Patty Hearst's 'Guerrilla' Legacy

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted February 16, 2006.

"Mom? Dad? I'm with a combat unit that's armed with automatic weapons." -- Patty Hearst

"Even though this film is thoroughly immersed in the 1970s, I think it's a timeless story… and I wanted to create a documentary that would unfold like a political thriller and not be rooted solely in the past." Robert Stone's description of Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst -- newly released on DVD -- lays out its tensions acutely and evocatively. The film does bridge past and present, in sometimes eerie ways, tracing the initial marriage of terrorism and television, the connections between melodrama and news, sensationalism and ideology.

From its early moments -- a focus on the emblematic tape recorder by which Patty Hearst's saga was delivered to journalists amassed in her famous parents' driveway -- Guerrilla breaks down how terrorism becomes a function of its audience.

Combining interviews and archival footage (much unseen before this film), Stone shows the effects of Hearst's kidnapping on the self-image developed by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and vice versa. While founding SLA member Russ Little imagines himself a product of a childhood spent watching movie adventurers like Errol Flynn, Mike Bortin -- who became a member later, after many of the original members had been killed in the famously televised L.A. shootout, and still wears mutton chop sideburns -- links his involvement to his opposition to the war in Vietnam. (As Stone says in the DVD commentary, "Vietnam doesn't explain the SLA, but it does explain the environment in which this group came together.")

As the film reveals, the SLA first emerged into the "public consciousness" when they assassinated Marcus Foster, the (first African American) superintendent of Oakland's public schools. As notorious as the group became with this "appalling act that made no sense whatsoever" (so described by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tim Findley, the documentary's third primary interviewee), the Hearst kidnapping on 4 February 1974 made them worldwide.

As Stone describes it in his commentary, "This really was America's first encounter with modern, media-driven terrorism." (The DVD features terrific extras that elaborate on this process, including 53 minutes of Patty Hearst's tapes to her parents, plus seven minutes of the Hibernia Bank robbery and 27 minutes of Sacramento courtroom footage, when members were convicted of the shooting of Hibernia employees.)

While Guerrilla illustrates that the SLA imagined themselves as revolutionaries in the vein of Che Guevara or the kidnappers in Costa-Gavras' State of Siege, it also shows otherwise: they were searching for an identity and a coherent cause, influenced by what Stone calls "pop culture roots… They really loved movies." (He recalls that Hearst told him that the two films they took her to see while she was being indoctrinated were State of Siege and Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds.)

The white members were especially moved by the romance embodied by Cinque (born Donald DeFreeze), as "black prison inmates were the most oppressed of the oppressed." Radicalized in prison and then escaped, Cinque encouraged his followers to fight the "fascist pigs."

But, as Stone says, if the group begins as a political group, it transforms into a cult, referring to Cinque as "the fifth prophet," even as the police and Randolph Hearst "continue to deal with them as a real political threat."

This is connected to the melodrama of Patty Hearst, in the sense that her own transformation -- her immersion in the group and succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome -- was a public saga. When she speaks to her parents, saying, for instance, "Mom should get out of her black dress, that doesn't help at all," the intersections of tv and Hearst's own experience come flying to the forefront.

She's seen her mother on tv, or her captors have, and now they are orchestrating the spectacle. Stone's film includes no interviews with Patty Hearst, a decision he says in the commentary, is premised on his focus on her effects ("It's her enigma that makes her interesting").

Cynthia Fuchs is Popmatters' film and TV editor.

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