Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders is a shallow dip in a deep pool of conspiracy and weirdness. The book it’s based on—CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), by Tom O'Neill, with Dan Piepenbring—is only one of many in the last thirty years or so whose title promised “secret history”; unlike others, it delivered. O'Neill found a multitude of buried facts and forgotten documents. He highlighted existing holes in the standard version of the Manson murders, and punched many new ones. What he didn’t do was offer a unified-field theory, with all questions answered, all contradictions squared; and that, aside from the evidence he delivered, was O’Neill’s edge over other conspiracists. The sum of his unearthing, as he readily admitted, was a mound of irreducible mystery, uncanny remains forming no definitive shape. CHAOS was both enormous fun and disturbing to the point of nightmare.
O’Neill had been commissioned by Premiere magazine in 1999 to do a modest anniversary piece about the Manson murders and their effect on the Hollywood community. After twenty years down the rabbit hole, he emerged with a book that laid waste to the all but universally accepted narrative created by Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of the killers and co-author of Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974), not the first but by far the most influential book about the case. Bugliosi’s rationale was that Manson, a career criminal who somehow amassed a psychotic band of acolytes in California in 1967 and 1968, combined his own racist paranoia with The Beatles’ White Album to envision an apocalyptic race war: “Helter Skelter.” He and his minions would survive the war in a desert hole, then resurface to take charge of millions of violent, well-organized, but presumably docile black revolutionaries. The mortal toll of this madness included the murders of Gary Hinman, a musician, on July 25, 1969; five people in the home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on August 8; and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca the following night. Other murders have also been attributed, more than plausibly, to Manson or his followers.
Tom O’Neill’s research brought out two key realities that had somehow escaped the focused attention of previous writers. The first was that Manson and his Family, living in San Francisco in the summer of 1967, had frequented the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, an outpost of altruism later identified as the site of LSD experiments conducted by Air Force psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, whose work in drugs and mind control had begun during the Korean War. (Helpfully or not, Morris’s film includes clips from The Manchurian Candidate for context.) The second reality was that during the supposed gestation of the Helter Skelter vision at the Spahn Ranch and elsewhere, Manson was excused for multiple parole violations, including crimes involving guns, drugs, stolen goods, and underage girls. Certain of his associates were also the recipients of unaccountable leniencies. The implication, O’Neill suspects, is that Manson and his people were either subjects of West’s drug experiments (whose stated goals were to instill mental illness and/or murderous capabilities in controlled subjects); valuable informers whom various law-enforcement agencies wished to keep on the street; or both. Bugliosi’s theory had never sat right with a lot of people. Was Manson insane, or legally culpable? Were those who killed for him under his control, but likewise self-responsible? How was Manson guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders when he hadn’t even been present? The race-war scenario sounded far out even for the late sixties. But Bugliosi got the convictions and copyrighted the story, and in the forty-five years since his book appeared, no one had proposed anything convincing in the way of a counter-theory.
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| (Little, Brown, and Company) |
O’Neill’s book, while it didn’t constitute a theory, was decidedly counter. It must have been catnip to Errol Morris, many of whose documentaries since The Thin Blue Line (1988) have incorporated true crime, military and government subterfuge, and the psychology of obsession. Chaos gestures towards all of these. It’s every bit as cleanly shot, intelligently assembled, and masterly in exposition as we’d expect from him. It makes use of Manson’s own music and recording-session tapes, with the still-chilling “Cease to Exist” medleyed into the Beach Boys’ bastard cover, “Never Learn Not to Love,” a smoother, lusher hymn to domination and death. (Somehow, Morris obtained the rights to quick snatches of key White Album songs, too—the Beatle originals, not soundalikes per the 1976 TV version of Helter Skelter.) So Morris’s film is by no means a failure. But it’s a corner hit on the proverbial barn-size target. It shuffles news footage, some of it familiar and some not, and layers headlines and gory photos in the style innovated thirty years ago in the credits of Se7en. Instead of focusing on O’Neill’s motivations, and digging into the specifics of his twin revelations—the Louis West connection (if connection it is), and the eagerness of police to keep Manson et al out of prison—it mostly just recaps the crimes and eloquently restates what those who have read a couple of Manson books or seen a couple of Manson docs already know. With all it has going for it, Chaos decides it only wants to go down to the corner and back.
Everything seemed set for Morris to do with the Manson case what he did, also on Netflix, with the four-part docuseries Wormwood (2017). That was about the case, well-known to postwar conspiracy buffs, of Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, who plunged from the window of a New York hotel in 1953 in what was filed as a suicide but was probably a murder. (Olson had been involved in LSD experiments supervised by Sidney Gottlieb, an architect of MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control project.) Utterly engrossing, with archival footage augmented by exacting and imaginative reenactments, Wormwood was not only a meaty delve into secret history but also an artful work which organized its material around the Hamlet theme of a son searching for the answer to his father’s death.
For some reason Morris wasn’t given, or chose not to take, comparable space and time to elaborate on the Manson murders: his Chaos lasts barely over an hour and a half. Tom O’Neill seems tailor-made as a Morris protagonist. Surely he was changed by his twenty-year descent into Mansonland, which left him, as he writes, “at various points broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist, a lunatic.” And evidently the two men have known each other at least since O’Neill was writing his book: the photo insert of CHAOS includes pictures taken by Morris of the author at home in 2014, looking just as he does in the interview segments of the film. But O’Neill isn’t brought out as an individual, nor does Morris craft any unique comprehension of his particular obsession with this case. (Manson himself, meanwhile, gets plenty of screen time—slow walks to and from the courtroom in 1970, later penitentiary interviews by Tom Snyder, Geraldo Rivera, Charlie Rose—but he ceased long ago to be a magnetic camera subject.)
No one with any interest in the Manson case—which is to say the history, both known and secret, of the interrelated cultures of the sixties—will want to miss Errol Morris’s take on it, however glancing that take seems. But among the effects of his film was to remind me of other works that have done the same things more fully, surprisingly, or mysteriously. These include Helter Skelter: An American Myth (2020), a thoughtful six-part series distinguished by rare footage, contemporary interviews with former Family members, and an immersive pace; Emma Cline's The Girls (2016), a memory novel about a haunted woman's teenage trip through the Family orbit; the NBC crime series Aquarius (2015–2016), with David Duchovny as an LAPD detective in the late sixties, and Gethin Anthony, in a firecracker performance, as Manson; and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), which, for reasons not unrelated to its engagement with the Manson murders, happens to be the one Quentin Tarantino movie I enjoy without reservation. But mostly I think of Manson (1973), a documentary by Robert Hendrickson, which got an Oscar nomination before falling into a legal black hole that made it impossible to see for many years, except on bootleg videotapes. Made while the killers were still on trial, Manson is not a slick retrospective but a druggy, thuggy report from the ground. As Squeaky Fromme and other true believers fondle their rifles and plot retribution back at the ranch, Paul Watkins and Brooks Poston, former Manson henchmen who testified against him, perform a macabre genre of fluty folksong that makes you feel flowers of evil growing all around you. The film coalesces like a witch’s spell from some of the darkest parts of its time and place, and you suddenly appreciate an old line that’s often been applied to the 1960s: “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
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