Charlie Says Directed by Mary Harron
Charlie Says
Directed by Mary Harron
Starring: Suki Waterhouse, Hannah Murray, Matt Smith, Annabeth Gish, Merritt Wever, Chace Crawford, Sosie Bacon, Kayli Carter, Kimmy Shields, Grace Van Dien, India Ennenga, Bridger Zadina, Lindsay Farris, Marianne Rendón, Sol Rodriguez
Year: 2018
Country: USA
Review Author: Roberto Matteucci
"I am perfect."
Characteristics of sects, both religious and secular, are always the presence of a falsely omniscient and omnipresent guru, who dominates his followers until he is considered a God.
At the base, there is a simple and syncretic doctrine: many references to the Bible, to oriental religions, to the doctors of psychology. The master pretends to be the messenger of their unique and authentic meaning.
The main consequences are the prohibition to express criticisms, oppositions and doubts. Every declaration of the master is an authoritarian dogma and includes the ban to participate in social life. The master uses all kinds of rites to control the members. Mostly are magic, fantastic and, of course, sexual, both erotic and sadomasochistic.
Members can have: "... human warmth, attention and support. Sharing all together a goal, fraternity, and have protection and security. In short, through understanding, dialogue, encounter, closeness and mutuality, people recover their sense of belonging." (1)
Therefore, every adherent has a unique, special possibility: "... saturate their need to get out of anonymity, so they can feel important and participation in the world." (1)
The "family" led by Charlie Manson responds to these properties.
The history of the Manson cult is well-known. The end was tragic: a series of murders, a death sentence transformed to life imprisonment only for its abolition in California. His popularity was worldwide. The effect was the creation of a pop brand with the name of Manson. Fame came with the brutal killing of the young but famous actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polaski. Sharon Tate was twenty-six years old. Her film career had just begun with great success. Also had starring with Tony Curtis and Claudia Cardinale. On the day of her die, she was eight months pregnant.
Many movies, books, TV series, plays narrates about Manson and his vicissitudes. The Canadian director Mary Harron made a new one, Charlie Says, presented at the 75th Venice Film Festival.
Charlie Manson was the centre of the "family" with his cruelty, his immense ego, his criminal narcissism. The result was a catastrophe for all.
Mary Harron is not interested in Manson, she has other ambitions, other aims, almost political. She focuses on women, on the three participants in the assassinations: Susan, Patricia and Leslie. They were sentenced to life imprisonment; Patricia and Leslie are still in jail, while Susan died in 2009.
The interest in these females is for understanding on: "... why he persuaded these girls to commit what they committed, he was a psychopath, insane, we know it but the girls were definitely normal." (2) The culprit is Mason and the followers are victims. A political and human simplification.
The film begins August 9, 1969, the day of the Sharon's assassination. One girl is in the shower, another greedily eats a watermelon while a man hitchhikes trying to block a car. Day effect. A car stops and a boy gives him a ride.
Flash forward, the story jumps three years. The long trial is over and Patricia, Susan and Leslie are in a women's prison. The director shoots the girls behind bars. Then there is an alternation between life in penitentiary and flashback of existence in the community at Spahn Ranch. In the Californian ranch, the unyielding Charles Mason guides with iron fist the group, composed almost entirely of females.
The personality of the protagonists.
Charlie obviously has endless flaws, but he is definitely not mad.
He grows up in a family with law and drugs problems.
Charlie is superb, arrogant, treats everyone with contempt until their total sexual possession. He has a lust without love. He is continually disappointed, jealous, greedy: he wanted make movies, he wanted to be a singer. The envy will destroy him, the rejection of one of his songs by a music producer will cause the worst. Anger is the answer to denial; its carcinogenic ego will incite revenge. Beyond that many criminal actions, there is a "family" without sexual controls, with nervous sadism and with an absurd depravity to polygamy.
Susan, Patricia and Leslie are not better.
They have a depressive laziness, an inertia of living, a constant abulia. Their choices are always limited by personal will, by free will. They think of paying for their decisions with a nymphomaniac carnality. It is the accidie: both physically and mentally, the worst of human behaviour. Their passive submissive attitude is show in their exhibitionism and the consequence is the demotivation to choose the good.
The union of these elements is the answer to the director: "we all belong to Charlie."
The key scene: Manson screams to motivate the disciples, arranged around him. He commands people, annihilate them. He screams his power; he has the authority to kill anyone in that circle. The camera goes crazy, dominating everyone.
In many other sequences, there is the same style and the same subject. Charlie orders to followers to take a girl's clothes off and they obey. He dominates their sex carnality, decides who and how they can fuck: "He is like a lighthouse or something."
The most studied feature is the male chauvinism of Charlie. His person is drowning in a sea of weaknesses but Mary Harron likes to focus on this issue.
The composition of the group is fundamental: more female than male.
Women can not have money; they must search through the rubbish something useful for the farm. Men must eat before them. His sentences are peremptory: "woman has a small brain","I didn't ask for your opinion, I asked for your boobs", up to the demonic: "being beaten by the man is no different than making sex with him.” Even the orgiastic emancipation has its masculinist scale.
In the background of Manson, there are the sixties in the United States. These are the years of the war in Vietnam, of rebellion, of oriental religions, of hippies, of cynicism, of indifference, of free sexuality, of erotic initiations, of LSD. Literature, cinema, music inside hid a new disintegration, the abandonment of the knowledge and sociality of a people. The outcomes were the bands, the motorcycle ones, the satanic sects, and the religious syncretism. These behaviours had harmful results. Manson and his followers are the product of their age, of the exaltation of malign culture.
The author studied weakly these aspects, she understands them but barely perceives them.
The contrast between the past and the present is, stylistically represented, in the structural duality. One is the story of apparent freedom in the sect, the other one their life in prison. They are two different worlds. In both Manson absorbed their energies.
The language is a rapid camera, an orgiastic speed, as the characters must be. The colours and movements are the same because the cinematographic environment is twofold. The attitude of the girls must be dichotomous; two distinct styles are essential, but the difference belongs only to their minds. Women are now incarcerated. The same happened in Manson's ranch. They were subjugated by rules of rules, dictated by a fascist leader. Yet - this is the tenor - in their mind, they felt free. They conceal the free will behind the mechanical mantra, the iteration of their guru's name: charlie says charlie says charlie says.
The repetition does not depend on manipulations or brainwashing but on the main mental destabilization: love.
The movie is, for the legitimate cultural preference of the director, totally feminine, even if the protagonist is a man. This are the strangeness of the film.
The main victim of Manson was not the females but a boy: Tex Watson. He is completely subjugated, he will drive the murders and he is constantly humiliated.
However, in the plot Tex is little more than an insignificant appearance. It is the political question; the description of the film is absolutely not a true and real. To know the events there are other authors, one of them is Ed Sanders.
Ed Sanders, one of the producers, wrote the book that inspired the film: The family. The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion(E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., New York).
The book details the social history, the sixties: the Hollywood environment full of extravagances, with exaggerations in the use of drugs and debauchery.
Manson yearned for this social condition, but he clashed against them. They refused him. The Manson's farm and Hollywood had more contacts than one could imagine. The film avoids this aspect. The conflict is between the growing paroxysmal tendency of the Hollywood counterculture versus the aspirations of the egocentric vanity of Manson's and his girls.
(1) Silvia Bonino e Alessandro Salvini, Le sette: storie di «straordinaria follia»? In Psicologia Contemporanea, sett.-ott. 1991 n. 107, Giunti, Firenze, translated by the author.
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