The documentary Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone) is not remarkable in itself, being mostly a combination of footage and talking heads interviews. Nevertheless, the overall effect is simultaneously icy and almost comic, heartbreaking and ludicrous. The film, in a tight 85 minutes, chronicles the rise of The Symbionese Liberation Army generally and its specific crime of kidnapping Hearst and making her one of the SLA over the course of a year and a half, during which Patty robs two banks and sprays a store with bullets. For those of us familiar with the combination of earnestness, self-righteousness, naivete and otherworldliness brought by many children of the middle classes to graduate school many of the “characters†may seem vaguely familiar; but instead of the humorless radical correcting another student on his/her interpretation of Foucault, these humorless radicals take up automatic weapons, rob banks, kill people and issue “communique’s.†They call themselves “Generals†or “Field Marshalls†in the Unified Army of the People. They refer to the “pigs†and claim spiritual connections to Che and George Jackson.
I am obsessed with the history of the SLA—meaning not that I necessarily know much about them but that I am endlessly interested in their brief trajectory, having seen the notorious Compton shootout on TV when I was 11 and remembering it to this day (other events that join it in the category of Spectacular Police Actions include the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia and the Branch Davidian conflagration—these events convinced me that radicalism in the US too often takes a lunatic turn, perhaps in response to the chaos just under the surface of everyday life, and in response the Authorities return the lunacy in an apocalyptic form). The same thought keeps coming up during the viewing of this documentary—“These people are ridiculous. Did they really believe that 8 people constituted a “People’s Army?†But, even so, how did they get the balls to pick up guns, rob banks, kidnap heiresses and go underground for decades?†The black comedy comes from the earnestness of these guerillas, their humorlessness the same that marks the deadliness of authoritarian regimes (Can anyone imagine the SLA members sitting around joking in 1974? If so, it would only be along the lines of “Don’t Pigs walk funny?â€) But a certain sadness comes from the alien feel of the time period, the realization that ideals were never realized, only perverted, and that now we have a time when “the spectacle†is so comprehensive that remarkable violent events are seamlessly interwoven into everyday life so that they communicate nothing except their sensational nature. Columbine, for example, does not spur a consideration of education and the emptiness of the future that faces teens but it does spur endless hand-wringing of a really insincere nature.
The most bizarre and eerie part of the documentary is not the film itself but one of the ‘extras’ on the DVD—the tapes made by Hearst during the time she was held by the SLA, about an hour of material that starts with “Dear Mom and Dad†and moves through “pig Hearsts†and claims that she was lovers with “Cujo,†a member who dies in the LA shootout. The voice is so affectless, yet so immediately present that you feel like 18 months or so in the mid 1970s is consolidated into 53 minutes—you almost feel yourself turning from pampered apolitical multimillionaire art history student to lunatic urban guerilla “Tania.†Listening to the 53 minutes gives you the same sort of chill provided by the paranoid films Mike mentioned in another post (The Conversation, The Parallax View, etc.) or the coldest novels of people like Robbe-Grillet and DeLillo. Did such fantastic events really happen? Are they happening now? Is it still possible to imagine society differently—an impulse represented in a pathological manner by the SLA but now apparently dead or dormant. I believe I will use this film in my class at Lehigh (Popular Culture, Democracy and the Public Sphere) as a starting point for the discussion of narratives that guide “news†stories—but the unreality of teens in 2006 meeting the events of 1974 may prove too much for me.
Jackie is a punk judy is a runt
They both went down to berlin, joined the ice capades
And oh, I don’t know why oh, I don’t know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Second verse, same as the first jackie is a punk judy is a runt
They both went down to berlin, joined the ice capades
And oh, I don’t know why oh, I don’t know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Third verse, different from the first jackie is a punk judy is a runt
They both went down to frisco, joined the sla
And oh, I don’t know why oh, I don’t know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
I wanted to mention this song by The Ramones. One reason why it is the most brilliant one minute and 32 seconds in political theory and music history is the last four lines. The Ramones trump the SLA because they combine in a concentrated joke teen middle class angst, utopian radicalism, the death wish accompanying the desire for “action” and the ghoulish but funny nursery rhyme song of “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly…” Now if The Ramones had gone around kidnapping rich folks and forcing them to dance to “dumb” lyrics masking a fiercely incisive critique of society (and its rebels, too)–well things might have worked out differently…
“These events convinced me that radicalism in the US too often takes a lunatic turn, perhaps in response to the chaos just under the surface of everyday life.”
“But a certain sadness comes from the alien feel of the time period, the realization that ideals were never realized, only perverted, and that now we have a time when “the spectacle†is so comprehensive that remarkable violent events are seamlessly interwoven into everyday life so that they communicate nothing except their sensational nature.”
these are very good sentences, michael. the second is poetic and deep. the alito confirmation hearings taking place these days are, in a completely different way from the ones you mention, a bleak endorsement of the points you make. we seem, collectively, to have lost the ability to be shocked. in alito’s case, i am vaguely stunned by the way these hearings, only weeks ago mentioned in the same breath as words like “filibuster,” have turned into a total political non-event. this man could have been part of the KKK and it wouldn’t make a difference. the truth is, alito is not that bad. i mean, his CAP membership seems to have been nothing more than perfunctory. but he does have extreme political views, and there is no space in the country’s psyche left for outrage.
i want to date the start of outrage’s death throes around the destruction of the twin towers in new york. i want to date its last breath around the time of the new orleans Great Flood and the subsequent Exodus. i want to put the knife that killed outrage in america in the hands of the american media. we need a serious discussion of what the american media (and i’m including hollywood) is doing to our capacity to distinguish good from bad.
i was going to go on and connect all this to the magnificent Bus 174. but i need to go, plus i feel too depressed to say more about this now. anyone else?
Gio, I think your thoughtful response to Michael’s post (particularly your frustration with the American media) helps explain all of the good will George Clooney’s film Good Night and Good Luck is receiving right now. It certainly is a sturdy, well-written, economically photographed and edited little film, but I have no idea how or why it has become such a major cinematic “event film” during these last few weeks of awards and critical accolades (unless the cigarette industry is lobbying hard on LA’s version of K Street). Your argument is the best I can come up with concerning this film’s vigilant, somewhat Brechtian critique of the media’s responsibility to sort out the difficult truths and contentious points of view from the notion of news as spectacle entertainment or, even worse, as little more than benign pap to feed and placate the overfed masses.
That being said, Bus 174 is a great documentary. Much to Reynold’s chagrin, I have championed this film over the more flashy, apolitical extravaganza of poverty that is City of God.
City of God left me cold (i walked out of it). but i found Bus 174 an amazingly powerful movie. one element that connects it to what i was trying to say above is that it takes a lot of contemporary footage of the hostage crisis and intercuts it with commentary from the protagonists. this not only humanizes the whole situation (in the same way, say, in which spielgerg’s retelling of the siege at the olympic village in Munich humanizes it), but also recasts the media as a character in the story, so that you simultaneously wonder HOW all that mayhem could happen with the cameras rolling only a few feet away and WHY, if the presence of journalists on the scene was so insignificant, the police were squeamish about blowing sandro away in front of the cameras.
the simultenous power and powerlessness of the media was present also on 9/11 (CNN’s judy woodruff literally leading the country in the hours before bush got his act together and appeared on TV) and, much more strikingly, during the new orleans flood. it seems that, in all three cases, the role of the media was to sensationalize without engaging. and this seems incredibly problematic to me.
when it comes to hollywood, spielberg appears to be the prime culprit vis a vis sensationalization and banalization of human tragedy. Schindler’s List was the beginning on an era.
I’ll leave aside City o’ God, and second that Bus is a good doc; I’m very excited to see the Hearst doc. Michael, have you seen Paul Schrader’s version of the SLA/Patty story? Ving Rhames is amazing, and I recall kind of liking it–but it missed (I think) exactly that lunacy of radicalism you note. (I have a novel called Trance that supposedly gets this just right, but I haven’t read it.)
I don’t think–given the miniseries “holocaust” or, say “hogan’s heroes”–you can blame the banalization of the holocaust or human tragedy on spielberg.
Mike–I saw the schrader film a long time ago and don’t remember too much about it. but it’s on my netflix cue along with “Katharine” a similar story. I have also heard of Trance, which I may check out. John Waters perhaps should be the director for the SLA story–if only Divine were alive to play either Hearst or Cinque. if you rent Guerilla, make sure you listen to the tapes provided in the extras–as I mentioned these give the most precise sense of the lunacy of the group and the transformation of Hearst. I’ve considered writing a one act play about Hearst–as a kind of absurdist farce–but the tapes pre-empted me really as they provide their own theater. I can go along with the “brainwashing” aspect of the case though I wonder if there wasn’t a kernel within Hearst that reacted positively to the danger and excitement provided by the SLA–that is, the kidnapping relieved her of responsibility and she was free to join the revolutionary play-acting under a new identity. Or is that just crass? Even in the earlier tapes there’s a resentment toward the family which suggests the truth of the caricature of the exceedingly wealth family–a distant self-involved father, a hysterical appearance-conscious mother and a child desperately looking for attention. Is that the undercurrent of the whole SLA phenomenon?
as for discussing the banalization of the holocaust, I often have a twinge of bad faith, or at the very least a conflicted feeling. Certainly it is always worth discussing the consequences of certain choices in representing an event, particularly one that is such a devastating culmination of history–however, when critiqueing representations of the holocaust, I have a strange sense of an unearned moral authority, partly because the holocaust is only a reality to me through representations, the only “direct” access I’ve had to its reality is a visit to Dachau twenty years ago. And why should the holocaust be singled out as The Event that defies representation–such an idea removes it from history, and prevents the crucial act of seeing it as a culmination of historical forces. Further that position seems to be a misunderstanding of representation, an idea that it must somehow have a direct correspondence to reality or be silent. Everything represented is misrepresented.
Having said this and questioning some of my motives in criticizing spielberg, I have to say that I don’t get a sense of struggle over representation in something like Schindler’s List. it’s far too assured and slick. I’d like to see the tension between the impossibility of representing an event like the holocaust and the realization that most of us only know the event through representation. I have always wondered why we do not see more (and why there is not more interest in seeing) of the vast number of films made during the war, during the holocaust, etc.–why does everything need to be ‘narrativized’ and filtered so heavily? It’s not so much a matter of avoiding the representation of the holocaust but of not domesticating it so that it becomes only one event among others.
oh, I do ramble on….
This one went in my queue after I read your review, Michael, and I watched it last night.
Yes, the tapes provide their own theater, Frisoli, but that shouldn’t stop you from writing the play. Speaking of theater, one of the more interesting moments for me was when Patty called attention to her mother’s inane sense of the theatrical (“stop wearing black, Mom, I mean, c’mon.” Theater vs. theater.
I think the documentary was okay, though I wish the filmmakers had done a bit more research. A lot more, actually. But still, the film was compelling.
There was a preview in the DVD for a documentary that was very well received in the Bay area called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Anyone seen it?
Waters could do an SLA film as a musical, à la “I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing it on Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me That it Ain’t.”
michael: write the play!
Maybe you should watch The Stawberry Statement
whatchoo talkin’ ’bout willis?
what about the Strawberry Statement is relevant here….please to explain as I don’t know the movie.