I Know That Girl

Nixon Era Idea of Social Justice.

5/26/05


The other day, the PBS series American Experience, presented the documentary film, Guerilla, The Taking of Patty Hearst(2004). This was one riveting movie.

For those of you who don’t know, Patty Hearst, the teenage heiress to the newspaper empire, in 1974 was kidnapped by a bunch of left wing radicals calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). What started out as an act of barbarism took a turn for the surreal when, two months later, Patty officially joined her captors and renamed herself “Tanya.” What followed was an odyssey of bank robberies and audio recordings of political ranting which came to an end in 1975 with the very violent public storming of the group’s hideout in Los Angeles, leaving pretty much all of the SLA’s members dead. Hearst was captured alive not that long afterward.

With her family being politically connected and filthy rich, the Hearsts were able to hire big shot lawyer F Lee Bailey who, after a sensational controversial trial, was able to secure a five year sentence for his client by using the “Stockholm Syndrome” defense. She was released after serving barely two years and immediately returned to her sheltered pre-kidnapping debutante lifestyle as if nothing ever happened.

Every once in awhile you can catch her on Page Six or playing some campy character in some cheap movie on the any number of toilet channels digital cable has to offer.

The film shows these events through interviews with key witnesses, the authentic audio tape of Hearst talking about “pigs,” “injustice” and denouncing her family as murderers. But, most effectively, the filmmakers make use of the actual bank surveillance camera footage from the robbery that clearly shows Patty Hearst, still considered a “victim” at the time, yelling at customers and wielding an automatic weapon with authority.

The grainy black and white footage of the robbery is presented at length and with no music or commentary. With the stop-action feel of the staggered images, the figures’ movements seem otherworldly and combined with the dated seventies fashions, an ominous eerie sensation overpowers the viewer.

The whole incident is a perfect representation of that time. That period in American culture when the optimism of the 1960s Hippy movement was slowly crushed by the traumas of Kent State, the Oil Crisis, Cambodia and Watergate leaving an atmosphere of hangover and an American public, told to question anything and everything, not knowing where to turn.

Our social evolution was at a watershed moment and the more it changed the more dissatisfied some people became. Violent, domestic terrorism, wrapped in the flag of freedom and equality, emanated primarily from the left.

All of these factors created the Reagan years where his famous slogan, “It’s morning in America again,” not so covertly, suggested we would be better off forgetting the 1960s and turning back the clock to a world of racial oppression, materialistic gluttony, sexual repression and intellectual conformity. A time when, “THEY knew their place.”

After viewing the documentary, it is clear that Patty Hearst was a sheltered, pampered heiress who thought it was a “hoot,” manipulating the media and getting publicity for behaving outrageously. She was the original Paris Hilton.

The more things change...

What I find interesting is that 30 years ago, Patty Hearst felt that to be a player, she had to join some ultra-fringe, left wing militant group that purported purpose was to “bring down the unjust system and have a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth,” while Paris thinks the way to go is self produced porn tapes.

Sign of the times I guess.
Sixth Army