That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst

By Rick Perlstein, The Nation. Posted January 19, 2009.

These were the questions, he demonstrates, that everyone was asking in the 1970s. Some will find certain of his examples too tendentious (Cindy Sherman's photo series Complete Untitled Film Stills felt that way to me); but some will find them quite brilliant and convincing. Consider the intellectuals: the '70s was the time when social thinkers and their students became increasingly conversant, and comfortable, with the idea that the ego was not master of its own house. Althusser, Foucault, Debord, Derrida and Robert Jay Lifton, one of Bailey's expert witnesses: all, in various ways and to various degrees, were dealing with the notion of the self not as a sovereign but as a subject, yoked to deterministic forces that made individual will seem more and more a fiction. We were all -- were we not -- victims of brainwashings of our own. "The understanding of addiction as a disease remained prevalent into the 1970s," Graebner points out in one of his fugues on the trial's relationship to its cultural context, "but by 1980 addicts were increasingly being held personally responsible for their plight, and 'she could even be you'" -- the slogan of a popular anti-Valium campaign -- "had morphed into Nancy Reagan's 'just say no.'"

By the time of his closing statement, Bailey realized that the trial was not going his way -- that his expert witnesses, with all their nuanced questions about who, after all, could be said to possess a "true" self, were utterly falling flat. Abruptly, Bailey shifted tack. He pleaded with the jury, "I am not really a flaming liberal" and admitted that he, too, had been angry at Hearst when she called her parents pigs. He began arguing in the same Perry Mason just-the-facts mode as the prosecution. He "revealed," Graebner concludes, "a great concern: that he might be arguing his case to the silent majority." And so he was. One juror, reflecting on the decision to convict, noted that Hearst's postcaptivity interest in radical feminist tracts like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, which she read under the SLA's sway during her captivity, was "more important than some things" in arriving at the verdict. The jury considered the intellectuals and their insistence on the limits of free will, and blanched; speaking for American culture as a whole, the jurors had tired of elite discourse's flirtation with the complexities of the protean, overdetermined self. Our national cult of self-made identities triumphed. Enough with the fashionable nonsense about vulnerable selves: people mean precisely what they say and do precisely what they intend to do.

The summer after Hearst's trial, Star Wars was released and immediately became a pop sensation. America now preferred its captives to be self-willed self-rescuers. Rambo would soon grace movie screens; Ronald Reagan would soon be president. And Patty Hearst would go to jail, a harbinger of our new age of "personal responsibility." What was a captive supposed to do? The jury decided: she was supposed to just say no.

See more stories tagged with: patty hearst, sla

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »