While the heroes of American Gigolo and Mishima, like Travis Bickle before them, strive to create selves to present to the world, Schrader’s Patty Hearst is emblematic of the other kind of Schrader protagonist: one whose identity is completely formed by events beyond her control. Schrader’s chronicle of the nineteen year-old Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and her subsequent seventeen months with the extremist group depicts Hearst as an Alice in Wonderland pushed through the looking glass of 1970s political extremism. The film presents her odyssey as a tour of an underground in which ideology has given way to posturing and playacting, albeit with deadly results. Schrader himself has suggested that Patty Hearst’s box office failure may have stemmed from its discomfiting revelation of the shocking ease with which the self can be totally destroyed and reconstituted.