Seen in film today, Mark Rudd seems just like every other flower child gone to seed you ever might have met. The same is true of Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, still wearing their denim jackets and paisley sundresses, respectively. The names don’t ring a bell, but in these aged activists’ demeanor you can recognize the same resignation that marks their generation’s reflection on the past.
As three of the most prominent leaders of the Weathermen, the violent revolutionary offshoot of the 1960s leftist group Students for a Democratic Society, these former student radicals are the principal interviewees featured in Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s documentary The Weather Underground.
The disparity between the drab, rapidly aging people in the interviews and the brash, fiery, self-assured young rebels shown in the period footage is jarring. This contrast serves to heighten the sense of transition pervading the film, which leaves the viewer with a portrait of the shrapnel of a shattered zeitgeist and the harm it did to the Weathermen themselves as well as their targets.
The inception of the Weathermen at the 1969 national convention of SDS is portrayed as “an act of organizational piracy,” with the most radical members hijacking the entire group. This act is portrayed as the moment when the peaceful, loving spirit of the ‘60s really began to turn sour. It is quickly followed up by an account of the Chicago “Days of Rage,” with student radicals taking to the streets to combat the police and kick off the revolution.
The footage of the riots captures the intermingled passion and terror that defined the Weathermen until their demise in the mid-1970s. But the images of Nixon and even some Black Panthers, with whom the Weathermen worked closely, speaking with disdain of the riots are more telling.
The editing is brilliant, with original film from demonstrations, press interviews, television news and various cultural milestones spliced in to great effect. Voice-overs from Rudd’s unpublished memoirs along with interviews from group members, nonviolent SDS leaders and FBI counter-agents further humanize those involved while making their actions seem all the more misguided. At one point, shots of the ice-cold young activists looking sexier and hipper than ever are contrasted by voice-overs describing the group’s increasingly tenuous philosophical justifications. The filmmakers set up a constant dichotomy between the decaying but still attractive idealism of the era and the disturbing reality, violent on so many levels, that history remembers it with.
The film’s main triumph is its portrayal of that bloody, disillusioned shift from the ‘60s into the ‘70s, which the Weathermen epitomized. The period is punctuated by assassinations, the My Lai Massacre of the Vietnam War, the Manson family serial killings and the murder at the Altamont festival. As the student movement lost support and potency, the Establishment’s response to what remained grew more violent and demoralizing, and the Weathermen were eventually driven underground. After several more years of violent subversion, the group imploded in 1975, in line with mainstream America’s increasing disillusionment and commercialization in trying to forget the ‘60s.
The film concludes with portraits of all those surviving members interviewed in their current lives. Many are college professors, and most now have children, but the last shot depicts one of them saying that if given the opportunity “to be a part of a revolution” came up again even now, she would join it in a second.
This poses an interesting question to student viewers today; we are still the children of this generation, seeing this account of this movement at the same point in our own lives, while our national political situation grows more and more repressive of the liberties the Weathermen, however misguided their efforts were, genuinely wanted to protect.
But young people today are still, in large part, cynical victims of the disillusionment with politics, activism, and life that has pervaded society since the end of the ‘60s. One can make all sorts of arguments about social developments of the last 35 years, but this film is an extremely well-crafted piece of evidence that something greater was lost when Rudd, Ayers and Dohrn finally had to give up and find a place for themselves to fit into the society they had tried to overthrow.
The Weather Underground is showing at Visions Cinema, 1927 Florida Ave., for a very limited time, and at independent theatres across the country. It will also air on PBS in April.
