TSA told me I had to go back to the American Airlines counter. It turned out I’s entered my birthday wrong (by a day) when hastily booking the ticket after I had to cancel my train when it was over eight hours delayed before it even got to Georgia. The airline employee wasn’t happy with this red eye request—even less so when she saw that my name on the ticket didn’t match my ID. “Sorry, I go by my middle name. All my bank info is under it too.” “They’re not gonna let you through security this close to Washington like that,” she said, whatever that meant. With an updated boarding pass I got in with just enough time to get to the gate and board for O’Hare. One thing with a last-minute ticket is that you might end up in the good seat upgrade that nobody wanted to pay for, leaving you with some unheard-of legroom right behind first class on an Embraer—a plane I might’ve felt dicey about a decade ago, but now I’m happy to ride in anything that isn’t Boeing-built.
I made it to the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago with minutes to spare before the screening that was to take up my whole weekend: a rewatch of Peter Watkins’ massive masterpiece The Journey (1987).
Coming in at a little over 14-and-a-half-hours, The Journey is probably more well-known for being one of the longest films ever made, not unlike its 1980s documentary counterpart Shoah (1985) in preceding the durational craze that followed in the burgeoning slow cinema moment that came out of the 1990s [Satantango, 1994] being exceptional here both in its contemplative formal committed and length) and exploded in possibility with the adaption of more affordable digital technology (the works of Lav Diaz and Wang Bing spring to mind here). However, Watkins’ film doesn’t just stand out for its runtime, but also its formal separation from the director’s oeuvre.
Watkins is known for his hybrid approach—making films that aesthetically take on the form of television documentaries while often taking place in historic or speculative environments. This first took proper shape with Culloden (1964) about the last pitched battle on Britain during the Jacobite Rebellion, where Watkins presents the event as if a TV news camera team were there reporting from the ground in 1746. This approach would be applied in varying degrees to the vast majority of his work, in other out-of-time masterpieces like Edvard Munch (1974) and La Commune (2000), or in the near-future what-ifs of Punishment Park’s (1971) Nixonite fascism or the nuclear apocalypse of The War Game (1965). The latter film is his most famous work outside of niche film circles and media-enthusiast Marxists, and while The War Game stands high above any of its imitators (most notably, Threads (1984), it’s nowhere near the tantamount greatness of The Journey. The moment I knew I was watching something far beyond the experiment it initially lays out—or any of Watkins’ other work, or anything but maybe a handful of films in the medium’s history—was when seven or eight hours in, the documentary starts slipping itself into speculation, moving from its present-tense exploration of the past and into the immediate collapse of the future.
Much of the body of The Journey’s text is Watkins interviewing families from around the world at their kitchen tables, showing them intimate and horrifying blown-up images of the carnage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, asking them how much they know or don’t know about the bombings and their fallout, talking to the children about whether or not these things are discussed in school, their links to the larger arms race and its hidden effects on their daily lives, etc. Suddenly, one of the families in Sweden is evacuating; simulating, along with hundreds of other members of their community, what would happen in the event of a nuclear attack, where they’d go, what the procedures would be. At one point in this chaotic sequence, Watkins’ cameraman runs with a pair of children, a brother and sister holding hands as they run from one filled-up schoolhouse shelter to the next, the lens staying low and wide at their level. In an instant, the present’s broken, and the future’s here.
It’s coincidental, but not without resonance, that I watched The Journey over the course of two days over the weekend where the ceasefire in Gaza began on the 19th, followed by Trump’s inauguration on the 20th. As I’ve written before, The Journey’s deconstruction of mass audiovisual media is particularly prescient with regards to how the genocide in Gaza was portrayed by mainstream sources. The Journey presents an alternative to intentionally falsified top-down narratives through education, and in experiment finds something shocking: that most people, when considering information and contemplating its implications, come to remarkably similar conclusions. In the case of The Journey, it’s the misanthropic insanity of the global arms race. In our present moment, the more people learned about Palestine the more people supported it against its systematic destruction.
Above all, Trumpism is a referendum on education. Like most conservative impulses, it’s a reaction against the idea of progress, and its particular flavor comes from the kind of sharp regressive instincts and lionizing of the archaic mystique that enraptured the Romantic-influenced fascists of the early-20th century. With one of the first acts of new administration a pen-stroke to reverse the landmark Civil Rights Act proposed by Kennedy and signed by Johnson in 1964, it's clear the extent to which the restored Republican hegemony is willing to attack every piece of progress the country has wrestled with since Reconstruction. And at the heart of it is resentment—the resentment of a bunch of losers and failures against the people who dared look at them with their expertise. Trump wanted to be a Broadway producer, and J.D. Vance’s Hollywood film flopped critically and at the box office that he decided to make himself non-grata with the liberal pundits that had raised him into the spotlight and run as hard as he could into the rightwing grift. Elon Musk is a loser.
These are angry people, ones who feel betrayed by their promise of domination being unfulfilled. “The professors are the enemy,” said Vance at the National Conservative Conference in 2021 in the run-up to his Senate campaign. If education is salvation, they know to come for it. But on a mass scale the systems of power have already hijacked (well, created) the airwaves to suppress information under the guise of sharing it—something Watkins’ cinema so provocatively deconstructs.
My hotel was right across the river from the Trump Tower in Chicago. Riverfront view. It turns out that hotels are cheap there in the dead of winter, including beautiful Art Deco constructions with free espresso bars and staff tailored made to attend to even the most finicky bourgeois guests. It turns out, too, that the dead of winter in Chicago is really cold and, believe it or not, windy. Outside of the weekend-long screening I explored a few blocks of the most architecturally-cited sections of the city, using coffee shops and bars as waypoints to and from the farthest extremities I was willing to reach on foot in sub-zero temperatures. And despite the untenable delays on the front-end of the trip, I was determined to take the train back from Chicago to the Northeast.
One of the parts of The Journey that sticks with me the most is a character we only see in the first couple of segments, but whose heuristic of activism runs as a throughline for the subsequent dozen hours of the picture. An activist in Washington, she realized that right behind her house is the terminus to the tracks that move the nuclear warheads assembled in the Amarillo Plant in Texas and shipped to the Trident Submarine Base in Bangor. She was at first horrified by this discovery, but realized something: these tracks go through towns, and if people knew these weapons were going through their towns they’d also be horrified and want something done to stop it. This was the advent of the movement against the great “White Train,” where people all along its route gathered to protest the shipping of nuclear arms through their backyards.
“You know Dan was part of those protests.” I’m sitting in a bar in D.C. with a friend from my political days in Montana after spending almost 30 hours on an Amtrak that was delayed not just due to the “once in a lifetime” winter storms that blanketed the country east of the Mississippi but also for frequent stops to step aside for freight rails. “By law freight is supposed to yield to Amtrak,” he tells me, “so the shipping companies made their trains so long that they wouldn’t fit in the runoff, so Amtrak has to divert to them anyways.” “Whatever happened to Dan?” I ask him. “Dan died. Years ago—you didn’t know? He was in his 90s when we knew him.” I order another High Life and a pour of Kentucky Gentleman before the bartender makes us close out. “The protests were kind of successful, you know. They put the warheads on trucks now.”