The Radical Story of Patty Hearst, is a six-part docuseries, the first episode airing last night. I have been intrigued by this story for a while, about the heiress daughter of William Randolph Hearst, who was abducted by a radical leftist organization, the SLA. She was kidnapped from her Berkeley home in February 1974, and after a couple months in captivity, the nation was appalled to see that she had changed her name to Tania and was now swearing allegiance to the very organization that had abducted her. The SLA, or Symbionese Liberation Army, were an unsophisticated yet highly motivated set of radicals and apparently the previously unpolitical Patty was swayed into believing their Marxist socialist theories. Within months of her kidnapping, she reappeared in surveillance footage wielding a automatic weapon in San Francisco, where she was helping the SLA rob a bank.
The reason this docuseries is fascinating is because this incident is so representative of the political turmoil brewing in Berkeley in the 70’s, as a result of the counter culture and its followers clashing with the Nixon and Reagan Republican ideals. Patty Hearst was an newspaper empire’s heiress, and therefore the epitome of what leftists believe was the problematic capitalist system combined with the media was doing to America’s poor and oppressed.
I recommend this docuseries, as it is a mystery whether Patty chose to become Tania, or whether, as many have suggested, she was suffering from Stockholm’s Syndrome. It includes interviews from her former fiance and even one of her abductors, and each have differing accounts of what led to Patty’s transformation. More interestingly, I think it is an interesting comment on the state of American society in the mid 70’s, and the unexpected power the SLA was able to attract because of their flare for dramatic symbolism.
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