When the American journalist Joan Didion moved to San Francisco in the spring of 1967, she set out to write something about the crazed and chaotic hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury. It was a time when her own worldview was in meltdown. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” a line from Yeats’s post–first world war poem “The Second Coming,” dominated her thoughts. The Haight was a place riddled with the symptoms of some undiagnosed cultural condition that looked terminal. Everywhere were bankruptcy notices, homemade posters about missing children, abandoned buildings in which vagrants scrawled four-letter words they couldn’t even spell.
Aquarius, the new NBC series about the Manson cult playing on Seven, also begins in 1967, two years before the sensational murders committed by Charlie Manson’s “family.” Though the title, with its reference to the song from Hair, is surely ironic, the antithesis to Yeats’s imagery could not be more sharply drawn. Jupiter aligns with Mars. “Peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.”
There’s a commonly held view that the Manson murders represent a cultural turning point in the sixties revolution – as if, over that single weekend in August 1969, a bad moon rose and the flower-power generation lost all claim to innocence. Didion presents a very different view in her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem: of a world in which casual murders are commonplace, fourteen-year-olds routinely turn to prostitution, a small child is fed on a diet of acid and peyote. By 1967, the hippie scene in California was already well and truly under the reign of a bad moon. But a TV series is entitled to some imaginative licence. The idea of the turn has a lot going for it as a structural arc for the stories in Aquarius, so it’s not hard to accept the terms of engagement.
Innocence, epitomised by a wide-eyed teenager, Emma Karn (played by Emma Dumont), stalks through scenes in which the wilder fringe of youth experiment has yet to enter the domains of the macabre. It’s a social milieu made increasingly unstable by the random comings and goings in the endless house parties. A blonde in a pastel mini-dress sings, “I Only Want to Be With You” at a pool party while, across town, the Stones’ “Paint It Black” blasts through the rooms of a crowded neon-lit house. On Manson’s ranch, the hippies are only a couple of removes from the cleancut kids of yesteryear. Hair is combed, faces washed, clothes are cute.
The idea for Aquarius is powerfully alluring. A middle-aged detective (David Duchovny) follows some leads on a missing teenager who has fallen into the hands of Manson (Gethin Anthony) and his entourage. At this stage of the game, there’s nothing much to distinguish them from any other bunch of countercultural groupies gathered around a self-declared prophet. Manson has a criminal record for burglary and car theft but there’s nothing on the police radar to suggest he’s anything special.
Duchovny, having abandoned the open-necked shirts and rakish stubble he affected in Californication for a return to the grey-suited cool of Fox Mulder, should be an interesting choice for the role of Detective Sam Hodiak. Always a minimalist, Duchovny has a way of monopolising the camera without anything you might recognise as an expression crossing his face. Strolling into a throng of multicoloured hippies, he’s a non-negotiable presence, completely unfazed by the character who fronts up to him with a denunciation of “pigs.” “Do your thing, pig. Do your thing,” says the guy. And he does, sweeping the challenger aside like an old curtain. He conveys the impression that if hell or high water crossed his chosen path, he would hardly bother to notice them. From a dramatic point of view, that presents something of a challenge when he comes into direct confrontation with Manson.
Perhaps the intention is to establish a presence of equal force, but Aquarius is a frustrating package of potentially great ideas that just don’t work on the screen. Here, Manson himself is the weakest link. Gethin Anthony, who was good at looking poised and princely as Renly Baratheon in Game of Thrones, is not prepared for the psychological terrain occupied by Manson. On one level, he’s simply too young and good-looking, and Manson was never either. By the time he was in his mid thirties, he looked as if he’d been knocking around for at least a century. There was something ancient about that face, and the primordial stare of the eyes. Making him physically attractive distracts from the bizarre qualities of magnetic attraction he possessed.
It’s true that in 1967 Manson was more focused on music than murder, but the scenes of him strumming the guitar and singing clichéd lyrics to a circle of adoring women are… well, the kind of stuff that should be left on the cutting room floor. Or better still, in the wastepaper basket in the script room. But if Manson was a second-rate musician, he was a tour de force when it came to writing his own scripts. Previous dramatisations, most notably the 1976 film Helter Skelter and its 2004 remake, took advantage of this by allowing Manson to speak in his own words.
The courtroom monologue delivered by Steve Railsback in the 1976 version is a j’accuse fit to make Émil Zola’s hair stand on end. “These children that come at you with knives are your children. You taught ’em, I didn’t teach ’em. The people you call my family are people you didn’t want… I’m a reflection of you. I’m what you made me. I tried my best to get along in your world and now you say you want to kill me. I’m already dead. I have been all my life.”
Both Railsback and Jeremy Davies, who played Manson in the remake, have a way of delivering Manson’s words that suggests nervous energy in the red zone, travelling through the voice and the body in unpredictable bursts. There is none of this about Anthony’s performance, and the lines he has to work with are glib in comparison. “We’re special, we’re powerful and we can change everything,” he tells the newest recruit to the family, fixing her with the insinuating gaze of a seducer.
Well, that’s pretty ordinary, and Manson never had an ordinary moment in his life. Railsback and Davies capture something of a very different order (or disorder) in psychological terms. Davies moves in behind the woman, speaking close to her ear in a rapid whisper, as if directly feeding into her thought processes. “You think I don’t know what it feels like to be thrown away? I can see inside of you and I know what you are. You will never be thrown away again.” When you watch Helter Skelter, in either version, you can see how Manson’s acolytes came under the spell. They thought he was Jesus. He could breathe on a dead bird and it would fly away. His sudden swerves between kindness and brutality were all part of a pattern. There was no radical turning point for Manson, any more than there was for the culture he symbolised.
At this distance, an alternative rendition, semi-fictionalised, could be interesting. But Aquarius fails the challenge on every front. Duchovny starts to look like a parody of himself; Anthony has strayed out of his depth and so, evidently, have the scriptwriters. In interviews, Duchovny has talked much about the commitment to evoking a sense of era, but you can’t do that effectively without a more cogent connection to its social and psychological dynamics. The portrayal of an endless party circuit might look like an effective way to capture these, but the blurring of background and foreground in the cinematography serves only to muddy the focus and smother the lines of tension.
There’s now such a huge market for high-quality, big-budget television drama that the field has opened up for ambitious ventures like this, but how frustrating it is to see such a comprehensive failure in execution, especially when the subject matter might have significant resonances for a contemporary audience. Anyone trying to understand the phenomenon of young adults being lured into a dangerous world whose realities are beyond their comprehension might learn something from the Manson story. ISIS recruiting is an entirely different ballgame, but there are parallels. And if you really want to encourage the trend, just keep referring to it as a “death cult.” The Manson court statement is something of a garbled rant in the full transcript, but edited down for Steve Railsback’s monologue, it’s an extraordinarily potent attack on any society that tries to define itself by making outcasts. •
