Coming to Our Senses by Dierdra Reber

Author:Dierdra Reber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI040000, Philosophy/Movements/Critical Theory, PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Diarios de motocicleta: An Economy of Love for the Open Veins of Latin America

Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries), directed by Walter Salles, preeminent in Brazilian cinema and nominated for dozens of awards the world over, counters the fatalistic resignation of No Country for Old Men with the rejuvenation of revolution. Whereas No Country for Old Men presents a social portrait of ineluctable addiction to the deadly logic of capital flow, Diarios de motocicleta methodically dismantles the supports of this portrait, and, like Blindness, posits another in its place. If Mad Men travels back in time to identify the origins of contemporary cultural ills, then Diarios de motocicleta revisits the same time period in order to recuperate a model for their correction—a correction that is framed, significantly, as healing.11

The agent of this cultural therapy is none other than the young Argentine medical student and future revolutionary icon Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal). Adapting Guevara’s travelogue to the screen, Diarios de motocicleta recreates the well-known journey that he and his friend Alberto Granado made across continental Latin America in the early 1950s, during which Guevara’s political conscience was progressively awakened. Like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Diarios de motocicleta retells the story of a towering cultural icon, arguably the greatest in twentieth-century Latin America, who since his death has even become popularly canonized as “San Ernesto de la Higuera” in the Bolivian region of his execution. What is significant about this particular Che story is its emphasis on a personal journey from sickness to health as a narrative through line that we might say runs parallel to the story of his political awakening, but even more accurate would be to say that the film represents this movement from sickness to health as what underwrites his political awakening—what makes his revolutionary metamorphosis possible. In other words, politics are physiological disposition. Strongly echoing Gibson’s treatment of Christ, Guevara’s story under Salles’s direction becomes a function of the feeling soma.

The very first shot of the film is a close-up of Ernesto’s inhaler as he packs his bags for the famously transformative trip. During the establishing sequences, we see him using his inhaler while playing rugby, a sport inherited from British neocolonialism that signals Ernesto’s well-to-do social status. Even in the blush of health, the film suggests, Ernesto is fundamentally unwell. As he leaves for his journey, his mother (Mercedes Morán) wraps a scarf around his neck with an anxious brow and tells him that as long as he uses his inhaler he will be fine. The film’s chronicling of Ernesto’s metamorphosis into the revolutionary Che will, in fact, adopt the same definitional axis of Ernesto as an asthmatic, and, as though his asthma were a marker of his bourgeois background, he will fight to overcome his asthma in the same measure that he struggles to reject bourgeois culture. Every time Ernesto confronts a major juncture in the development of his social conscience and principles, the film makes the challenge somatically manifest in relation to his asthmatic condition.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.