William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, died this past July at age 66. Published at the height of the counterculture movement in 1971, the book is a how-to guide for manufacturing bombs, weapons, and LSD, a subversive method of advocacy for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Powell and The Anarchist Cookbook are thoroughly examined in filmmaker Charlie Siskel’s latest documentary, American Anarchist, which screens as part of the Chicago International Film Festival this weekend.
Charlie Siskel: I first heard about it when I was pretty young. I remember that an older cousin had [the book] on his shelf. It must have been in the late 70s or early 80s. This cousin was ten years older than me. I never read it; he certainly never read it. My cousin and I grew up in the suburbs, and I think it was the kind of thing that kids had on their shelves to rebel or act out against their parents. It was kind of a badge of honor. So I was aware of it more as a book that had a cult status, and certainly not something that people would use in any way.
When did you decide that you wanted to make a documentary about the book and the book’s author?
It’s a period that I’ve been interested in for a long time: the late 60s, early 70s. It was a time when anger over the war in Vietnam and the crackdown on civil liberties by the government turned peaceful, ordinary protests into violent clashes, and when certain people on the left grew impatient with normal civil disobedience and started to promote violence. And Bill Powell interested me, partly because he wasn’t a joiner. He wasn’t a member of the Weather Underground, the Students for Democratic Society, or any of the familiar leftist groups of the period. He had a kind of lone-wolf status.
Bill also mentions in the film that he turned down many requests for interviews over the years. Why do you think he agreed to be interviewed by you? I think part of it was that he was ready to talk, and part of it was the timing. Bill had written a number of books after The Anarchist Cookbook and they were all works of historical fiction. At the time, he was working on a memoir and trying to tell his life story. He sent me a copy of it, and I was struck that even in his memoir, with The Anarchist Cookbook in the subtitle—where he was presumably trying to come clean, address the book, or reveal his feelings about it—there was so little about the book, and so little specifically about the role that the book played in his life after writing it: the effect that it had on his family or the effect that it had on the world, how he dealt with the fact that the book had associations with notorious acts of violence [the Columbine High School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Aurora movie theater shooting, to name a few]. It really skirted all of that stuff.
To get back to your question about the FBI, I did have his entire FBI file with me. We filmed a whole sequence where we went through it pretty exhaustively. He had not read the FBI file, even though it had been made publicly available since 2010—he was the subject of an investigation, as you say, and there were numerous letters from the public, as well as from members of Congress, the FBI, and the Justice Department, which investigated possibly banning the book. I was tempted to include some of that sequence, but ultimately it didn’t work for the way that the film was structured.
I imagine that Bill had a lot of arguments within himself throughout his life. Like, “this information was out there, other people would have found it anyway.” Or in the legal world, “I’m not the proximate cause of this violence.” Or that “We can’t say none of the violence would have happened, had it not been for the book, because [the perpetrators] would have found other ways to do it.” All of that is true, and none of it, I think, allows Bill to truly put the book behind him. But to tell oneself these things, that’s the difference between a human being and a monster. A human being wrestles with all of the complexities of the story, and that’s what makes Bill a compelling person. And as a filmmaker, I think you have to fall in love with your subject if you want to spend time telling their story.
Part of what is so troubling about The Anarchist Cookbook is that it has this kind of libertarian ethos to it, and it’s susceptible to all of these different interpretations. It’s kind of a Rorschach phenomenon, in that different groups have interpreted it for their own ends. I think that’s why it appealed to people on the left during the 70s and people on the right, with the abortion-clinic bomber in the 80s, because it has this “us against them, individual against the government” mind-set. If the government doesn’t reflect your will, then you take matters into your own hands. That’s a way of thinking that can appeal to anyone who feels anger toward the system, and that makes it really potent and dangerous.
