Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [68]
The serial killer became much more prominent in the popular imagination on August 8, 1969, the day that Joan Didion, in The White Album, explained was considered by some to be “the end of the sixties.” As soon as the murders at the house of Roman Polanski were reported, whispers about the director spread through Hollywood. The national press presented him as a bizarre, promiscuous European stranger with a thick accent, long hair, short stature, a taste for violence, and a tragic family history. Most of all, there were those weird movies. “It was a scene as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski’s film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character” was how Time magazine described the murders.
Early newspaper stories emphasized that Polanski was abroad during the murders but that he was cracking jokes at a Broadway show before a killer was apprehended. Polanski added to the suspicion by visiting the murder site for the first time with a photographer who took shots that were widely publicized. It made a terrible crime look like another act of self-promotion. Law enforcement focused on Polanski as the first suspect in the case, and he was brought in to talk to the police. The investigators asked why his wife would be targeted. At the time, they were searching desperately for some kind of motive. Polanski had a telling suggestion. “The whole crime seems so illogical,” he explained to the detective during a polygraph test. “If I’m looking for a motive, I’d look for something which doesn’t fit your habitual standard, with which you use to work as police, something much more far out.”
He was talking in private to the police, but this was an answer that he could have also delivered to film critics looking to know where future monsters of the horror genre would come from. In the New Horror, clear motives and obvious metaphors were replaced by a more general sense of confusion. The murders of Sharon Tate and her friends were so bizarre and random and spectacular that for many people they almost didn’t seem real. The situation only became murkier when the world learned about Charles Manson. Details trickled out about this other strange little man and his virulent cult, and they didn’t add up to a coherent picture. He was described as a hippie but also as someone who hated hippies, a nihilist and a race warrior, an idiot and a genius, starved for fame and completely indifferent to it. None of these explanations made more sense than Polanski’s original speculation. Manson was simply far out.
By the early seventies, as his multiple insanity trials received blanket press coverage, Manson became an antihero for a segment of the counterculture. It emerged that he was a budding musician who had worked with the Beach Boys and had seduced a harem of beautiful women to opt out of their bourgeois society. The yippie Jerry Rubin praised him, and members of the radical group the Weathermen celebrated him as a kindred spirit. As for his violent methods, well, that was simply by any means necessary.
For the other side of the generation gap, Manson represented the danger of the hippie movement and the out-of-control youth culture protesting the war, rioting in the streets, and generally ignoring their parents. He stood in for the nagging anxiety of parents who didn’t understand why their kids were dressing and talking like that. In the age of the silent majority, the media ran with this narrative. Accompanying a tight photo of his face, the cover of Life magazine proclaimed Manson “the dark edge of hippie life.” One hitchhiker told The New York Times that in the wake of the Manson murders it was impossible to hail down a ride: “If you’re young, have a beard, or even long hair, motorists look at you as if you’re a ‘kill crazy cultist,’ and jam the gas.”
Manson was not the