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