One of the better movies that i’ve seen in awhile. The film, shot like a documentary, takes place in 1970s America, where the Vietnam War wages and on a cultural schism has opened up between those that support the establishment and those that were against the war. What English filmmaker Watkins did was to add a pinch of dystopia to reality. In this alternate-universe USA, dissent has been criminalized and the establishment is even more heavy-handed in its tactics than history was itself. Watkins took the worst aspects of US political history and culture–and extrapolated from there. He took the torture and internment camps and created “Punishment Park”, a place where “criminals” (eg draft-dodgers, organizers, hippies, peaceniks, writers, artists) are taken and given a chance to go free.
Punishment Park is located in what appears to the be the Death Valley or Joshua Tree National Park area in southern CA. It’s scorching hot desert, and the criminals are told to find their way to some American flag about fifty miles away. If they reach there without getting caught, they can go free. If they are caught then they must serve the sentence they were originally handed.
The sentences they hare handed out are manifestly and quite exaggeratingly unjust: they are given 15-20 years, even life sentences, for their dissent. The “tribunal” they face is a kangaroo court, of course, though the senators and housewives and factory workers–who represent the status quo–seem to be genuinely baffled as to why the young people of the 60s are so maladjusted and misbehaved. They believe that these young people are inciting others to violence, for the dastardly purpose of overthrowing the US government.
It’s quite obvious where Watkins stands. He creates this dystopia for this very reason. But what is more interesting is how the psychologies of the characters show the rift in America. The tribunal members characterize the hippies as spoiled kids on the dole who would rather see America destroyed by her communist enemies from within and without rather than lift a finger to help. It’s quite similar, I think, to the cultural divide that we now dub “red” and “blue.” There are bien-pensants on both sides, there are slogans and shibboleths. The DVD was re-released recently and not surprisingly, some of the other commenters on the web have talked about how germane the film’s politics are in the Bush, Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay world. (
The film was released for only four days in the US before being pulled from theaters.)
A note on the role of the fourth estate: the film crew starts out by asking fairly basic and standard questions of both prisoners and police in Punishment Park (and briefly, of the tribunal members). After one of the policemen at the park is found dead, the policemen get riled up and aggressive, and as a result you get the typical police brutality scenario: threatened cop shoots first and asks questions later, innocent people die needlessly. ONe of the camera/sound guy gets held hostage and is killed by a sniper. The camera continues to roll as billy clubs and guns are used against the criminals. THe camera man is forced out of his moral Switzerland behind the camera: he begs the police to stop, he tries to communicate with the prisoners, and as the killings get more senseless, he protests more vehemently. Finally, he starts cursing the police and telling them that their deeds have been captured on camera for the whole world to see. The cops, at this point, shout back that they don’t care and that journalists just do it all for ratings and money.
I think this is quite interesting, because the question that I believe Watkins seeks to ask: when do those of us who have not yet taken a side have to take a side? Is it our moral obligation to do so?
What should we be doing as we see this drama unfold before our eyes.
Anyhow, I will quote, by way of conclusion, a passage from another short essay on the “Punishment Park”:
Where the hell are we? We’re in the highly radicalized, politicized, and deeply angry world of British filmmaker Peter Watkins, probably the greatest filmmaker that you’ve never heard of. Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) is his deepest incursion into the American psyche, and the centrality of violence in American political and social life. At the center of Watkins’s films is his foregrounding of style, and key to Watkins’s style is the borrowing of documentary tropes for his quasi-documentary fictions. Beginning with his stunning first two features, The Battle of Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), and continuing through his most recent work, the incomparable six-hour epic La Commune: Paris 1871 (2000), Watkins persistently draws attention to the films’ “reality,” which leads savvy viewers to see their patent lack of documentary truth, which in turn brings a realization of the films’ dedication to a truth deeper than documentary, reached through the false screen of doc mise-en-scène. Witness The War Game, where the combination of impassive narration and a verite-style camera reveal the unbearable reality of nuclear catastrophe better than a hundred On the Beaches could ever manage. Watkins is dedicated to two principles above all: returning the blood to the lifeless corpse of history and an uncontrollable need to speak truth to power.
I think the last sentence says it quite well.
