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Hi yall. This is one of those threads that will produce 0 replies and should be locked but preserved forever in some sort of archive of trash. This is also probably one of the most sophisticated attempts at spam ever.
I just finished this crazy review/analysis and posted it on my blog. It's a little bit long, and the thesis is pretty insane, but I mention Terminator 2: Judgment Day in it, if that means anything to any of you. For the TL ; DR crowd (probably all of you), I'm basically trying to say that Che Guevara was a hero because he chose to become a zombie, and Che as a zombie is the only lens by which you can properly interpret revolutionary ethics. I also really liked the film.
I thought we could maybe discuss this film, or at least—in classic rufnek style—discuss the historical figure of Che.
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On Steven Soderbergh's Che . . .
I just finished this crazy review/analysis and posted it on my blog. It's a little bit long, and the thesis is pretty insane, but I mention Terminator 2: Judgment Day in it, if that means anything to any of you. For the TL ; DR crowd (probably all of you), I'm basically trying to say that Che Guevara was a hero because he chose to become a zombie, and Che as a zombie is the only lens by which you can properly interpret revolutionary ethics. I also really liked the film.
I thought we could maybe discuss this film, or at least—in classic rufnek style—discuss the historical figure of Che.
---
On Steven Soderbergh's Che . . .
Endlessly emblazoned on the T-shirts of countless bourgeois hipsters, that familiar, high-contrast silkscreen of Guerrillero Heroico—Alberto Korda’s immortal photograph of a scowling Che Guevara—was the subject of a recent discussion with some friends of mine. Was Che merely—as some of them claimed—a cold blooded murderer, or was there something more “heroico” about the iconic guerrilla? Steven Soderbergh sought to answer this question with his dualist exploration of Guevara’s first and last revolutions in The Argentine (Part One) and Guerrilla (Part Two).
Of course, the pertinent question here is: what did I think about the historical figure of Che Guevara after watching Soderbergh’s films? Anyone who has seen the films already knows the answer. Soderbergh’s Che is an undeniable piece of Marxist propaganda, and it is as beautiful and refined as Marxist propaganda gets. It is not at all strange for an artist like Soderbergh to be attracted to these naturally poetical, near-mythical figures like Guevara. What is surprising about his portrayal is its remarkable irreverence; it is both impressive and entirely appropriate. Guevara never wanted to be a demiurgical Stalin figure or an epical savior like William Wallace in Braveheart. He was always a warrior for the proletariat; he was their voice and their violent arm of justice.
With Che, Soderbergh actually somehow resists a cinematic recreation of Guerrillero Heroico or any shot even vaguely reminiscent of the famous photograph. Guevara is always kept at the level of the camera. He is never elevated. He never looks down upon us but we down at him, though mostly it is eye to eye. The only time he is physically elevated is during his speech at the United Nations as he speaks frankly and darkly to the General Assembly. The insistence to mythologize a revolutionary figure like Guevara can be justified simply by the inspiring nature of his actual biography. Much more can be molded from the bare facts of his rebellion than just the rebellion itself, but Soderbergh does no molding here.
His most interesting move with The Argentine is to narrate most of the preliminary battle scenes in the Cuban Revolution with excerpts from an interview with Guevara speaking through a translator while silencing the soundtrack of the battle scenes themselves. This fascinating choice of a two, even three degree separation from Guevara himself is exactly how this film succeeds, I claim. Not only are Guevara’s narrations of the battles guided as direct responses to the questions of his blonde, female interviewer; Guevara’s gruff, dim voice is also quieted down in favor of the high, smooth voice of his translator. This move strikes me as a tad bit “pompous”, so to speak, since the rest of both films are entirely in subtitled Spanish. The obvious questions arise: why not quiet the translators voice and subtitle Guevara directly, or why not remove the translator and the interviewer entirely? Their presence as context to Guevara’s narration is shown only very briefly. The answer, I claim, is not as simple as that of increasing the “power” and “directness” of his message by letting the primarily American audience avoid the visually disruptive act of having to read subtitles and watch the frame. This explanation is not only insufficient to explain the extent of Guevara’s distanciation; it is also entirely inconsistent with the formal character of Soderbergh’s work as a whole. Simply, Soderbergh refuses to let Guevara be portrayed as saying something he did not say in a way he did not say it. Guevara never sat back and narrated a battle. He never wrote poetry and recited it aloud; at least not any like in his interview. It is precisely this fact—that the interview with Lisa Howard did take place—that Soderbergh exploits. He goes no further with Guevara’s words. He takes no samples from Guevara’s inspirational speeches. He diminishes Guevara to the subservient, placid subject of an interview. In the end, Soderbergh even takes away the very voice that Guevara speaks in. Indeed, Che is said to have lived for precisely that reason: to give his voice for others.
Where The Argentine focuses on a generally upbeat story, complete with vivid complementary color pallets and humor, the strain of Guerrilla‘s depressive monotony is immediately noticeable. The ArgentineSan Francisco Chronicle and David Edelstein of New York Magazine—to address the tedium of Guerrilla as a major flaw. In his review, LaSalle writes, sometimes seems to move too fast, not even giving us enough time to celebrate. The soldier’s faces are lucid and bright, always with smiles or smirks. Everyone is clean, and the sun is always out. Indeed, where the Cuban Revolution was one victory after another, Bolivia was literally the opposite. This has lead several critics—namely Mick LaSalle of the
If Soderbergh’s ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded. [1]Here LaSalle is absolutely correct, but I reject his notion that this is a vice of the film. Guerrilla is a tough film, because it doesn’t even begin to try to redeem the inevitable disaster; it instead chooses to highlight the group’s failures. Usually in the case of a story with an inevitably sad ending, directors will try to focus on the triumphs of the losing party and paint their defeat as “accepting” or “honorable” like in the case of a duel or medieval battles when opposing generals would shake hands afterwards. This is absolutely not the case for Guerrilla or The Argentine, when the gesture is reversed. Guevara’s losses were absolute losses and his victories were absolute victories. Guevara’s men lacked personalities in Guerrilla precisely because they had none. From the beginning they were antagonistic and dishonest to each other and their cause. Soderbergh attempts no reconciliation or rehabilitation of the miserable subject matter that is Guevara’s The Bolivian Diary. After being captured, there is a scene where Guevara attempts to convince his guard to help him escape. What is not happening here is Guevara begging for his own life, even though he does implore with Del Toro’s best puppy-dog face. Guevara wants to escape only so he can attempt revolution again elsewhere, which is exactly what happened after his similar failure in the Congo. Though Soderbergh chooses to not mention Guevara’s Congo Revolution, still succeeds in communicating the utter devastation of the inevitability of this second failure in a few key scenes.
The most notable is that of an asthmatic Guevara trying to move his horse, getting frustrated, and stabbing that horse in the neck. The scene is probably the most moving in the entire two-film series. It is also one of the rare moments that Guevara is shown expressing genuine emotion. What Guevara sounded like, what he acted like, what it felt like to be in his presence: these are the things that a biopic should tell us about its subject. From the film, it is clear that he was a very reserved and stoic person who always chose to present himself in the humblest light possible. Benicio del Toro’s great genius in his performance of Guevara is how he is able to perfectly age him from one segment to the other. The unspoken years of triumphs and failures are quite evident in Guerrilla‘s Che and fittingly absent in The Argentine‘s younger, livelier, and saucier Che. But still, a spark remains in Del Toro’s eyes even in Guevara’s final moments as he faces his executioner. Soderbergh then cuts to perhaps the only subjective point of view shot in the entire film: Che Guevara’s final vision. After being shot once, he falls to the ground where his executioner’s boots are out of focus in the distance. He stares, lens against the ground as the rest of the frame moves slowly out of focus. Again, Soderbergh makes the ultimate emotional payoff of his film a banal matter, refusing even to show us an actual shot of Guevara dying. In this way he precisely avoids submission to the obscene sadistic effect suggested by Edelstein in his review:
Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. [2]In a brilliant move, Soderbergh chooses the most pathetic point of view for the death scene, the most hopeless—i.e. Guevara’s own, and it is nothing more than a dusty patch of ground and two boots in the distance. Compare this to other recent death scenes like Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s Christopher McCandless biography, Into the Wild. When McCandless finally dies, he replays the most meaningful moments of his life and has an existential realization about finally realizing the importance of human relationships. This sort of melodrama is exactly what must be avoided in order for Soderbergh to succeed, and—at every opportunity—he does. Guevara’s death scene is then followed with a handheld tracking shot of his corpse being carried on a stretcher to a helicopter. What is striking about this scene is the ugliness and disappreciation of the moment. The surrounding villagers are shown looking on the dead man without feeling or realization. Again, it is a scene of absolute irreverence. As the helicopter takes off, dust is kicked up into the faces of the observers and they are forced to turn away. This is the Bolivian Revolution at its purest: a mild disturbance of dust. Only the music, Mercedes Sosa’s “Balderrama”, signals the scene’s tragic beauty. We should be thankful that Soderbergh made even this concession.
The principle ideology that completely justifies this film is a simple one, and is even stated explicitly during Guerrilla.
CAMBA: Fernando, I am a bit sick. I don’t believe . . .This idea, of the living dead, was essentially the basis of the argument that I tried to make in discussing the merits of Guevara’s heroism, though, at that point, I was not sure how to put it. “To live as if you’ve already died” is a powerful concept and embodies—or debodies—the person who was Che Guevara and his lifelong struggle for social justice. It could be said, following from Guevara’s line, that from the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto Guevara was dead, and a specter was inhabiting his body; this specter was called Che.
CHE (FERNANDO): Camba. I can’t let you go until we meet Joaquín’s group . . . because if they capture you . . . you not only risk your own life . . . but you also put the whole group at risk.
[Camba looks down and nods his head]
CHE: Look, Camba. To survive here, to win . . . you have to live as if you’ve already died.
Make no mistake at what “living dead” refers to. The term is not at all synonymous with martyrdom. Martyrdom claims no duality; it is simply a state of death. What lives on is not the martyr but the nature of the martyr’s sacrifice as an inspirational event. In other words, the martyr’s death becomes a holiday. Che was and is a martyr for Marxism and social justice, but this has nothing to do with his life, only his influence. Instead, it could be said that, while alive, Che spent his later years being dead. More accurately, he was actually dead, but only acted as if he was alive. His flesh was reanimated, so to speak, and this bizarre, Frankensteinian force is that of a revolutionary’s passion.
What made Che Guevara heroic was not his death and subsequent martyrdom. It was his life itself and how he lived it being dead.
Soderbergh’s realization of this aspect of Guevara’s character is an essential elements to his distanciated portrayal in the film. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker has some fair criticisms about Soderbergh’s rare attempts to “humanize” Che as well as his refusing altogether to contribute to the already-bloated Guevaran mythology. Lane writes,
It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise–of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one’s total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie? [3]Is this not because Guevara is already dead? Take for example Soderbergh’s decision to use a subjective point of view shot during Guevara’s subdued death sequence. Is there not an instant intercinematic correlation here with films like James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day where we experience the “death” of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator through a similar subjective point of view shot? T-800′s red-tinted electronic readout first flickers a little—lines of static and interference running across—then blinks, then blacks out all together like a television set. The relationship of T-800, an animated hunk of steel and synthetic flesh—not really alive but somehow still living—with Guevara’s own post-revolutionary existence as the automaton “power behind Fidel Castro” is clear.
Guerrilla begins with a shot of Fidel Castro on television conducting a public reading of Guevara’s farewell letter, which otherwise should have only been read on condition of his death. One of the reasons why Guevara had to take an alternate identity and become an expatriate of Cuba is because of Castro’s reading of this letter. Here, Guevara’s line about living dead can again be explicated. During the time directly preceding the Bolivian Revolution, Guevara was not only living dead but also officially dead. Throughout the rest of the film he is referred to only by the pseudonyms of Ramon and Fernando. Guevara’s hair also becomes longer and bushier throughout Guerrilla. Everyone by now knows that intriguing medical fact about hair and nails growing on a person even after they are dead. To interpret Guevara’s action as that of—as silly as this might sound—a zombie is, I claim, the only way to really understand his otherwise questionable ethics.
Guevara is a hero because of his choice to die, to never return to the land of the living. so to speak. He is shown only very briefly inhabiting his comfortable bourgeois world as an apartment-dwelling medical school student. And exploration of his transformation is the subject of Walter Salles’ wonderful adaptation of Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries, but it is not the subject of Soderbergh’s film. Quite simply, Soderbergh’s film is about Guevara as the zombie; it is Guevara after his sacrifice.
Guevara is depicted as being in a state of constant existential angst during The Argentine‘s black and white sequences depicting his 1964 UN visit. His attitude is dismissive and dark. His manner is violent and angry. This era, with Guevara serving as Cuban Finance Minister and international diplomat, could be said to be his brief foray back into the “land of the living”. On the surface this appears to be a glorious time for Guevara, but Soderbergh makes it clear in The Argentine‘s flash forwards that Guevara did not consider it so. This relatively brief but direct characterization explains why after not being able to handle such a reserved lifestyle, Guevara returned to his previous life as an active revolutionary and member of the living dead.
This era of national politics and global diplomacy is when Guevara was truly a monster, I claim, if only because he was again returned the land of the living after renouncing it. The reason why he subsequently left was because he couldn’t live with being a monster among humans anymore. Soderbergh draws attention to this discrepancy by emphasizing his enormous coat and lumbering stature during the 1964 scenes. When returned again in the forests of Bolivia, he fits beautifully like a puzzle piece, once again small and at peace, having at last reclaimed the life he chose during his Motorcycle Diaries period: the life of the living dead.
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[1] LaSalle, Mick. “‘Che’ a Bloated Biopic.” Rev. of Che. San Francisco Chronicle [San Francisco] 16 Jan. 2009. SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle. Web. <http://www.sfgate.com/>.
[2] Edelstein, David. “’Tis the Season….” Rev. of Che. New York Magazine 12 Dec. 2008. New York Movies. New York Magazine. Web. <http://nymag.com/movies/>.
[3] Lane, Anthony. “Che’s Way.” Rev. of Che. The New Yorker 19 Jan. 2009. The New Yorker. The New Yorker. Web. <http://www.newyorker.com/>.
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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."
Last edited by planet news; 08-08-10 at 03:33 PM.
