I watched Punishment Park a few days ago. A cinema vérité pseudodocumentary from 1971(!), it takes place in an alternate United States where hippies, Commie sympathizers, and anti-war protestors who don’t want fifteen to twenty years in prison are shipped off to Punishment Park, where they have three days to run fifty three miles through the desert to an American flag. If they reach it in time, they get to walk free, or so they are told.

It’s a gritty, chilling, masterfully put together work of alternative history and it’s also kind of a misery fest. The absurdity of the concept leaves room for some degree of reaction to the extremity of it, and maybe in a different context I would be able to crack a smile at lanky seventies youths running towards nothing with awful posture through a desert in record-breaking heat. But you have to understand that I have been put through the ringer of having regurgitated radical politik parroted at me over and over and over. It gives certain people a thrill to wallow in that misery. But it just doesn’t thrill me to have people try to insert a microchip in my head repeating slogans of Everything is Awful and Will Never Get Better.

You would think I would relate to one of the girls who gets interrogated at the Punishment Park, who is blonde, 19, and writes (kind of awful) songs about the Pigs and Tricky Dick and all that. She talks about how she dropped out of college because after the Kent State massacre, she realized that it wouldn’t matter if she wore a stars-and-stripes cheerleader uniform and rah-rahed America all day; even if she was just a spectator, the National Guard would just shoot her anyway. She didn’t feel safe being out in the open.

This allure of the “underground” was in full swing during that era of the Weathermen and is even more common today where we long for a time when the revolution wasn’t televised. It seems people love this movie because of these tendencies. When your face is in the light, it’s scary. You retreat to the womb, or in this case the commune, and you feel safer but you also isolate yourself. You surround yourself with hardcore ideals that present plain fact but with no room for changing those facts substantially. You preach upheaval but get so caught up in the concept of it that you mentally can’t go about ever making it happen, because doing so would make you like the world better, and you can’t have that when you live off of the world being against you. It’s addicting. We need the truth, especially now, but we’re all individuals with our own individual lived experiences. The real world isn’t a colorless, lifeless desert plateau. There’s color and water and food and little creatures crawling in the ground.

Different strokes for different folks, but why did Ken Russell have to die before he could direct a hilarious and extremely Ken Russell remake or take of this? These are the thoughts that go through my bored, weird, college girl head.