‘CHAOS: The Manson Murders’ Review: Errol Morris’ Tease of a Netflix Doc Is More Interesting to Think About Than to Watch

The official description for Netflix’s new documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders invites viewers to “Explore a conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder.”

The trailer for the Errol Morris-directed film, which is based on Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s 2019 book (CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), suggests roughly the same thing, with lots of flashy editing and creepy Manson cutaways.

This is probably a recipe to deliver the largest audience of Morris’ storied career, because there are few things the Netflix algorithm steers people to more reliably than sensationalistic chronicles of mass murderers.

I’ll be interested to see how audiences respond to CHAOS — whether some viewers come away thinking the doc actually advocates for “a conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder,” which it definitely doesn’t, and whether some viewers get frustrated because it fails to prove “a conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder,” which it definitely doesn’t attempt to do.

Morris is too pragmatic and calculating a filmmaker to make the documentary that CHAOS and Netflix suggest it’s going to be. Instead, CHAOS is about our desire or need to craft narratives around the terrifying and unknowable, how those narratives come to be accepted as “truth,” and the challenges of revising those narratives once they’re entrenched.

It’s a complicated meta-commentary delivered loosely in the guise of a ghoulish conspiracy thriller, presented in rushed form to an audience that would happily devour many more hours of the actual ghoulish conspiracy thriller that this is not.

Conversations with O’Neill make up the spine of the documentary, as he’s able to link Charles Manson, a recently paroled ex-convict slowly building up a cult in San Francisco in the late 1960s, with Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist connected with the CIA’s MKUltra project through the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. O’Neill can connect Manson to the clinic and he can connect West to the clinic, and he can connect the mission of the MKUltra project to what Manson was able to achieve in the brainwashing and mind-controlling of his followers.

What he cannot do, what he admits he cannot do, is connect Manson to West or Manson directly to MKUltra, or to the CIA’s Operation CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO, two parallel programs in which the American intelligence apparatus investigated and often undermined domestic organizations.

O’Neill is exactly the sort of committed obsessive Morris has built a career out of chronicling (and not just because the MKUltra stuff was central to Netflix’s Wormwood). If what Morris had wanted to do here was support O’Neill’s case or debunk O’Neill’s case, he’s a trained researcher who surely could have done that, or at least made the attempt. What he does instead is listen, because although Morris isn’t convinced by anything, he’s curious throughout.

Instead of speaking with O’Neill primarily through the Interrotron, the Morris-created device that allows him to let his subjects speak directly to him and the audience simultaneously, long stretches of their chats are filmed with both men on-camera, with the gaze directed at Morris’ face, not O’Neill’s. This lets us see whom O’Neill’s stories are primarily directed at. It’s mostly a performance for an intrigued listener, a director who doesn’t want to give O’Neill’s version of events his fullest visual authority.

O’Neill probably believes what he’s selling. Morris doesn’t not-believe.

Morris is shopping. He’s skeptical about the dominant narrative surrounding the Manson Murders, which for decades has been steered by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. In that bestselling book, adapted multiple times for television, the Tate–LaBianca murders represent the logical nadir of the counterculture, a warning of the consequences of a decade of permissiveness toward sex, drugs, racial progressivism and rock-n-roll.

Morris is able to explain why that story is convenient, why it was self-serving for Bugliosi, why it has been so enticing, and what agendas it has been used toward. But Morris has always been cautious about monoculturally accepted narratives, so he builds this documentary around at least four different interpretations of events.

There’s O’Neill’s conspiracy theory, which isn’t given room to make total sense, but at least is helpful when it comes to understanding some of the biggest questions regarding how Manson was able to get his followers to do what they did. That is, if you buy any of it.

There’s the Bugliosi version of events, reenforced exhaustively here by prosecutor Stephen Kay, repeating stories he’s been telling in courtrooms, books and news reports since 1970. There are new audio interviews with Bobby Beausoleil, who was arrested for a different Manson-related murder. Beausoleil, clearly exhausted with the mythologizing of his former friend, gives his own explanation for events that he admits is “mundane,” the polar opposite of O’Neill’s wild swing.

Somewhere in the middle of this, Morris breaks down the dry basics of the case, telling the story of the murders through court transcripts and subsequent interviews that Manson and his followers did.

The dry basics of the case are where Morris and CHAOS flounder a little and cause the documentary to lose the directness of its argument. I’m not a Manson obsessive, but I’ve read Bugliosi’s book and watched and listened to various podcasts and docuseries on the subject, and this may be the first approach to the events that I’ve found straight-up boring. I respect Morris’ desire to avoid tawdriness in the depiction of the murders and I guess he’s probably correct that you can’t tell this story assuming that every single viewer will have a wide-ranging awareness of a 55-year-old crime. But there’s maybe 45 minutes in the middle of the documentary that’s just bland regurgitation.

It’s intentionally bland. It’s what you get if you strip away our fascination with celebrity and victimization, if you strip away our gawking appetite for brutality, if you don’t try finding a “story” in the Manson Murders that fits into a societally acceptable genre or theme through which to process the tragedy. the documentary.

Otherwise, Morris is an active and engaged presence in the documentary, making himself an avatar for the audience’s own interest. He can be ghoulish and gross himself, as when, regarding the discovery of Gary Hinman’s body, he says to Kay: “I read somewhere that they could hear the maggots eating him.” Kay doesn’t engage at all. He can be prurient, as when he asks Gregg Jakobson to set the scene at Dennis Wilson’s cabin, overrun with Manson groupies and music industry types. And he can be incredulous, as he tries to push O’Neill for specifics he knows the author doesn’t possess.

“People are very fond of their fantasy,” Beausoleil says, aware that whatever the choices, his own interpretation of events will likely be the least enticing.

Morris doesn’t say what “fantasy” is his own and he doesn’t push viewers in one direction or another, so be very wary of anybody who watches CHAOS and comes away saying that it’s a doc about Manson’s connections to MKUltra or anything related to “conspiracy of mind control, CIA experiments and murder.”

Anybody who gets an “answer” of any sort from CHAOS has missed the entire point of the documentary, which is a story about the need for stories when it comes to explaining the unexplainable. If you come away thinking Morris failed, that probably means he succeeded, which I find compelling as an idea if not always in this execution.