The public can sense when they're watching a symbolic tale of the age, especially when there is a young female figure at the centre, representing the soul of a nation, being competed-for by good and evil.
Here the symbolism is as stark as you can get. The heiress to one of the great American dynasties gets kidnapped, brainwashed and reduced to a helpless pawn in the hands of a group claiming to represent 'the will of the people' - supposedly meaning black people, though only one member of the original Symbionese Liberation Army is black. The rest are students from Berkeley, as Patty was, and the whole story is drenched in Californian hippie-talk. You can almost smell the drugs, as these ageing lefties recycle their lazy, dreamy philosophies, and (significantly) try to distance themselves, thirty years on, from the childish antics that surrounded the kidnap.
So, a 'General Field-Marshal' declares all black jailbirds to be political prisoners, though in another breath they have become prisoners-of-war, who need to be exchanged. This is called playing soldiers, though amazingly this rag-tag bunch is able to keep at bay thousands of police and troops for more than a year.
Meanwhile a dubious black preacher in multi-coloured robes has to be appointed as the neutral liaison man, but soon makes clear where his loyalties lie, with a speech that sounds like a send-up of over-emotive ghetto sermonising.
Perhaps most symbolic of all is the demand from the Army council that the Hearst fortune should be spent on 'feeding the poor of California', resulting in a chaotic distribution of groceries to huge, pressing crowds, with at least one person crushed to death. The sheer immaturity of the student-revolutionary mind is writ large in this drama. (One of the retired class-warriors admits he was inspired by the Robin Hood films.) We know, of course, that Patty lived happily ever after, marrying her bodyguard and mothering two children. Yet there is something unreal about her in these few short clips, as though something died inside her during her captivity. And many have noted the irony of her brief jail sentence, reduced to almost nothing, thanks to powerful family connections.
The final irony is that the protest-lobby of 1974/5 did actually have a few grains of justice on their side. After Vietnam (America's first-ever defeat) and Watergate, which made the president look both corrupt and incompetent, young people could not be expected to show the same instinctive regard for authority that their elders had. A more mature form of protest might have gained a willing audience from higher-up. But the Hearst kidnapping demonstrated that students are generally the wrong people to do the bossing, and should go back to their schoolbooks.
