I’m one of those people — there are a lot of us — who is always up for a Charles Manson movie. There have been so many! All the documentaries and dramatizations. Not to mention the TV specials, both prestige and tabloid, the broadcast interviews with Manson acolytes like Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel, and the epic-event television interviews with Charlie himself, like the famous one conducted by Tom Snyder in 1981 (“Get off the space shuttle, Charles!”) or the one that Charlie Rose did with Manson in 1986. Then there are the books, from Ed Sanders’ “The Family” to Jeff Guinn’s “Manson” to the one that remains the granddaddy of all Manson studies, Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” the best-selling crime book in history (seven million copies).
The Manson saga has been excavated from every angle. Yet I’m always open to any new ray of light that can be shed on its darkness. So I sat down to watch “CHAOS: The Manson Murders,” a new Netflix documentary directed by Errol Morris (“The Fog of War,” “The Thin Blue Line”), with what I would describe as a kind of skeptical curiosity. Given what an acclaimed and intelligent filmmaker Morris is, I thought: There has to be something new here. Or why do it? That said, is there actually anything new to discover?
“CHAOS” gives off a deep-dig archival glow typical of contemporary documentaries, with a fair amount of photographs I’d never seen before of the settings of the Manson crime scenes: the occasional oblique shot of a butchered body, as well as images of the words that were scrawled in blood (“death to pigs”), but mostly the banality of the settings before they were drenched in murder, as if those rooms were waiting for the violence to happen.
What’s newer than the photographs, however, is the art-grunge treatment Morris frames the entire film with. “CHAOS” is full of rapid-fire punk coffee-table-book graphics, and such touches as a time-lapse shot of mescaline cactus flowers or a close-up of wriggling maggots (to accompany the story about how when the police discovered Gary Hinman’s body after a week, they could hear the maggots eating him), or psychedelic imagery that looks like it came out of a Kenneth Anger film, or the raw photos of blood on the floor that are now placed in a kind of aestheticized context, as if they were grisly Nan Goldin photographs. Often the photos will be black-and-white, but one part of the image will have a red tint, or the images will be doubled, for that Warhol Confidential feeling. The whole movie is designed as a sick-crime art object.
It’s kind of seductive, but let’s be clear: This is all Manson window dressing. What’s truly new is that Morris, building the film around an interview with Tom O’Neill, author of the book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” explores a conspiracy theory about the Manson saga that seeks to explain its most mysterious and haunting element. Namely: How is it that the Family members who did the killing — those four “Manson girls” along with Tex Watson (who actually did most of it) — could have been brainwashed and manipulated into descending into such savagery?
We do know that’s what happened. And we know the mythology that’s been built up around it — that Manson was a devious street-hustling criminal who exploited the new youth culture to turn himself into the garbage version of a hippie cult leader, using the psych-out tactics of a pimp combined with breaking down the egos of his followers through massive doses of LSD, spinning out his theory of “Helter Skelter” (an apocalyptic uprising against middle-class white “pigs,” which would be led by Black revolutionaries) as if it were a demonic catechism. He turned his followers into believers who would literally do anything for him.
But Tom O’Neill thinks that this trajectory of events is full of holes. And he’s the one who’s going to fill them in. Because he has a theory — oh, does he have a theory. This man is a piece of work. He doesn’t have evidence — he has hunches. Which he’s willing to palm off as the grand missing puzzle pieces of it all.
O’Neill is a former entertainment journalist who, in 1999, received an assignment from Premiere magazine to write about how the Tate–LaBianca murders changed Hollywood; he wound up going down a rabbit hole. The core of O’Neill’s theory is that he has devised a way to tie the Manson murders into the hidden dark side of the CIA. He’s figured out how to take this legendary chapter of ultraviolent insanity and connect it to…the Man.
O’Neill’s focus is the clandestine CIA program known as MKUltra, which was launched in 1953 and lasted for 20 years. (It was so dicey that the records of it were mostly destroyed in 1973.) MKULtra was the Agency’s ongoing experiment in mind control, rooted in what could be done with hallucinogenic drugs, and utilizing university research centers, most of which had no idea that they were working for the CIA. The LSD experiments had multiple dimensions, but one key facet of them is that the CIA wanted to see if it could use LSD to produce programmed assassins. This idea, part behavior mod and part sci-fi, was very much in the air at the time (it’s dealt with quite spectacularly in the classic 1962 Hollywood thriller “The Manchurian Candidate”). And so you could say that there was an overlap between what the CIA was doing in its subversive bunkers and what Charles Manson was doing with his sermons and drug orgies at Spahn Ranch. But was there a literal connection?
Here’s about as far as it goes. Manson was released from prison in 1967, and he violated his parole by traveling up to San Francisco and settling into the Haight-Ashbury scene. That’s where he started to attract the followers who would become the Family. Manson spent a lot of time at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, mostly because his girls were stricken by venereal disease. But the CIA had also set up an office there. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist who was deeply involved with MKULtra (he’s known for having conducted an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby just before Ruby’s murder trial), used the clinic to recruit subjects for his studies of LSD and youth. He called the place a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.”
But did West and Manson ever meet? O’Neill concedes that he has never found evidence or testimony placing Jolly West and Charlie Manson in the same room. But he’s got enough of a hunch to suggest that Charlie learned his mind-control techniques from the CIA.
Since there’s no actual evidence of this to linger over, Morris fills out the documentary with a dozen tangents, always implying that he’s finding new details and angles — like, for instance, his exploration of Manson’s music career, and how close Charlie actually came to landing a recording contract. Through his friendship with Dennis Wilson, there is actually a Manson song, “Cease to Exist,” on the Beach Boys’ 1969 album “20/20.” And the truth is that Manson had a singing voice of knowing mellow command. Stranger things might have happened than this eccentric crooner turning into a one-hit wonder.
But when the music producer Terry Melcher came up to Spahn Ranch to give Manson an audition, Melcher liked Charlie’s songs but said, “I don’t know what to do with you.” So Charlie came close, but not close enough. And that was a key motivation for the Manson murders, the first night of which took place at the home that Manson thought was Terry Melcher’s house.
But we’ve been through all this before. In “CHAOS,” Errol Morris winds his way through Manson back-alleys, now mixing in the spice of conspiracy theorizing. Here’s a man named Bernard Crowe who Manson shot (and thought, wrongly, that he’d killed) because Charlie believed that Crowe was a Black Panther. Here’s Susan Atkins, the breathy WASP witch-princess of Manson’s followers, talking in an old interview about how she and Tex Watson got super-wired on speed the night of Sharon Tate’s murder (the drug factor is a major part of the explanation of how the girls could see the stabbings they were doing as “unreal”). And here’s a theory, offered up by Bobby Beausoleil in a new interview with Morris, that Charlie was so paranoid that he was afraid one of his followers was going to rat him out, so he orchestrated the murders to make sure everyone was too complicit to snitch.
And, finally, here’s Tom O’Neill’s most scurrilous theory: that the way Vincent Bugliosi pieced together the whole race-war/piggies/Beatles mythology of “Helter Skelter,” in what was one of the most brilliant acts of prosecutorial perception an American courtroom had ever seen (for he had to convict Manson of murder when Manson hadn’t actually killed anybody — a paradigm that goes back to Hitler), was just something he came up with…to sell books! “CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.