The public’s fascination with Charles Manson and his “family” remains intact over 50 years after a group of his devoted followers murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of movie director Roman Polanski (away in Europe at the time) and four others at 10050 Cielo Dr. in Los Angeles. One of the cold-blooded slaughterers, Susan Atkins, who once sang in her church choir in San Jose, California, scrawled the word “pig” in Tate’s blood on the front door as the group left the house. Tex Watson—the former honor student, editor on his high school paper, and captain of the football team—who Manson chose to run the show that night, told one of the home’s inhabitants, Wojciech Frykowski, “I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business,” before shooting him and, along with his fellow killers, stabbing him multiple times. They stabbed Abigail Folger, also at the house, 28 times.
In addition to the sheer brutality of that crime, along with the celebrity connection, a major factor in keeping the story alive for so long is the still unanswered question of how Manson was able to get his women, many of them from solid middle-class backgrounds, to commit murders on command, and without remorse, on five people they didn't even know. They didn't even know who they were. Chaos: The Manson Murders, directed by Errol Morris for Netflix—the streaming service that loves murder stories—tackles that question, drawing from Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s 2019 book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.
Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who convicted Manson, wrote Helter Skelter, the best-selling true crime book of all time in which he proposed that Manson was trying to provoke a race war with his murders, but it's never been credible that Manson actually believed that. Chaos, which portrays Bugliosi as self-promoting hustler, draws a connection between the Manson family and the CIA, the greatest incubator of conspiracy theories ever to exist. While it's a novel theory containing some interesting observations, it's no more credible than Bugliosi’s. But at least the prosecutor’s speculations helped convict a monster. This film’s ruminations would accomplish very little in a court of law.
At first glance, this film appears to be the conspiracy thriller Netflix audiences crave, but Morris isn't a director who's eager to please. His attitude (he's often on camera) towards the alleged CIA link (plus a suggested FBI link) is more one of curiosity than acceptance. With the help of archival footage and showy production values, he builds his film upon conversations with Tom O’Neill, a former entertainment journalist who found that Manson and his girls, when they were living in San Francisco before moving to the L.A. area, frequented the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic where Charlie often had to take his girls for STD treatments and pregnancies. His other discovery was that Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist famous for his work on hypnosis and brainwashing, was studying patients at the clinic as part of his research on the effects of LSD on young people.
For the camera, O’Brien produced documents linking West to the CIA for 15 years, and then the author draws a connection between West and a bizarre CIA program, Project MKUltra, which sought to develop, using LSD, trained assassins—Manchurian Candidates—who’d follow any order without question. When Morris asks O'Neil how he imagines MKUltra experiments were conducted in the Haight clinic, the author admits he has no evidence they were carried out there—just a hunch.
The film then spends about 45 minutes going into the details of Manson's activities in the L.A. area, but this is well-covered terrain. A search I did on Amazon Prime for “Manson” yielded 15 movie titles. This material seems like filler that was needed because the director, along with O'Neil, couldn't produce enough material on this government-related theory to fill out a 90-minute feature film. Although it has little or nothing to do with the film’s narrative, the director’s choice to play one of Manson’s songs captured my interest. Undeniably, the madman had talent. In a soulful, accomplished voice he sings: “There's a time for livin’/And the time keeps flyin’/You think you're loving, baby/But all you're doing is crying/Look at your game, girl.”
The Beach Boys recorded another of Manson’s songs for an album, but when record producer Terry Melcher went to the Manson family commune at Spahn Ranch, he recognized the talent but told Manson he didn't know what to do with him in the studio. Manson was crushed. As it happened, Melcher was the tenant of the Tate-Polanski home just before the couple rented it, a key fact that this film pays scant attention to.
Morris frames his film with arty graphics which give it a contemporary look but it’s just window dressing. There's the clip of swarming maggots, representing the larvae that were supposed to have infested one of Manson’s victim’s dead body when the police discovered it, that comes off as sensationalism. There's a time-lapse clip of mescaline flowers, and black-and-white photos that are partially tinged with red. It looks cool, but to what end? Perhaps Morris was trying to distract his viewers with flashy graphics because he's skeptical about O'Neill’s theorizing.
The central problem with Chaos is Tom O'Neill can't place Manson and Jolly West in the same room, thus relegating his entire thesis to speculation peppered with some interesting facts. In the final third of the film, O'Neill talks about other government efforts, such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, to discredit an array of counter-culture, left-wing movements. He found an FBI memo stating that the Black Panthers had stated that when the revolution finally comes, the celebrities publicly supporting them were going to be lined up against the wall like everybody else.
Less than a year after that memo came out, O'Neill points out that the murders on Cielo Dr. occurred. He says that, while the government didn't order those murders, it had given Manson enough leeway to kill “rich jet setters” in order to cast blame on the Panthers, who’d already threatened such people. This is where O'Neill lost me, as it's pure speculation.
In a phone call Morris has with Bobby Beausoleil, a former Manson associate in prison for murder, the former musician tells the director that what happened on the night of the murders was far more mundane than all of the speculation associated with the case. As a former Manson family insider, he has insights that O'Neill can't match. It's been demonstrated that Manson was bitter towards Terry Melcher, and there's a good chance that he thought the record producer still lived at the Cielo Dr. address when he ordered his acolytes to kill everyone in the house—a simple case of revenge. What are the chances that Manson chose to murder, for the FBI, some rich people for who just happened to live at the very same house where someone who’d crushed his dreams had recently moved out of?
If you're open to talk, unlinked to evidence, that the government had a big hand in engineering the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends as part of an effort to turn the public against the hippies, the Panthers, and the Vietnam protesters, this film’s for you. But the story has too many holes in it for me.