Review: Mellnick, Creepy Crawling (2018)
Dec. 31st, 2020 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThis is an excellent book of cultural analysis of Charles Manson and the Manson family, both in and of themselves and in the artistic work they have inspired. Melnick is very smart about things like the way the Manson "girls" are constructed, both the way they constructed themselves and the way they were constructed socially at the time and since then. Also, although he doesn't use the word "over-determined," he helped clarify for me that what Sanders and others are trying to do against Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter reading: not to propose a different motive, but to say that there were MULTIPLE motives. Melnick even points out that the various people who went out to commit murder may have had different ideas about what they were doing and why they were doing it. PART of it is Helter Skelter (why else would Patricia Krenwinkel write THAT, misspelled as "Healter Skelter," in blood on the LaBiancas' fridge?), part of it is to make the Hinman murder look like part of a series, so that Bobby Beausoleil could not be convicted (which, along with being a really BAD idea, was also a really stupid one, as events showed), and I'm gonna go ahead and say that part of it was that Charles Manson wanted some rich people to die as payback for the way Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson had seemed to welcome him in and then just as quickly welcomed him back out.
For me, Melnick was strongest and most useful when talking about the 1960s (the way Manson camouflaged himself as what the 60s meant by a "freak" and the ways that turned out to be like an alligator camouflaging itself as a floating log) and early 1970s (the performance of Vincent Bugliosi as "Vincent Bugliosi"), but I appreciate the way he followed the trail up to basically the publication of his book. There is a lot of Manson art out there, some of it the deliberate epater la bourgeoisie stuff that avant gardians like to do, some of it novels that engage with Manson in different ways (Emma Cline's The Girls, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night ), hip hop sampling, John Waters' sculpture, Punisher comic books ... Melnick pursues his target through a kaleidoscope of American culture, and is smart and fun to read while he does it.
For me, Melnick was strongest and most useful when talking about the 1960s (the way Manson camouflaged himself as what the 60s meant by a "freak" and the ways that turned out to be like an alligator camouflaging itself as a floating log) and early 1970s (the performance of Vincent Bugliosi as "Vincent Bugliosi"), but I appreciate the way he followed the trail up to basically the publication of his book. There is a lot of Manson art out there, some of it the deliberate epater la bourgeoisie stuff that avant gardians like to do, some of it novels that engage with Manson in different ways (Emma Cline's The Girls, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night ), hip hop sampling, John Waters' sculpture, Punisher comic books ... Melnick pursues his target through a kaleidoscope of American culture, and is smart and fun to read while he does it.
