Culturally and historically, the only precedent I can think of for the brutal murders of filmmaker-actor Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner this past Sunday are the Manson Murders of Sharon Tate and others in the summer of 1969.
I was born about a decade after Sharon Tate was killed, but the event’s reverberation carried well into my life, and continues to echo now even decades later (most notably, in recent years, through how Quentin Tarantino reimagined the event in the 2019 film “Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood”). From what I understood, the Manson Murders ended the 1960s, not just on the collective timeline but culturally and spiritually. Too, they ushered in a new mindset in Hollywood come the 1970s, one wherein the films were no longer innocent, but fueled by an adult sense of danger, corruption, and paranoia (Watergate would also help to steer the change).
I think I’m seeing the beginnings of a similar shift.
Before I go on, I should say that I’m a staunch opponent of the “Donald Trump’s finally finished” genre of op-ed journalism — which has not only been wrongheaded for about a decade, but also tends to backfire — but I’m going to go ahead and file my own entry. I’m not saying Trump’s “done,” though I do think a meaningful turn has occurred, and I’m not sure this particular bell can be unrung…
The Reiners had their throats slit with a knife. The suspect in custody on murder charges is their 32-year-old son Nick Reiner, long known for his addiction and mental health problems. The night before the murders, at a party at comedian Conan O’Brien’s house, a fight had broken out between Nick and his parents. Nick had also allegedly clashed there with actor/filmmaker Bill Hader. The next day, after Rob and Michele’s murders, actor/comedian Billy Crystal showed up at their house, having been phoned by their daughter Romy Reiner.
I track these details here because they converge into the kind of Hollywood ecosystem that also surrounded the Manson Murders. Tate herself was a movie star. She was in a romantic partnership with director Roman Polanski, and carrying their baby when killed. Also killed that night in 1969 were Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter, and Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist. Charles Manson, on whose command the murderers acted, was an aspiring singer-songwriter who’d set up a cult on the Spahn Ranch, an expanse of L.A. land where “Bonanza” and “The Lone Ranger” had once been filmed.
The Hollywood of then is not the Hollywood of now. Back then, Hollywood was central to world culture; now, it’s one among many entertainment nodes. Regardless, both narratives are heavily embodied by people that the public feels close to. Rob Reiner was a great filmmaker whose movies are universally beloved, but his impact as a director is owed in part to his familiar presence as an actor, most notably as Meathead in the landmark sitcom “All in the Family.”
In other words, the loss of Reiner is shattering because we felt like we knew him. And the macro-narrative around the murders — the clashes at the party, the call to Billy Crystal — carries the eerie charge of chronicling an array of other familiar personalities. You hear that Rob Reiner — nice guy, good guy, sweet guy, talented guy — died, your heart breaks. You hear he was murdered, your mind gets scrambled; it just doesn’t make sense that such a pleasant and reassuring presence could meet with such a grisly end. Then you find out that his own son is the suspect, and his wife was murdered simultaneously, and other affable entertainers were in or near the blast zone, and it accrues into a legitimate trauma, not worse in scope than the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia or the mass shooting at Brown University from the same weekend, but deeper in impact due to our decades-long intimacy with the work and personalities of the people involved.
Which brings us to Donald Trump…
In true attention-seeking toddler fashion, Trump took to Truth Social and tried to make the murders about him, posting about how Reiner had been afflicted with a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and had become such a nuisance to the people around him that he had incited his own murder. Trump was not only trying to seize the news cycle (his specialty), he was actually trying to tie himself to Reiner’s death. It was so spectacularly depraved and antisocial that even members of his own party, usually afraid to stand up to him for fear of being bullied, had to express their disapproval.
But something else happened, I perceive, which is more subtle and may yet prove more enduring…
For once, Trump’s vile method of stealing the spotlight by being outrageous made him look not bigger, but smaller. He was to some extent able to siphon the conversational energy toward himself (this op-ed’s existence confirms it), but the sheer mismatch between the shocking, horrific nature of the crime and the who-gives-a-shit irrelevance of Trump’s narcissistic lens on reality was so stark that Trump could not become the moment’s equal. He became a footnote. Maybe not this week, but in the course of history, the gravity of the Reiner murders — so sick and harrowing, such a nightmare and a loss — will leave little bandwidth for the comments of our president who prides himself on acting like a lunatic.
Trump’s methodology has been sustainable for a decade. He’s an expert marketer; he has us all fixated on him. He says something outrageous, he seizes the news cycle, he sows debate, he becomes the common denominator of every conversation, he gets the left reacting emotionally and the right explaining what he really meant, and then he walks away vacantly from the mess so he can go on and stage another one.
This time it landed differently, though. Three conservative men I know told me (inbound) that they thought Trump’s words were disgusting. His own base has always known that he’s an asshole, but they’ve justified their support for him on the basis of policy or ideology. This time, though, no — he was just an asshole.
The gambit went sideways, petered out like a whoopie cushion. For Trump’s trolling to work, the population must be tense. He needs us all primed to argue, so he can throw big slabs of meat at us and watch us tear each other apart. But what if there is no argument? What if the topic at hand is too steep or serious for him? Then the system malfunctions. He becomes isolated. He declares himself irrelevant while being unable to embed his vileness in any feasible foundation of legitimacy.
As a kid, I never got it about the Manson Murders. How could one event change an entire culture? Surely we were creating before-and-after markers with the aid of simplistic hindsight?
No, I get it now. Events don’t stand apart from the times. Events express the times. The unraveling of Nick Reiner, squared against the magnanimity of his parents, encapsulates what the older generations had and what the younger generations are deprived of. And the Hollywood surrounding the Reiner tragedy is but a shadow of the one that existed in the 1960s; fewer artists live there, less money flows through it, fewer individuals are famous in the old-fashioned, traditional media way. So you have this horrid event that expresses not just a frightening and sorrowful family dynamic, but, in an ambient and tonal sense, the lack and sadness of our times. And seeing the times expressed so clearly awakens our collective awareness that we need to change them. It can’t stay dark forever. And it’s grown too dark.
When the 60s ended, light made way for darkness. Things are different now; we feel desperately the need to wake up to another morning.
Add to this the meaningless commentary of the president, and you see another way in which the dark trance of these times is fracturing. All fads end, including Donald Trump. And in his tone-deaf reaction to the Reiner murders, Trump did the one thing that he’s always staked his power on not doing.
He united us.
