Motorcycle Diaries Diary

Last week, an RA at a Rockhurst dorm asked me to come talk to his residents about "leadership." He was starting a new extracurricular program that featured movies about leadership, and he'd heard that I taught film.

I liked the idea and agreed to come by and introduce a movie. I suggested Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries.

I warned the RA that the movie is in Spanish. I asked for assurances that students wouldn't hate me for invading their lobby with a movie that forced them to read subtitles. The RA assured me that, as far as he knew, there were no illiterate residents of Xavier-Loyola Hall.

I felt bad asking about the subtitles, but I've been burnt on that point before. At a previous school, I taught a summer course on "Road Movies," in which I showed The Motorcycle Diaries. After the movie was over, I turned the house lights up, tears of inspiration still in my eyes, and was met with this question: "Do we have to watch any more movies that aren't in English?" That one still hurts.

Armed with this past experience, a handout to accompany my introduction, and trepidation-bordering-on-paralysis about seeking entry to a dorm lobby at night, I walked to XL. It was cold and I couldn't put my right hand in my pocket because a knuckle was still bleeding from a recent ginger-peeling accident (I had to start marinading the chicken before I returned to school).

I was met at the door by the RA--a very cool guy. The screening was to happen in the lobby, on a TV that is way nicer than the one I own. There were two bags of tortilla chips and a big ol' box of fruit treats. "Who's going to lead the way into those chips?" I asked, breaking the ice and setting up the theme of leadership.

Most of the students already knew who Che Guevara was, so I didn't have to go into the whole thing about how he's a pivotal, controversial revolutionary leader in South America and beyond, with perhaps the most t-shirted face in all of the first world.

Instead of this thorny, ironically-consumerist legacy, I focused my introduction on the fact that The Motorcycle Diaries is a movie about the preliminary moments in the life of a leader; it's about the life experience that motivated one young man's extreme commitment to social justice. Ernesto ("Fuser") Guevara is a normal college student who, when exposed to the landscape of poverty and injustice that exists just beyond his sheltered middle-class life, responds to an impulse to redress this injustice.

I left before my favorite scene; had to get home and broil that chicken. It's probably best. I never quite make it through without getting a little choked up.