It becomes clear very early on that the new documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders is going to be largely incoherent. What is unclear is how exactly the renowned, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris allowed this material to get so disorganized and, well, chaotic. Based on Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret history of the Sixties, the film functions simultaneously as a kind of advertisement for the book as well as a truncated, CliffNotes version of it. Author O’Neill is on hand as Morris’ primary interview subject, but the film jumps around so much that you’d need to be a student of the era (or, paradoxically, already have read the book) to put all of its disparate pieces together. O’Neill presents his project as a long delayed attempt to interrogate the generally accepted narrative around the Manson murders, an epochal event that, by and large, is generally accepted to be a symbolic end to the revolutionary zeitgeist of the American ‘60s.
Political assassinations, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the murder at Altamont all represent a roiling undercurrent of violence in the American project, a fervor that gradually becomes sublimated into the me-me Reaganomics of the ‘80s. O’Neill touches on some of this, with his deep research into CIA-funded Operation CHAOS and the MKUltra program, as well as the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which was used primarily to target and destabilize anti-war protests, suspected communists, and the Black Panther Party. O’Neill is also very interested in airing grievances against Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, whose best-selling 1974 book Helter Skelter has become the accepted historical account of the infamous murders. O’Neill suggests that Bugliosi’s account is fully bogus, meant entirely to bolster the prosecutor’s own reputation while demonizing a still burgeoning counterculture in the process. There, Manson became a boogeyman for suburbanites to scare their children with — stay away from Haight-Ashbury and cut your hair or Charlie will get you. Instead, O’Neill posits that Manson was either wholly or in part a subject of the MKUltra program, and that he was able to manipulate his followers to murder using techniques learned from the CIA.
Much of the middle of CHAOS is made up of a simple re-telling of the murders, while Morris occasionally checks in with prosecutor Stephen Kay and audio recordings of Bobby Beausoleil — apparently recorded specifically for this film, and containing new information, although you wouldn’t know that unless you were, again, already well-versed in the subject matter. But Beausoleil does offer a different interpretation of the Manson crimes, which stands in stark contrast to O’Neill’s theory. But O’Neill is convinced that Louis “Jolly” West had a connection to Manson; indeed, the film even switches gears for a few minutes and makes a detour into JFK lore, linking West to Jack Ruby (who was in police custody immediately after killing Lee Harvey Oswald). LSD is the magic bullet here, apparently able, in the right dosage, to turn anyone into a Manchurian Candidate.
All of this information is relayed in dribs and drabs, as Morris has arranged the documentary into chapters that flit about from idea to idea. Gone is his famed Interrotron — the (vaguely menacingly) named device that allows him to make eye contact with an interviewee while the subject makes eye contact directly with the camera — and instead Morris utilizes both standard talking-head setups as well as ostentatiously framed two-shots and useless split screen effects. Whether or not one is convinced by O’Neil’s arguments — Morris occasionally interjects his own skepticism at the author — the film is an eyesore to look at. It’s a barrage of stock footage, recreations, and endless info-graphics that flash by so quickly that you can’t actually read them. And then there are mentions of documents acquired via FOIA requests and the plentiful redactions, with CGI images of black bars popping up to illustrate the point. It’s quite simply information overload, which is ironic for a streaming platform that typically designs its own content to be “second screen” entertainment. It all adds up to more artless true-crime nonsense, which has proliferated at an alarming rate in our present streaming era. In this case, you’re far better off reading the book.
DIRECTOR: Errol Morris; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: March 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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