* film and book reviews A road movie that leads nowhere Men With Guns. A film written, directed, and edited by John Sayles Reviewed by Gary Cristall
From Canterbury Tales to Heart of Darkness to Hope, Crosby, and Lamour to Hard Core Logo, the road' genre has proved a worthy vehicle for an examination of society and its foibles. Men With Guns operates firmly in the tradition.
Set nowhere in particular in Central America, but clearly about Guatemala in the 1980s, John Sayles' latest movie accompanies a doctor on vacation to the rural villages where his students have gone to establish clinics. They don't phone, they don't write: so the good doctor sets out to find them and to examine the pride of his life's work. Starting off alone, the doctor is soon joined by a young boy - a victim of the military - and then by a deserter from same, who has given up, out of revulsion for what he has been forced to observe and participate in.
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Next comes a priest who has fled a village to escape execution at the army's request.
We now have innocence (the doctor) and three ambiguous and flawed victims of the terror going down the road. At each stop, it appears that the doctor's students have been murdered, mostly by the army, but at least once by the guerrillas. At each stop, the villagers claim impotence in the face of 'men with guns." As the quartet moves along, the message is clear: those without guns are at the mercy of those with. Only somewhere in the far off mountains is there a perhaps mythical paradise where there are no men with guns and therefore a peaceful life. By the end of the movie. the travellers. now five with the addition of a mute woman who has been raped by soldiers, receive their rewards. The doctor dies of a heart attack, having lost innocence and found knowledge, the boy finds a home, the deserter finds forgiveness and redemption, the priest regains his lost martyrdom, and the mute woman continues to search for paradise. It is all a bit too neat, and a lot too ambiguous.
The film, Sayles' eleventh feature, is well made. Sayles is a brilliant editor, and, with a crack European cameraman, the film looks good. From the first credits, with shapeless forms moving to reveal the names of the crew and cast, to the end, this is a professional telling of a tale. The problems are in the details.
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There is a total lack of suspense: you can pretty much predict the story after ten minutes. The army is bad, the guerrillas are not as bad, but they are bad enough. The American tourists who meander in and out of the picture as the story unfolds, are two-dimensional at best, combining cliched, hackneyed, stereotypical tourist lines with equally cliched, hackneyed, stereotypical, bad Spanish. The peasants are equally two-dimensional; simple people of the earth, full of goodness, honest to a fault (unless corrupted by "whites'), and looking only for a quiet life, uncontaminated by urban society. Even the names of the villages are cliches;
Sucias (dirty faces), Tierra Quemada (Burnt Earth), and the paradisical Cerca al Cielo (Near to
The musical score is similarly oblivious to reality. Mason Daring, Sayles long-time collaborator has crafted a 'world beat' fusion of Afro-Caribbean vocals and New York brass fusion; all this set in a region where the Mayan traditional music (including some of the wildest brass band music in the world) is as lovely, and evocative as any composer could wish for. The whole thing rings false.
This brings us to the question of the politics of the film. Sayles is no fool.
Matewan, his film about the war of the mine owners against the miners in West
Virginia in the 1920s, is about as sophisticated an analysis of American politics as has been put in an American film. What is he telling us here? I think there are two possibilities. The first and most likely is that, like much of the US left, Sayles has reached a political impasse. The army is a bunch of murderous bastards, killing raping, robbing and plundering. The guerrillas are better, but ineffective, weak and not above the odd atrocity of their own. Only the 'people' are inherently good, always victimized, and without much hope. This really is a road that leads to nowhere, a pessimistic abandonment of all hope for change.
The other possibility is that Sayles is brilliantly creating a frustrating tale where only 'Men With Guns' are subjective actors. In this reading, those without guns should get them; organization (the clinics)
without armed protection is useless. If this is Sayles message, it is at least optimistic - simplistic, but at least more real than the search for 'Cerca al Cielo."
My bet, however, is on the former rather than the latter reading. This is not a great film. It is interesting for what it says about the thinking of American artists on the left ten years after the collapse of
Stalinism, the winding down of the war in
Central America, and the 'death of Socia-
This is, after all, the John Sayles who, a decade ago, lionized the gun-toting volunteers of the Lincoln Battalion in
Spain, writing, 'The example of their sacrifice stands up in history for those not yet born when they shipped out for a
Republic that was mostly a belief in what
people could be..'!
Now, Sayles has a different take. For
Sayles, as well as his fictional travellers, and perhaps his political fellow travellers as well, this may well be the end of the road. That may partly explain why there is not a larger solidarity movement with the current Mayan uprising in Chiapas * 1 Quoted in Shouts From The Wall, Posters and Photographs Brought Home From the Spanish Civil War by American Volunteers. Uni. of Illinois Press. Post-Trotsky Trotskyism The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism vol. 1. Edited by Sean Matgamna. Texts by Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, C.L.R James, Al Glotzer, Joseph Carter, Leon Trotsky, and others. 608 pp. ISBN 09531864-0-7.
What exactly was the USSR? The collapse of Stalinism and the resulting disorientation of much of the left has brought back to the fore the question of the fate of the Russian Revolution.
One major perspective has been buried in the archives for almost 50 years - that of Max Shachtman, Hal Draper and others who saw October 1917 as a genuine workers' revolution, but Stalinism as marking the creation of a new form of exploitative class system. While the writings of Trotsky, Cannon and others who saw the USSR as a form of workers state have remained available, those who opposed their view of Stalinism have been out of print from many decades, and available only in a few specialised libraries.
This book presents the writings of this tradition from its origins in the disputes in the US Socialist Workers Party in 193940, through World War Il to the post-war expansion of Stalinism and stabilisation of capitalism. By following the issues
, in connection with the political choices of the day, it traces the developing disorientation of post-Trotsky Trotskyism as it was faced with new conditions. It also shows unexpected connections between the question of the USSR and other controversial issues in socialist politics - the national question, democracy, evaluation of post-1945 capitalist expansion and the concept of the revolutionary party.
An introduction by Sean Matgamna critically analyses Trotsky's own writings on the USSR from 1928 until his death.
Further information and a full table of contents are available on: www.labournet.org.uk/awl/book/index.htm AVAILABLE FROM: UK; All good bookshops By credit card purchase from Central Books. Tel: 0181 986 4854 Directly from the publisher, Phoenix Press, WL Publications, PO Box 823, London SE15 4NA, UK. Fax: 0171 277 8462; E-mail: AWL@gn.apc.org Europe: Directly from Phoenix Press, WL Publications, PO Box 823, London SE15 4NA, UK. USA: Barry Finger, 153 Henderson Place, East Windsor, New Jersey 08520, USA. Australia: By credit card from Eleanor Brasch Associates, PO Box 586, Artamon 2064, Australia. Phone: 02 9419 8717 Email: ebe@enternet.com.au Directly from Workers' Liberty, PO Box 313, Leichardt, NSW 2040. Worldwide via the net: From amazon.com at