While it’s debatable whether Charles Manson was actually the Devil, he was undoubtedly a cultural and political focal point, someone whose magnetically evil spirit forced an unlikely convergence of multiple 20th century developments. The dark side of 1960s sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll certainly found purchase in the formation and eventual cataclysm of the Manson Family, the cult of impressionable souls brainwashed into committing horrific violence, but Manson came to embody much more than the counterculture seemingly going awry. Left-wing and reactionary politics coursed through Manson’s ecosystem until they transformed him into a slate on which anyone could project America’s myriad ills. Beyond the salacious details of his crimes, it’s why he’s a permanent fixture in the culture 50 years after the Tate-LaBianca murders, a subject of sketch show parodies, Quentin Tarantino films, and yes, countless true crime documentaries.
Tom O’Neill published “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” in 2019, twenty years after he initially accepted a simple reporting assignment to examine how the murders impacted Hollywood for Premiere magazine. O’Neill fell down the Manson rabbit hole and emerged two decades later with an intricate web of confounding, interconnected threads that had gone previously overlooked and unreported. America may have fully absorbed Manson into its culture, but according to O’Neill, the full story, in all of its glorious jaggedness, had never been fully told.
Errol Morris was interested in O’Neill’s findings long before “CHAOS” was even published. He filmed an interview with the author in the final stages of his book, but even he hadn’t, he would have been a good fit to adapt it. From his biographical portraits to his panoramic explorations, Morris has questioned official narratives, such as the shooting of a Texas police officer, and offered powerful people enough rope to hang themselves. His experience as an investigator and his filmmaking sensibilities filmmaker make him sympatico with O’Neill unorthodox take on infamous history. They both believe that there’s somehow always more and less than what meets the eye.
Morris’ “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a perfectly Netflixy revision of the book’s original title, essentially offers a quick-and-dirty précis of O’Neill’s reportage. With the help of O’Neill, Morris speedruns through 1967 and 1971, from the time Manson landed in San Francisco through the gruesome murders and the end of the trial. He captures the dizzying pace at which he became a cult leader whose ties to the music industry superficially conferred minor respectability. The dozens of young girls who surrounded him — eventually referred to as his “wives” — was merely a product of hedonistic eccentricity.
“Chaos: The Manson Murders” formally replicates the experience of flipping through case file after case file in the seemingly futile attempt to determine how and why a twice-imprisoned man, someone who requested to stay in prison rather than be released, could convince middle-class kids to brutalize on his behalf. Anyone familiar with Morris’s style will recognize the visual strategy at play: names, dates, and highlighted documents populate the screen alongside filmed interviews and archival material — not just news footage of the murders and the trial but also the seemingly endless postmortem interviews with Manson and former Family members from prison. No reenactments are required to bring this period of history to life; it was so thoroughly televised that it sickened the country in real time.
O’Neill’s primary thesis in his extensively reported, highly digressive book throws the official explanation for the murders into serious doubt. Lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi put forth this argument that Manson brainwashed his Family to commit mass violence in order to incite an apocalyptic race war (Helter Skelter), supposedly prophesied via wild misreadings of the New Testament and The Beatles’ “The White Album.” By covering up and withholding evidence to fit this predetermined claim, he secured a conspiracy conviction and validated a sensationalistic narrative that eventually culminated in his best-selling 1974 true crime book “Helter Skelter.”
While Morris’ adaptation certainly endorses O’Neill’s thesis, it doesn’t serve to deterministically prove it. Instead, the film adopts an impressionistic approach by allowing O’Neill’s numerous alternative theories to emerge from the historical wreckage. A number of strange associates arise like gophers on a golf course, such as Manson’s parole officer Roger Smith, who was also a researcher at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) where he received government funding to study the effects of LSD and amphetamines. Smith would routinely overlook Manson’s criminality and keep him on the streets; Manson and a number of young women in his orbit, many of whom joined the Family, were frequent visitors of the HAFMC and became prominent subjects of Stone’s research.
Another one is psychiatrist Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a subcontractor for the CIA’s Project MKUltra, an experimental program designed to study the use of psychoactive drugs as a means of mind control. West had an office in the HAFMC at the same time Manson was present. By his own admission, O’Neill could never place West and Manson in the same room, but he and Morris illustrate how the cult leader intersected with the interests of twin covert government programs: FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, from which O’Neill named his book. Both programs were specifically formed to surveil left-wing movements—everything from anti-war protests to radical Black activism—and ultimately infiltrate and neutralize them by any means necessary.
“Chaos: The Manson Murders” doesn’t follow a straight line by design. O’Neill cites the “chaotic” nature of the Manson story as an explanation for its scattered incoherence, and Morris embraces this disjointed nature by creating a ping-pong lie structure where ideas materialize and disappear across a linear timeline. Morris also gives competing accounts their due: prosecutor Stephen Kay argues in favor of the Helter Skelter scenario, and former Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil, speaking from prison via phone, simply believes Manson pressured people into committing violence with the threat of reprisal. “They don’t want to hear how mundane the story actually is,” he flatly states.
The footage, on the other hand, frequently indicates the opposite. It’s possible that the sheer glut of true-crime documentaries has rendered interviews with violent or brainwashed individuals a banal affair, but even the most ordinary conversation with Manson radiates a genuinely frightening aura, even if it’s all an act. Any scene with the indicted Manson girls singing in unison while walking into court, or the ones showing solidarity with their leader by crawling on all fours on the street, can send a chill down your spine. Morris understandably leans on this material, even though it’s been exhibited to death, precisely because the consequences of this man’s influence are never in question. It’s the reason that’s up for debate.
But because “Chaos: The Manson Murders” appropriately doesn’t advocate for a sole theory, we’re often left with a morass of data whose salience or interest can be difficult to determine without prior knowledge. O’Neill’s suggestion that Manson was a passive, convenient puppet potentially trained in CIA tactics only develops intermittently. (His best evidence involves numerous state officials neglecting to punish Manson for repeatedly breaking parole, as if they wanted him on the street.) Competing ideas surface but don’t break through. Instead, we’re just thrust into the deep end of the story and—again, like O’Neill—left to swim through the madness to somewhat mixed results.
Morris’ film best serves as a visual primer on the Manson case and a fairly compelling advertisement for O’Neill’s more thorough book. (“Chaos: The Manson Murders” is the rare Netflix film that actually deserves the miniseries treatment, if only to let some of the material breathe better.) Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.
Grade: B
“Chaos: The Manson Murders” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, March 7.
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