girl gods
what Bella Baxter and Mother God can teach us about doing what we want
discussed:
girl cult leaders
female indulgence
what it means to do what we want
Welcome back, grrrls, to this Very Special issue of internet bedroom, a newsletter about girl culture and nostalgia. This issue is Very Special because we’re only going to be looking at the strange cases of Amy Carlson (aka Mother God) of the Love Has Won Cult and Bella Baxter, so if you have yet to watch the HBO doc about Love Has Won or Poor Things just know that both will be spoiled if you read further.
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rabbit hole: There are very few cults led by girls, which doesn’t make sense to me because being a cult leader requires a level of delusion and mystique that men often don’t possess.
I think this is why I went down the rabbit hole when I first heard about Amy Carlson, a pretty blond who went from managing a McDonald’s in Texas to being mummified by her followers, who believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, called her Mother God, and sold thousands of dollars worth of colloidal silver and other spiritual-enhancing supplements online on her behalf.
Carlson met her demise from a combination of anorexia, alcoholism, and ingesting too much colloidal silver, (which had the side effect of giving her skin a blue-ish tinge in her final months). But before that, her conviction that she was a 19 billion year old begin who had returned to save the world afforded her a life where she could seemingly indulge every whim and fantasy with her followers. She fucked, drank, smoked, cursed, and indulged her eating disorder with the kind of abandon girls and women are rarely afforded in public life. In the end, however, it’s difficult to tell how much of the conditions she died from were her choice and how much her situation was a product of those who followed her.
Until HBO released their documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God at the end of last year, it was hard to piece together her story. But what emerges from the four-episode series is a story about a woman who, despite removing herself so far from society and its norms, was still consumed by her own desires, as well as the needs and desires of those who followed her.
Carlson appears throughout the documentary in grainy YouTube footage and clips shot on followers’ iPhones as a mercurial figure: loving, tender, and mothering one moment before spiraling out on alcohol-induced rages, chain-smoking while yelling and calling her followers whores (as in this infamous tantrum over not receiving chicken parmesan like she had asked for.)
It is often unclear who is actually being abused and who is in control as Carlson’s followers fawn over her, putting her on a pedestal so high it seems impossible to climb down and return to being a normal person once again. While Carlson appears to be free to indulge every whim, emotion, and fantasy, one can’t help but wonder if her outbursts are a symptom of being so dehumanized by those who were drawn into her light and her darkness.
Unlike with Mother God, I knew very little about Poor Things going in. I think I saw a clip of the dance scene on TikTok and was intrigued because I mistook Lindsay Lohan for Emma Stone. In all honesty, I still think LiLo would have made an incredible Bella Baxter.
Poor Things is a bizarro-coming-of-age story about a middle-aged woman who kills herself and is resurrected by a scientist who literally replaces her brain with that of her unborn child. Much like Shelly’s Frankenstein, the resurrected Bella has no concept of how to function in society, tilting the world on its axis in delightful and frightening ways for herself and all those she comes into contact with.
From attempting to punch a baby to masturbating at the breakfast table in full view of her creator, his assistant, and the housekeeper, all while wearing the most delightfully unhinged deconstructed Victorian-era gowns, Bella is an instant icon whose refusal to comply with or conform to what is expected of a lady asks viewers to consider what happens when girls do what we want.
Bella Baxter and Amy Carlson are, quite literally, from two different universes. But their stories lead us to the strange places that female indulgence can take us. But even living as far outside of the bounds of society as Mother God and Bella did, they still were not ever far enough to escape those who would control them and dictate how their lives should go, which seems to me to be a uniquely female predicament.
It is interesting to me that, at the close of 2023, these are the stories we are getting about women and girls. The friends I saw Poor Things with all commented on the similarities between the plot of this film and Barbie, a film that resurrected the summer blockbuster, redefined the word bimbo, and yielded one of the most tone deaf award-show monologues in recent memory. In the first year after the rollback of reproductive rights in the States, we are no longer in the #MeToo era, but one in which the penalty of female indulgence is death. And both Carlson’s story and Bella’s reflect that to different degrees.
No matter how much power we amass, no matter how many we bring into the world we created, we are still just dolls being dressed up and played with by forces beyond our control. Always an angel, never a god.
xxx. r.m.
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