Cowboys & Sanyasis

Cowboys & Sanyasis

- Jason Overdorf

In the early 1980s, the era of gurus and seekers was finished in America. The Christian right had seemingly put the last nail in the coffin of the counterculture. Ronald Reagan was president. The Official Preppy Handbook was hot. And greed was good.

But in one rural corner of Oregon, where a handful of ranchers and retirees had hunkered down and waited out the radical ’60s and psychedelic ’70s, a new revolution was brewing, filmmaker brothers Maclean and Chapman Way suggest at the outset of Wild Wild Country, a documentary series about America’s encounter with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho.

What’s stunning about the sixpart Netflix series is its subtlety. There’s something archetypal about the story: like Socrates, Osho is mainly a cipher, his wisdom sketched out by the memories of his disciples. Like Jesus, he comes to destroy the conventional order of things and is eventually betrayed. Or like Mao Zedong, he cleverly shifts the blame for his excesses onto his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela—a sort of Jiang Qing figure who presided over her own version of the Gang of Four.