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On the Most Outta Control People in History (aka You’re Outta Control!): #1 Keith Rainere

Note: This piece begins a new series, The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control), which looks at extreme historical and contemporary figures whose behavior, movements, or belief systems veered dramatically beyond the bounds of ordinary reality. The tone is intentionally informal and impressionistic rather than academic, blending biography, cultural memory, and personal reaction. The goal is not exhaustive analysis but a clear read on just how outta control these figures became. This piece takes up the case of Keith Rainere.

Epigraph: 

“Out of control / You’re out of control…”

— Out of Control, The Rolling Stones

Keith Raniere began life in New York in 1960 and built his early identity around claims of extraordinary intelligence and unusual gifts. He cultivated a reputation as a prodigy, a polymath, and a moral philosopher, though many of these claims were exaggerated or unverifiable. In the 1990s he co-founded a multi-level marketing-style company that ran into legal trouble, then pivoted into what became NXIVM, a self-improvement organization marketed as executive success training. Participants attended workshops, advanced through ranks, and absorbed Raniere’s pseudo-philosophical teachings. He adopted the title “Vanguard,” cultivated an inner circle, and emphasized ethics, discipline, and personal growth. Wealthy backers, including Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman, funded the operation for years, allowing NXIVM to expand in upstate New York and attract professionals, actors, and seekers.

Behind the self-help veneer, however, the structure tightened. Raniere exercised increasing control over followers’ lives, and a secret subgroup known as DOS emerged, involving master–slave hierarchies, collateral-based coercion, and branding rituals incorporating his initials. Superman actress Allison Mack played a key role in recruiting members. Investigative reporting in 2017 exposed the group, leading to arrests. Raniere fled to Mexico, where he was found living in a villa with loyal followers, still holding late-night volleyball sessions and maintaining his guru persona. He was arrested in 2018, returned to the United States, convicted on multiple charges, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. The NXIVM empire collapsed, its mythology dissolving into court transcripts and testimony.

And yet what stands out most about Raniere is not grandeur but pettiness. The volleyball — endless, late-night volleyball as the center of spiritual life — already tells you everything you need to know. Important conversations at midnight on the court, guru hanging out in athletic shorts, disciples orbiting. It has strong George Santos energy: self-invented genius, weird rituals, faux casualness masking control. Then the egomania. The IQ mythology, the titles, the little cushion on stage so he’s physically higher than everyone else. It’s not even theatrical; it’s dreary. The branding scandal — initials burned into skin, coercion, sexual manipulation — pushed it fully into outta control territory. And all of it funded for years by the Bronfman money, which makes the whole thing feel even more surreal. Rich people with nothing better to do underwriting a volleyball cult.

What really kills it, though, is the atmosphere. It’s all so fucking boring. Endless seminars. Faux-ethical language. Guru perched slightly above the group. No charisma, no sweep, just control. I basically hate gurus, and Raniere is the worst kind: small, humorless, self-mythologizing. Even when he fled to Mexico, he didn’t become mythic — he just kept playing volleyball in a villa while the walls closed in. Outta control, yes, but also petty. Not a visionary gone wrong, just an egomaniac running a dreary self-help cult.

By contrast, Jim Jones has a sweeping, almost Shakespearean arc. He began as a Midwestern preacher in Indiana in the 1950s, preaching racial integration and social justice at a time when both were rare in American churches. His Peoples Temple grew steadily, and by the mid-1960s he relocated to Northern California, first to Ukiah and then to San Francisco, where he gained real political influence. The early movement was diverse, activist, and in some respects ahead of its time. But alongside the growth came drugs, paranoia, authoritarian theatrics, and increasing control. Facing scrutiny and defectors, Jones moved followers to an agricultural commune in Guyana — Jonestown — deep in the jungle. Life there deteriorated into long work hours, loudspeaker propaganda, and rehearsals for mass suicide. In November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived to investigate, accompanied, improbably, by Mark Lane, the JFK conspiracy lawyer hired by the Temple as a defender. After several members attempted to leave, Ryan and others were shot at a nearby airstrip, and Jones ordered the mass murder-suicide — cyanide-laced drink administered to more than 900 people. The trajectory is horrifying, but it has scale: idealism, power, paranoia, catastrophe. You can at least see how it built.

Marshall Applewhite is stranger still. A former music teacher who fell into an intense partnership with Bonnie Nettles, he constructed a theology blending Christianity, UFO lore, and apocalyptic expectation. After Nettles died, Applewhite grew more isolated and doctrinaire, leading the group known as Heaven’s Gate. Members lived communally, detached from ordinary life, waiting for a spacecraft they believed was trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp. In 1997, Applewhite convinced followers that they needed to leave their bodies to board it. Thirty-nine members died in a coordinated mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, wearing matching clothing and following a carefully staged sequence. The whole thing is eerie rather than theatrical — calm, methodical, and deeply surreal. Of the three, Applewhite may be the most bonkers, but also the most otherworldly, a teacher who wandered into cosmic delusion.

So the comparison is stark. Jones is tragic and terrifying, a charismatic reformer turned paranoid autocrat. Applewhite is cosmic and surreal, a gentle-seeming teacher convinced salvation lay behind a comet. Raniere, by contrast, is just small — petty control dressed up as philosophy, volleyball instead of vision, branding instead of belief. All three are outta control, but in different registers: tragic, cosmic, and contemptible.

The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee
The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)
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On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.