Get in the fog of the conspiracy

I am one of these people – there are many of us – who are always ready for a film by Charles Manson. There were so many! All documentaries and dramatizations. Not to mention the TV specials, both prestige and boulevard newspaper, the broadcast interviews with Manson acolytes such as Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel and the television mone interview with Charlie itself, like the famous by Tom Snyder 1981, “Get off the space shuttle, charles, Charles!”). Jeff Guinn’s “Manson” to the one who remains the grandfather of all Manson studies, Vincent Bugliosis “Helfer Skelter”, the best-selling crime book in history (seven million copies).

The Manson saga was excavated from every perspective. Nevertheless, I am always open to every new light beam that can be shed on its darkness. So I sat down to see “Chaos: The Manson Morders”, a new Netflix documentary under the direction of Errol Morris (“The Nebel of War”, “The Thin Blue Line”), with what I would call a kind of skeptical curiosity. In view of what is for a celebrated and intelligent filmmaker Morris, I thought: there has to be something new here. Or why do it? Is there anything new to discover?

“Chaos” gives a deep archive archive light that was typical of contemporary documentaries with a reasonable amount of photos that I had never seen in the environments of the Manson locations: occasionally weird shot of a slaughtered body, as well as pictures of the words that were scratched into blood (“death to pigs”), but mainly the banality that was in the rooms that were the rooms in the room The rooms were, to the attitudes when they were at the settings when they were at the rooms when they were at the rooms, were the rooms that were in the rooms when they were at the rooms when they were at the rooms.

However, the more recent than the photographs is Art Ground Treatment with which Morris frames the entire film. “Chaos” is full of quick-fire punk coffee-book graphics and touches such as a time-lapse recording of mescaline cactus flowers or a close-up of wobbling maggots (to accompany the story about how the police look like the police. Floor, which is now being put in a kind of aesthetic context, as if they were gruesome NAN-Goldin photographs. The photos black and white, but part of the picture has a red color, or the pictures are doubled for this confidential feeling of warhol.

It is a kind of seductive, but let us be clear: this is all Manson window dressing. What is really new is that Morris, who has built the film about an interview with Tom O’Neill, the author of the book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the secret history of the 1960s”, examines a conspiracy theory about the Manson saga that tries to explain its mysterious and urgent element. Namely: How is it that the family members who did the murder – these four “Manson girls” together with Tex Watson (which actually did most of them) – can be undergone and manipulated in order to descend into such a fabricity?

We know that happened. And we know the mythology that been Built up Around it-That Manson was a Devious Street-Hustling Criminal Who Exploited the New Youth Culture to Turn Himelf Into the Garbage Version of a Hippie Cult Leader, Using the Psych-Out Tactics of a Pimp Combed Wigh Breaking Down The Egos of his follower through Massive Doses of LSD, Spinning Out his theory of “Helter Skelter” (to Apocalyptic Uprising Against Middle-Class White “Pigs, which would be led by black revolutionaries) as if it were a demonic catechism. He made his followers in Believer Who would literally do something for him?

But Tom O’Neill believes that this trajectory of events is full of holes. And he is the one who will fill them out. Because he has a theory – oh, he has a theory. This man is a piece of work. He has no evidence – he has a clue. What he is willing to remove the lack of a lack of puzzle pieces from everything.

O’Neill is a former entertainment journalist who received an order from the premiere magazine in 1999 to write about how the murders of Tate -Labianca Hollywood changed. He landed on a rabbit hole. The core of O’Neill’s theory is that he has developed a way to bind the Manson murders into the hidden dark side of the CIA. He found out how to absorb this legendary chapter of the ultraviolent madness and connect it to … the man.

O’Neill’s focus is on the secret CIA program, which is known as Mkultra and started in 1953 and lasted 20 years. (It was so spicy that the notes of it were mainly destroyed in 1973.) Mkultra was the ongoing experiment of the agency, which was rooted on what could happen with hallucinogenic medication, and the use of university research centers, most of which had no idea that they worked for the CIA. The LSD experiments had several dimensions, but an important facet is that the CIA wanted to see whether it could use LSD to produce programmed assassins. This idea, a partial behavior mod and part of science fiction, was very in the air at that time (it was treated spectacularly in the classic Hollywood thriller from 1962 “The Manchurian Candidate” from 1962). And so you could say that there was an overlap between what the CIA did in its subversive buns and what Charles Manson did with his sermons and drug orgies on the Spahn Ranch. But there was a literally Connection?

Here is as far as possible. Manson was released from prison in 1967, and he injured his probation by traveling to San Francisco and setting himself into the Haight Ashbury scene. There he started attracting the trailers that the family would be. Manson spent a lot of time in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, especially because his girls were affected by venereal diseases. But the CIA also set up an office there. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist who dealt intensively with Mkultra (he is known to have an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald Assassin Jack Ruby, used the clinic to recruit subjects for his studies by LSD and youth. He called the place a “laboratory who was disguised as a hippie crashpad”.

But have West and Manson ever met? O’Neill admits that he has never found evidence or statements to put Jolly West and Charlie Manson in the same space. But he has had enough of A Idea In order to suggest that Charlie learned his spirit control techniques from the CIA.

Since there is no actual evidence that Morris fills the documentary with a dozen tangent and always implies that he finds new details and angles – such as his research into Manson’s music career and how narrow Charlie actually came to land a admission contract. Due to his friendship with Dennis Wilson, there is actually a Manson song “Cease to Exist” on the album “20/20” by Beach Boys from 1969. And the truth is that Manson had a singing voice to know a mild command. Foreign things could have happened than this eccentric Crooner, who turned into an arrived miracle.

But when the music producer Terry Melcher came to Spahn Ranch to give Manson an audition, liked Melcher Charlie’s songs, but said: “I don’t know what to do with you.” So Charlie came close, but not close enough. And that was an important motivation for the Manson murders, whose first night took place in the house, which Manson thought was Terry Melcher’s house.

But we have already gone through all of this. In “Chaos”, Errol Morris winds through Manson Back Alleys and now interferes with the spice of conspiracy theorization. Here is a man named Bernard Crowe, who shot Manson (and wrongly thought he had killed) because Charlie believed that crowe was a black panther. Here are Susan Atkins, the breathtaking waspe-witchprinels of Manson’s supporters and spoke in an old interview about how she and Tex Watson were wired at the night of Sharon Tate’s murder (the drug factor is an essential component of the explanation of how the girls can see the stitches that they made as “unreal”). And here is a theory that Bobby Bausoleil offered in a new interview with Morris that Charlie was so paranoid that he feared that one of his followers would puzzle him, and he orchestrated the murders to ensure that everyone was too involved to sniff.

And finally here is Tom O’Neill’s most bizarre theory: the way Vincent Bugliosi put together the entire racial crawl/pork fabric/Beatles mythology of “Helter Skelter”, which was one of the most brilliant actions of the public prosecutor’s perception, had an American court room that had ever convicted an American judicial area. Came with … to sell books! “Chaos” suggests that the Manson murders were a great conspiracy that was approximately to turn the counterculture from above (from the CIA? The deep state?) Nixon? I don’t think this theory for a second, but I think it remains true to Charles Manson’s spirit: it is pure madness.