image: Wikimedia commons (link).
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood brings to the screen the events surrounding the horrific murders of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby, along with four other men and women, on the night of August 8th / early morning of August 9th, 1969. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the film, of course, is the fact that the murders are foiled at the end and none of the intended victims are killed: instead, the members of the Manson Family themselves meet a gruesome end.
What could possibly be the message of such an unexpected conclusion to the film? The movie’s title provides the first obvious clue: when we hear the words “once upon a time . . .” we know that this phrase is associated with the telling of a fairy tale, often one which will end with the words “happily ever after.” By depicting a completely false set of circumstances, concluding with a happy ending in which Sharon Tate, her friends, and her unborn child are not brutally murdered, the director appears to be challenging us to reconsider what we have been told about the events of that fateful night in August of 1969 — and perhaps to realize that virtually everything we’ve been told about that event is essentially a fairy tale.
The movie contains many other curious elements which reinforce the conclusion that the Tarantino is inviting us to re-examine everything we know about the awful killings of Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Voytek Frykowski that night (and by extension the murders of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca the following night). One such curious twist is the decision to give the dark brown, leather-fringed jacket which is very closely associated with Charles Manson to the film’s central protagonist character Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) rather than to Manson himself, who is never seen wearing it.
Significantly, Dalton’s character is given this jacket as part of a role in which he is told by the director (portraying the real-life director Sam Wanamaker, who lived from 1919 to 1993) that he wants to give Rick a “hippie jacket,” and that he also wants Rick to have a new hairstyle: “something more . . . hippie-ish!” This emphasis on playing a role which evokes a hippie is in marked contrast to moments later in the film in which we see Rick Dalton’s deep distaste for and animosity towards hippies.
And, strangely enough, it is Rick Dalton who actually carries out the most actual violence on the night on which the murders on Cielo Drive took place, in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time” re-imagining: Rick Dalton who is asked to play a role as a “hippie-ish” character and to wear a dark brown leather-fringed jacked, but who clearly despises hippies himself.
What is going on here? What could be the message we are being asked to consider?
In order to help with that question, let’s turn to an incisive and penetrating early analysis of the many anomalies surrounding the official narrative that we’ve been fed about the so-called “Manson murders” of 1969: the analysis presented by Mae Brussell (1922 - 1988), in a broadcast first aired on October 13th, 1971, which you can listen to this archived version that was re-broadcast on Bonnie Faulkner’s Guns and Butter and which also has a complete text transcript published here.
In that broadcast, Mae presents abundant evidence to suspect that aspects of the Manson killings indicate involvement by “clandestine” and “secret” forces, and says that the reason such covert actions are so difficult to detect is that these secret forces like to “disguise certain persons and send them into roles to influence: they become actors on a stage and they influence our minds in a way that is not real but effect a reality that will touch us later.”
Among the arguments she makes in that broadcast is the well-known fact, articulated by Manson himself and attested to by those who knew him, that he was not a hippie and that he hated being called a hippie: it was a role he was being told to play, Mae argues.
She also recounts details of the brutal murders that took place at the house on Cielo Drive that night, in which five men and women lost their lives (one of them over eight months pregnant, thus adding up to six lives taken), and indicates that according to her analysis, the elements add up to something more akin to a military operation than to anything that could have been carried out by the nomadic band of drugged-out followers Manson had assembled around him. Mae says:
“It was described by people later as a military ambush. And for the reasons as this: these many people were slaughtered; nobody heard a sound; there were dogs on the grounds that didn’t say boo; there was a caretaker in a guest cottage who didn’t hear one gun go off — and guns went off; they didn’t hear any screaming; nobody saw a getaway car; the place was completely destroyed; there was time to put hoods over the people, ropes on their neck, leave signs and symbols that would come down on a particular group in our society — two groups — and split. And no, not a dog was killed or barked. The fellow that lives on the grounds said he slept through it. And they shimmied up the telephone poles, cut the wires, left all this obvious evidence, and split. And the way the wires and the lines were cut I felt that it had to be a military-type ambush.”
During the same 1971 broadcast, Mae also points out that Manson himself and Charles “Tex” Watson appear to have had access to high-powered lawyers, well prior to the killings of August, 1969, and she also notes that it is extremely questionable that Manson and his throng of followers could have supported themselves for so long, able to own a bus and drive it all over the state and even up to the Canada border and down to Mexico, paying for gas and food not to mention weapons, ammunition, and military gear as well as massive quantities of drugs including LSD, without any ostensible source of funds, unless they were being supported by elements which have remained hidden to the general public.
In a remarkable book published in 2019 entitled Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, author Tom O’Neill presents overwhelming evidence to support the conclusion that the story we’ve been asked to believe about the Manson Family, and the murders of August, 1969, is indeed largely a fairy tale which portrays the murders as the spontaneous and arbitrary act of a fringe group of acid-drenched hippies, when in fact powerful forces appear to have been involved in the murders themselves and in the subsequent cover-up of the facts surrounding the case.
Mr. O’Neill’s book is the result of twenty years of painstaking and often frustrating investigative journalism in which he criss-crossed the country conducting personal interviews, and in which he consulted original files and boxes of records and evidence, some of them never-before-examined by previous researchers.
His research is thoroughly documented and the book reaches to 500 pages of absolutely stunning evidence which reveals that Manson committed violations which should have caused his parole officers to revoke his parole, but that instead these violations (many of them serious crimes) were inexplicably overlooked time and again — and that Manson can be shown to have been moving in circles that put him in contact with leading elements of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control operation.
While presenting more than enough evidence to demolish the conventional narrative surrounding the Manson killings, Tom O’Neill’s book does not force the reader towards a decisive conclusion as to what might have actually been going on, but rather leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from the matrix of evidence presented — but he provides evidence which suggests that Manson was taught effective mind control techniques to use on his followers, in conjunction with the administration of large and repeated doses of LSD; that government-backed psychological and behavioral researchers were in regular contact with Manson during the “Summer of Love” of 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during which time Manson was provided with copious amounts of acid as well as an apartment in the Haight; that a professional clandestine operative or operatives were surveilling the Tate residence on the night of the murders at the Tate home and that it is very likely that someone came back to the scene of the grisly murders to rearrange the bodies prior to their discovery the next morning; that the connection of the Manson Family to the Tate and LaBianca murders, as well as to an earlier torture and murder of Gary Hinman in July of 1969, were already known to certain elements of law enforcement but were kept quiet for months, during which time other murders by members of the Family (possibly including murders by Manson) probably took place; and that powerful political forces worked to obscure the actual scope of the events surrounding the murders and to replace the truth with an elaborate and false narrative which would be presented to the public and which continues to be maintained to this day, despite evidence which should have long ago revealed the fact that this narrative is unsustainable.
In an important chapter of the book, entitled “Neutralizing the Left,” Tom O’Neill provides evidence which indicates that powerful elements of the establishment felt extremely threatened by the growing youth movement centered at Berkeley and in San Francisco which was actively demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and for rights such as Free Speech, as well as by the growing Black radical movements demanding equal rights and justice, such as the Black Panther Party which originated in Oakland, and that both the CIA and the FBI launched aggressive operations (entitled CHAOS and COINTELPRO) to infiltrate and subvert these movements and to instigate suspicion and splintering within the movements themselves, turning them against one another from within — as well as actively working to discredit these movements in the eyes of “middle America” and cause them to appear violent and dangerous.
From the evidence presented, it is almost beyond doubt that the Manson Family and the horrific murders of July and August 1969 were deliberately employed as weapons in that campaign, with paw-print symbols being painted in blood on the walls at the scenes of the murders in order to try to implicate the Black Panthers, as well as the use of hoods and ropes placed on the bodies of the victims.
Mae Brussell in the broadcast referenced earlier from 1971 points out that one of the first articles to be published after the horrific killings of Sharon Tate and the others on Cielo Drive was written by Ed Butler (Edward S. Butler III, 1934 - 2005) who had been an associate of Clay Shaw in New Orleans and who had participated in the infamous radio interview of Lee Harvey Oswald that was intended to portray Oswald as a Marxist prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. Entitled “Did Hate Kill Tate,” Butler’s article implied that the gruesome murders were the work of Black radicals.
Tom O’Neill’s book also provides abundant and disturbing evidence which reveals that local law enforcement already had indications that the torture and murder of Gary Hinman (a music teacher with whom Manson had previously stayed in Topanga Canyon and whose address Manson in fact gave to his parole officer at one point as his point of contact) over the period of July 25 to July 27 was linked to the Family: Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil had been arrested after being found asleep in Hinman’s Fiat station wagon on the side of highway 101 on August 7th, prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings. He had placed a call to the Spahn Ranch from jail on August 8th, which call had been tapped, and had told whoever answered to “tell Charlie” he had been picked up by the police and needed help. When the description of the murder scene at Cielo Drive became known on the subsequent days, the men who arrested Beausoleil recognized the similarities to the Hinman slaying (including paw-prints designed to implicate the Panthers, and the words “pig” or “piggy” scrawled in blood at the scene) and tried to alert their superiors to the connections: their analysis however fell on deaf ears.
Despite these connections being perceived within days of the August 9th killings, the Manson Family was not brought in for the crimes until December of 1969, after one of the women was arrested for another crime and bragged about her involvement in the Tate killings to a fellow inmate. In the interim, local law enforcement did launch a massive raid on the Spahn Ranch later in August, involving hundreds of officers, multiple vehicles and even helicopters, only to let everyone go. We have been told (and Wikipedia still declares to this day) that the raid was unfruitful because the warrant was misdated, but O’Neill provides incontrovertible evidence that this excuse is false. Despite the presence of weapons, stolen vehicles, underaged girls, and stolen credit cards (some of the credit cards in the pocket of Manson’s shirt, in fact), no one was arrested and Manson was not charged with violating parole. And a week after that raid, O’Neill shows, Manson actually had yet another encounter with law enforcement, this time for possession of cannabis and for contributing to the delinquency of a minor (he was in an abandoned cabin with a seventeen-year-old girl), but was again released inexplicably.
By deliberately not pursuing the obvious leads pointing towards Manson and his followers at the outset, it appears very likely that the murders of the beautiful movie star Sharon Tate and her companions were intended to turn public opinion (and Hollywood insiders) against the ongoing Civil Rights movement, if the killings could be successfully passed off as having been the work of the Black Panthers. Tom O’Neill points to actual FBI memos which expressed a desire to diminish “vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists” among “liberals” including Hollywood actors. Mr. O'Neill notes that Abigail Folger, who was murdered at the Tate home on the night of August 8 - 9, had actively campaigned that year for Tom Bradley, the first African American candidate for mayor of LA, and that Folger was “an outspoken civil rights activist” (219).
image: Los Angeles Times (link).
Based on this and other evidence, the plan appears to have been that, if and when that false storyline (of Black Panther involvement in the killings) could no longer be maintained, then the murders could instead be used to discredit the youth and anti-war movements and cause a backlash against “hippies” and everything they represented, even though (as Mae Brussell observes regarding Manson in her broadcast from October of 1971), “He was not a hippie or a part of the youth culture.”
And, as quoted earlier, Mae Brussell perceived that these murders which shocked the world were designed from the outset to be able to be blamed on either of the two movements that so concerned the national security agencies responsible for Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO, saying, in her discussion of the anomalous aspects of the murder scene at Cielo Drive, “there was time to put hoods over the people, ropes on their neck, leave signs and symbols that would come down on a particular group in our society — two groups — and split.” The fact that she says that blame could be made to come down upon either of “two groups” indicates, in the context of the rest of Mae Brussell’s analysis in that 1971 broadcast, that she already perceived that the killings were designed to be used to turn the general public against either or both of those two powerful movements.
And so we return to the message that director Quentin Tarantino might be suggesting through his 2019 film, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. In his “fairy tale” re-imagining of the events of that awful night, it turns out that Manson’s followers don’t end up killing anybody: instead, Rick Dalton and his double, Cliff Booth, dispatch Tex Watson and his two female companions, with Rick torching one of the girls with a flamethrower. The implication we may be intended to consider is that these horrific murders were not actually the product of “hippies” at all, but rather that they were a manifestation of an active element within the establishment itself which is quite willing to perpetrate violence in order to achieve its objectives. Indeed, as we have already seen, it is Rick Dalton in the film who wears the distinctive jacket associated with Charles Manson, and who is told to play a role that is “hippie-ish,” even though Rick (like Manson) actually despises hippies.
The actual evidence which has come to light through the work of researchers over the intervening decades (including the monumental research of Tom O’Neill in his recent book) indicates that the killing of Sharon Tate and her unborn child, Stephen Parent, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca, Gary Hinman, and other victims of the Manson Family (possibly numbering dozens more, as Tom O’Neill reveals) may well have been actively enabled by elements of the burgeoning national-security state (and its illegal mind control program), national security elements whose leaders despised the hippies and the youth movement and the antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement and all that they stood for, rather than the murders being the organic spontaneous actions of a group of “anti-establishment hippies” acting on their own, the way we have been led to believe.
By switching the role of who actually does the killing, and by having Rick Dalton being the one who “plays a role” and who wears the iconic jacket, and who actually inflicts the most horrific violence in the film, the director may be asking us to reconsider just what aspects of our society were really responsible for the events of that night, which forever turned the majority of “middle America” decisively against the hippie movement and the youth culture that was questioning the war in Vietnam and the intense commercialization of modern “consumer culture” (as Mae Brussell also articulates in her 1971 broadcast).
Rick Dalton is not an unsympathetic character, by any means, but he certainly acts throughout the film as a troubled, self-doubting, and disconnected individual. His internal “division” and angst is dramatized by portraying him as one half of a “twinned pair” or set of “doubles,” alongside his partner Cliff Booth (who is in fact his “stunt double”). While much more could be said about the use of “twinned pairs” in literature, such a device can often be seen as dramatizing the division present within a single individual, metaphorically divided into two halves. In light of the theme we are discussing here, this division could actually be extended into a commentary on the society itself which produces Rick and which is in a way represented by him: an agonized and deeply divided society, and not a healthy society (Rick himself chain-smokes throughout the film and is given to frequent extended fits of hacking and coughing).
Indeed, Rick Dalton’s character is most well-known in the movie for being the star of an earlier television show called Bounty Law, in which Rick plays Jack Cahill, a bounty hunter. The show’s opening credits feature a narrator who declares: “Whether you’re dead or alive, you’re just a dollar-sign to Jake Cahill on . . . Bounty Law!” Here, Tarantino seems to again be emphasizing one of his consistent themes throughout many of his previous films — the reduction of human life to a “dollar sign” through the metaphor of the “bounty hunter.” The commodification of men and women by a violent and oppressive society could not be more succinctly represented. It is the agents of that commodifying and debasing system which saw the antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement and the hippie rejection of consumer-culture as a threat, and which weaponized Charles Manson as a means of neutralizing that threat: those forces can be blamed for the murders of July and August 1969, which were intended to terrorize the people of the United States (and indeed of the world), especially through the murder of Sharon Tate and her companions on the night of August 8 - 9.
The decision by Quentin Tarantino to completely upend our expectations at the end of the film, then, can actually be seen as a brilliant (if shocking) way of calling our attention to the lies we have been told, and that we have allowed ourselves to accept, about that momentous and tragic night.
The conclusion that Tarantino is deliberately calling our attention to these details by inverting the events at the film’s end is supported by the fact that Rick’s guardian angel stunt-double, Cliff Booth, is first alerted to the intruders by a signal from his pitbull dog, Brandy, who hears someone creeping around outside the house. Is possible that this detail was deliberately worked into the plot as a reference to the actual lack of dogs barking during the military-style operation on the night of August 8, 1969, in which phone lines were silently cut and in which the dogs on the property were not killed but were somehow kept from alerting anyone to the impending invasion?
Even the date of the film’s original release appears to support the conclusion that Tarantino is urging us to consider the anomalies in the conventional accepted narrative surrounding the Manson killings: Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood made its official theater debut on July 26, 2019. We have already seen that this particular date is tragically significant: Gary Hinman was being held prisoner in his own residence and tortured from July 25th to July 27th, 1969, fifty years earlier. His murder was the first in which a rag was used to gather his blood and write “piggy” on the walls and make paw-prints intended to implicate the Black Panthers. Manson appears to have participated in the torture, slicing Hinman’s ear in half with a long knife or a sword. Hinman’s killer, Bobby Beausoleil was captured in Hinman’s own car on August 7th, and placed a phone call (which was being tapped by the police) back to the Manson Family at the Spahn Ranch on August 8th — both events taking place before the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends.
The decision to release Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood on a date with such significance to the murder of Sharon Tate is almost certainly not a coincidence.
The decision to make this movie, one which powerfully evokes the events of that awful period, seemingly so far in the past, and to bring them once again front-and-center in our minds, is no mere act of nostalgia: Quentin Tarantino is quite clearly telling us that we need to think about the message that this “fairy tale” is trying to convey.
National security forces are in fact necessary for any society existing in a world in which there are real threats, but they exist in order to protect the people (all the people) -- and in the United States, they are strictly enjoined to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which details a system of democratic control answerable ultimately to the people. The events of July and August, 1969, and the horrific killings surrounding the Manson Family provide unmistakable evidence of the existence of elements within the national security state operating outside of democratic control, with reckless disregard for the safety of the citizens — indeed leading directly to the horrific and brutal murders of citizens (including the murder of an innocent child less than a month away from being born).
The events surrounding the subsequent investigations and trials, and the crafting of a deliberately false narrative regarding the events of those killings, provide unmistakable evidence of disregard for the rule of law, and subversion of the criminal justice system by those same unaccountable and anti-democratic elements.
The ongoing obfuscation surrounding these events tells us that these conclusions are not confined to history — they do not belong only to 1969 and the “bygone era” of the sixties and early seventies: they describe the world in which we are living today.
And until we face the facts — and the implications — of what took place so many years ago, things will not get better, and in fact they will continue to get worse.
image: Wikimedia commons (link).