The New Phillistinism

In the interests of full disclosure I should say that my father is working on a project with Walter Salles at the moment. Nevertheless, I've written on this general subject before and Paul Berman's review of The Motorcycle Diaries really pissed me off. Is the difference between an evaluation of the life of Che and an evaluation of a film about a brief period in Che's life really that hard to understand? We don't get a movie review at all -- instead we get a rant about how Che was a bad guy and people shouldn't admire him and put his image on all kinds of stuff. Well, fine, but what about the movie?

The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors.

So given that description, what's the relevance of Berman's "criticism" that:

Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system--the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become ..."

This is all stuff that isn't portrayed in the movie. Besides which, since when did the correctness of a work's politics become the sole -- or even an important -- criterion in evaluating it. Do we need to burn our copies of The Battleship Potemkin? Eliminate all the Shostakovich compositions that Stalin didn't condemn? In case Berman hasn't heard, the whole Soviet Communism thing didn't work out very well. It was pretty totalitarian, in fact. Do we condemn Shakespeare as a crude propagandist for the royal dynasty of the day? This is just a bizarre way to behave.

The release of a film about Che is a perfectly appropriate moment for an article about how Che was not, in fact, an admirable person but that's not the same thing as a movie review....