Bring Me Beauty: Model Cult Review – A juicy TV series about a guru with a guest star | Television

Dcult literature all have the same task, where almost all of them fail: to explain exactly how many people fell under the spell of a person (always a person) who was, to an outside observer, obviously ruined. None of it makes sense; it would not count as tradition if it did.

Bring Me Beauty: A Model Cult does a disturbing job of telling the story of Frederick von Mierers, who spent the 1980s seducing people with spiritual knowledge, Eternal Morality. The life of the Von Mierers was one of lies, chaos and mystery and it would be difficult to describe it coherently, even if you tried hard. But that’s like trying to keep up with some annoying guy in a bar who’s focused on the most important things so he can skip the gossip. Of course, every new knowledge is very sweet.

The early years of Frederick von Mierers are vague, but the main facts are that, as a 40ish-year-old model, he was a socialite, living in an apartment in the middle of Manhattan and going to Studio 54, where the doormen could pull back the velvet rope to let him sashay through the crowds and walk straight. Dolph Lundgren. In 1978 he suffered from an ear infection, and after his fever subsided he announced that his body had become a vessel for the red star, Arcturus.

With an extraterrestrial light in his already piercing eyes, Von Mierers began presenting a television program where he spread the message about the benefits of healthy food, the power of emotional control – the idea of ​​romantic love was a weapon of “the most demonic and evil forces in the world” – and the need to realize that the paths to happiness are not all about happiness.

Casual players sent checks to Eternal Values ​​for astronomical calculations; The insiders ended up living in Frederick’s house, where they would sometimes wake up to find that he had applied a fragrant face mask to them at night. Unhappily, they fostered a culture where anyone who stepped out of line was mercilessly scrutinized in reprimands known as “slamming sessions”. Also fearing the loss of the rebels, the foot soldiers of the Eternal Tree hoped to restore the Earth’s magnetic poles, which were foreseen by the Arcturians, which led the organization to buy a second place in the mountains of North Carolina that would survive the coming earthquakes and tsunamis.

What is not a secret with religions is the leader’s motivation: it is always sex and/or money, and, for Von Mierers, it was everything. Our main evidence is a man named John Hoyt, who under the name Hoyt Richards was one of the highest paid men in the late 1980s and 90s, who always appeared in shoots with Cindy Crawford and so on. After work in Milan, the Caribbean or Los Angeles, John would return to sleep under the flatbed EV, handing over all his spare cash to Frederick to return powerful “gems” that in retrospect may have been jewelry. Sometimes Frederick would invite boys to his room, whose spiritual wisdom was so pathetic that John would be asked to give them $100 when they left.

The members of the Eternal Character are supposed to participate in sex, but this is rarely mentioned and does not add up, which makes it confusing when two of the group are punished more for being in a relationship. Somehow the series also skips over the content of the aliens: Hoyt and other acolytes of the Von Mierers, several of whom were interviewed, were not asked why they took this wild ass without question.

But the series finds that everyone involved, including the Von Mierers, was affected by loss, or the feeling of loss, in their illustrious adulthood. Von Mierers may be looking for role models because they understand that they may be insecure people, worried that their supposedly good jobs and relationships were imaginary and meaningless.

In the final episode of Bring Me Beauty, there is a dramatic scene as a sincere Hoyt recalls the pain of realizing, years after Von Mierers death from an AIDS-related illness, that he left his family and friends for nothing. Hoyt now works as an outreach counselor, trying to get members of the cult to understand that they are one. However, as this program emerges, why people join cults is difficult to understand.