The Weather Underground

While I don't agree with any kind of war, I also don't agree with violent demonstrations to get your point across.
Other than a couple of interesting film clips of historical moments of which I had only previously seen in print photography (the Vietnamese man about to be shot in the head, the little girl having just been burned by napalm, running down the road) there was not a significant amount of dramatic or even above-average relevant footage featured. While the stories were at times fairly compelling, they only succeeded in making the film simply average.

The Weather Underground and the radical left are shown in this documentary with most of their warts covered; but every now and again the blemishes pop into view. It makes an effort to show these graying radicals as somehow noble, idealistic characters; but in the end it exposes them as the childish, misguided, aimless fools that they were. Most of them have gone from being clueless kids to clueless adults; still waiting for a world revolution that is never coming. In the end the lesson, as stated in the film, is that radical movements cannot succeed because at some point the radicals always turn on each other. The only person in this movie I admired by the time it over was Mark Rudd who admitted having trouble coming to terms with his past actions and beliefs. Three of the nine members profiled in the film are now teaching college, giving me nightmares about what they might be indoctrinating their students into.

Politics aside, the film is well shot, well edited and uses a pseudo-sixties original score which provides a good backdrop without distracting from the story that is being told. The frequent cuts into archival news footage gives a good feel for the era although it's clear that the Vietnam footage was chosen purely for its shock value. I highly recommend this film for any student trying to get a feel for the times and some insight into the radical movements of the sixties. Just make sure you pick a few more memoirs by more traditional political figures to get some real context and the other side of the story.

I was a lefty was I was young [not anymore], and I was really looking forward to this dvd. this is a completely sanitized look at the weather underground. some of their members admired sicko charles manson, seems they left that little tidbit out. wonder why? and look who has joined the "bourgeoisie" class, these whiny so-called radicals. I wanted to see the history of the american left, warts and all. what a disappointment.

Something of a `Where are they now?' documentary profiling members of the radical group the Weather Underground three decades on. A splinter group of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society,) the Weatherman, as one interviewee notes, `stole' the student left from SDS at an acrimonious convention held in the late 1960s. Affirming an affinity with liberation movements across the globe - revolution was `in' back then, - identifying strongly with the Black Panthers, and in violent opposition to the Vietnam War, the Weathermen preached active resistance against America's `white imperialist' actions at home and abroad.

Although director Bill Siegel must have sympathized with the subject, the graying radicals, neither the film nor his commentary track betrays an overbearing bias. The film moves, sometimes confusingly, from the SDS convention to the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969, the Weathermen's first public protest that degenerated into a bat-wielding riot. Then it's on to a townhouse bombing where three Weathermen were killed when a bomb they were building to use at a military dance exploded prematurely. More bombing followed the townhouse bombing, although the ex-members, who went underground at that point, stress often that the bombings were symbolic actions only. No one was killed, they claim, and targets were carefully chosen. Police stations when a Black Panther was killed, State Department buildings in response to atrocities in Vietnam. Siegel strings together archive film, old newscasts, and the like to tell the story. Interspersed are talking-head interviews with surviving Weather Underground members. Visually it's all a little static. I've watched this film three times in the last week or so. There are two commentary tracks, one with director Siegel, the other with original Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. I don't think it could have been cut much better, but with so many talking heads and footage shot from the inside of a moving car at an anonymous landscape, well, the eye starts to starve a bit.

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND confronts us with an issue that is still with us and probably always will be. What are your responsibilities when confronted with what you believe is injustice? Is, as one ex-member asks at one point in the movie, doing nothing in the face of violence an act of violence itself? The brilliant thing about this movie is that it is open to many valid responses - you can view the Weathermen as committed idealists willing to risk their lives for social justice, or young, white children of privilege intoxicated with their own sense of moral righteousness and willing to bomb themselves, along with the whole anti-war movement, to the margins with their outrageous behavior. Some documentaries invite you to stroll down Memory Lane. THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND marches you through a nightmare battleground. The questions it raises about social action and responsibility are as valid now as they were thirty plus years ago.

I gave this 5 stars not because I agree with them but thought at the time, and this documentary confirms my belief, that these people, like all terrorists, are sick. They engaged in what Prof. Lee Harris calls "fantasy ideology".


" . . . It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge, and it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. But normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world stays relatively hidden. Indeed, a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control . . . Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent, resulting in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God - or his neighbor's dog - commanded him to do so belongs to the latter."


"Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology", By Lee Harris
http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html

In his article, he relates a "personal recollection" of first encountering this type of fantasy while having an argument with his college roommate over how to conduct their anti-Vietnam War protest. It is somewhat long, but worth the read.