The point I was making here is that Che Guevara, like Nixon, like Kennedy, is an intriguing figure and a symbol of a certain type of individual. Nixon was not charismatic at least to most people, but he was a true tragic figure, an archetype of the classic tragic figure.
Che and Kennedy are archetypal charismatic figures of the Messiah type: the singular individual who arises, captures the popular imagination and then is martyred before he can grow old.
Juan Peron is an example of what happens when a charismatic figure lives on after his own defeat and manages to return. This was also the pattern of the earlier Argentine president Hipólito Yrigoyen, though I doubt that any of you here have ever heard of him. Both Yrigoyen and Peron were removed by the military and both were eventually reelected as old men, then they fizzled. Neither would make much of a film because of that fizzle. Adolf Hitler was in many ways a tragic figure (his obsession with imposing a racial hierarchy on the world with the Germans at the top), but he has become the embodiment of total evil, and therefore a poor figure to dramatize, at least in our times.
Maybe Genghis Khan, another mass murderer, died so long ago that something interesting could be made of his life. John Wayne made a Genghis film, but it was one of his cheesiest efforts, and also probably being in it gave him cancer.
Certainly the time is ripe to dramatize Attila the Hun in Hungary, but I doubt the rest of the world is ready for a heroic Attila movie. Lots of Hungarians are naming their kids Attila. But no one else seems to have gotten on board
But everyone has heard of Evita Peron, who WAS a true tragic figure. Her tragic flaw seems to have been that her being sterile (which allowed her to not become pregnant and therefore with children to look after like most Argentine women of her time) developed into cancer, which killed her tragically, at the age of 33, which is a great age at which to be martyred. Evita was of course, also vain and a clothes horse (just like Jackie O, by the way), but those flaws did not bring her down. The cancer got her first. An EXCELLENT life to portray in the movies. Or in the musical, which was full of historical inaccuracies, but dramatically nearly flawless. In the film, it was hard to see Madonna as a teenage Evita, though.
Nixon is the archetype of the tragic figure, who manages to climb to the top, but is flawed, and whose obsession with his flaw brings about his downfall.
In 'Motorcycle Diaries', the young Che and his pal Alberto Granados manage to bum their way through poverty-stricken Chile and Peru by constantly bragging about their being doctors. Being typical Argentines and therefore ethnically European, they manage to get a number of molecules Chileans and Peruvians to befriend them and finance their travels, where this was impossible for the impoverished Indians of the lower caste. Unlike nearly all films about South America, 'Motorcycle diaries' was filmed on location in South America, and most of the extras were local people of little or no experience as actors. There is a feeling of true authenticity in this film that is very rare.
Both Granados and Guevara in "Diaries" are transformed from typical bourgeois Argentine know-it-alls into Marxists. Before the trip, Che is Fuser (a nickname derived from FUribundo de la SERna, referring to his frenetic style of playing soccer) The importance of Dr Bresciani giving Che Mariátegui's famous book 'Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality' (1928) is hardly stressed in keeping with its importance as the motivator for the radicalization of Che and Alberto as they work with the leper patients at the isolated San Pablo mission hospital on the Amazon or one of its tributaries.
This is the wikipedia listing for Mariátegui:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Carlos_Mari%C3%A1teguiMariátegui's writings resulted in the formation of the now rather centrist APRA movement, currently in power in Peru, as well as the formation of the Sendero Luminoso party, which fused ideas of Mao with those of Mariategiui and Sendero founder Abimael Guzman into the violent movement that was squelched during the term of Alberto Fujimori.
Mariategui is absolutely essential to understanding Peruvian politics and the indigenist movements in South America. I would be surprised to hear that Condileeza has ever heard of him.
