Diksha Sundriyal
Directed by Justin Kurzel, ‘The Order’ is an action thriller film that follows FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law). He is posted in a small town in Idaho with the intention of slowing down a bit after the many difficult cases he has worked on over the course of his career. However, things take such a turn that Husk finds himself in the middle of what could be potentially one of the biggest cases of his life. It all has to do with a local white supremacist group led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult). At first, seen as nothing but a splinter group from a bigger organization, it gains notoriety pretty quickly, and its power increases exponentially. The story is made more impactful by the fact that it is woven around real events. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Order Tells the Real Story of a White Supremacist Group
‘The Order’ is based on the 1989 non-fiction book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, titled ‘The Silent Brotherhood.’ It charts the story of the group led by Robert Jay “Bob” Mathews, who had a history of being a part of racist and white supremacist groups since a young age. Before laying the foundation of The Silent Brotherhood, also known as the Order, in September 1983, he was a member of the Aryan Nations Group, founded by Richard Butler. However, he got tired of the organization’s passive approach toward their goals and decided to do something of his own. He took several other members of the group with him, and that marked the beginning of the Silent Brotherhood.
One of the major influences on Mathews was ‘The Turner Diaries,’ the 1978 fiction novel by William Luther Pierce. The book follows the story of a fictional white nationalist named Earl Turner, who hatches the plan to establish white supremacy over the country by overthrowing the government. Mathews seemed to have a similar idea in his mind. He took a militant approach to fulfill his goals and prepared the group for war by reading up on army training and military strategy and setting up training camps. He also invested in buying weapons and other things that would come in handy in a battle. The nickname for their group, the Order, was also borrowed from Pierce’s book.
Any operation of such a scale required money, and Mathews and his men got that by robbing banks and other establishments while also counterfeiting cash. They started with small robberies, at first stealing only a few hundred dollars from the establishments they did not deem fit for society. This is why pornographic stores would often be their target. Soon, however, they turned their attention towards the banks and then moved on to armored trucks, from where they stole about four million dollars. Their last robbery in July 1984 near Ukiah, California, got them $3.6 million in cash. Around the same time, they also bombed an adult film theatre, primarily to distract the cops from a pre-planned robbery. The increasing scale of their crimes brought them onto the FBI’s radar, and the murder of Alan Berg in June 1984 brought them public notoriety.
How did Bob Mathews Die?
After Alan Berg’s murder and the robbery that got them more than three million dollars, Bob Mathews and his group started preparing for the next phase of their plan. By now, however, the FBI had gained quite a lot of intel on them, and they were actively pursuing the group. One of the Order’s members, Thomas Martinez, became an informant for the FBI after he was arrested on the charges of counterfeiting. With the information that he gave them, the Feds launched a full-scale manhunt to find and capture Mathews and his accomplices.
On November 24, 1984, they almost got the man in Portland, but he escaped with a minor wound while also wounding an officer in the process. He went underground and wasn’t found again until December 7. The Feds discovered that Mathews and some of his men had been hiding out at his house on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. They surrounded the entire property, and even when it was clear that there could be no escape, Mathews refused to surrender. The stockpile of firearms in his possession made the task more difficult as he fired at the FBI agents, who had to come up with other ideas to flush him out of the house.
At first, they used tear gas, but Mathews seemed to have a gas mask, which meant that the gas had no effect on him. Later, they threw flares into the house, one of which caused a fire that quickly spread through the house. Even with the flames around him, Mathews kept firing at the agents, which meant that neither could they go into the house nor could they put out the fire. On December 8, 1984, after about a 35-hour-long standoff, 31-year-old Bob Mathews died in the fire. His death marked the end of The Silent Brotherhood, aka the Order. The remaining members of the group were arrested within the next two years and were brought to justice.
The Writer and Director Wanted the Order to be a Cautionary Tale
While the story of Bob Mathews and the Order came to an end in the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2016 that screenwriter Zach Baylin found out about them in detail. He and Bryan Hass, the producer, were researching the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992 and Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist behind the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, when they chanced upon Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s ‘The Silent Brotherhood.’ The book’s detailed description of Bob Mathews and his group gave them the story they’d been looking for. They were further encouraged to make the film when they noted that extremism was becoming more prominent in the country’s politics. Baylin was caught off guard by how the story from about three decades ago felt like something that could happen in today’s climate, and this thought heavily informed and influenced his writing process.
For director Justin Kurzel, the events of January 6, 2021, were evidence that the ideology followed by Bob Mathews and preached by ‘The Turner Diaries’ is still around. In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, he mentioned “seeing images of nooses hanging outside the Capitol Building as props and finding real similarities to a particular chapter in the book called ‘Day of the Rope’ that was describing and reenacting these politicians being hung outside the building.” It disturbed him but also compelled him to bring the necessary depth to the story through his direction. At the end of the day, the writer and director wanted the film to resonate with the audience and serve as a cautionary tale about the unforgiving ends brought on by hate and violence.
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