The much publicised kidnapping and coercion of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army is the focus of Schrader’s 1988 film, a critical look back at the protracted complex political choices that underpinned the counter culture of the 1970s. It is an unusual film to have emerged from 1980s Hollywood cinema and is also one of Schrader’s most political works. Reconnecting with the proletarianism of Blue Collar, Schrader examines how the will to adopt and maintain a political posture is riddled with a gamut of intersectional insincerities that are class and race related. Schrader treats the first part like an exercise in Brechtian tableau, imbuing the SLA with an ideological sincerity while sympathetically framing militancy as wholly reasonable given the wider inequalities.
At the core is Natasha Richardson’s gruelling performance as Hearst who conveys the right degrees of ambivalence to make one uncertain of her motivations and ideological beliefs. Much of the film deals with the assimilation of Hearst, brainwashed to join the group, suggesting the decorative nature of counter culture was simply a momentary allure to middle class white people wanting to interminably escape the system while indulging in faux acts of sexual and political liberation. However, the government’s brutal annihilation of the SLA, carried out with impunity by the police, critiques the gradual erasure of counter culture militancy as something unambiguously ideological; a benign cultural struggle for political discourse, mainstream lifestyles and conformity.
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