“I once met a former Scientologist at a backyard barbecue who explained to me how L. Ron Hubbard, the mediocre science fiction author who founded the Church of Scientology in the 1950s, got his retro-pulp novel “Battlefield Earth” on the bestseller lists in 1982. According to this fellow, the church compelled all its members to rush out and buy multiple copies for friends, family members and even non-Scientologists (sometimes derogatorily known as “wogs”). How many copies of that 1,050-page doorstop actually got read? There’s no way to know, but “Battlefield Earth” spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Something similar happened earlier this summer with Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s film “Sound of Freedom,” which occupied the No. 1 spot at the box office until it was mercifully overtaken by Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Whatever the original intentions of the filmmakers may have been, “Sound of Freedom” arrived in theaters as a thinly disguised QAnon recruitment film whose star, Jim Caviezel, is an evangelical Christian who has said he believes in the central myth of that conspiracy theory: that innocent children are being kidnapped by Satanists, dragged into underground dungeons and tortured to manufacture a chemical called “Adrenochrome,” whose consumption keeps the privileged elite forever youthful. This fantastical concept is ripped off from various sources, including Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as well as an array of grade-B horror movies.
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