he setting is the near future—for 1971; now, it is "alternate history." The film is presented in writer/director Watkins' trademark "faux documentary" manner. The United States president, amid civil unrest caused by an escalation of the Vietnam conflict, invokes powers granted by Article II of the 1950 Internal Security Act (the "McCarran Act"). An "internal security emergency" is declared. Secret detention camps are established—without the approval of Congress—to hold draft dodgers, antiwar demonstrators, militants, pacifists and those who "there is reasonable ground to believe ... may be involved in future, possible certain acts of sabotage."
Detainees are presented before tribunals "without right of bail" and without "the necessity of evidence." At a tribunal near Bear Mountain National Park in California, a collection of detainees, Corrective Group 638, is brought for hearing just as Corrective Group 637 is led into the desert.
The members of Corrective Group 637 have chosen, as a means to commute their sentences, to undertake "Punishment Park"; they must cross the desert and reach an American flag at the base of Bear Mountain while evading an armed pursuit force of federal marshals, a National Guard unit and an LAPD riot squad. Failure to reach the flag within the allotted time will result in immediate incarceration and serving of lengthy sentences in federal prisons.
The film cross-cuts between Group 637 in the desert and the hearings of Group 638. The hearings are exercises in polarizing political rhetoric; meaningful communication is smothered. The desert and desperation take members of Group 637. A BBC documentary crew films the proceedings. What role will the filmmakers play? What role must the audience play as "passive" observers, if there is such a thing?
Manipulative—and that's the point
Media scholar Scott MacDonald wrote: "the widespread evasion of Peter Watkins is one of the embarrassments of contemporary film criticism." This may be best illustrated by the obscurity of Punishment Park, a film that uses documentary techniques to push its audience to question those techniques. Peter Nichols in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction pointed out that Watkins uses propaganda techniques to decry the use of propaganda: "Whether knowingly or not, he is fighting fire with fire."
Yet with Watkins' The Journey (an antinuke documentary) and La Commune (a borderline SF treatment of the 1871 Paris Commune as covered by modern TV news), there can be no question that Watkins' purpose is to deconstruct media to the point that one can't watch media passively. That one must actively watch Punishment Park is key to its effectiveness. Subversively, the fictive BBC news crew (which has nominally filmed the footage the audience of Punishment Park is watching) becomes involved in the goings-on, thereby involving the audience.
As SF, Punishment Park brilliantly creates in microcosm a depiction of far-reaching societal collapse. Watkins and his cast (who improvise much of their lines) hyperbolize the unrest of the early '70s to the point that one can believe a superpower is sliding into dystopian chaos. This does create some of the shrillness for which Watkins has been (perhaps overzealously) criticized by writers like Canby and Crist. The film is deeply unnerving in its presentation of a political crisis spinning further and further out of control.
The photography by documentary specialist Joan Churchill is stunning, most especially for those scenes in the desert, in which bleak and empty landscapes slam home a bleak and empty moral situation. The scenes of violence are terrifying, filmed as they are on the same grainy film stock that captured authentic violence for TV newscasts back in the '70s.
