Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

I saw this at the Florida Film Festival and was quite blown away. Taken with the Oscar-nominated doc The Weather Underground, both movies present a jaw-dropping look at just how tumultuous those times were, especially for someone who didn't live through them, like myself. It's amazing to see how far young, well-educated, mostly white kids were willing to go to prove their points about race, money and war. Archival footage, especially that of the harrowing shootout in Los Angeles that was broadcast live on the air, shows you an America that is almost unrecognizable to us. The ending, which juxtaposes images of media-darling Patty with the rest of the SLA either in jail or long-since dead, is truly stunning.

Sorry to say, this film suffers in comparison with the extraordinary WEATHER UNDERGROUND, which managed to become an unexpected commercial success, largely on the strength of meticulous film-making which not only recounted the history, but also captured context and diverse commentary on the events, times and people central to its' story. It was a film that - in many ways - raised the bar on recent-historical documentary film-making.

Alas, GUERRILLA is a far more pedestrian affair, mostly a compendium of archival footage (much of which is fascinating), with precious little digging into context - the fragmentation of the American left during the early 70s, the rise of underground radicalism (Weathermen, PLO, IRA, Red Brigade, et. al.), the post-60s decline of many major American cities (and the rising despair that ultimately fueled the crack wars of the 80s/90s and the riots that hit Miami and Los Angeles). Each of these elements are of some relevance to what's being presented in this documentary - the SLA were weirder and wiggier than most, mixing their Mao and inner-city blues with a big dose of dadaist strangeness, but they didn't just materialize out of the ether, and - in keeping the focus too tightly on the events and the group, this doc plays the history out as some ultra-violent theatre-of-the-absurd, in real life; a sort-of weird-sploitative pigs-vs-the-people melodrama.

This does a great disservice to history - through this film, Patti Hearst remains an enigma, with a great many class issues, psychological issues (post-traumatic stress, or the Stockholm syndrome) barely touched upon. The other surviving members of the SLA get plenty of screen time (unlike Hearst, who I assume didn't want to be involved), but the many interviews presented don't really seem to dig into anything deeper than who-did-what.

GUERRILLA isn't a total failure by a long shot; anyone with any memory of the 70s knows how weird the story seemed to be, and the recounting of it seen here is definitely captivating; the strangeness, chaos and confusion of the era doesn't feel very distant at all. But I also recall something else: back in the late 80s, the rock band Camper Van Beethoven recorded a snappy, satirical homage to Patty Hearst, entitled "Tania." In three-and-a-half minutes, I think they might have outdone this 90-minute documentary. Oh well.

There are so many excellent documentaries being made these days. This another example.

What is so striking about this story is how far people were willing to go to complain about racism and poverty. What's more, many people were willing to support them. One Berkley student, Popeye, makes the most telling statement when he says how sad it is that the likes of the SLA are required to make people act to stop poverty in the US.

Even more disturbing is that no-one would dare even think like this now. They would be branded unpatriotic terrorists. What this doco and see how freedom of speech and thought has been eroded and how the popular media is now just a puppet of the government and big business interests.

It is also incredibly ironic. Patty Hearst joined the SLA in their fight against racism and poverty. As soon as she was captured she was let out within months and Clinton gave her a full pardon. Compare that to those people without money and a powerful family - they went to jail for years. When push comes to shove, money and power will keep you out of jail whilst others involved in EXACTLY the same event go down for 8 years! Where are the SLA when you need them ... ;)

The public can sense when they're watching a symbolic tale of the age, especially when there is a young female figure at the centre, representing the soul of a nation, being competed-for by good and evil.

Here the symbolism is as stark as you can get. The heiress to one of the great American dynasties gets kidnapped, brainwashed and reduced to a helpless pawn in the hands of a group claiming to represent 'the will of the people' - supposedly meaning black people, though only one member of the original Symbionese Liberation Army is black. The rest are students from Berkeley, as Patty was, and the whole story is drenched in Californian hippie-talk. You can almost smell the drugs, as these ageing lefties recycle their lazy, dreamy philosophies, and (significantly) try to distance themselves, thirty years on, from the childish antics that surrounded the kidnap.

So, a 'General Field-Marshal' declares all black jailbirds to be political prisoners, though in another breath they have become prisoners-of-war, who need to be exchanged. This is called playing soldiers, though amazingly this rag-tag bunch is able to keep at bay thousands of police and troops for more than a year.

Meanwhile a dubious black preacher in multi-coloured robes has to be appointed as the neutral liaison man, but soon makes clear where his loyalties lie, with a speech that sounds like a send-up of over-emotive ghetto sermonising.

Perhaps most symbolic of all is the demand from the Army council that the Hearst fortune should be spent on 'feeding the poor of California', resulting in a chaotic distribution of groceries to huge, pressing crowds, with at least one person crushed to death. The sheer immaturity of the student-revolutionary mind is writ large in this drama. (One of the retired class-warriors admits he was inspired by the Robin Hood films.) We know, of course, that Patty lived happily ever after, marrying her bodyguard and mothering two children. Yet there is something unreal about her in these few short clips, as though something died inside her during her captivity. And many have noted the irony of her brief jail sentence, reduced to almost nothing, thanks to powerful family connections.

The final irony is that the protest-lobby of 1974/5 did actually have a few grains of justice on their side. After Vietnam (America's first-ever defeat) and Watergate, which made the president look both corrupt and incompetent, young people could not be expected to show the same instinctive regard for authority that their elders had. A more mature form of protest might have gained a willing audience from higher-up. But the Hearst kidnapping demonstrated that students are generally the wrong people to do the bossing, and should go back to their schoolbooks.

to watch this documentary and not have clear answers. The documentary leaves you with a confusion answer, I guess if I'm understanding right that's what was left for people in the 60's and 70's and still today? And I'd say the confusion is what happened to Patty Hearst and what was the mindset of the SLA. Both things we don't see.. It's also hard to understand from the interview's what the Interviewers roles are in the TOTAL picture, this I think this can effectively be blamed on the documentary makers.

One thing this story does recant is human stupidity, which is a age old tale that is endless and never ceases and ironically re-occurs a lot.