MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. In any event, whatever that hairy little arsehole did to those kids, he did it well. Good riddance, now let the others out.

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.