Punishment Park

On the recommendation of housemates plus David Carr, who reviews the film in the latest Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, I finally watched “Punishment Park” tonight. This is one seriously underrated flick!

Released in 1971, this mock documentary by British director Peter Watkins perfectly captures the whole bad trip of post-Kent- and Jackson State dissent in the US as experienced in the heads of many participants, and sometimes with their bodies. Although the scenario is fictitious – alleged and real dissenters have been rounded up, tried in military tribunals and offered either lengthy sentences or a three-day run through the no-win “Punishment Park” in the high desert, without food and water while pursued by government swine – the picture of the social, political and mental climate of these times strikes me as accurate. Everything has been reduced to momentary evasion, to ridiculous attempts at survival, to perhaps vigorous mouthing off in protest or even violence more desperate than strategic, but there seems to be no real solution to the massive power of those with the guns and in command. At least one person before the tribunal, of course, gets offered amnesty if she agrees to sever all ties to vaguely-defined “subversion” (and honorably and perhaps stupidly doesn’t go with the choice.) For the rest, whether they tend towards pacifism or militant bloodshed, and whatever the degree of their illusions, it’s punishment. They even become functional for the system as “counter-insurgency” training material. The scenario makes for gripping and uneasy watching. Plot spoiler: people die.

Given that the times don’t seem all that groovy at this very moment – and that we’re again dealing with the question of rollback and repression – the DVD reissue of this movie, which was under-rated when not reviled upon initial release, couldn’t have come at a better time.

One last note: after watching this movie, I checked online and read a few reviews. The ideological racketeers at the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) utterly miss the point of the movie. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising - they evidently leave their Trotskyite blinkers on even when viewing films. The moron responsible for the WSWS review, Clare Hurley, states, “the [movie’s] structure is unduly repetitive.” Yet it is precisely by repetition – by case after rigged case, by non-communication after non-communication, with all the torture that accrues in such situations (as there is no question of Truth, simply of truth-power, and the powerless are identifiable precisely by their “incoherence”) – that the movie resonates with the viewer. Hurley concludes that the movie displays “no real understanding of the actual driving forces behind the government’s resort to police-state measures.” Presumably these “actual driving forces” can be derived from crude Marxism’s base / superstructure differentiations and a concomitant reduction of the social to political/economic “progress.” In fact, the movie shows a better understanding than its imbecile reviewer, who fails to understand the constant interweaving of the “subjective” and the “objective” in our world. This is not to say that the movie doesn’t have problems – Carr’s review for Anarchy: AJODA is un-blinkered and points to some of these – but that it at least poses the fundamental question. It doesn’t ask us how to play the power/punishment/politics game, but broaches the topic of how to get it out of our lives once and for all. Wretched times call for unfailingly creative thinking; “Punishment Park” may still provoke some.