Much like Stephen Hawking — the brilliant astrophysicist who understands the universe better than any other man alive, yet sits drooling in a wheelchair and talks like a robot — if you made up Patty Hearst for a work of fiction people would say it was too far-fetched. This documentary isn’t as well made as the similar and also recent “The Weather Underground,” but the specifics of the Patty Hearst saga are just. . .so fucking perfect that any opportunity to just sit and ponder the significance of the story and its signifiers strikes a very pleasing chord with me. And to listen to those tapes! To actually hear Patty, with her lazy California rich girl accent (or is it the accent of the brainwashed?) say “Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People”. . .I dunno, for some reason this excites me. I was surprised to hear on the commentary track how Patty had seen and liked the film. My reading of it was an indictment of her — that her power and influence got her out of a serious prison sentence that many of her “comrades” are still serving. Also, there were a couple of aspects that aren’t here (no doubt cut for time) which is the sexual aspect of her time with the SLA and the curious connection with future would-be Gerald Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore. Something else untouched, but I think telling, is perhaps Ms. Hearst is still suffering from the “Stockholm Syndrome.” Once she got her pardon and went back to Mommy and Daddy, who did she marry? Her bodyguard.
This was a better documentary than The Weather Underground … which was basically a belated propoganda piece for that misguided group. That documentary never got into the murder they ended up committing by knocking off security guards in a Boston robbery in the early 80s, i.e., why one of the guys they interviewed was sitting in a jail for the rest of his life. The truth was these were a bunch of spoiled, upper-middle-class white class white kids engaging in some radical white and class self loathing (all the pathetic, phoney “whitey” nonsense they were spouting … while the Black Panthers were smart enough to shun them like the plague). The view of the group given in that documentary was entirely too sympathetic — these people were hardcore shitheads. And the tone of the documentary, made post 9/11, did not acknowledge in any way that 9/11 ever happened or existed — and you have to acknowledge something like that for a bunch of buffoons whose dream was to blow up the Pentagon … like the 9/11 terrorists nearly succeeded in doing.
The Patty Hearst documentary was much better, and you should point out that Patty Hearst did not participate — whether that was by her choice or the makers of the documentary, I don’t know. At first, I thought, “How could they do this?” But it works. As noted in an earlier conversation, the real message of this documentary is the Hearst story was the birth of “human interest” TV journalism, i.e., news entities covering a story to death under the guise of caring about a human being in trouble. The way the Hearst story was covered in the 70s serves as a blueprint for any overblown media story of the CNN/Fox/MSNBC age where we have these stories shoved down our throats 24-7 for weeks on end.
The killer for me was in the bonus footage seeing the son of a woman killed in one of the SLA’s botched armed robberies confronting his mother’s killers in court (Patty Hearst participated in that robbery, but somehow got excluded from criminal charges …) — that brings it all home. This poor woman, working some non-descript bank job to support her kids, gets killed because a bunch of armed buffoons think they’re going to start a revolution by doing … god knows what. Probably not much different from some waiter working in Windows of the World on 9/11, looking out the window, and having a very deep “What the Fuck” moment as the jet closes in on the World Trade Center.
These kids were terrorists — and it’s an interesting time-piece (I’ll give that much to the Weather Underground documentary) to see the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that took root in the late 60s and sputtered out in the 70s … as most of these people simply grew the fuck up.
My recollection of the Weather Underground doc did address 9/11 — there was one of the saner former members who made several comments about how one is so blindly dedicated to what one thinks is right that one is capable of justifying terrible violence. I took that to make a reference to current international terrorism. True, they didn’t get into the botched armored vehicle robbery and made it seem that all of their violence destroyed only property.
The documentary makers clearly think Patty got off scott-free. Which, of course, is a tribute to the defense attorneys that Hearst money can buy, coupled with her post-abduction celebrity.
The strange thing for me, ditto the Weather Underground film, is seeing all these former radicals as basically sane, adjusted adults. Computer consultants, teachers, small-business owners, etc. What no one seems to ask these people is how their lives have changed … why they no longer hold these highly-charged beliefs — and your beliefs must be highly-charged to blow shit up! Granted, just going through life, you can feel your beliefs change over time, but sooner or later, you must reach some point where you consciously choose to become a productive member of the system you tried to bring down.
I do have to credit both documentaries — it is fascinating to see how far out people went in the early 70s. “Come the revolution” was a popular statement at the time and for years afterwards — eventually, you said it ironically, because you knew that day wasn’t coming any time soon. There’s a good documentary to be made with former radicals in defining that point in their lives when they realized that and traded off.
You can read the book!
Jerry Rubin’s “Growing Up at 37” is out of print, but you can get used copies from Amazon for under five bucks. Read this in high school — it is all about the art of selling out, maaaaan