Partly Truth, Partly Fiction: 2019 Cinema Revisits the Manson Family

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FIFTY YEARS AFTER his Family’s August 1969 murder spree, Charles Manson has been inescapable in summer fiction film releases.

In theaters, there was Mary Harron’s Charlie Says and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood; on Netflix, there’s an episode of the David Fincher–created series Mindhunter; buried on VOD, there’s Daniel Farrands’s The Haunting of Sharon Tate. Commemorative marketing strategies begin to explain this confluence, but artists haven’t reanimated Woodstock or Neil Armstrong with the same consistency. The brutality of the Manson Family is unthinkable — perhaps uniquely compelling when confronted with the abyss of 2019 — while legible as a twisted outgrowth of the symbolic ’60s, a commune that festered into a cult of white supremacy, sexism, and delusional close-readings of the Beatles. When these filmmakers re-create, reenvision, or remix the events leading up to the murder of pregnant starlet Sharon Tate, they seek a clean thread through an unwieldy historical record — and their mental blocks can be just as telling as their final visions.

Source: Partly Truth, Partly Fiction: 2019 Cinema Revisits the Manson Family