LGM Film Club, Part 134: Punishment Park

Tonight’s film is an old favorite of mine: Peter Watkins’ 1971 Vietnam-era dystopian film Punishment Park. The plot is that Nixon declares a national emergency, hippies and Black Power leaders are rounded up and given a choice between long prison terms and trying to escape Punishment Park, a place in the California desert where they are hunted down by the cops. The film is basically nothing but people screaming ideology at one another, so of course I love it. It also cast right-wingers as right-wingers and left-wingers as left-wingers, so the yelling is pretty real. Favorite parts: the right-wing union member as well as the left-wing folk singer screaming at the white woman on the jury “Do you know what snatch is?!”