicken and sprinkling blood.
Yeah, nothing at all like the imagery of the sacrament.
No.
A lot of the documentary covers the publicity arc from 1980 to 1982, and Cheryl recounts a lot of travel, fancy hotels, limousines, fancy dinners, and amidst it all, Michelle cutting a very curious figure.
Yeah, okay.
So this is a little bit of a jump, but we do have to talk about the dresses.
The incredible wardrobe of Michelle Smith.
There are these clips from a game show that I'd never heard of that they appeared on.
It's called To Tell the Truth.
This is just fucking bizarre.
Yeah, so weird.
Yeah, and so the deal with the game is that there's a panel and they're supposed to read a story that belongs to one of the three mystery guests and then they choose the right one based on asking questions.
So in the clips, so the story that's presented to this panel is Michelle's basic story.
So they read this like in the context of a game show.
Um, but in the clips, we have, we get a full-length view of what Michelle chose to wear to this TV set.
And, you know, we have to remember that they just got $242,000 as an advance, U.S.
Huge amount of money at the time.
And she comes out wearing this super plain, boxy, Amish-style smock in flat blue
with these quiet stripes, a high ruffled neck, She's wearing purple hose and brown Mary Janes.
It's like she's walking right out of the 19th century homestead.
Yeah.
As a spinster aunt.
Yeah.
And in the next scene, which is with the Scottish introvert, you can see that she has the identical dress, but in a different pattern.
Yeah, so this made me think that maybe she'd made them.
That maybe she was, like, very, you know, handy work type person.
My mom would do this.
She'd get, like, simplicity patterns that they started making in the Depression and then, you know, you could get two yards of two to three different patterns of fabric and then whatever was on sale, of course, and then she'd cut the fabric in layers with the pattern so that she could sew, like, assembly line style two to three dresses at the same time, right?
Yeah.
And just a quick note here.
I think actually this was the Welsh guy that you were wondering about.
This guy actually was Welsh, but on the game show.
Oh, was he?
Okay.
All right.
It's an obsession of mine.
On the game show, Michelle is standing next to two other women who are part of the to-tell-the-truth kind of setup.
They're wearing 80s attuned TV show clothes.
One is in tailored slacks and a satin blouse.
The other has a flowy empire waist dress and cropped vest.
And then standing in the middle is Michelle looking like an extra in Little House on the Prairie.
And it's this It's a weird construct because it's like, we're going to tell you this abject story of like fantastical horror.
Right.
And then we're going to be like, so which one of these three ladies do you think this really happened to?
Yeah, and she's dressing the part.
Anyway, I go to, I mean, I don't know anything about fashion.
So I go to my psychotherapy expert and fashion consultant, my partner, and I showed her the stills and I said, what is going on here?
And she says, oh yeah, that's a look.
And then she sends me the Pinterest boards for 80s prairie style, sometimes these days called cottagecore.
So it's not out of the norm for 80s fashion, I learn.
And then she also reminded me that these dresses are standard for the women in the Roulon and Warren Jeffs cult.
Oh yeah.
And I wonder then if there's a kind of deliberate signaling there that communicated authenticity or innocence or traditionality.
One of the interview subjects mentions that churches were typical whistle stops on the book tour, and they might have been going off to a church after this TV set.
So the dresses also, I found, made her look like a doll.
And so, this is her wardrobe as she's presenting the most abject horror porn in the world to mainstream media.
Like, she's a trad wife that is just pushing back against, you know, late 70s glamour.
Yeah, she's also very chaste.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the completion, I think, of her regression into being a grown-up little girl who survived the dark side and then reclaimed her innocence by marrying her therapist.
Oh, God.
I think, yeah.
Listener, you might want to review that and rewind and listen to that line again.
That really hurts.
Okay.
Moving on, there are a lot of great things about this doc, but one of the things we should mention is that it has a really stellar lineup of skeptic talking heads.
And what is so kind of heartbreaking about listening to them all is that they're all like completely demoralized and baffled by their absolute inability to stop any of it.
And it made me think of The guys at QAnon Anonymous, by contrast, because, you know, I think what they recognize is that we've moved into an era in which, like, the inability to stop moral panics becomes its own source of, like, artistic and comedic despair.
Yeah, yeah.
It's the, oh, here we go again.
Here's the lineup of skeptical talking heads who provide a lot of great insights.
So we have Charles Ennis, who is a Wiccan cop in Vancouver.
He says he was the first Wiccan priest, I think he said, who became a cop in Vancouver.
Then there is Blanche Barton, who is from the Church of Satan, and recounts how actual Satanists responded to the dumb book.
Brings up the funniness that Dana Carvey's church lady signified as a kind of turning point.
Well, it must be Satan!
Then we have Ken Lanning, who is the FBI guy who became an expert in Satan, the cults, and the whole bit, but nonetheless...
That's a direct quote.
He says, I was an expert in Satan, the cults.
And then he's like, I was able to actually pull back and see how this was spreading all over the all over the Western world.
And then just all over the planet in general.
And there was just all of this crazy stuff going on.
And I started to think, yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah, I think he realized that he was the expert in a whole bunch of things that didn't really happen and didn't really exist.
Then we have Elizabeth Loftus, who is a super controversial character in a lot of circles we run in, because her research just slams the door on recovered memory theory.
Her whole career is like a huge fuck you to Bessel van der Kolk.
One key bit of information I imagine the documentary makers got from her was the accounts of the lawsuits filed against psychiatrists and therapists accused later of having planted false memories.
Her suggestion is that insurance companies did more to stop the satanic panic than anything else.
Which is incredible.
Thank you, big insurance.
Yeah, and sort of on point as well, it kind of reminds me of You know, is it going to be insurance companies that actually close the door on, you know, real estate development opportunities in low-lying floodplains?
Right.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then it's also we also have like, OK, it's it's the it's the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits that may bring about the end of Fox News.
Right.
I'm also going to say that with comments by Loftus and others, they make this really good point that I hadn't grasped yet, which is that adults recovering memories were looking to the children in these panic-driven cases in order to find validation.
And I find this to be a very chilling dynamic throughout the satanic panic, but then related panics like the fictional relationship between vaccines and autism.
In which the child is always used as a pawn in the adult's psychodrama, you know, and it becomes really ironic that this is actually the real bad parenting.
Continuing with our list of skeptics, we have Jeff Victor, who's a sociologist, and he breaks down the therapeutic economy because there was actually a lot of money to be made in gradually getting people into your downline who also were recovering their satanic ritual abuse memories.
Yeah, totally.
There's Debbie Nathan, who's a great debunker of the Satanic Panic.
She's an investigative journalist.
She's the author of Satan's Silence, Civil Exposed, and Pornography, which was written in 2007.
She debunks the claim of causal connections between porn and criminality.
The documentary also compiles a bunch of really great clips from 1980s training videos for the police and therapists, given by Total Cranks, who bring out stage props to these really dumb seminars.
And the documentary really confirms that the police started using Michelle Remembers as a guidebook for questioning suspects.
Yeah, they've got shots from news reports in Victoria in 1982, where extra police were assigned to the maternity wards because people were afraid that babies were going to be kidnapped.
They even interview a mom who's saying, you know, it felt really scary because there were all these police walking around.
Yeah, she's in her recovery bed in her maternity ward room.
Then, the doc also does this really good job of tracking how Pazdur and Smith get recruited for the McMartin preschool trial.
And there's this really disturbing comment from Smith's friend, Chidi, that Smith talked about Talking with the children in the case, and I want to just pause on that for a moment, because Julian, when you consider what it would mean for Michelle Smith to have personal access to the McMartin children in the midst of their trial, like, what comes to mind for you?
Well, I mean, a huge part of this story of what went on with the satanic panic and with all of these trials of people who ran daycares or preschool teachers is that the kids were interviewed by police officers in a way that has since been understood as being a completely invalid way of trying to figure out what really has happened to kids because it's a way of asking leading questions.
It's again this kind of idea of some sort of cold reading, some variant on a cold reading technique that is actually eliciting the answers in this case that you've already gone in expecting to find, and the Kafka trap of like, well if you don't get those answers it's because the kids are too traumatized or scared to acknowledge it.
And so if I imagine Michelle Smith then, in terms of her level of motivation, and her, the place she was inhabiting within her own cosmology
at that point in time.
Her own business, her own business.
Yes, yes, yes.
Talking to these kids in a way that was assuming that they must have gone through what she
thinks she's, or she's claiming she has gone through.
It's really gross.
So yeah, after covering the viral spread of the book, the doc makers go back to the origin
of it all with the family members and how the book really shattered them.
And there's this really shocking comment from Marilyn about Larry watching the made-for-TV film Sybil in 1976 with Sally Field at home and saying, I've got a patient who is like that.
And then he phoned her.
Yeah.
Like, holy shit.
Incredible.
Yeah, it's incredible.
I mean, that's the moment where it would not be unfair to speculate that there's a sort of narcissistic need for special attention going on here that he sort of shamelessly waded into.
So they go on to describe constant phone calls from Michelle.
She stalks the family in a way that disrupted their lives.
And there's also something quite gendered about this moment, because there's nobody in the room who can tell Larry to have better boundaries.
There's no way for anybody to say, dude, this is fucking us all up.
You know, she's got too much of your attention.
Yeah, Marilyn becomes, I think, a quiet but towering figure in the film, especially when we learn that she actually helped journalists quietly debunk the book.
Yeah, it's an amazing thing to watch.
Yeah, and then she also recorded a call between herself and Father Guy Merrillville at the local church where he confirms that Larry had been paid by the church for his work.
And then zooming out just a bit, you know, the documentary relies on paperwork, a lot of shots of paperwork, and there's something about the parade of newspaper clips that is so atmospheric and that really locks the satanic panic into the archaeology of the age.
And, you know, most of these sources are not online, they're not easily accessible, but we have dozens and dozens of them flash, and I think that You know, in the age of newspapers, there's this way of really engraving an idea into a culture that is now, I think, a lot more unstable or volatile in the digital age.
But also, there's the same opportunism and feedback loops involved.
Because with those newspaper clips, you can see the assignment editors like all over the country sniffing this stuff out like bloodhounds and like, reporting all of it from secondary sources, you know, they're
reporting on people say that they're not reporting things that happened, they're
reporting stories about things that happened. So it's also very postmodern. Yeah, it's a it's a
early warning of what was to come.
We also have the influence of the daily talk shows with their highly influential charismatic hosts like Sally Jesse Raphael, Oprah, Geraldo's three hour special is especially cited as having massive influence.
Never a single challenge in their interview technique.
Never a single bit of curiosity about like, hold on a second.
Let's talk about the evidence we have for these claims being made.
It's only a moment but we can see like Geraldo's dumb face listening to a bizarre claim and he just turns to the audience and he takes a deep breath and he sighs and he shakes his head like well this is so hard to believe but it's it's true and it's shaking me to the core.
Um, and I think, like, there's some unexplored aspect here, Julian, that, you know, we have all of these journalists or hacks who all decide at the same moment in relation to the same story that they're just going to give up on skepticism.
They're going to indulge in the pleasure of credulity.
Is this, is this FOMO or something like that?
That suddenly, if you didn't do this, if you didn't, you know, just Go on and be a talk show host and create an empathetic effect that you were going to miss the boat on the great human stories of the age.
Well, look, I mean, this is you have this new format, right?
You have the daytime TV talk show, which has a particular format, which has a particular
length and it happens every fucking day and you need, you need, you need a parade of lurid
and sensationalist content and you're in a ratings battle with everyone else.
And so if this is what everyone's covering and this is what people are watching, this
is what I mean when I say it's an early warning.
It's kind of like where cable news ends up and you know where we end up with a lot of
the influencers that we cover.
So we're going to round up here with just one last note, but I want to say before we
do to Sean and Steve, we look forward to having you on sometime in the summer when your schedule
calms down a little bit.
We hope we didn't spoil too much of it.
We're saying to everybody who hears this that They really have to go and immerse themselves in this wonderful project that you've come up with.
And congratulations for a great piece of work.
It's really great, Julian, to actually review a good documentary because we're pretty misanthropic when it comes to documentaries, I think.
Yeah.
Rounding up, Pazder dies in 2004.
And I'm just gonna say that what Sean and Steve capture about the way that Cheryl, Teresa, Marilyn, and Chidi speak about the aftermath of that death in personal and intimate terms is just incredibly moving.
A very satisfying human, but also a very satisfying structural explanation of this cultural catastrophe that has made things very, very bad for a lot of people.
So, it's a great service, I think, this documentary.
I give it five stars.
I say go see it as soon as you can.
Any final thoughts?
Yeah, definitely see it.
It's fantastic.
Hopefully the background that we've given and the analysis that we've given actually enriches the viewing experience for anyone not familiar with this period or wanting a refresher on the period, because I think documentary will then be sort of even richer and more fascinating.
And I want to say too, you know, in the same way that The Crucible was a cautionary tale about what was happening with the House Un-American Activities Committee, When Arthur Miller wrote it, this to me is, it's a similar cautionary tale about a vulnerability that exists within our collective psyche for this kind of stuff.
And they're very clear at the end of the documentary that, oh, Pizzagate, QAnon, here we go again.
So hopefully, to me, this is, This is something that great art and great documentary making and journalism can really do, is it can help us to see pervasive themes that repeat themselves because of something about what it is to be human that we're struggling to make sense of.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
We'll see you back here on the main feed or on Patreon.
