The Motorcycle Diaries

Showing chosen sections of lany number of  lives can be used to prove any number of points. I remember a quote by Cardinal Richelieu—“If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” While inescapably true, I believe the reverse is also true.

I've just finished watching the glorified paean to the communist killer Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries. In it, we watch a literal “Hero's Journey” as Guevara emerges from naivete into a hard-boiled adulthood. The movie is well shot and directed. The screenplay's also good, as screenplays go. There are some dangling bits that go nowhere, some tiresome exposition ("You know Mial, all this time we spent on the road, something happened." Yeah, really?), some melodrama—swimming the Amazon at night to be with the ‘downtrodden’ comes to mind—and so on. These things prevented me from calling it superlative, but it was good enough, as movies go. Especially for Hollywood, those old unrepentant Communists nominated it for a few Oscars. It won one Oscar for Music.

The pink elephant in the room as I watched this journey of revelation was that it was of a man who would, in time, summarily execute thousands in pursuit of the so-called ideals he learned on this same metaphorical journey. In the several scenes in which Guevara is shown almost dying from an asthmatic attack, I bet you any one of his many victims would have wished he'd simply kicked the bucket then. Certainly in their stead.

Guevara's character ponders injustice at the end of the movie, an injustice he loathes. As would any feeling human being. But I can't ignore the feeling that the road he continues on after the one we just saw could have been and should have been "better," not involving violent death at his ‘healing’ hands.  Near the end, in another fit of tired exposition, his character says that what happened on the road is “something” he “would have to think about for a long time.” History shows Guevara arrived at the wrong conclusion.

As the film winds down, the director chose to insert his own diary, of sorts. We see or rather we read what happens to Guevara. It's the story we know, a euphemistic version anyway: in old-timey typewriter font, white over black, Geuvara is said to have been “one of the most prominent and inspiring leaders of the Cuban Revolution. Che went on to fight for his ideals [guffaw] in the Congo and Bolivia where he was captured, and with the support of the CIA [I had wondered when the ever-present American bogeyman would show], murdered in October, 1967.”

Fucking good riddance, I say.

And here's a big fuck you to Robert Redford, executive producer: "Fuck you, Redford."