Patty Hearst RevisitedIn a
new documentary.
"This was huge; it was the biggest story in the country - maybe even the world," says British-born documentarist Robert Stone, director of Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst. "It was like Paris Hilton getting kidnapped by Al Qaeda, turning to Islam and becoming a terrorist."That's an exaggeration; Patty Hearst was an unknown before she was kidnapped. However, it was an astonishing story that riveted the nation, especially after the twist where she joined her kidnappers in a bank robbery.
But it's hard to believe the filmmaker's claims of impartiality with statements like this:
"Out of all the groups, the SLA were the most interesting, the most off the wall and got most of the attention," says Stone. "They started out as political but morphed into this weird cult: there was this big incestuous sex thing going on and at one point they thought their fugitive black leader - Field Marshall Cinque - was the fifth prophet.
"But they were the ones who succeeded most. They made the FBI look like fools, they made Randolph Hearst grant them media access and give away millions of dollars worth of free food to the poor… and, lest we forget, there were only 12 of them.
"But I think the real lesson to be learnt is that the SLA were a perfect example of how not to go about changing the world," concludes Stone. "The way they went about things did more harm than good to any cause that they espoused."That strikes me as dangerously close to the formulation that "You may not agree with their methods, but at least their goals are just." Which is a bunch of crap. Stone (not Oliver by the way) accepts at face value the claims that the SLA never raped Patty:
"The treatment that she described is somewhat exaggerated," says Stone. "I do know she wasn't raped, as the SLA were run by right-on feminist lesbians who wouldn't have let that happen, although I would say she wasn't treated as well as the SLA like to remember either. It's kind of somewhere in between.Those "right-on feminist lesbians" didn't do much to save
Myrna Opsahl; in fact one of them shot and killed her.
