Documentary films and documents of true crime continue to developEspecially Netflix. While subjects and topics may be different, almost all of these documents have a familiar formula: between archive news shots and stylish dramatic events will sometimes be talks about the main interviews. More often than not, these recreational tools also follow a familiar formula: the face of actors depicting real shapes is usually overshadowed, and their movements often occur in a slow motion for an additional effect.
If you ever thought why So much true crime material that sticks to this familiar approach can be traced back to Errol Morris’s revolutionary 1988 documentary, “The Blue Line of the Blue”. Morris film followed the story of Randall Dale Adams, a man convicted of the murder of a Dalas police officer. Morris film made it clear that Adam was innocent from the crime, and the documentary was so effective that it actually helped to cause Adamsa release a year after its release.
While these days the “thin blue line” is held very high, Morris’s film was actually contradictory when it first arrived. When Morris made a “thin blue line”, he chose to use a stylish, dramatic rest of events, and although modern viewers tend to think about this approach as a standard (and even cliche) in the true crime documentary, “Genre, during the release of the film, such an approach was very unusual. Some critics even claimed that the film was not considered a “real” documentary because it used so much rest. And yet, despite all this, the reputation of the film has only increased over the years since its release, and its approach to its material became very influential among other true crimes for doctoral filmmakers.
Charles Manson’s story … with twist
Due to the influence of the “thin blue line”, Morris can be considered the father of a true crime documentary genre – virtually every contemporary document of the true crime follows his project. Morris has now returned to a brand new documentary of crime that covers a topic that will be very familiar to enthusiasts: the murder of the Menson family.
But Morris’s new Netflix movie “Chaos: Menson’s murders” is not telling the same old known story, so popular was Vincent Bugliosi and Kurt Gentry’s book “Helter Skelter”. Instead, Morris deals with materials covered with Tom O’Neille and Dan Psenbring’s book “Charles: Charles Manson, CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties,” which offers a rather shocking conspiracy theory, which perhaps maybe CIA’s control was something related to Menson’s murders.
Most people may know the basic information of Menson’s story. In the 1960s, a short, Wannabe musician named Charles Manson, gathered mainly in the female hippie cult to create a kind of commune in California. With the hopes of starting a race war, Manson sent some of his followers in August 1969 to commit a number of terrible murders, including the murder of pregnant actress Sharon Teita. While Manson himself physically did any of these murders, he was considered the head of the situation. Menson was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 2017 while he was still imprisoned.
For various reasons, Manson is still big over pop culture landscapes. His family crimes, which arrived in 1969, testified to the end of a kind of free love hippie age. The fact that crimes also took away a new, beautiful (and pregnant) actress also made them a heavy feed for the media consumption, as did the sensationalized trial of Menson and his tracking. The Helter Skelter book just increased this attention, just like various other books and movies including Quentina Tarantino’s recent “Once in Hollywood,” Who dared to offer an alternative approach to history, in which Menson’s fever was eventually defeated (and violently) before they could hurt someone.
Was the CIA’s mind -controlled connection with Manson’s murders?
Despite so many media and pop culture reflection of events related to Menson, a number of unanswered questions are delayed around the case. The biggest question that tends to be asked again and again is, “How?” How did Charles Manson spoke many children to make a horrendous series of murders? The common consensus, including the Menson family members themselves, is that Manson was able to wash them somehow. But again, the question is: how?
In 1999, journalist Tom O’Neill was recruited to write about Manson’s murders. O’Nil was three months to submit a composition, but eventually he missed his term and continued to dig. O’Neill’s end result was the wide book “Chaos: Charles Manson, CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties”. I’ve read it when it seemed exciting to me, and I have to admit that it had a bit of a headache for me. O’Neill’s book goes along some wild alleys and eventually feel like a famous printed word rest “Pepe Silvia” The moment from “Philadelphia is always sunny.”
In the book O’Neill and co -author Dan Powenbring, there is a possibility that Manson’s murders had something to do with the CIA’s infamous Mcultra program. As long as it sounds like a fantasy of cellulose, MKULTRA was very real: CIA really experimented with ways to control people’s mind using drugs and other methods. The book “Chaos” tries to connect points by pulling a figure called Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist who worked in the CIA, who committed to the Hight-Oashbury area around the time Manson was hiding while still assembling his family. The only problem is that, despite his efforts, O’Neill never could connect Manson and West.
Chaos are worth watching even if it requires a pretty simple approach
Certainly, O’Neill’s book never comes out and blatantly says something like: “Charles Manson worked with CIA!” He simply points out that Manson supposedly rinsing his family’s brain, which included a large amount of hallucinogenic drugs, is a striking similarity to the work done by the CIA with the mult. It could be a coincidence. Or it could be something more threatening.
As I read the book, it was very interesting for me to see Morris dealing with “Haosa” material. Frustration, Morris’s approach is surprisingly simple. The filmmaker has worked with Netflix in the past “Hermann,” Miniseries that mixed documentary and fiction. This work felt a truly revolutionary (and, like “chaos”, ” also Focuses on potential CIA mind control elements), while “chaos” is more or less a standard true crime document to set out the case. Morris seems more interested in introducing the schedule of events than going too deep into the mind control case, and it is quite clear from the get-go, which the filmmaker does not buy in any of them.
“Do I think Manson was programmed by Mcultra, the government – Manchurian candidate programmed to kill?” The filmmaker said Guardian“Not quite. Can it be proved? I don’t think so. But can it be taken away? I don’t think it can be. Can be provided with the skepticism.”
While I want Morris to be a bit formally dare with this documentary, “Chaos” still creates a captivating watch that will allow you with more than a few uncomfortable issues.
“Chaos: Menson’s murder” stream Netflix 2025 on March 7, 2025.
