Punishment Park

1971 social statement

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Pseudo-doc chronicling a group of counter-cultural anti-establishment troublemakers ranging from subversive folk singers to people who want to blow up government buildings as they are sentenced and given the option of jail time or a trip to Punishment Park where they have three days to run through a desert to reach an American flag while policemen chase them.

This is one of the most consistently realistic mock documentaries I've ever seen. There's no way this Punishment Park was even considered, let alone something that actually existed, but it's hard to watch this without being almost fooled that the government had set something up like this. A lot of the credit has to go to the actresses and actors--the hippies, the pigs, and the members of the tribunal. The desert setting also contributes, giving this a harsh realism. The story is tense, filled with bile and what looks to be actual hatred, both from the screaming maltreated hippies and the less-obvious government people whose loathing was a little more submerged. The complete lack of music, the handheld cameras, and what I think was probably largely-improvised dialogue also helped. As a metaphor, this at times delivers its message a little too forcefully, an allegory that could have been two pages but ended up as twenty. And I don't think the good guys in this always look like good guys. There's also a moment when the documentarians turn subjective (when documentarians attack) and I'm not exactly sure that was necessary. But this is a completely engrossing product of its time, one whose relevancy today is more than a little scary. Strong stuff, likely to offend a bunch of people, even people who might agree with the politics. But most hippies would love it, assuming they can afford dvd players to watch it on and could squeeze in some time to watch it between all their dope smoking and not bathing.