The 60's -- that over-mined cache of documentary footage -- has become a trite subject for my generation. The preferred discussion topic of stoners and dreamers young and old, the era is bereft of its scholastic worth by both common misconception and profound, pervading falsehoods. Here, enterprising and thorough directors have the opportunity to illuminate an age which modern culture has cloaked in tie-dye and pot smoke.
At the outset, Bill Siegel and Sam Green's documentary The Weather Underground, a picture of the radical protest group the Weathermen, seems to let this opportunity slip. They tip-toe nimbly past the basic arguments of the opposing side and instead to ply their audience with unilateral footage and popular leftist ideology. But upon closer investigation, the directors have conveyed their feelings through form rather than content.
The Weather Underground gets its name from the clandestine organization the Weathermen which was driven "underground" after the group's violent and destructive actions propelled many of the members to the FBI's most wanted list. Like many other protest groups at the time, the Weathermen were organized initially in opposition to the Vietnam War. Their name name comes from a line in the Bob Dylan song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.."), and they distinguished themselves from the rest of the radical left by embracing violence as a legitimate form of resistance.
After taking over the 1969 convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a largest and most efficient leftist student group in the 60's, the group made its declaration to "Bring the War Home," a cry that soon became their slogan. From here the group staged "The Days of Rage," a gathering of radicals to take the first step towards "real, effective protest" ostensibly violent opposition. The "Days of Rage" in fact amounted to little more than pure violence -- the small crowd of radicals clashing viciously with the police (and the many storefront displays) on the streets of Chicago's North Side. From then on the ideological platform of the Weathermen became more and more obscured by the group's escalating use of violence. When the group began to make a frequent practice of bombing government buildings, and the FBI lent its dogged attention to the radicals, the Weathermen formed the "Weather Underground."
The film follows the rise of notable Weathermen including Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert, and Brian Flanagan, coupling sixties footage of the members with contemporary interviews. The directors seem to rely too heavily on the insight and explanation of ex-weathermen. They allow statements, like Bernadine Dohrn's legitimizing the group's rejection of monogamy and the resulting orgies as a harmless experiment -- just another type of outward opposition to the "middle-class white norm" -- to be presented without debate. Siegel and Green thereby present a one-sided picture during the first two-thirds of the film of the radical left as fundamentally justified, with truth and good on its side despite the extreme behavior of some of its factions.
Fortifying this idea is a captivating compilation of live footage, still shots, and archived interviews. The viewer is easily wooed by the tone of mystery and revolt established by the scratchy black and white footage of protest marches, the yellowed photographs taken from official FBI surveillance records, and the psychedelic soundtrack. As in so many other 60's documentaries, one is quickly caught up in the hipness and "revolutionary" spirit of the left. The actual facts of the ideological struggle are disregarded as the mundane fodder of a political history textbook.
Toward the last third of the film a rather dramatic shift occurs. After being bombarded with the justification of sixties radical action and footage of police violently beating and disassembling gathering protesters, reality (and some snippets of interviews and footage) provides us with a different take. We see old footage of an interview with a member of the Black Panther Party defaming the Weathermen as an unorganized, ignorant group with little or no knowledge of proper or effective resistance (in a far more colorful statement, spoken in jive, no less). Here the viewer is first exposed to the true status of the group in the context of the sixties cultural revolution. They were discredited by the very groups with whom they plead a common cause and to whom they profess an unwanted support.
As the interviews are wrapped up, we finally see the true fruits of their youthful activism: two of the subjects are jail serving multi-decade jail terms, one is a community college math teacher known to his students for his comments on "free radicals" rather than "radical freedom," and another owns a bar in Chicago where he seems to spend most of his time partaking alongside his customers. "When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things," says former weatherman Brian Flanagan.
Thrown in at the very end, as if one more barb of playful irony, is that Brian Flanagan recently won several thousand dollars on jeopardy. For one who lent his whole mind and spirit (and for whom little is left of either) to a radical and outdated cause, there is but chance and the oh-so-hated popular culture to comfort the affliction of age.
Despite several inconsistencies at like this one at the film's end, Siegel and Green get their point across.
The Weathermen's cause may have been viscerally appealing, but we can't forget how unscrupulous these people were, and the film answers this query by showing us how pathetic their post-Weatherman lives turned out to be.
