\n<\/p>\n
Most likely you know the outline of the case: Charles Manson, the failed musician and wild-eyed hippie, ordered his \u201cfamily\u201d \u2014 drug-addled runaways, mostly, who had been living with him at a ranch full of old movie sets \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The story includes all kinds of weird spiky bits, well-documented, from accidents and coincidences (who was there that night, who wasn\u2019t) to Manson\u2019s 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\u2019Neill, 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.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill, a dogged reporter who pursued the story for decades, is well aware in the book that he appears to be a bit deranged \u2014 but that\u2019s because, he insists methodically, the whole thing is kind of deranged. There\u2019s 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<\/a> and Operation CHAOS<\/a>, 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.\u2019s Cointelpro<\/a> projects aimed to disrupt groups viewed as subversive, such as the antiwar movement, civil rights movement, Communist and socialist organizations, the women\u2019s movement and in particular the Black Panthers, on whom Manson\u2019s family explicitly tried to pin the murders. These covert operations on citizens are familiar territory for Morris, including his 2017 six-part series \u201cWormwood,\u201d<\/a> of which he inserts a tiny clip into \u201cChaos,\u201d with little explanation. It\u2019s seemingly a way to remind his more dedicated viewers this isn\u2019t his first go-round on this topic.<\/p>\n \u201cChaos: The Manson Murders\u201d features O\u2019Neill, who says much the same thing onscreen \u2014 look, I\u2019m not saying it did<\/em> happen this way, we just can\u2019t say it didn\u2019t<\/em> \u2014 but brings in other voices, too. The most notable is Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician whose path intersected with Manson\u2019s in unfortunate and grim ways, and who insists that Manson\u2019s motives in conducting the murders were much more pedestrian than people like O\u2019Neill made them out to be. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Yet the most significant other voice in the film is Morris\u2019s, both stylistically and literally \u2014 in typical style, we see and hear him interviewing O\u2019Neill (on camera) and Beausoleil (on the phone). There are remnants of the now-established Netflix true crime style in \u201cChaos,\u201d most notably the irritating little introduction to what\u2019s 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\u2019s obsessed with that single question: Why do we keep returning to this story?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n