Chaos: The Manson Murders
Regardless of the story he tells, regardless of the success of his work, his approach is always going to be interesting. Here, he turns his lens into the Manson Murders of the late ’60s, and the allure of Charlie Manson. From the moment I watched “The Thin Blue Line” back in the mid-late ’90s, I could tell there was something different about Morris, and that has remained the case as I’ve watched films like “Gates of Heaven,” “A Brief History of Time” and his docuseries, “Wormwood.” With “Chaos,” he’s looking to get to the truth of the Manson murders through all of the conspiracies that people have taken in over the years.
My first awareness of the name Charlie Manson was at 16, when Guns N’ Roses snuck one of his songs onto the end of their 1993 cover album, “The Spaghetti Incident?”. Over the years, I learned a bit more of the lore of Manson and his cult- and obviously, the horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four friends in 1969- but my curiosity never really went beyond a general one. It really wasn’t until Manson’s death in 2017, and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” was ramping up- with Quentin Tarantino’s controversial rewriting of history regarding the Tate murders- that it came into consciousness for me. Even then, though, I never really delved into it.
Morris’s film is an adaptation of the book by Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, which looks at the twisted web of information about Manson, his cult, and the prosecution of he and his cult members after the string of murders that included the Tate tragedy. In an age of QAnon and a cult of personality surrounding our current president, Morris’s film is worth putting in the context of modern day politics, even as he allows O’Neil’s delving into mind-control experiments like MK-Ultra that might have played a larger role in the hysteria of the moment in the ’60s to elevate the Manson murders into something wholly unique, while also being of a piece with the way a more paranoid era was taking hold in America, at the time. One of the things that makes “Chaos” feel less formed in the context of Morris’s other work- even the Netflix-produced “Wormwood”- is how it relies less on first-person interviews with people at the time, and more on archival footage to bring us into the story. Of course, this is not unexpected, given how many of the principles in the narrative are deceased, but it also hampers Morris in what is one of his strongest gifts as a filmmaker- putting his subjects in front of his lens, and allowing them to reveal themselves. As a result, “Chaos”- which is still worth a look for Morris fans and true crime buffs- doesn’t feel like a Morris film, but like any number of true crime documentaries that have been produced over the years. It’s a shame he didn’t get to this story sooner- as “The Thin Blue Line” showed, Morris is capable of getting to the truth as well as anyone when confronted by a messy, tragic reality.
