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September 12, 2006

Punishment Park

Unfree Radicals

By Andrew

Here it is the fifth anniversary of September 11th, 2001, and I'm thinking of the video store I work at, one of the few unmediated windows into the world I have these days. The store carries some sort of Kevin Costner-narrated patriotic number called On Native Soul, as well a handful of films more negative towards the Bush administration. Of all them, 9/11: In Plane Site, a conspiracy doc, is definitely the top renter.

Now, I don't know if there's anything to these 9/11 conspiracy theories. But frankly, I don't really care. Of course, it would be great to know what happened on that fateful day. It'd be great to know who killed Kennedy too. It'd be great to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth about a million and one political events in history. But even if I did know the truth about all of them, it wouldn't impact my own little world.

This is what bugs me most about the conspiracy theorists (and also anyone single-mindedly anti-Bush): so preoccupied with the machinations and motivations of the powerful, they forget what makes movements for social justice the most effective. Not speaking truth to power — as if power didn't know what it was doing, as Ward Churchill likes to smugly quip — but organizing people, building power. When political struggle becomes part of peoples' daily lives, and not, say, a congressional hearing on a television screen, that's when it becomes the most dangerous.¹ I can see how conspiracy theories contribute to a great deal of cynicism, but not much else.

Peter Watkins' 1971 film Punishment Park is not a conspiracy theory, but its premise teeters on the brink. Filmed in the wake of 1968, the shootings at Kent State, and all that, the movie is a simulated documentary depicting what many — especially young people — had feared America had become at the time, and what conspiracy jockies fear looms today: a fascist state. The film's footage inter-cuts between a citizen tribunal trying a string of politically conscious twenty-somethings for "subversive activity," and another group of young people struggling to survive the tribunal's favorite sentence: punishment park, a hellish three-day obstacle course and training ground for law enforcement officials found somewhere in the deserts of the American southwest.

Because I've grown tired of the impotent mixture of political cynicism and paranoia of conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios — a recipe for apathy if there ever was one — I dreaded Punisher Park would be nothing but a gloomy, glory rendition of repression. I feared that, like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, we'd be treated to a hyperbolic harangue overly focused on the latest fascism at the expense of resistance to oppression, the social movements that ebb and flow in our midst on a daily basis. Thankfully, I found a film whose premise lies equally in the political resistance of the Sixties as it does on political repression.

Much of this Peter Watkins' himself spells out in an introduction to the film appearing on New Yorker's DVD release. While many of the characters are modeled after real-life activists — in some cases, like the binding and gagging of a black militant ala Bobby Seale, quite obviously — Watkins apparently encouraged the young actors in the film to express their own opinions and views. This created an alternative media outlet for their radical ideas while at the same time testing the boundaries between documentary and fiction, much like Medium Cool had a few years prior.

In this way, Punishment Park is able to serve as an example, thirty years later, of the strengths and weaknesses of the political movement at the time, and a benchmark for movements today. The film is strong in demonstrating the institutional nature of oppression, and the ways in which repression is a reaction to resistance. In one scene, the tribunal takes offense at a young black militant's language, equating the hurt they feel at being called a "pig" with the oppression of racism. The militant quickly shoots back that the little power he has is in calling the tribunal bad names — and that the tribunal itself, all white and middle class with one important exception, will have to give up a whole lot more than their good names before anything truly changes. Soon after, the tribunal members take a lunch break, indulging their petty concerns to the camera over hamburgers and potato chips.

At other times, the concerns of the movement itself seem rather petty. When one hippie laments the police killed a young white kid "because they can't allow a poet to exist in this society," the absurdity of it illustrates how the white counterculture took itself too seriously. In another instance, another young white dude is brought before the tribunal for draft evasion, and in a doggedly stoic mumble, explains he who just wants to do "his own thing." Despite what Punishment Park suggests, these two dudes, white male poet loners — two poles of the Beat Generation prototype — were actually among the few to emerge from the Sixties as cultural victors. Which, in the big picture, really wasn't much of a victory at all, but more a recapitulation of everything America has always been, going back to Huck Finn and beyond: individualistic, irresponsible and eventually sold out. It would have been nice to see the film break from its fake documentary format in the final scene, to have the survivor's of the park don business suits in the manner of Yuppie-cum-stockbroker Jerry Rubin, marching off happy in the manner of Tim Robbins in Robert Altman's The Player - though I admit such a scene only seems appropriate because of the hindsight that the present affords.

Seeing Punishment Park today changes its meanings considerably, a fact that becomes especially evident when Watkins provides a short summary of critics' initial reactions to the film in his introduction. Many critics considered the picture a wild sadist's political dreams come true, ignoring — as coolly Watkins coolly observes — that much of what occurs on-screen in Punishment Park was happening in real life to the Vietnamese abroad and the Black Power and student movements at home, all at the hands of the American government.

With all these critics' talk of hard-to-watch, pain-inducing narrative — something I'm not a fan of — I tried to prepare myself to be uncomfortable and pissed off by Punishment Park. But the film's effect has clearly aged with time. I found Watkin's supposed sadism to be merely picking scabs compared to the "toilet-snake to the soul" cinema we know today, what with the likes of Von Trier and Asia Extreme². Perhaps it's that the "fake documentary" style has lost its Brechtian bite at the hands of Christopher Guest comedies and the Blair Witch bunch, I can't be sure.

While the visceral effect the film's violence once had on viewers may be lost, Punisher Park still has relevance today beyond historical significance. Watkins' introduction connects the dots to contemporary issues of repression, suggesting Gitmo and the PATRIOT Act among other things as possible analogies to the tribunals and punishment parks in the film. The comparisons are apt, certainly, but as I've said, I'm more interested in the resistance side of things — and thankfully the film comes through on this front as well. The credits of the film reveal what the narrative has already established: of the young people marching through the desert, some are "militants," some are "semi-militants," while others are "pacifists." When the law enforcement surrounding them increases the repression, each group decides to face it in a different way, and the result is intriguing.

Unfortunately, Watkins only takes this so far. By the final reel, he has subjected all these characters to a common fate. Though providing short vivid glimpses of a world outside, Punishment Park itself is trapped in a punishment park; its structure as a repressive fantasy ultimately muddies the film's greater intentions. Perhaps Watkin understands this; in the introduction, he critiques the film for adhering to the "monoform," though he never defines the term. No matter - not only does Punishment Park beat out Zabriskie Point as the best Sixties-counterculture-lost-in-the-desert movie, I'd also recommend it over a 9/11 conspiracy doc any day.

NOTES
¹ An entire strain of Marxist thought, "autonomous Marxism," is devoted to this idea. They consider most Marxist scholars to be far too concerned with capitalism's oppression , failing to recognize the "self-valorization," or self-organization, of the working class to resist capitalism. Now, I like the idea, they're a cool bunch of Marxists, and everything I've read by them has been intriguing. But ideologically speaking, I think anarchism has never had a need for a fancy qualifier like "autonomous" to prove its all about people organizing themselves.
²The toilet-snake quote is taken from a critic cited on the box of some Takashi Miike movie at my work.
³Though I'll admit I'm yet to see Roger Corman's post-apocalyptic hippie flick, Gas-s-s-s.

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