I hope the New Alliance Party movie is next

nodoilies got me out of the house to see "Guerrilla: The taking of Patty Hearst" at the film fest on Monday. A movie and a Slurpee were the perfect antidotes to the oppressive heat. Neither Nodoilies, nor San Francisco, nor I are built for this kind of weather.

The obvious comparison to this movie is the Weather Underground documentary that came out last year. Guerrilla is less thought-provoking, but has a lot more footage that I’d never seen. The quick version is that the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a vanguardist revolutionary group consisting of a handful of mostly middle class college kids and a Black man who had escaped from prison. Their first action was assassinating Oakland’s first Black Superintendent of Schools. Their second was kidnapping Patty Heart and demanding her father donate millions of dollars of food to the poor which he did. Patty Hearst then joins the revolutionaries, kinda, and there are bank robberies bombings and shootouts with police covered live on TV until all 15 or so of them are dead, in prison or in hiding.

Part of Guerrilla’s focus is on the way the media has changed since the ‘70s. TV crews camp out in the driveway of the Hearst’s mansion for weeks and interview the family seemingly at will. This was before the days of handlers and spin doctors and it shows, often painfully. For example, via tape recording, Patty Hearst denounces her fiancée, Stephen Weed, and tells him she has joined the revolution, is fucking one of the SLA members who kidnapped her, and then declares Weed to be sexist and ageist. Weed immediately steps outside and goes live in front of the cameras with the worst mustache in history and ad libs a response.

The movie did a good job of showing the SLA as excellent propagandists in their Patty Hearst kidnapping and demand for free food for the poor in exchange for her release. You can see why people assumed they were a bigger, more powerful organization than they were and for awhile everything went right for them. And then some of the clips are priceless too. Patty Hearst while still a captive says in a recording, "Mom, I’m not dead. Please stop wearing that black dress on TV."

And the weird thing is, that even though they were complete nuts* and had a ridiculous plan for revolution the only two members interviewed were much more likable than the Weather Underground folks were in their movie. Maybe the pressure was off. They certainly weren’t trying so hard to justify their actions. Michael Bortin became my new favorite wingnut New Leftist when he was trying to explain what it felt like after Patty Hearst announced she had joined the SLA, "It was indescribable. . . It was like … It was like 1981 when the Niners came from nowhere and won the Super Bowl" **

It was all I could do not to yell out "Forty Fuckin’ Niners!" in response. Seriously, how often does someone on the Left make an analogy that most people could understand?***

The film maker had a recurring theme that the SLA grew up on TV shows and were living out their Robin Hood fantasies that they could make everything right in the world by battling the bad guys. Sure. Maybe. OK. Whatever. After the fact, I can’t decide if it was his theme going in or if he went to one of those script helper people who look at your work and the make up a theme to tie it all together. If you’ve ever gone to a bad, re-worked one person show, you know what I mean.

Contextually, the film didn’t really tie in the SLA to other movements except to say that they came out of the desperation of activists giving up on the revolution. I don’t think they even mentioned the Weather Underground, except in a montage of press clippings.

The most disappointing part though was the soft ball approach to their assassination of Marcus Foster,. He was the first Black Superintendent of Schools in Oakland and as the SLA’s first public political act, SLA members ambushed and killed him. They never really gave an explanation for why they picked him, just a vague comment about making students carry IDs. Though a public official, his absence beyond the first few minutes underlines the way history is remembered. I know the movie isn’t subtitled, ‘The Killing of Marcus Foster". And certainly a super-rich heiress being kidnapped and turning revolutionary is a great story. It’s just kind of typical that the lesser crimes would overshadow the political assassination of a Black man by a group of mostly white revolutionaries.

Seeing these types of movies in the Bay Area is always fun too. After the movie I played spot-the-old-new-leftist and wondered who in the audience hid out Sara Jane Olsen back in the day. Then, while walking to my car, two women asked us what we thought of the movie. The weren’t impressed. They went to high school with Patty, they said, and the movie didn’t show her perspective enough.

I should also mention that the showing started with a completely exploitative short on gentrification called "Café 1996". First an old Jazz musician is interviewed about the Oakland neighborhood he lives in. Then a child reads a long definition of gentrification over shots of little houses and smiling or suffering people of color. The kid can’t quite say all the big words they’ve written for him, so they provide subtitles. Just terrible.



* I feel comfortable basing a diagnosis on their logo and the slogan "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people" alone.
**I wasn’t taking notes so the quote is approximate.
***OK, someone’s gonna give me crap for this. But it is my contention that in the Bay Area, most people would understand this, at least contextually. It is true that there are certain social gender determiners that will make this statement more approachable, in general, for men. Still, my point is that it sounds like something a regular person would say, not that someone got out of a textbook or an agitprop project. It certainly sounds nothing like "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people".