What I've been reading and watching

on Charles Manson, James Ivory, "Opus" (2025), and more

What I’ve been reading

April has been busy, so this time I’m cheating with an audiobook: CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill.

To really enjoy CHAOS, you have to be kind of a Manson nerd (I’m not, but his story lives at the intersection of New Hollywood, the civil rights movement, and the libidinal energies underpinning twentieth/twenty-first century true crime, topics about which you could say I’m passionate). Yet you must also be credulous enough to need persuading that there may be something…untoward…about the institutions (child prisons, policing, the CIA, etc.) that produced the world’s most famous Beach Boys stan. While I appreciate O’Neill’s contributions to the case that the United States government is so corrupted by racial capitalism that it would manipulate charismatic psychopaths into destabilizing the Black liberation movement and dispatching inconvenient political figures, I certainly don’t need it, you know?

More interesting to me, as a writer, is how CHAOS illustrates the deterioration of American journalism over the past 25 years. What began in 1999 as a three-month assignment by a now-defunct entertainment magazine snowballed into twenty years of obsessive research that put O’Neill hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with, if not little to show for it, then at least not the definitive proof of the CIA’s role in the Tate–LaBianca murders that he was looking for. This is not to undermine O’Neill’s persistence, resourcefulness, and grit; the man deserves a Pulitzer for all the death threats he received in the making of this book alone. For all that it’s inconclusive, CHAOS is not a failure, but it does represent an increasingly unimaginable undertaking. Unfortunately, in 2025, the notion of an independent investigative journalist devoting a quarter of his life to learning the truth behind one of the most famous crimes of the past century without institutional support other than a few book advances is almost as unthinkable as the nightmarish evening of August 9, 1969.

For a significantly shorter exploration of this same topic, I recommend Alexander Sorondo’s new long-form piece on William T. Vollmann. “The Last Contract” documents the writer’s herculean efforts to publish A Table for Fortune, his 3,000-page novel about the CIA. Not even Vollmann, the man for whom every avenue of inquiry—from poverty, to climate change, to violence—becomes a white whale of sorts, can escape the collapse of publishing, media, and journalism as we know them. I suppose I’m part of the problem: I’ve read lots about Vollmann, and a few short pieces by him, but have yet to finish one of his books.

What I’ve been watching

Maurice (1987): Last week, Jade and I went to the Paris Theater (once informally known as the Merchant Ivory theater) for a screening of Maurice, which debuted there in 1987. By a stroke of luck, its director and co-writer, James Ivory, was sitting directly in front of us, accompanied by a strapping young man that Jade described as one of the top-ten most beautiful people she’d ever seen. I would go to war for him, she whispered as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the tiny seats. Looking younger than his almost 97 years (although, Jade wondered, when was the last time she’d been this close to someone so old?), Ivory was dressed in a charming red knit sweater and khakis, a polished wooden cane propped against his knees. Alert but distant, he seemed nonplussed when director Ira Sachs (who we also adore) came to shake his hand. The man of the hour, said Sachs. Indeed, Ivory’s silence suggested.

It wasn’t difficult to focus on the movie, which is one of my favorites¹, but every so often I glanced over at Ivory, whose three-quarter profile shone like a quail egg at my nine o’clock. He watched the screen carefully, his expression rarely changing, except when Ben Kingsley’s hypnotist adenoidally observes that, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Like the rest of the audience, he laughed. It’s a great line read in a movie chock-full of them.

After the show, Ivory took to the stage to be interrogated by Sachs. I say interrogated because he resisted almost every question with generalities, quibbles, or circuitous summarizing. Of course homophobia was different in 1912 than in 1985! Of course his partner of 40 years, Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, shaped his world! He seemed a trifle over it; but maybe he was just distrustful, humble, or hard of hearing. When asked about Hugh Grant, the Maurice co-star who went on to become the king of the ‘90s romcom (and of my heart 🫶), he said simply that he had gone out for Daniel Day-Lewis’ role in A Room with a View (1985), but that he hadn’t been quite right.

Sachs was a good sport. Maurice, he explained, had meant so much to him as a young gay man who struggled with the closet as the film’s main characters do, despite having been born 70 years later in a different country. While Ivory wasn’t dismissive outright, he didn’t seem particularly interested in getting into it all, either. Perhaps when you’re almost 100, you’re just zen about everything. When, prompted by Sachs, Ivory announced his age, I was surprised by how excited I felt, by how hard I clapped along with the rest of the audience.

Ivory did say a few memorable things, including the observation that actors are deep, while directors are shallow, plus a few kittenish remarks that set the audience laughing. Still, I have to admit I was disappointed that he avoided answering the question that was, incidentally, one I asked Jade as the credits rolled: why had he chosen to end Maurice on Grant’s tragic Clive closing the windows on the greenwood, and not with the book’s happy ending (which had prevented its publication until many years after its author’s death)? In response, Ivory focused instead on the beauty of Clive’s wife in her looking glass, her face placid and yet fixed, as if she is doing a difficult math equation in her head. Of course, Ivory said, she didn’t know what was really going on, and [her closeted husband] would never tell her. But in a scene just a few minutes before, Clive remarks that his wife has an uncanny intuition. Like the other mothers, daughters, and wives in Maurice, her feminine repressions play differently than those of their male counterparts, but rarely are they as ignorant as they’re meant to be perceived. It’s funny—every time I watch Maurice, I’m struck anew by its women characters, who for me all but disappear between screenings. I wonder what this says about me.

“Fun City: NYC Woos Hollywood, Flirts with Disaster”: Criterion’s April programming of ‘60s and ‘70s cinema set in New York depicts a “raw and often surreal portrait of a city in crisis.” Popular classics—like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)—adjoin gritty gems that were new (to me), like Little Murders (1971), the scariest comedy I’ve ever seen starring the adorable Elliott Gould and a scene-stealing Donald Sutherland, and Black Caesar (1973), helmed by the sartorially sensational Fred Williamson as a Harlem mafioso with a diehard vendetta. It includes Black Caesar’s original ending, the fitting yet surprisingly surreal conclusion to a very violent film that has you simultaneously rooting for and despising its underdog.

Opus (2025): Not even Ayo Edebiri, whose beauty is just “normal” enough that she can be reasonably cast as the world’s most charming working girl, could make this AI movie likeable. Its villain (John Malkovich) is Alfred Moretti, a megalomaniac pop star with a murderous, if ideologically muddled, cult following that claims to worship creativity. Edebiri is a no-name young journalist who tries to foil, then capitalize on, his diabolical plans to spread his religion across the country. I say that Opus is an AI movie as both compliment and insult: while it seems interested in examining the contemporary hostility toward human creativity—what is its value? why does it matter? does it have a future?—it does so with a derivativeness that isn’t even redeemed by iteration. Whether or not we’re intended to find something salvageable in the dogmatic goulash that is Moretti’s ethos, the end result is the same: a film about art and creativity characterized by bad writing, wooden acting, stupid plotting, and pointless cinematography (establishing panoramic shots seem to take place in a different movie altogether, and one gets the impression that writer and director Mark Anthony Green has some kind of grudge against good lighting). There are a handful of pretty/interesting/frightening images and a fascinatingly disturbing nonsequitur of a puppet show about Billie Holiday, but otherwise this one’s poop from a butt.

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1. I’ve written about it here, but if you’ve only got a few minutes today, skip it for Alex Chee’s wonderful “The Afterlives of E.M. Forster.”