With the 50th anniversary overlap of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie - a black comedy-cum-thriller set in 1969 LA - and an orthodoxy-busting new book by Tom O'Neill, the helter-skelter spiral concerning the life, death and afterlife of celebrity mass murderer, Charles Manson, continues to unravel.
If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.
Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.
Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.
What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.
Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.
One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.
As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.
His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.
His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:
'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'
If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.
Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.
Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.
What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.
Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.
One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.
As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.
His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.
His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:
'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'
Notes
Quentin Tarantino's new film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019. It is released in the UK on 14 August 2019. Click here to watch the official trailer.
See: Tom O'Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, (William Heinemann, 2019).
Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink
This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title.
For a follow-up post to this one, click here.
This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title.
For a follow-up post to this one, click here.
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