Sunshine e Noir: la Famiglia Manson nelle narrazioni contemporanee degli anni Sessanta

In 2019, when Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood was released, it was 50 years since the night of August when members of the Manson Family drove to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon and committed multiple homicides. By analyzing Tarantino’s movie as well as other two fictional works, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) and Steve Erickson’s Zeroville (2007), this essay tries to problematize the way in which mainstream culture and political forces have used this episode in order to dismiss and subdue the Sixties countercultural experience as intrinsically nihilistic and destructive. In these 21st century noir narratives, in fact, the Manson murders serve as the basis for a revisitation and a reconstruction of the broader political and social atmosphere of late Sixties Los Angeles, and crime fiction becomes the ideal site in which the history of Californian sunshine-to-noir myth can be temporarily challenged.