Rewatching The Motorcycle Diaries at 30

There are moments in life when the passage of time forces you to reconsider your past, to revisit things once held dear with what you’d like to think is clarity of years that have since passed. One such moment occurred when I revisited The Motorcycle Diaries, a film that first made an impact on me when I was seventeen. At that time, the film seemed like a revelation — a vision of youth’s romantic idealism and its potential for world-changing adventure. It was a story of a man before he was a man, before he was history, before he was anything more than a boy on a road with an old motorcycle and a friend, journeying across the Latin American continent, discovering his purpose. 

When we are young, the world seems like a map of injustices waiting to be set right, and Che Guevara holds up a mirror to the indignation of so many. He was a boy who looked upon suffering and swore, silently but with unshakable resolve, that he would not be content to simply look. I remember walking out of that first viewing feeling that I, too, had been called to something greater. That justice was a fire, and I had a duty to stoke it.

Now at thirty, I found that the same film, the same images, the same words, landed differently. Where once I had seen a young man awakening, I now saw an untested soul, enamored by the poetry of righteousness. The wide-eyed medical student on the screen was no longer a prophet to me but a boy, unscarred by failure, untouched by the weight of what change truly requires. And yet, in that youthful dream of revolution, there was a beauty still that I could not bring myself to dismiss entirely.

The camera lingers on the Andes, on the wide plains and tired villages, on the lined faces of forgotten men and women. The landscape is grand, noble even, and it flatters Guevara’s journey by suggesting his heart is just as pure. But then, the dreams seen by most young hearts are precisely that — pure. Pure, not only of malice, but also bereft of experience. Idealism is a seductive thing; it has the power to shape not only history but memory itself. A beautiful picture can make a hard truth seem softer, just as a well-told story can turn a man into a myth. And myths are dangerous things.

The film was an inspiring myth of the sort of freedom that only youth, in its unencumbered idealism, can afford. What struck me most, now that years had put some distance between me and my younger self, was the silence of the film—the things it chose not to say. It is a story about the making of a revolutionary, but it does not talk of the cost of revolution. Che was not yet the figure he is now known to be, one shrouded in the weight of history and ideology; rather, he was a man in search of meaning, the wide open spaces of South America serving as both literal and metaphorical landscapes of discovery. While not wishing to discredit the achievement of the cinematographer, I cannot help but think that the camera lingers on the majesty of the Andes as if to suggest that the purity of the scenery reflects the purity of Guevara’s intentions, a romantic sleight of hand that flatters the viewer into uncritical admiration. Beauty here becomes propaganda in disguise. 

The film offers the thrill of righteous anger, but it spares us the burden of consequence. At thirty, I have learned that righteousness, untethered from the hard work of understanding, can be a dangerous thing. It can turn from justice to vengeance, from liberation to tyranny. And so I watched, uneasy, as my younger self stirred within me, still wanting to believe in the purity of it all.

I do not mean to say that I have entirely outgrown the dreams of my youth. The world is no kinder now than it was when I was seventeen, and I am not so old as to have forgotten what it means to want to change it. But I have learned that revolutions are rarely as noble, as clean, or as simple as they seem at the beginning. That even the best of intentions, when carried far enough, can lead a man to places he never meant to go.

There is something intoxicating about the idea of revolution, about the notion that a single man, armed with conviction, can tear down the walls of injustice. But walls are not so easily dismantled, and the rubble they leave behind is rarely as pristine as one imagines. The young man who rode through Latin America would one day become a symbol, a banner waved by those who saw in him whatever they wished to see. And in that transformation, something was lost—a man, perhaps, or at least the complexities of him.

Still, I do not begrudge my younger self her idealism and the need to believe that the world can be shaped by sheer force of will. There is a time for that fire, just as there is a time for the slow burn of wisdom. No great change—whether in a man’s soul or in the world at large—comes without its weight in cost. At seventeen, I wanted to set the world ablaze. At thirty, I am more interested in how to build something that lasts.

There were moments when I felt that the film’s focus on systemic injustice encourages a kind of fatalistic passivity, as if individual agency were irrelevant in the face of overwhelming social forces. Yet true progress is not achieved through sweeping revolutions but through the steady, often unglamorous work of small, personal transformations.

That Guevara, a man who signed his name to death and purge, remains an emblem of rebellion for the young, says something about how we think of justice. We do not always love justice for its own sake—we love the shape of defiance, the poetry of resistance, the rush of feeling righteous without the burden of doing right. Grand depictions of such figures encourage the viewer to feel virtuous merely for agreeing with their premise, without demanding any real engagement with the messy realities of poverty, inequality, and governance.

There is a reason college campuses are littered with Che Guevara t-shirts, worn by young men and women who have never read his writings, let alone grappled with the full consequences of his actions. What matters is the feeling—the great, swelling certainty that the world is broken and that they, if they only believe hard enough, might be the one to set it right. They do not want justice so much as they want purpose, and in a world where purpose is not up for grabs the way it was once—through parenthood and trades, through faith and community and the slow work of belonging—they find it where they can. In lectures on oppression, in theories on power, and in the stories of revolutionaries. And so the campuses swell with protest, with slogans scrawled on banners, with young voices raised in defiance. But the harder work—the quiet, patient work of shaping, of creating, of carving meaning from the raw and stubborn world—goes neglected. They are told that protest is the only avenue of meaningful contribution left to them, that justice is found in destruction, that the old must be burned to the ground before anything new can rise. But who, then, will build? Who will plant and mend and make?

That being said, my decision to rewatch the film was not a disheartening one. On the contrary, it was a necessary confrontation with my own evolution. The journey of self-discovery is essential, but so too is the journey beyond it, where one learns to balance passion with prudence. A man who learns only to burn will one day find himself with nothing left to stand upon.

Most of us grow out of it and we come to see the world not as something to be toppled but as something to be tended. We get jobs, we fall in love, we raise children who remind us too much of ourselves. We take up the unremarkable work of living—of mending what we can, of making peace with what we cannot, of waging little battles and winning over the darkness in our own souls. But there is always one—one who does not bend, who does not outgrow the hunger for fire, one who, in his quest to set the world right, will leave ruin in his wake.

Maybe that is why we return to old stories, to books and films we once held close. Not to relive them as they were, but to measure how we have changed since they first entered our lives. I no longer find myself swept away by the allure of Che’s youthful rebellion, nor do I regret the seventeen-year-old who once felt his fire. But I see it now for what it was—not just the making of a revolutionary, but the making of a man who, like all of us, would one day come up against the weight of the world and have to choose what to do with it. And in that choice, rather than in the dream of upending it all, the real story lies. At thirty, I do not look for revolution—I look for reconciliation.

Image Source: The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)