Patty vs. Tania

When you remember something, you don't remember the thing itself---you just remember the last time you remembered it.---John Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead.

I'm not as old as I sometimes pretend to be here, nor am I as young as I sometimes hope folks will think.  ("Folks" being those of my readers named Gwyneth, Uma, Maggie, or Anne.)  What I am is about the right age to remember the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the great national melodrama that followed.  And you know what?

I don't remember it.

Not really. 

What I think I remember is Shana Alexander's book, Anyone's Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst, which I read sometime during the Clinton Administration and which I liked, although I don't know how good or accurate an account it is.  But in reading the book I probably replaced all my own memories of what I read and saw on TV in 1974, '75, and '76 with what Alexander reported and I read in 1996.  All this is just to say that I remember if I thought or if anyone I knew thought she was "guilty" of the crimes she was forced by her kidnappers to take part in.

All I know is that at least since reading Anyone's Daughter I haven't thought she was guilty of anything except surviving and that I can't believe that anyone could have believed she was.

But they did.  Probably plenty of people still do.

It never fails to amaze me every time I'm reminded of it that Patty Hearst was not rescued, she was caught.

After the shootout in LA in which most of the members of the gang that had kidnapped her---the self-styled "revolutionary" Symbionese Liberation Army---died, Hearst didn't go running to the police or back home to her parents.  She went on the lam.

Not necessarily surprising since it had been a long time since the Law had stopped treating her as a victim and started hunting her as one of the gang and the LA Police had just shown they didn't care if they brought her in alive---they had good reason to think she was in the house they'd just shot up and burned to ashes along with everyone in it.

Hearst might have had good reason to believe she was safer running away from the cops than she'd have been trying to go to them for help.

But what Patty Hearst thought at the time is the great mystery at the center of her story.  Her contention, at least her lawyer's contention, is that she wasn't thinking anything at the time.  It was as if other people were doing her thinking for her.  She'd been brainwashed.  That's a way of saying that Patty Hearst had been washed away and someone, a criminal pretending to be a revolutionary calling herself Tania, had been put in her place.

The jury didn't buy it.

Hearst was caught, arrested, tried, and convicted.  She went to jail.  And now that strikes me as crazy.  It's as if she was found guilty of being her own kidnapper.   It seems so obvious that she was brainwashed or that she'd had some sort of psychotic break while her kidnappers held her---and tortured her---that I'm  astounded anyone ever thought that she had willingly joined the gang, let alone been in on the plan to have herself kidnapped and held for ransom.  But believe it they did.

And I might have too.  There was this to consider.

Hearst remained on the run for almost a year after the shoot-out.  She was with the two remaining members of the gang who apparently let her come and go as she pleased.  She was alone when she was arrested.

Why hadn't she "escaped" long before?

Now we know that she was tortured for weeks after the gang kidnapped her.  We know that their preferred method of torture was rape.  We also know things we may not have known then, things about the effects of torture, imprisonment, isolation, trauma, terror, on the human mind and spirit.  We now know how likely it was that Patty Hearst did snap.  We know that she could have been so terrorized and traumatized by what was done to her that she believed that the gang could do whatever they wanted to her, whenever they wanted, wherever she was, and so there was no point in even trying to get away, even after most of them were dead.  Yes, she stayed on the run for a year, but why hadn't she been caught long before that?  Why hadn't she been rescued?  Why hadn't her ultra-rich and influential parents been able to save her?  Had they really tried?  Did they really want her back?  Why hadn't the FBI or the police been able to find her?  The SLA wasn't a chapter of Mensa.  How were they able to elude the best law enforcement agencies in the world, unless those agencies weren't really trying to catch them.

Now we know how despair, depression, fear can wear down the strongest wills, break the most seemingly indomitable spirits.  Seems to me it's something we should have known then too.  But did we?

Do we?

We know this stuff.  But do we believe it?  Do we want to?  If something like what happened to Patty Hearst happened now, would a jury accept that a person could be one self one day and a completely different self the next?  Would a contemporary jury be any more willing to face the fact that we are not in as much control of who we are as we like think?

According to Shana Alexander, the jury who convicted Patty Hearst of bank robbery didn't want to send her to jail.  They thought she was guilty but they didn't want to hold her accountable.  What they wanted was for Patty to confess and express remorse.  What they wanted was for her to say what they wanted to believe about what had happened to her.  That she had been herself the whole time.  That she had been in her right mind.  That she had acted rationally, even if she was acting out of a rational fear for her life.

They were even willing to forgive her for joining the gang and for taking part in the robbery, which left one person dead, by the way, if only she'd admitted that she had made the decisions to do so.  They were willing to accept that she had been foolish, dumb, coldly calculating, scared to death, even childish to the point of doing everything she did to get back at her parents for whatever reason she might have to want to get back at them.

They wanted to hear that she'd had control over what she'd done and over who she was.

They didn't want to hear that she'd been brainwashed, which was the defense her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, relied on. 

In a review in the Atlantic of a forthcoming book about the kidnapping and trial and their cultural import, Patty's Got A Gun, Caitlin Flanagan reports that it was evidence that Patty had seemingly fallen in love with one of the gang members who'd raped her that turned the jury against her.

They felt that no amount of brainwashing could have done that to her, made her love her rapist.  No matter what else she might have been compelled to do she could not have been so perverse.  Seems to me that the jurors were being perverse and using the most telling evidence that she had been brainwashed, or so traumatized that she was no longer thinking or feeling like her old self, as evidence that she hadn't been.  But the jury appears to have thought that her old self, her true self, could not have been changed, erased, fooled, or incapacitated to the point that it couldn't assert itself and reject that!  They believed that there was a limit to how thoroughly a person could be brainwashed and so either Patty was lying about having been raped or she hadn't really minded it.

To the jurors' credit, I guess, they decided she was lying.

What's clear is that jury thought Patty Hearst had an old self, and that this was her true self, and that that self could not be made to stop being itself.

It's not clear if they thought that her old self, her true self, was a criminal self, that the good Catholic girl and dutiful daughter she'd appeared to be before she was kidnapped was an act.  If you believe that we are who we are, that our self is what it is from birth to death, and that when it appears that someone has changed, that they are not the person, the self, that they'd been, then what has happened isn't really a change but a revelation.  The true them has decided to show itself for what it really was all along.  The seemingly bad man who does a great good deed is showing that he's really a good man.  The seemingly heroic one who suddenly collapses in fear and tears is showing himself up as the coward he's always been inside.   This is the stuff of melodrama.  But it's also a way of looking at human nature that I believe has some validity.  People don't change, their circumstances do, and having to react to something we've never had to react to before can make us appear to be a different sort of person.

The question is how to look at this apparent change.  Did we change our behavior to fit the circumstances, or did the circumstances change us to fit them?  Who or what is in control of who we are?  Ourselves or fate?

In Patty Hearst's case, the jury apparently decided that we are in control.

I hadn't started keeping notebooks yet back then and have no record of what I was thinking about Patty Hearst at the time, and I can't find any reference to Anyone's Daughter in my notebooks from twelve years ago, so I don't know if what I thought was changed by what I read twenty years later.   My guess is that it was.  My sense is that it wasn't.  My sense of who I was in 1974 is that I was pretty much like who I am now.  Which is ridiculous.  But that's the way we are, I think.  We can't remember ourselves.  We have a hard enough time remembering what we did.  In fact, we often don't, and I don't mean just that we forget things we did.  I mean that we remember doing things we didn't.  Memories are tricky things.  Some of them are actually tricks.  We can be fooled into thinking that something that was told to us happened to us.  The fooling can be done by ourselves, or it can be done from without.

And how do we know we are who we are if we are remembering ourselves all wrong?

The fact that memory is unreliable doesn't prove that there is no real us to remember.  But it is worryingly suggestive.  If all we have to go on is our memories of what we felt, what we thought, what we did before, and those memories can be changed, edited, added to, subtracted from, erased, simply forgotten, then it is possible that our self can be changed, edited, added to, subtracted from, erased, or simply forgotten too.   If I can be made to remember myself as a different kind of person than I "am," won't I start acting like that different kind of person and cease to be what I "am"?  If I am what I am and that's all that I am but what I am is only what I think I am that am I?

There'd seem to be a physical limit to our ability to stop being ourselves.  I don't like beets and I don't like anybody who does.  But the fact is that I haven't eaten beets since I was one or two.  One of my earliest memories is of being in a high chair in a restaurant and throwing the beets on my tray onto the floor in disgust.  I've refused to touch beets ever since.  But what if I could be persuaded that that never happened?  What if I forget that it did?  What if I could be made to "remember" that I like beets and someone served me some?  I might try them.  And if my taste buds haven't changed that much I might spit them right out.  We are bodies as well as minds---some might say we are bodies, period, mind being a biological effect.

Which means that an assault on the body can be an assault on the mind.  A shock to the body is a shock to the mind.  Change the body, change the mind.  We have a name for effect of this.  Post-traumatic stress.  I don't think people called it that in 1976 when Patty Hearst went on trial, but people knew it happened.  Patty Hearst's body had been brutally assaulted.  But the jury refused to believe that that assault resulted in a change in her mind.  They preferred to believe that the assault hadn't happened or that it hadn't been that awful.  Why?

Probably because they didn't want to admit that it could have happened to them.

George Will saw what happened to Patty Hearst as proving what had already been proven in the prisons and torture chambers of the Soviet Union, that the self is a very fragile thing.  The self can be broken and broken to pieces that, if they can be reassembled, can be reassembled into a completely different self.

I think this is something we'd rather not have to know about our selves, that we could stop having one, a self, and that it wouldn't take much to take it away from us.  I think this is a scarier thought than the fact that we will die.  It is the theme of all the great horror stories.  What passes for horror these days is just a fear of bloody death.  But in works like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, The Wolfman, the fear that they inspire is the fear of the total loss of self.  We are only barely in control of who we are, these stories and movies tell us.  We are only barely who we think we are.

The story of Patty Hearst is a horror story and I think it scared the jury.

Patty's Got A Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner is available for pre-order from Amazon.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

It would be fun to talk to the jurors today to see if they suffered any PTS from having to sit in judgment over issues that were so terrifying. The average citizen is ill prepared to make decisions of such moment. I imagine the experience changed their "selves" irrevocably.

[sbgypsy]

I remember there was enough of "don't let the rich girl get away with it" going on to make it expedient to call her guilty.

[Juno]

I was 5 in 1975, so all my ideas about Patty Hearst have been picked up on the way sort of peripherally. But I was surprised by what you wrote. In my head I assumed, in so much as I thought about it at all, that of course she was so broken by what she was subjected to that she became what ever was necessary to survive. But that's a adult perspective.
I remember when the Menedez brother's were on trial - which was when? - talking to my dad about it. I remember being unable to accept the idea that murder was their choice, even if abuse was at the root of the trouble.
Like, couldn't they just report it and leave?

Which is a very, very black and white and immature attitude, that yes, comes from not being able to bear the idea that torture of whatever kind couldn't be ended so simply.

And know I can't remember if it was really my dad I was talking to, or if it was just LIKELY to have been my dad, or if there were more than one conversation. But I would call the memory true, even if it isn't accurate. It's fuzzy territory of course, memory and truth, but words and rhetoric are just as slippery when is comes such things. We have to find some kind of feeling of solid ground in a land of indeterminacy in order to survive and thrive, and conceptualize terrible things as well as beautiful ones.

[Ruth]

Having practiced criminal law for about 20 years, I've seen that questions about situational ethics in cases- such as captor scenarios - or when people are faced with survival issues, are particularly hard to defend. The concept of the victim, the one who is wronged is quite narrow for juries if the victim looks like an aggressor and steps out of role. It's true in our legal system that some people faced with decisions and choices they should not "have to make" (Sophie's choice scenario) find themselves defined or judged by others under the same standards applied to the norm. I think our legal system would benefit from a broader understanding of these issues, even in terms of jury instructions, not necessarily to exempt people from consequences for their actions, but to better align consequences with true culpability.

[Dave the H.]

I got "Gwyneth (Paltrow), Uma (Thurman), Maggie (Gyllenhaal)"

But who is "Ann"?

[Rana]

I don't like beets and I don't like anybody who does.

Awww... *goes off to eat beets by herself in a corner*

[Queequeg]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That's the scariest of this genre of movies. Unlike the Wolfman or Mr. Hyde, the people in Body Snatchers didn't look different. They merely acted differently. It's like they were brainwashed by those pods.

You can't divorce these terrifying transformations from betrayal. In fact, they are the same thing: transformation as betrayal. Who can forget the betrayal in the last shot of the original version of Body Snatchers? Patricia Hearst was transformed into Tania and thus betrayed Steven Weed and her parents.

In this way, every child betrays his or her parents; every husband betrays his wife and vice versa. Every body betrays itself as it ages. Goddam thing can't ride as fast on a bike as it could six years ago!

Transformation as betrayal. We want to deny it, to push it away. We don't want to acknowledge that we could betray others and ourselves as much as Patricia Hearst did. She had to be convicted. Another verdict would have been an admission that we're all vulnerable to a Hearst-style betrayal.

[iamcoyote]

Hey Rana, I like beets. I'll join ya!

Great essay. Thanks so much. I was 14 at the time, and since I loved old movies and baseball, I was around a tv a lot. I remember Patty Hearst, and Tania, and being confused at the transformation, but I'd been reading Dickens and Bronte and Hitchcock. I knew from different selves. Plus, my sister was just showing the first signs of schizophrenia at the time, so the "self" being fluid was already shaking my world. Pretty dang scary for a young girl - I remember being instinctively sympathetic to Hearst even though my parents leaned the other way. I hadn't known about the torture until just now. I was very innocent back then, and I hadn't really thought about those details as an adult, so it's like re-remembering something with a vastly enhanced context. Funny thing, memory.

It occurs to me, though, that there is a socially acceptable way the transformation can be made - alcoholism. Drug addiction, to a lesser extent, maybe. But as you say, the acceptance of guilt and the public atonement ritual are demanded to assure the rest of us that one is back to the old self, and that addicted self is gone.

And I second the "who's Ann?" Ann Bancroft? Anne Hathaway? Annie Lennox?

[jasmine]

see, if ure rich and stuff but u got nothing to hold onto and see the privelage and hypocrisy within all that emptiness, then maybe u can go beyond stockholm syndrome bonding and really want to belong to something like the SLA. I don't blame brainwashing, i blame emotional deprivtation and the emptiness of matierialsm as well as Patti's own super white guilt trip angst.
People do crazy stuff cos of emotional deprivation and i knew many girls from me own culture who are now Pro hardline Islamist and have gone hijabi, cos it gives an identity without having to work out who they really are, cos when ure unhappy and hurting,anything that seems to be a salve on ure suffering inside is welcomed as liberation.

[jasmine]

Huh, no way, iamcoyote is not me name, how come?
Me name is Jasmine and I put that comment up top no one else, I wrote it. I want me OWN name by me comment thanks.

[jasmine]

"The self can be broken and broken to pieces that, if they can be reassembled, can be reassembled into a completely different self."
Lance

This post raises so many questions i could write for pages. Who are we? Often, it is defined by fear alone, yes, even what we believe.
Family, society, friends, me religion, me culture, being dragged from school in the UK at age 11 and taken to a medieval country, so much stress and in the end u just decide, ok, I'll be whoever they want me to be then, do whatever they want, believe what ever they believe. And even after all that i still got trashed and for all those efforts to please everyone, i just succeeeded in tearing meself apart, and when u try to put all the bits back, u just get three girls in one head.

[Brian]

You owe it to yourself to try some beets -- if for no other reason than a further exploration of your self.

[actor212]

The Hearst kidnapping, and the Tania films were the first time I became aware of the term "Stockholm Syndrome," so I was acutely aware of the Hearst tale from the get-go (Lance, it sounds like you and I are close in age. I just turned fifty in December).

I remember being shocked by her transformation from rich sheltered white girl to gun-totin' anarchist (despite the fact it was clear in many of the surveillance tapes from banks and the like that she was as much a victim as the bank tellers).

I also remember that much speculation was made about F Lee Bailey's demeanor during the trial: while his evidence of brainwashing was particularly strong, he never was able to sell the jury on the connection between the rapes and the mind-alteration, and gave one of the weakest closing arguments he'd ever given.

Indeeed, Hearst herself thought he was drunk. He spilled an entire glass of water on his lap while giving it.

Your exploration of "memory = us" is an intriguing one. I'd argue that, indeed, the fact that our memory changes over time is precisely to be expected, because memory is not like a card catalog: once filed, it cannot be changed, and only contains fact and detail to help you find it.

No, memory is far more holistic, three dimensional, and emotional. Memories live within us, almost tangibly. As an actor, I have to rely on that truth, that I can draw on my memories of an event in order to color my emotional palette for a scene I'm performing (yup! Method!)

It is this emotional context to memory that makes "sworn testimony" at a trial so iffy and unreliable. It is the very essence of Rashomon, and moreover, is why police are trained to ignore the emotional response to a situation as best as possible.

Emotions don't cloud memories, to be sure. You remember all the facts.

What emotions do, however, is shade how we relate to those facts and how we relate those facts to others.

There's the rub of "memory".

[jasmine]

ok, sorry, me name's in the right place, it comes below the comment on this blog, not above it. Sorry, i see stuff very rigidly sometimes

[voxpoptart]

Excellent piece, Lance, thoughtful and moving, except for the kids-these-days touch near the end, about how modern horror is only about bloody death. The most successful horror TV shows of our time, Buffy and Angel, put the fear of turning into something horrible at the center of their cosmos, playing with its implications in dozens of ways. The most successful modern horror writer, Stephen King, has loss-of-self running through Christine, Pet Sematary, the Tommyknockers, Insomnia, Needful Things, and probably plenty of others I'm not thinking of.

People also flock to Saw, the Tales from the Crypt of our hi-tech era. But I don't think it's time to update Sturgeon's Law and insist that 94% of everything is now dreck, either.