Manson And #MeToo

New films from Quentin Tarantino and Mary Harron reflect on the Charles Manson killings— and show starkly different sides of their industry

- Brian D. Johnson

Half a century on, no one knows exactly when the six-ties dream died. Altamont, the free concert staged near San Francisco four months after Woodstock, is usually cited as ground zero —  specifically because of the killing of Meredith Hunter, the teenager who was stabbed and beaten by a group of Hell’s

Angels as the Rolling Stones played onstage. But as Joan Didion wrote a decade later in her book of essays The White Album, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” That was one week before Woodstock, the day police found five people slaughtered in a luxury home above Benedict Canyon.

The dead included actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with her and Roman Polanski’s child. The word pig was scrawled in her blood on the front door.

The legend of cult leader Charles Manson, whose disciples carried out the massacre as part of a deranged plan to ignite a race war and bring on Armageddon, has since fuelled over two dozen movies and TV shows. By Manson’s death, in 2017, the puzzle of this ex-con and frustrated musician, who channelled Christ and the Beatles in his maniacal quest for fame, had been spun more ways than a Rubik’s cube. He’s no enigma, though. He’s just another man trying to carve his name into the cosmos. But what compelled Manson’s dedicated “family” of followers, in particular the young women among them, to murder strangers at his bidding remains mysterious, or at least misunderstood.

This summer, the fiftieth anniversary of the killings coincides with the releases of two movies that present diametrically opposed visions of the women who became known as “the Manson girls.” Quentin Tarantino’s