#not even mentioning the internal dialogue between the pacifists and the armed resistance within the dissenters

[steampunkforever]

Were you to pitch me on a film about a dystopian government taking a bunch of youthful political rebels to the desert and hunting them in organized challenges as they try to earn their freedom, I would say that I'm too old for YA novels. Except Punishment Park is decidedly not this, instead presenting us with a documentary-style political commentary on America and the encroaching Fascism of the 1970s.

If you've been reading these filmposts, you know my dislike of the soapbox and the use of art as a pulpit, political and otherwise. That said, sometimes when you make movies about politics you have to actually talk about politics. This can also be well done, just like in the 1971 political commentary film Punishment Park.

Punishment Park is all in all a properly bleak film. Shot in documentary style, it tackles the hippy fears of Nixon-era internment camps for counterculture figures. This same cultural anxiety can be found in Thomas Pynchon's book Vineland, except this time it's Reagan-era internment camps, and the traces of this anxiety have trickled down all the way into the FEMA Camp conspiracies of the 90s and onward. For as outlandish as those conspiracies may seem, just a couple decades prior to the release of this film we'd seen the US Government legislate, build, and forcibly round up and imprison Japanese Americans regardless of their guilt or association.

Which is to say that as the hippies saw the iron-fisted crackdown against the excesses (civil rights protests) of the flower children at the same time as the ongoing military draft was dumping the country's young men directly into a meatgrinder shaped like a failing imperial war, the prospect of getting tossed into a desert prison for "thinking different" was less of a YA Novel premise than it sounds today coming from your weird aunt who stays on facebook groups too much. A lot of stuff was happening back then, and all at once. Punishment Park reflects this political turmoil, and makes no attempt to hide the politics of what is an explicitly political film.

SO, what about this film makes overt political commentary OK while leaving Adam McKay's attempts in baby jail for "being too self-righteous with it?" My answer to this lies in the combination of the documentary storytelling of the film and the movie's use of the Socratic Method.

See, one of the main gripes about soapboxing in films focuses on the strawmen this sort of script-as-pulpit storytelling generates. For the otherwise perfect film that is First Reformed, the youth group scene's handling of the opposing viewpoint is jarring when compared to the nuance the rest of the film exhibits. Punishment Park skirts the bad-faith readings of the opposing ideology, and harnesses the documentary style to do it.

The movie is set in two parts, exchanging points of view as it hops between them. The first part is the action of the film, showcasing hippies in the desert running for freedom as the cops hunt them down, all of the captured by a team of foreign documentary filmmakers. The second part showcases prisoners in a kangaroo court of sorts as they are questioned by a board of Union reps, draft board members, and other community administrators in something half trial half Hayes Commission pt. 2. Enter the Socratic Method.

The desert section of the film stands well on its own. A minimal dialogue documentary style depiction of police brutality in a bitter commentary on jackboots serving The Man in what's basically Cop City: California. The interspersed trial footage brings to bear the overt commentary of the film. Punishment Park Vs America, facilitated through the board's interrogations of various counterculture prisoners.

The inquests held before sentencing provide us with the push and pull of ideas (intercut between desert scenes showcasing the output of said ideas) much like Magneto and Prof. X debate over a game of chess, but with significantly more oppressive power dynamics. This allows the film to present both sides of the argument bare faced, free of subtext. Pure clash of ideas, presented in a way too interesting to be preachy. It's organic, and nobody feels like a strawman.

Punishment Park pulls it off. The tirades against American Imperialism and police brutality in the film feel natural, unforced. The bad guys are presented as intelligent, rational people who are in fact supporting a fascist regime, and that makes things much more powerful. The Union Rep. and the Draft Board member are ordinary people, and the questions they pose to the prisoners awaiting the judgement of a sham trial are very much in tune with the culture of the time, as are the responses of the counterculture prisoners. It's a human film, and the humanity reaches out to even the inhumane cops killing hippies in the desert.

The best thing the film does is present us with the exchange of ideas. There is no fear of the other guys being right. Because they aren't, and any good ideological position should hold up against them. And they do, it just doesn't matter, because the system is rigged against them from the start, and no matter how much they rail against it the panel of concerned citizens sitting in judgement, the court will never judge in their favor.

It was never intended to.