Two recurring inquiries — scary ones, entwined — characterize Errol Morris’s decades-long directing career, which includes landmark documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line,” “Mr. Death,” “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” The first question regards the nature of evil: what it is, where it comes from, whether it’s invited into a man’s heart or chooses to takes up residence there. The other is the fine membrane between truth and fiction, which dictates how we become deluded, by others and by self, and how those delusions come to rule the world.
In Morris’s more recent work, those themes are brought together most sharply in “American Dharma,” a 2019 chiller in which Morris feeds ample rope to the Trump adviser Steve Bannon to explain his vision of the world and, in so doing, expose a kind of cruelly pompous vapidity. But other contemporary works by Morris — “Separated,” about policies that tear migrant children from their parents; “The Pigeon Tunnel,” about what the spy novelist John le Carré never really revealed about himself — are also held together mostly by these questions. At their heart is some primal fear: that evil, or evil people, can control us without our even realizing it. And for Morris, this is not a religious question so much as an existential and political one.
Little surprise that his latest project, the Netflix documentary “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” returns to the same arena. Based, sort of, on the hair-raising book by the journalist Tom O’Neill, the film winnows its central question to one recurring baffler: Why are we, as a culture drenched in true crime narratives, so obsessed with this particular set of murders, which occurred over 55 years ago?
Most likely you know the outline of the case: Charles Manson, the failed musician and wild-eyed hippie, ordered his “family” — drug-addled runaways, mostly, who had been living with him at a ranch full of old movie sets — to carry out a series of gruesome murders on the evenings of Aug. 8 and 9, 1969. Among the victims was the actress Sharon Tate, then eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. Her husband, the director Roman Polanski, was out of town at the time.
The story includes all kinds of weird spiky bits, well-documented, from accidents and coincidences (who was there that night, who wasn’t) to Manson’s connections to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and his worship of the Beatles to the bizarre behavior he and his acolytes exhibited during the sensationalized trial. O’Neill, in his book, goes deeper, raising the specter of various conspiracy theories about potential covert government operations that seem, with the space of time and some well-placed Freedom of Information Act requests, to at least have the potential of maybe being linked to the case.
O’Neill, a dogged reporter who pursued the story for decades, is well aware in the book that he appears to be a bit deranged — but that’s because, he insists methodically, the whole thing is kind of deranged. There’s no strict evidence but the distinct possibility that Manson crossed paths, and maybe more, with United States covert operations that intersected eerily with the sort of mind control he was able to enact on his followers. The C.I.A., through initiatives like Project MK-Ultra and Operation CHAOS, for instance, spied on citizens and experimented with initiatives aimed at controlling minds and creating, as Morris puts it in cinematic terms, a Manchurian candidate. Similarly, the F.B.I.’s Cointelpro projects aimed to disrupt groups viewed as subversive, such as the antiwar movement, civil rights movement, Communist and socialist organizations, the women’s movement and in particular the Black Panthers, on whom Manson’s family explicitly tried to pin the murders. These covert operations on citizens are familiar territory for Morris, including his 2017 six-part series “Wormwood,” of which he inserts a tiny clip into “Chaos,” with little explanation. It’s seemingly a way to remind his more dedicated viewers this isn’t his first go-round on this topic.
“Chaos: The Manson Murders” features O’Neill, who says much the same thing onscreen — look, I’m not saying it did happen this way, we just can’t say it didn’t — but brings in other voices, too. The most notable is Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician whose path intersected with Manson’s in unfortunate and grim ways, and who insists that Manson’s motives in conducting the murders were much more pedestrian than people like O’Neill made them out to be. There’s also archival footage of Manson himself, both during the trial and in several later interviews, and of several of his followers decades after their convictions.
Yet the most significant other voice in the film is Morris’s, both stylistically and literally — in typical style, we see and hear him interviewing O’Neill (on camera) and Beausoleil (on the phone). There are remnants of the now-established Netflix true crime style in “Chaos,” most notably the irritating little introduction to what’s about to happen in this documentary, a kind of mini-trailer for itself, that starts the film, perhaps the most visible indication that streaming has altered the way we not only watch but structure movies. But Morris has clout that exceeds most documentary directors, and this is mostly his movie: curious, skeptical, dependent on interviews conducted by the director. And it’s obsessed with that single question: Why do we keep returning to this story?
The answer the movie gives is that we’re interested not so much in murder as mind control. It’s a compelling answer: We want to know how Manson did it, how he brainwashed people and compelled them to lose all prior sense of morals, ethics and humanity. In archival clips, Manson’s former followers, years after being deprogrammed from his influence, talk about his still being in their heads. How does someone do that?
It’s an interesting question to try to answer in the case of “Chaos” because — though Morris never comes right out and says it — this anxiety clearly extends far beyond Charles Manson. It’s obvious the proliferation of true crime and cult documentaries, so often one and the same, is keyed to a very modern fear: What if it turns out your beliefs, everything you think is true about the world, is not just wrong, but implanted in your mind by someone who wants to manipulate you? This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.
Thus, wrapping this story up in the bigger, now documented narrative of covert government operations seems purposeful, and accounts for its staying power. “What else did they withhold from us?” O’Neill asks. Throughout the film, Morris is skeptical of O’Neill’s narrative, but he won’t discount it outright, in part because he can’t. There’s no way to put a bow on this one, or to find an answer to the questions Morris has been asking. In an exchange near the end of the film, O’Neill says that people watch drama because “they want to find the truth beneath the surface, otherwise they’re bored out of their mind.”
“You can always do things with fiction so there’s a resolution,” Morris replies. “Whereas, in real life, you can’t.”
The post ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ Review: All You Ever Knew is Suspect appeared first on New York Times.
