As one of America’s most successful and prolific documentary filmmakers, Alex Gibney has made a career of exploring the shadowy contradictions in human behavior, the porous boundaries between good and bad. People are strange, and there is an endless variety of strangeness for Gibney to tackle. His latest film, “Going Clear,” lays bare the operatic weirdness of the Church of Scientology, from its origins as a religion invented whole-cloth by L. Ron Hubbard to its current incarnation as a secretive, litigious organization that demands absolute loyalty and bizarre psychological surrender from its members. The movie uses rarely seen footage and interviews with high-profile players — Gibney trademarks — to make greater points about how intelligent people can behave with startling certainty about things that are so patently crazy.
Gibney, 61, narrates most of his films, and it is almost jarring to experience how little distance there is between the cool, reasonable voice on-screen and the real person in the flesh. In an interview just before Christmas in his office overlooking the Hudson, Gibney tended to talk in well-formed mini-essays, as if he had all the time in the world (he did not). Things were busy; there is not much downtime in his company.
What increasingly motivates him, Gibney said, is not just curiosity — though he is the sort of person who can wander out for a sandwich and come back with a dozen new ideas — but also the psychological process by which people lie to each other and themselves. Many of his protagonists have an almost messianic fervor for a greater purpose that they bolster with slippery half-truths or outright lies. (Julian Assange, the paranoid, secretive advocate of total transparency, in “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks“; Lance Armstrong, the megalomaniacal, bullying, cheating sports champion and cancer advocate, in “The Armstrong Lie“; Eliot Spitzer, the holier-than-thou scourge of white-collar crimes who flouted the law himself, in “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”) Law-enforcement officials call this “noble-cause corruption,” and Gibney’s subjects demonstrate it again and again.
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Despite how much he works, he realizes there is no way to fully get to the bottom of the ambiguity that opens up moral fault lines in people. But some of it, he has come to believe, has to do with the tacit contract between perpetrator and victim. “I’m interested in deception and self-deception,” he said. “In the case of Assange, a lot of people who believe in what he was doing were in willful denial about some of the stuff he did. And also in the case of Armstrong, a lot of people loved the beautiful lie so much that they couldn’t stand the ugly truth.”
We are all complicit in a way, he seems to be saying. “It’s one thing to say, ‘You liar,’ ” he said. But “there’s a person who lies and a person who believes the lie.” Perhaps that is the most interesting thing of all, the other half of the equation, where we fit in to all of this — “the fooler and the fooled.”
