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The
Weather Underground
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This documentary is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The episode of American history it unearths, the story of the terrorist cell known as the Weather Underground, is inherently captivating, even a little glamorous. Student radicals including Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers broke away from the peace-seeking orientation of their comrades in the mid '60s. With their stated intention of "bringing the war home", they wanted to show Americans that their society was founded on the most atrocious violence – by creating some further violence on home turf. Terrorism is, of course, a white-hot topic within all political debate in the wake of the September 11 2001 attack. Against those who decry any act of terrorism as inhuman barbarism, there are those who choose to remind us that Nelson Mandela was once considered a terrorist. It is an argument without any seeming middle ground. This generally superficial film doesn't really help matters or advance the discussion any. It is a documentary wholly lacking a point of view. Directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel have repeatedly expressed their intention to "raise questions" about the legacy of the Weather Underground's brand of terrorism and its relevance (or otherwise) to the present climate. Unfortunately, the end result of their attempt at objective, impartial balance is a television-style blandness. Despite the acres of fascinating archival footage, despite the rare interviews with surviving members of the group, very little is seriously raised or argued out. Too often the film passes in a blaze of shorthand, journalistic clichés – the hippie '60s were an era of free love, in the Nixonian '70s the countercultural dream soured, in the Reaganite '80s greed was good, and so on. One splenetic left-wing commentator (Todd Gitlin) stands in for all critical analysts, sympathetic or antipathetic, of the Weathermen. The interviews fall far short of truly investigative reporting. The Underground members are allowed to pretty much recycle their particular brand of '60s rhetoric without challenge or contradiction – the filmmakers waiting for those few all-too-human moments when sentiments of doubt or regret are expressed. Meanwhile, much of the footage is given a surreptitious editorial slant – scored with spooky synth tones and plied with a grave, slow-motion treatment. Documentary filmmakers the world over should henceforth be banned from using these facile tricks that replace serious thought. Almost inevitably, the documentary makes the actions of the Weathermen seem trivial and futile. How was blowing up a government institution here or there going to trigger the collapse of patriarchal capitalism? What did the drama of 'going underground' for a decade mean to the mass of Middle-Americans? What's the good of a supposed 'movement' that has so few members or even visible supporters? Green and Siegel miss out on a central theme in '60s radical politics – the debates about the 'society of the spectacle', and terrorism's role in creating symbolic acts that would wield their real effects by being broadcast throughout the mass media – not in their local, physical specificity. A better account of the Weathermen would require a postmodern touch – even a dose of Oliver Stone. Still, it's hard to entirely dislike a documentary which entertains us with a splendid archival still of government agents posing undercover as stoned-age revolutionaries. © Adrian Martin November 2003 |
