The Che Lounge August 25, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Interrupting my sequential watching of Deep Space Nine, Netflix decided to throw me a curve yesterday with The Motorcycle Diaries, the story of Che Guevara’s wanderlust as he and his best friend travel on a bike throughout South America. And being that I’m working on my novel a lot lately, I’ve been doing heavy thinking about characterization and plotting. Admittedly, I know next to nothing about Che’s life, and I was intrigued by the idea of two men traveling on the open road with no concrete plans except to reach Buenos Aires on his friend’s birthday. Without sounding cliché, I was expecting a kind of Latin American Kerouac, but I shouldn’t have been so naïve. I enjoyed Diaries as a film, but I think it had some deep flaws which prevented me from seeing it as the great film it aspired to be. Motivations are a big thing for any character. How does Joe Protag get from point A to point B? The two most common mistakes beginning writers make are either 1) they shift the character from A to B without clear motivations, or 2) the writer adds a calamity which forces the character to change (i.e. the death of a loved one). It may seem obvious why the first reason is a bad idea — characters need to be real and real people don’t suddenly change without reason. But the second may not be obviously so. Why can’t a single calamity change a person? The simple answer is, it can, but more often than not, people are propelled in their same old course by momentum. In other words, one single event is not enough to change a character in my opinion, unless that event is so tragic, so utterly world-shaking, that the character is forced to change. Yet in this film I never saw that event, I never saw Che see something so world-shattering that made him change. At the end of the movie he proclaims, “This trip has changed me in ways I don’t understand yet. I need a long time to think about that.” So I tried to recall what tragic events shaped his life. Though understated in the film, it is clear that the woman he loves has found someone else and didn’t wait for him to return from his trip. The second clear event is when he finds two refugees on the road, a man and his wife, and gives them American dollars he was saving to buy his (now lost) love a swimsuit. Che sees the sadness in the refugees’ faces and wonders how people can be so inhumane. The third event happens when a collection of refugees are waiting to be picked for mining work and the bossman doesn’t offer the workers water. This angers Che, and he throws a stone at their truck. And the last clear event happens when he reaches the leper colony, and he sees how the terribly sick are kept across the river, away from the “healthy.” Now, while all these events might have an effect on his life, I never thought any of them were strong enough, never thought any rose to the level that forced Che to change. How many of us have loved someone who loved someone else? How many of us have seen real human suffering? How many of us have seen the separation of the healthy and capable from the poor and sick? I can say with all seriousness that I have experienced most, if not all of these things in my life, and so have most of you reading this, yet we are not jumping to be revolutionaries. Maybe Che was a true idealist, but I wanted to know what changed him, what convinced him that fighting in Cuba was mroe important than caring for Lepers in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the film did not intend to show how Che became the leader of the Cuban revolution, but if it was just the story of a boy and his wanderlust, why did they choose the Che Guevara? In other words, and I said this in one of my critiques the other night, they had a Chekhov’s gun sitting on the mantle that is never used. Che was the leader of a large revolution, but in this film he’s just a young man who discovers the pain in life. It’s a visually stunning movie, and worth a see just to glimpse the amazing landscapes in South America, but as a coming of age story it falls flat only because we know this brooding “boy” will one day be a revolutionary. It’s ironic that in a film about traveling they never convincingly moved him from point A to point B.

Finally, I thought I’d end with a picture of morning glories blooming on my fire escape. Rumor has it that if you eat the seeds you hallucinate. (click to enlarge)