ON THE ROAD WITH CHE

DVD REVIEW

The Motorcycle Diaries, 2005

I have reviewed a biography of the life and works of the Latin American revolutionary (I think that is how he wanted to see himself) Ernesto “Che’ Guevara elsewhere in this space and make no bones about my admiration for his revolutionary skills and ardor while also noting my political differences. In a world that in 2007 is filled to the brim with fake ‘hero’ that youth are asked to emulate here is the real things. The film under review is a little difference take on Che’s life from a time before he became a world known revolutionary fighter and icon. Apparently this film is based on his diaries written while he and another footloose companion were traveling the highways and byways of Latin America on motorcycle, foot, boat, and cart or by any other mode of transportation that would move them to their objective. During that fateful trip middle class professional (doctor) Che has his eyes opened both to the geographic beauty of his continent but also the grim underside of life for the masses. We, unfortunately, are painfully aware of how that story ends in the hills of Bolivia literally pursuits by all of the security forces in the Western world.

Does this early life study of Che work? As a member of the Generation of ’68 I am very, very familiar with the wanderlust that drove many of my generation to seek salvation and companionship of kindred spirits on the roads of America and elsewhere. We rode those Volkswagen buses to the ground or we hitchhiked (nobody does that anymore, and unfortunately nobody should with all the weirdness out there on the mean roads of America these days). Che got the urge before Kerouac’s classic On the Road and we got it as a result. However that liberation from parental authority and the norms of bourgeois existence do not in themselves produce anything except an existential traveler. If one did not know that this was about Che then, while it was interesting, cinematically beautiful and the interplay between the two travelers was well-acted then it could have been about a fair percentage of the children of post-World War II generation. The missing link is the politics. Here it is hard to say that that on the basis of what was presented as ‘enlightening’ Che about the miseries of existence on his travels that he would be led to a revolutionary road. Yes, I know that to recruit people to revolution these days we will be dealing with bright, articulate, thoughtful, concerned liberals like Che in this period but I believe that the makers of this film took a dive on the politics. If they wanted to honor the memory of Che they did a disservice. If they, as I assume, wanted to ride the wave of a real icon for international youth then I have real political differences with their use of Che legacy.