Patty Hearst

I wrote this in 2005. The friend I mention, Natalie, has just gone on a 6 month(or longer) round the world trip.

Met a friend I’ve known since secondary school on Sunday by chance and subsequently we ended up wandering round Glasgow city centre with the intention of going to see Kung Fu Hustle. Unfortunately none of the cineplexes were showing it then and wouldn’t be for at least a good few hours or so. Since we both still wanted to see a film we decided to go to the Glasgow Film Theatre, which is usually the place to catch foreign subtitled arty films in Glasgow. We didn’t have much of a choice about what to see since only one film was playing: a film documentary about Patty Hearst, her kidnapping by the Simbionese Liberation Army and her subsequent apparent contraction of Stockholm syndrome. I enjoyed seeing the texture of the grainy newsreel footage stretched onto a large cinema screen as well the former members of the SLA once fresh faced revolutionaries now serious middle aged men with profound lined faces and even profounder facial hair. Most startling of all, for me anyway, was how beautiful Patty Hearst had looked posing in her beret with a machine gun. Contrast this with Patty in the early 90s on personality free-zone blonde TV presenter Gaby Roslin’s short lived interview show, all shoulder pads, big hair, and power dressing, she even crossed her legs and leaned forward like she’d been practising for hours. At this point she came across like a robot, like a pretty outer shell that had completely overwhelmed what little authenticity there might once have been in her movements and what little spark of life there might once have been in her eyes. She didn’t have many lines in her face compared to the 70’s but she still looked decades older. If her face didn’t seem to have aged much then was it just her dress that made her look like some jaded old rich housewife?

The friend and I then went shopping for food. I found our conversation throughout our little traipse through Glasgow’s shopping district very interesting, especially when she admitted how old she felt even though she was just 25. I’m 24, and I wholeheartedly agreed, I knew what she meant, even though it felt a bit weird her saying this considering that most middle aged and older women would sell their souls to look like her. We talked about 18-year-old TV presenters, and how they made us feel a bit past it, especially when they seemed to have accumulated so many amazing experiences in the space of their short meaningless lives. It was obvious that we hadn’t expected to feel like this, and that there was some kind of conflict between how mature and old we felt “inside”, the subjective introspective aspect to aging, and how we looked and felt in relation to others. It seemed to be a general thing among people our age. It seemed to have even entered popular consciousness, some commentators even having gone so far as to label it quarter life crisis. We talked about how it could be down to the fact that so many more people now go to university than had previously expected to; that the experience of going to university might have inflated their expectations, either because they expected the rest of their 20s to pass in the same carefree hedonistic haze, or because they’d tasted the intellectual life and now it was harder to accept that you had to work in Burger King flipping burgers or in a call centre choking under artificial lights.

Later it came to me that what ages you more than anything is disappointment. The onset of cynicism burns up the fire of careless joy nestling in a youthful heart until there’s just a black wisp of smoke tailing off. With the loss of each comforting and cherished conviction or self-delusion from childhood/early youth, each a rite of passage into adulthood and responsibility you lose something it is near impossible to regain, you lose that wistfulness. It struck me that maybe the transition between university and adulthood was too jagged, people thought that they were entitled to more than they should in all reality expect. You’re in your early 20’s you’re on the cusp of near-infinite possibility you’ve got so much ahead of you, a whole life to create, you’re still breathing fresh air into clean lungs, your arteries aren’t yet clogged. You have that living vitality within you that you see when you see a couple of young lovers walking down the street and you know they’re still exploring the possibilities of each others bodies still both carefree, unlined. Or you see a beautiful young girl walking down the street as simple as a flower and most of what is really beautiful about her is unintentional on her part, she doesn’t quite know how much power she has, she doesn’t know that she’s knocked you out.

But then I thought about it and it feels like society’s just become one big orgy of cynicism. We’re all older. I told my friend about sitting on a grassy slope on the big mound that rises up from the main path through Kelvingrove Park, how it was a beautiful sunny day, especially, especially rare in drab bland cold Glasgow. The rays of the sun rushed to greet you, where normally you’re glad to get a peep from behind a cloud. So I could lie back and feel it yawning in my face. But almost everyone else there was either smoking or drinking and smoking dope and peeling red like lobsters. OK it was the smoking or drinking I didn’t like — can’t people enjoy themselves without drinking? People drink to forget, because they don’t like the way their environment makes them feel, maybe they don’t like the way it feels to be them. But on a day like that, rare as a sober Scotsman, why would you want for it to be blotted out from memory?

So people are older and we’re all cynical. The 60’s was good, wasn’t it? People who were there and so by rights shouldn’t remember it talk about it all the time, well I don’t know, they’re supposed to, it was meant to be great. I think, because people were naïve, you could be idealistic because there wasn’t much of a precedent, at least not in terms of youth culture. But we can’t be naïve at all, for a start because we have a precedent, us young people while we’re still young people, that is namely those young starry eyed revolutionaries of the 60s who effed up and who are running the world now. In the 60s maybe it was the case that young people believed they had the right in fact the duty to be indignant about the way the world was run. Maybe they thought that just by being young, and unsullied you could overcome whatever obstacles there were, that with absolute purity of intention and force of conviction on your side you were unstoppable. Maybe it was because they’d had childhoods where they could watch old serials like Robin Hood, or Zorro, as a weird succession of clips at the beginning of the Hearst movie demonstrated, portrayals of imaginary worlds where Good and Evil were still very much real, and you could construct a neat narrative pitting one against the other. Have you seen the kind of things kids watch today? OK, the kind of things kids watch that are intended for them. There’s something icy cold about watching kids’ TV programs that are as smug and cynical as adult TV; children now have sitcoms that follow the slick easy Friends format or they have TV presenters who pretend to like Motorhead or the Ramones or who speak in drama school cockney accents. Whatever paternal condescension there might once have been in kids TV it’s all gone, and in view of the fact that now kids are primarily perceived in terms of their roles as potential consumers they are treated as empowered minature adults — empowered to the extent of course that they can exercise their rights to force their parents to buy them stuff.

All the idealism has ran out and just like a once religious now godless society which after a while no matter how much it strains cannot imagine how it could once have unquestionably believed in God, we’re puzzled but envious at how people could once have believed in all those lightheaded funky dopey 60’s slogans, even though they did eventually and rather inevitably finally come crashing down to earth.