In 1999 Tom O’Neill was commissioned by Hollywood-centric film magazine Premiere to investigate exactly what had — by then — happened a mere 30 years earlier, when a small-time criminal, Charles Manson, was unveiled as the mastermind behind one of the most brutal and defining crimes of the 20th century. It must have seemed like an easy job back then, but by the time the title ceased trading in 2007 O’Neill still didn’t have a piece for them — as he explains with great honesty in his self-deprecating and far-ranging 2019 book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.
That book took all his research — exhaustive and authoritative but frustratingly inconclusive — and threw it all up in the air in exasperation, which is not something many writers are inclined to do. It’s also not something that documentary legend Errol Morris is wont to do either, so it’s interesting to see what happens when these two minds meet. The result is fascinating, as Morris homes in on the crux of O’Neill’s book — that the official narrative of what have now become known as The Manson Murders was a sensationalist plot hatched by prosecuting D.A. Vincent Bugliosi to sell his true-crime book Helter Skelter — and leaves the viewer to, well, as the internet says, let that sink in.
To recap, if it’s needed, Manson came to notoriety as the hippie cult leader whose followers murdered Roman Polanski’s pregnant then-wife Sharon Tate on 9 August 1969, along with three of her friends (hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and screenwriter Voytek Frykowski) plus a random guest of the property’s pool boy (Stephen Parent). The next night they struck again, killing supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in an even-now shocking display of excessive violence. Nothing of value was taken on either occasion, but at both crime scenes, there were significant words daubed in blood: “Pig”, “Death to pigs”, “Rise,” and “Healter Skelter” (sic).
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So far, this story has been told and told (and told), but scholars of Mansonology might be pleased to hear that Chaos: The Manson Murders represents something of a reset. Far from being a checklist of Manson Family members — you can play that game yourself with some incredibly good archive footage — Morris’s film concentrates on just two people: O’Neill and Manson. Manson comes off as he always did, the cornered shaman who, having been a lifelong inmate, refuses to say what went down a) perhaps because of the drugs he’d taken, so he may not have remembered anyway, and b) because he was never a snitch.
This latter point will take you where Morris’s film declines to go, but the whole film is an invitation to the giant rabbit hole that is the Tate-Labianca murders. One can sense that Morris might have hoped to bring the forensic approach that he used so successfully with The Thin Blue Line (1988), but then pivoted to something closer to 2010’s underrated Tabloid.
It’s particularly interesting that Morris skirts all the possible scenarios for the Tate murders; one being that the family were retaliating after a bad drug deal, another that it was a copycat murder to get Family member Bobby Beausoleil out of jail for the killing of Gary Hinman (the events of which are semi-thoroughly covered), or they simply didn’t know who was at home at 10050 Cielo Drive that night (always contentious). And didn’t Charles “Tex” Watson actually kill pretty much everyone that died, so why aren’t they called The Watson Murders?
Morris’s presence is gentle throughout, and it could have been so easy for him to turn his lesser-seen comedic eye (have you seen Tabloid?) on O’Neill as a modern Don Quixote and suggesting that this is his Zodiac. But Morris seems to realise very early on (if he didn’t know already — that this is a story that will never end, and he embraces O’Neill’s uncertainty.
Which brings us to the point. Dotted throughout the film, and more present in the book, are O’Neill’s observations about America’s fear of the rifts in its society. Morris doesn’t indulge in the personality cult of Manson’s family — the Sadies, the Blues, the Reds, Texes, the Clems, the Snakes, and the Gypsys — which could have turned this standalone doc into a miniseries. But he does do very simply, which O’Neill couldn’t quite do with his enjoyably digressive book, and that is to locate all of these events within the possibilities of mind control.
Which opens another door…
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