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Rating: When the euphoric 1960s came to an end, the return to gray reality was marked by tragic events, among them the murders committed by Charles Manson's cult in the summer of 1969 (the same summer as the Woodstock festival and the moon landing of the first astronaut) had a great impact in the USA and in the Western world. It suffices to consider that even today, decades later, doubts still linger over the reasons for such gratuitous violence.
The documentary film "Chaos Operation and the Manson Murders", made by Errol Morris, tries to spark some curiosity about those events, taking its cue from the investigative book "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties", the result of twenty years of research by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring.
With archival footage and snippets of interviews with people connected to those events, director Morris retraces the key points of the story. And it certainly emerges that Manson, with a past steeped in crime, did not possess any special talents (inside and outside of prison, he had not had the opportunity to be regularly educated). However, he had a certain eloquence and unhealthy charisma, enough to find himself in the right place at the right time, having just been released in San Francisco in the summer of 1967 when the hippie movement and youth counterculture were at the height of their influence. For Manson, it was not particularly difficult to create a following of runaway boys and girls to form a hippie commune where they practiced free love, LSD trips, along with sermons about the imminent American civil war between whites and African Americans. All officiated by this strange little man (Manson, that is) who nurtured the dream of recording his own songs for some major American record label. When this plan failed, Manson's cult members, psychologically dominated by him and under the influence of powerful drugs, began to ferociously massacre some prominent members of Hollywood society (among them Sharon Tate, actress and pregnant wife of Roman Polanski). After somewhat chaotic investigations, the investigators arrested Manson and his affiliates four months after the murders. The subsequent trial led to the death penalty for the perpetrators, which was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 when the state of California decided to abolish the death penalty.
These are the main facts of the events, but the documentary sheds light on concomitant aspects that raise doubts about the reconstruction of the case. Meanwhile, during those years the CIA was conducting an operation called MKUltra, also supervised by psychologists, aimed at determining the effects and deploying hallucinogenic substances like LSD to alter the minds of those who ingested them, even unknowingly, making them easily manipulable. A strange coincidence was that right in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, there was a clinic frequented, among others, not only by Charles Manson but also by CIA-employed psychologists like Jolly West, and Roger Smith, Manson's parole officer. Just a coincidence?
Furthermore, it seems strange that Manson and his followers were initially arrested after the murders only for stealing motorcycles and were released almost immediately. Why were the police and investigators so slow and inept, underestimating the fact that the same blood-written messages on the walls of the victims' villas had been left at the crime scenes? Could this not be at least a suspicious fact?
It emerges that, in those chaotic years, infiltrating the ranks of the anti-establishment youth movements was fairly easy: an undercover agent with flowing hair could pose as a hippie and contribute to the so-called Chaos Operation, aimed at discrediting the movement as a bunch of drug addicts and, if necessary, violent enough to kill in a stupor induced by drugs, as those girls subdued by a skilled manipulator like Charles Manson claimed.
It must be mentioned sincerely that the director does not provide us with a definitive thesis about those distant events, but he certainly presents some doubts, given that the author of the investigative book on which the film is based states: "I only know that what they told us is not the truth".
And in some parts of the film, curious details stand out, such as Manson's complete detachment, as if he were just a character accidentally appearing in a reality show, stating that his plan for the future is "to take a desert trip" (he died in prison a few years ago). Not to mention a group of girls who, outside the courthouse where the conviction was just read (in 1971), claimed to be convinced that the revolution hoped for by the youth counterculture of the time was imminent, therefore the alleged culprits would be released from prison and they would be there to celebrate their liberation. But then, as well known, history took different paths.
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