On Thursday night their publisher, independent outfit OR Books, held a party to celebrate the book’s publication at the somewhat unusual venue of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations. Guests passed by a giant portrait of Fidel and a smaller photograph of Che speaking at the United Nations on their way to check their coats. Upstairs in a capacious event space, bartenders served mojitos to a soundtrack of Cuban jazz.

OR Books co-founder Colin Robinson had hand-painted a banner that read “Free the Cuban Five” himself. “This is independent publishing!” he said, proudly surveying his work. He acknowledged that it was now, technically, the Cuban Four (one of the accused spies was recently released from jail). “But he’s still trapped in Florida,” he explained. Mr. Robinson recalled the last time he had a party at the mission, on the occasion of celebrating Fidel Castro’s autobiography, My Life, published while he was still an editor at Scribner.

Michaels Ratner and Smith were jubilant about their reception, which came only one day after a paradigm-changing new law in Cuba that allows the sale of private property. Indeed, even C.I.A. assassinations have changed since the covert days of "plausible deniability" during the Cold War. “Now they brag about them,” lamented Mr. Ratner.

After a short speech by the Cuban ambassador and an amplified phone call from Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the Cuban National Assembly (who also wrote an introduction for the book) the authors took a moment to thank their guests.

“We came here straight from Zuccotti Park,” said Michael Steven Smith. “It’s like going from one free territory in America to another.”

“As we say in Havana,” said Michael Ratner, “Venceremos!”

Communist dictators tend to be garishly embalmed. The corpses of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung and Mao have become tourist attractions. Some of them wanted to be cremated. Instead they were placed in ornate coffins of crystal in elaborate, dimly lit mausoleums that are the focal points of vast city squares. Expert undertakers wage a complicated battle against time to keep the dear leaders seemly for the hordes that file past the coffins to pay their respects.

The most romanticized Marxists, though, are the ones that got away, the locations of their bodies not verified for decades: Che Guevara, who was shot in the jungles of Bolivia; Patrice Lumumba, who was shot in the jungles of the Congo; Salvador Allende, who was shot (or shot himself) in the Chilean presidential palace and dumped in an unmarked grave in Valparaíso for the length of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. And finally there is one whose corpse remains officially missing: Rosa Luxemburg, who was also shot, in a car in Berlin, and dumped in a canal.

Luxemburg, a Polish Jew born in 1871, lived a Pan-European political existence in a time of Pan-European tumult. She was educated in Switzerland but spent most of her adulthood in Germany. She participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and edited and contributed to a number of leftist European newspapers of the era. Today she is most famous for her role as a leader, along with Karl Liebknecht, of the Spartacus League, a left-wing spur of the Social Democratic Party that diverged from the mainstream to maintain adamant opposition to World War I. As a result of her views, Luxemburg spent most of the war in jail, released only in 1918, when political prisoners were given amnesty.

In January 1919, after an attempted workers' revolt, German paramilitaries kidnapped Luxemburg and Liebknecht from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. After an unsuccessful attempt to kill her by a blow to the head, Luxemburg was put in a car and shot in the head, her body thrown in the canal. When spring came, a body was fished out again. An autopsy at the city's Charité Hospital identified it as Luxemburg's, and she was buried at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery next to Liebknecht. For the next 90 years--at least the ones when the German government was not actively persecuting them--leftists came to pay their respects to Red Rosa, even though the remains in the mausoleum were said to have disappeared after Nazis desecrated the tombs in 1935. In Communist East Germany, her status was elevated to martyr, and today Berlin's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn stop is at the heart of the glossy consumer district that has sprung up in Mitte since the fall of the wall. The whereabouts of her body, however, remain unknown.

In 2007, the head of Germany's Institute of Legal Medicine, Dr. Michael Tsokos, was assisting in the effort to clear out the basement of Charité Hospital, part of a process of consolidating the forensic institutes of the former East and West Germany into one building. The building that had housed the East German institute was more than a century old, and the basement was filled with macabre detritus dating back to the institute's foundation, in 1833. In the days before photographs, doctors had learned anatomy by looking at actual specimens. Hundreds of these remained--tissue samples, ears, brains. There was also a body. Headless, mummified and missing its hands and feet, it had no identification to indicate its age or identity.

But Dr. Tsokos had heard a rumor, one that the oldest employees haunting Charité would talk about from time to time: that Luxemburg's body had never actually left Charité Hospital and that some other corpse had been fished out of the canal and buried instead. Dr. Tsokos was told that someone had even claimed to have seen Luxemburg's head, which was cut off post-mortem, in a jar of formaldehyde in Hamburg the 1970s. Unfortunately, this key witness died in 2006. Undaunted, Dr. Tsokos considered the possible connection between the missing corpse with the one he had found and set out to solve a mystery 90 years old.

The story of the missing corpse is only the latest chapter in the collected mythology of Rosa Luxemburg. There's no shortage of romancing when it comes to her life: She was the subject of a 1986 biopic, Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, by Margarethe von Trotta; a 2005 historical novel, Rosa, by Jonathan Rabb; and, most recently, a 2010 French musical, Rosa La Rouge. But as the introduction to a new book of her collected correspondence, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 512 pages, $39.95), points out, only a quarter of her written work has thus far been available in English, the rest inaccessible to the unfortunate "Anglophone monoglot."

The new collected letters is therefore intended as a companion volume to the forthcoming 14-volume collection of her newly translated complete works. It consists of 230 letters to 46 different recipients and spans from 1891 to Jan. 11, 1919, four days before her assassination.

While certainly useful and exciting for the Anglophone monoglot scholar of Rosa Luxemburg, the epistolary Rosa Luxemburg experience can at times be slightly tedious for the casual reader--and this is only a fragment of the 2,800 letters, postcards and telegrams contained in the six-volume German edition.

As Luxemburg wrote, "It's the German thoroughness that prevents a true picture of life or of the times from being created, a picture that should be tossed off with light strokes."

The bulk of the letters in the first part of the book are addressed to Leo Jogiches, an activist who was also murdered in 1919 and was Luxemburg's lover from the 1890s to 1907. Luxemburg variously refers to Jogiches as "precious gold," "my bobo" and "my little mite." Following their protracted arguments and reconciliations via one-sided letter is rather like trying to act sympathetic toward a friend whose boyfriend you hate. "He's a controlling asshole!" you want to tell her. But then you remember that this is a woman who devoted her life to things much greater than mere boyfriends.

There is some soap-operatic satisfaction to be gleaned, however, when she recounts "a brief and soft-spoken but frightening confrontation--during a trip on an omnibus" when, after he has learned that Luxemburg has taken a new lover (the dashing physician Kostya Zetkin), Jogiches declares that he would sooner kill her than lose her. After the bus ride, Luxemburg and Jogiches meet friends at a nice restaurant.

"A fine orchestra was playing, in the gallery, music from the last scene of Carmen," she writes, "and while they were playing L softly whispered to me: I would sooner strike you dead." Yikes!

As for the momentous political developments Luxemburg lived through and her stints in and out of prison, history comes through only in fragments--"Dear Vladimir," she writes to Lenin in Dec. 18, about a month before she died. "I am taking advantage of my uncle's trip to send all of you heartfelt greetings from our family, Karl, Franz, and the others. God grant that the coming year will bring us great fulfillments."

Footnotes assist in historical orientation, but in many ways the letters serve to remind that political movements are made up of incremental bureau
cracy and banal accounting as much as soaring speeches or dramatic marches.

Her best letters, then, are those written from prison, where she was held for almost all of World War I. Here monotony and loneliness provoke a literary unity between the smallest details of her everyday life and the larger political endeavors that she has tried to accomplish. She must face the depth of her commitment, and finds she has "become as hard as polished steel and from now on will neither politically nor in personal relations make even the slightest concession."

But she is drowning in memories. A wasp flies into her cell and she writes, "It's such a reminder of summer, of the heat, and of my open balcony in Südende with the broad view out onto the fields and the groves of trees shimmering in the heat, and of Mimi [the  cat] lying in the sun all folded together like a soft package, blinking up at the buzzing wasp."

She recalls the moving shadows of tree limbs across a cafe table in Berlin, the jubilation of Karl Liebknecht on a country outing one summer, the minutia of a frozen bumblebee "cold and still as though dead, lying in the grass with its little legs drawn in and its little fur coat covered with hoarfrost." In her letters to her friends, who sent her, it seems, a near constant supply of flowers and cookies, she constantly asks them to join her in her remembrance:

"Do you remember the fabulous full-moon night in Südende," she writes, "when I was walking you home, and to us the gables of the houses, with their sharp black outlines against the background of a tender blue sky, seemed like the castles of knights of yore, do you remember?"

She describes singing an aria from Figaro to a flock of titmice on her windowsill, the blackbirds that she feeds, her advances in her botanic studies and a ladybug she has wrapped in cotton wool to protect from the frost. But as soon as one is tempted to begin thinking of her as a nice Disney character who sings to birds, she brings us horribly back to earth.

In her most powerful letter, which must also be one of the most powerful letters of the German experience of World War I, she is merely describing the regular delivery of bloodstained army uniforms that come to the prison to be cleaned and mended for reuse. On one delivery, the cart is being pulled by a yoke of undomesticated water buffaloes, spoils of war from Romania. The buffalo must be heavily beaten to obey, to the extent one's hide had split.

"The one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child," Luxemburg writes. "How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-green fields of Romania! How differently the sun used to shine and the wind blow there, how different was the lovely song of the birds that could be heard there, or the melodious call of the herdsmen." She begins to cry. The prisoners unload the sacks of bloody uniforms while the soldier who beat the oxen paces in a corner, whistling to himself. "And the entire marvelous panorama of the war passed before my eyes."

I first read about Dr. Tsokos and the body from the basement that might be Luxemburg's corpse in the papers. After the discovery, a search ensued for sentimental tokens that might have traces of Luxemburg's DNA. A leftist member of the German parliament styled her updo in honor of Luxemburg. In a photo made public after the discovery, the corpse looked Classical in its repose, lying on white cotton drapery at the mouth of a scanner like a headless Venus de Milo, its surface the color of a used tea bag. The legs ended just below her bended knees and the upraised arms were cut off above the elbow. After 90 years in a cellar, one would expect a skeleton, but the body had served as the object of study for medical students as exemplary of a natural mummification process called adipocere that occurs in corpses that have been immersed for extended periods in an anaerobic environment--such as mud at the bottom of a canal.

In early 2010, I happened to be in Berlin wandering around Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and I started to wonder what had happened to the corpse, so I called Dr. Tsokos and, on a frozen January day, went to the Institute of Legal Medicine to meet him. His office was located in a compound of older brick buildings arranged around snowy courtyards that were scattered with birch trees. It had the feel of a sanitarium, and I half-expected to see nuns pushing invalids around in antique wheelchairs with blankets on their laps, but the sidewalks were empty.

Dr. Tsokos was a media-savvy guy, casually dressed in a sweater and jeans and cavalier about the more chilling aspects of his life's work. His interest in the mystery corpse seemed purely technocratic--he was somebody who was obsessed with his job, and not too concerned with leftist politics. Sitting before a dark wooden cabinet filled with skulls, he proceeded to tell me of all the unsuccessful attempts that had been made to identify the corpse.

He had begun with the original autopsy report from June 1919, which was riddled with inconsistencies. It had noted no signs of head trauma, and witnesses to Luxemburg's murder had said that she had suffered a blow to the head with a rifle before her death. There was no notation of hip disease, but Luxemburg had walked with a limp from a degenerative hip disease she had as a child. The autopsied body was shorter than Luxemburg's recorded height (even though she described herself as "Lilliputian"), and, most curiously, the doctors had not followed autopsy protocol--strange, because one of them was responsible for teaching it.

"I thought, 'Oh, shit, this is really interesting,'" Dr. Tsokos said. He went to the state archive to search for a postcard with a stamp she might have licked, leaving DNA evidence. But Luxemburg had always used water to wet the adhesive. He searched for a hat or a coat that she might have worn and left a stray hair on, but he found none.

He decided that he would instead operate on the exclusion principle, and prove that the body was not hers, but every step he took seemed only to affirm that the corpse was Luxemburg's: radiocarbon dating revealed that the woman had lived at the turn of the 20th century; a CT scan of her internal organs revealed that she was 47 when she died; the body had evidence of hip degeneration and was sufficiently Lilliputian.

Dr. Tsokos sent tissue samples to Munich, where a method of identifying trace isotopes in bones revealed that the corpse had lived in Poland, Switzerland and Berlin, and that it had signs of malnutrition that corresponded with Luxemburg's extended stints in prison. He issued a public call for information and received more than 100 emails in response. Nothing came of the 10 or 20 that were actually of interest: Luxemburg had kept a herbarium as a hobby, and four of her botany books were discovered in an archive in Warsaw, but they had only male DNA on them. A grandniece was located in Israel, but since she was not a direct descendant there was only a 50 to 60 percent probability that they were related. Luxemburg never had children.

Dr. Tsokos was in a bind: He could not prove that it was her, but he could not prove that it wasn't her, either.

"For me I don't care if it's her or not her," he said. "It's just an amazing story. It's a murder case that was 90 years old. I wanted to try and ID whoever it is."

So he did what he had to do: The body was turned over to the police and buried anonymously.

ewitt@observer.com

Reviews for Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic of Latin American revolutionary and T-shirt model Ernesto "Che" Guevara (played by co-producer Benicio Del Toro) had been split—The Los Angeles Times' Sheri Linden called it "extraordinary and challenging"; The New York Times' A.O. Scott called it "epic hagiography" and dinged Mr. Soderbergh's politics as "naïve and fuzzy"—but the crowd seemed fully ready to sit through the complete movie—4 hours and 23 minutes, with a half-hour intermission in between. IFC Films, which is distributing the movies, called this the Special Roadshow Edition—the company handed out lush, heavy-stock programs that looked like aged copies of Paris Match with documentary-style black-and-white photos of Mr. Del Toro and other cast members by Mary Ellen Mark—and would be showing it to audiences in New York and Los Angeles before bifurcating it and making the two sections available in slightly less gluttonous forms at theaters and on digital cable On-Demand service.

One Web site had already offered advice to viewers about when to take bathroom breaks, and judging by the snaking line at the concession stand, rations were being prepared on the fly.

The first image on the screen was a silhouette of Cuba, which was met by the crowd with a raucous cry of "¡Viva, Cuba!" and cheers all around. Throughout the next two hours and six minutes of part one (dubbed The Argentine), the crowd sat in mostly rapt, respectful silence as Che, Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir), Camilo Cienfuegos (Santiago Cabrera), and their scrappy guerrillas took down the Cuban army, intercut with an impassioned speech by Che on the floor of the United Nations and scenes of the fatigues-clad warrior as the awkward guest of honor at a pre-Radical Chic party in Manhattan in 1964, where, in one of the few jokes he makes, he thanks one U.S. official for the Bay of Pigs.

As the first film ended (Spoiler Alert: Castro, Guevara, et al. win), one attendee was overheard saying that it would've been a perfect biopic. But that was just the beginning.

As the lights came up and people bolted for the Ziegfeld's modest-size bathrooms or much-deserved cigarettes outside, the question of how people were holding up—and if they were prepared for the second siege in a long slog—seemed not unreasonable.

"We figured we'd eat first," said David Winn, 47, as he stood with his wife, Kim Campi, 50, by their seats in the upper section of the theater. "'Cause there wouldn't be much chance to eat during or later."

"Unfortunately, I'm being affected by the heat in here," Ms. Campi said. "It's stuffy."

Mr. Winn, who appeared to be sweating, agreed, but said, "It is nice to go to a four-hour movie that delves into a lot of detail about military strategy, political strategy, with a crowd that seems to be really pumped up for it."

Nearby, an older man was passing out flyers for a New Year's Eve celebration of the Cuban Revolution's 50th Anniversary, a party endorsed by dozens of groups including the Communist Party USA.

Outside, Francisco Taveras, Marmol Ejos, and Ivan Nuñez were grabbing a cigarette and talking about how accurate Mr. Del Toro's portrayal of Che was. "To me, it was like, 'Wow,'" said Mr. Taveras, 34, who also noted that Mr. Del Toro's Argentine accent was perfect.

They all agreed that they were ready for the second half. Was it too long? "I was so into the movie, I wasn't noticing," said Mr. Ejos, 35. "Everybody's into it."

"I wish I had better seats, though," Mr. Nuñez said.

Down toward the front of the theater, a 26-year-old culinary student, who like many in attendance, was in a Che T-shirt, was passing the time reading a Bible.

The man, who gave only his first name, Melvin, said he was from the Dominican Republic, and explained his shirt. "I bought it in Mexico," he said. "I don't like the ones they make here. This one, it's really nice and comfy."

A reporter wondered if it was strange to read a Bible during the intermission of a movie that valorizes the life of a godless communist like Che. "I don't see him as a Communist, I just look at him like a person. Even Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, you know?"

There's a scene in the second half of the film (dubbed The Guerrilla) in which Che—now leading a doomed insurgency in Bolivia—warns his troops that the campaign is going to be difficult, food will be scarce, and that at the end, they will feel like "human waste." By that time, hungry from ill-planned dinners, risking deep vein thrombosis or chair sores, and wishing they'd listened to that bathroom-break advice, viewers would be forgiven for feeling like Che was speaking to them as well.

If The Argentine, with its emphasis on plans, work-arounds, and scrappy determination, was about the making of itself (as Mr. Scott suggested in The Times), then The Guerilla, with its slow, occasionally interminable stretches and unflinching studies of Che's asthma attacks and various pustulating wounds of his men, seemed to also be about the challenge of watching both films together. Despite the hours crawling by, the heat, and any feelings of restlessness on the part of the audience, there didn't appear to be any walkouts and when the film ended, the audience rose in a standing ovation.

Afterwards, Mr. Soderbergh and the film critic Glenn Kenny stood at the front of the auditorium and took questions from the crowd as hundreds of camera phones clicked. Showing the sort of self-deprecating humor he exhibited as he accepted the Palme d'Or for sex, lies, and videotape as a 26-year-old wunderkind in 1989 by saying, "Well, it's all downhill from here," Mr. Soderbergh thanked the crowd at the Ziegfeld for coming and added, "And thank you for staying. … Your commitment to sitting is extraordinary." ("Sequel!" someone shouted from the back of the theater.)

During a sometimes contentious exchange with the crowd—one audience member screamed that Che was a murderer while others shouted him down, calling him a revolutionary (yet another shouted "Go to Miami!")—Mr. Soderbergh alternated between defensiveness and modesty. At times, the director seemed to quake a bit as he stood there, the single spotlight holding him against the mustard-colored velvet curtains like a bug caught by a magnifying glass in the sun. Update, 12:23 p.m.: Video of the exchange can be found here.

When pressed for his own stance on Che—murderer? revolutionary?—the director called himself agnostic. "It doesn't matter whether I agree with that or not," he said of Che's politics. He just had to be loyal to the facts, which he insisted was all rigorously sourced. "I can't be half in and half out."

But if the crowd seemed at times hostile, it was apparently nothing compared to a screening Mr. Soderbergh hosted in Miami earlier in the week: "You can imagine what the response was there," he deadpanned. (Mr. Soderbergh must've gone into that particular event with some trepidation; in an interview with Salon's Andrew O'Hehir that went online Friday, he joked "You know, this could be one of the last interviews I ever give, because I'm going to Miami this week. It was great talking to you!")

The director seemed most at ease—and most animated—when talking about the camera he used to shoot Che, a newer, cheaper high-definition digital camera that he promised would (with practically no pun intended) revolutionize filmmaking. The camera, it's almost too perfect not to mention, is called the Red.

Of the film's epic length, he said it was the shortest cut he could possibly have created, but lamented that he hadn't gone to HBO "and done 10 hours." He also talked about an earlier take on the the same material—Richard Fleischer's 1969 movie Che! starring Omar Sharif—paying particular attention to Jack Palance's take on Fidel Castro, "a combination of Groucho Marx and Tony Soprano." (Mr. Soderbergh said that 40 minutes into watching that film, he was forced to turn it off and watch Woody Allen's Bananas to cleanse his palette.)

At the end, Mr. Soderbergh offered to autograph programs. A crush of people moved towards him, booklets in hand.

An even bigger group made their way towards the exits. They'd all been in the Ziegfeld since before 7 p.m. They were tired and they were hungry. Some legs had fallen asleep and not a few necks were cricked. It had been a long and at times painful campaign, but they were all in one piece and together as a group. It was well after midnight and they were finally free.

[Silence.]

DR. SELMAN: So you were glad to see her?

GEORGE: Yep. She got some new shoes.

DR. SELMAN: Can I see?

HILLY: Little Ralph Lauren wedges. Yeah, I got those actually because of that lost weekend in East Hampton. Is that what it was? Two nights before that, there was another one of those George incidents when he was up in the middle of the night screaming, “I can’t take this anymore! You’re driving me crazy!”

GEORGE: We were watching The Wire, everything was going very smoothly, and Hilly—she’s really smart, able to follow that kind of cop show so much better than I can. Maybe it’s from watching Law & Order so much. So everything is going great, and she’s sitting still—which is important to me sometimes—and there was a rainstorm and the roof started to leak. It was pretty bad, but it wasn’t flooding the apartment.

HILLY: It started in one place and then 10 seconds later there was another spot, and within three minutes there were at least eight different places.

GEORGE: I was pretty relaxed about it, wanting to get back to the show, and Hilly called her dad—

HILLY: No, before I called my dad, first of all, you were freaking out. So I said, “I’ll run upstairs and see if the neighbors are home.” And you said, “Good.” And he was on the phone trying to reach the superintendent and the landlord, but he got voicemail. I couldn’t find anyone, so I came back downstairs and said, “Maybe we should call 311, because it’s kinda bad …. ”

GEORGE: You were worried about an electrical fire and all your stuff catching on fire?

HILLY: Well, one of the streams of water was coming out of a light fixture.

GEORGE: So the reason you called your dad, it had something to do with when you are a little kid—

HILLY [sarcastically]: It was because my dad knows everything.

GEORGE: And then you call 311 again, and after that it was just one thing after another, and you were in panic mode, and then from there she started doing laundry and ironing and frequent trips to the bathroom. And it just escalated. It got a little better when we started watching the Che Guevara documentary and then you started saying, “He’s handsome!”

HILLY: The second that I said that Che Guevara was handsome, he didn’t want to watch it anymore.

GEORGE: And then we tried to play this game she loves called Taboo, which makes no sense to me. It’s like, you give your opponent clues so that they come up with the right answer and then you score points for their right answer. There’s just no incentive to win or guess right or—

DR. SELMAN: What has this got to do with shoes?

GEORGE: We’re getting to that! So she went to bed and I started to relax. It was midnight, time to do some reading, and she came back in and—I can’t remember what she said—but it was such a volatile, hyperactive night out of nowhere, and I think I threw a plastic cup and said something like “You’re driving me crazy!” She owed me money for Con Ed—she hasn’t paid Con Ed for the whole time we’ve been living together, and the air conditioner’s been on 24 hours a day all summer, and she had agreed to pay half. So her solution to all of this, after I yelled at her—will you explain this logic?

HILLY: Let’s back up. The week before, George was complaining again about his breathing, and he was unable to sleep in his bedroom. So there was another night when he had a spin-out, a freak-out, shouting—

DR. SELMAN: You were going to get an air conditioner in the bedroom.

HILLY: Well, his mother ended up being gracious enough—she said, “We’re going to take care of this.” So then it was Tuesday, and I went to work and when I came home, his entire bedroom had been completely emptied. There was a new bed frame, a new box spring, a new mattress—

GEORGE: A Tempur-Pedic mattress.

HILLY: A new air conditioner. Everything was spotless and pristine. He was out on a bike ride and the doorbell rang. It was U.P.S., and they had two huge crates from Schweitzer Linen with all-new hypoallergenic French pillows, with matching duvets and, like, neck rolls and a new comforter—not just a new mattress cover, but also the whole set of sheets and a special layer of quilted sheet, and everything was folded over really nicely and just beautiful, and this was all for George so that he could, ideally, sleep well.

GEORGE: And get this—

HILLY: No! No, no, wait, you can’t speak right now. So then we’re so excited that we have to go out that night, so we went to a party. We come back and George says, “I can’t sleep in there tonight—you take it.” So I sleep in there. The next morning I’m at work and his mother calls: “Was George O.K.? Did he sleep better last night?” I said, “Actually, I slept in there last night and it was wonderful. I think he’s going to sleep in there tonight.” The next night, basically, the same thing happened. And then he tried to sleep in there the next night, but woke up in the middle of the night and woke me up. Finally I said, “George, you have to decide—what do you want? The room or the cubby? I need to know where I’m going to put my stuff so when I wake up in the morning, I don’t bother you.”

GEORGE: Now she’s sleeping in there like Samantha Boardman, and I’m up in the cubby like some squatter in—

HILLY: No, listen, you still can’t speak. This is beautiful: One night, it must’ve been 5:30 a.m., George just got up in the middle of the night—he must have been sleepwalking—and came in and pushed me out of the bed, and I had to go up to the cubby. So I started to realize: You know what? He just wants to have whatever he wants.

DR. SELMAN: How big is the bed?

GEORGE: Queen size.

DR. SELMAN: Why couldn’t you both sleep—

GEORGE: I can’t breathe in there.

HILLY: And when I’m there, I make noises that irritate him.

GEORGE: Anyway, it’s fine, that’s your new bed—it’s fine.

HILLY: But it’s not—because you’re still claiming it while you’re sleepwalking. And you use that room as your office.

GEORGE: We’re gonna work it out! Now I wanna talk about something else because—

DR. SELMAN: Why don’t we just stick with this and try to see it through to—

GEORGE: I’ll solve it right here: You’re going to sleep in the room.

HILLY: I’m sorry, you still can’t speak. Because then, over the course of the past week and a half, George gave me a list of rules. One of them was the air conditioner can never be below 70 degrees. Another one was “You cannot iron my dirty laundry—”

GEORGE: Semi-clean clothes!

HILLY: “ … that you find anywhere, even on the floor or in the laundry bin, because I might want to wear it again.” “No whistling.” Meanwhile, I never met my grandfather—my mother’s father, he died before I was born—the only thing she’s ever told me my entire life is that whenever I whistle, she says, “Oh, what a pretty little songbird, you remind me of my daddy!” And when I whistle around you, which makes me think that I have joie de vivre and kind of music in my heart, you say, “Stop it! You sound like a weirdo!”

GEORGE: It’s irritating; it’s like chewing gum loudly. And you have to pay half the Con Ed—

HILLY: You chew Nicorette and take it out of your mouth and put it back in and take it out and put it back in over and over.

GEORGE: And half the rent, and buy all the toilet paper.

HILLY: That was another one of the rules.

GEORGE: Oh, your hair, you have to let your hair down, you can’t pull it back all the time. Because I … yeah.

HILLY: So I try to explain to him again, for about the umpteenth time, that I have to wear my hair up for a couple of reasons. One is that it looks more professional when I’m at work. Two, George doesn’t allow me to wake up in the morning and blow-dry my hair—and if I don’t have 25 minutes with a hair dryer, I can’t make my hair look nice.

DR. SELMAN: Well, is there any solution to these—I mean, first of all, it does sound a bit controlling, George.

GEORGE: I know, I know. O.K., let’s jettison all those rules. I mean, I would like you, from time to time, to have the same hair style you did when I first met you at the Hog Pit in the summer of 2001.

HILLY: Oh! O.K., I’m sorry, I have to intercede one more time. This brings up another thing, which is: He’s been, for the past couple months, actually saying things to me on a regular basis about how “you really need to get in shape—”

GEORGE: Well, that’s—

HILLY: Shut up. So I’m sitting there poolside while he’s swimming—it’s so funny, because he puts on his bathing cap and his goggles to not even like tread water, just kind of milling about the pool. And he’s like, “Did that look like Olympic swimming?” or, “Do I look athletic?” I’m like, “Yeah, George—good work!”

GEORGE: Just doing some underwater somersaults and jumping jacks.

HILLY: And then he’ll come over after doing some Esther Williams–like water ballet, he’ll come over and take off his swimming cap and say, “You know, Hilly, you really need to get in shape.”

DR. SELMAN: You know, you seem like you’re a little—

HILLY: Upset?

DR. SELMAN: Yeah.

GEORGE: And amused.

HILLY: Shut up.

DR. SELMAN: Well, actually, I was going to that very thing. Right, you seem upset and amused at the same time.

HILLY: Well, it’s hysterical. How can I put this?

DR. SELMAN: Well, how much of an issue are these things?

GEORGE: Well, can I say one quick thing and then—? It’s my turn. Forget about all those rules. The main thing, I’m going to be an absolute tyrant about these rules: I am not going to live with someone—let alone get engaged, marriage, kids—unless this person does not drink to get numb, and who smokes cigarettes and doesn’t exercise—

HILLY: Oh, that is such horsepucky.

DR. SELMAN: George, you’ve got to apply that to yourself!

HILLY: He never—

GEORGE: What? No, no, no, no—I’m in the best shape of my adult life right now!

HILLY: Since I moved into your apartment. Anyway, it’s just ridiculous. Mother Teresa would drink if she lived with you.

GEORGE: When I have a cocktail, I become fun, social, wild and really good at pool. How good was I the other night at Dusk? Phenomenal. And you get inner, like a 6-year-old autistic kid. I think it’s O.K. to go out and have a couple drinks to loosen up, but you don’t need to do that at home.

HILLY: O.K., Mr. Saint. Saint George. Guess what George did two nights ago? We went out for his friend’s birthday, and we end up at this club, and I was having a pretty O.K. time, but knowing that I had to be at work the next morning—it was pretty late—and one thing led to another, and all of a sudden I realized, “Oh, where’s George?” And I asked a couple people, and guess what? He left. He left the club on the same block where that 16-year-old girl was raped and murdered—he left me there alone without even telling me he was leaving. Then I found out yesterday—

DR. SELMAN: Wait, he left and didn’t come back?

HILLY: Not only did he leave and not come back and not tell me—he left with a girl.

GEORGE: Ha ha ha ha ….

HILLY: He left with a girl. He walked outside of this club, where all of these people were standing around—don’t laugh at me, you snide ass.

[To be continued.]

—George Gurley

Prior Articles:

George and Hilly published 08/14/06
George and Hilly published 08/07/06
George and Hilly published 07/31/06
George and Hilly published 07/24/06
George and Hilly published 07/17/06
George and Hilly published 06/26/06
George and Hilly published 06/19/06
George and Hilly published 05/29/06
George and Hilly published 05/15/06
George and Hilly published 05/08/06
George and Hilly published 05/01/06
George and Hilly published 04/17/06
George and Hilly published 04/03/06
George and Hilly published 03/20/06
George and Hilly published 02/6/06
George and Hilly published 01/23/06
George and Hilly published 01/16/06
George and Hilly published 12/26/05
George and Hilly published 11/14/05
George and Hilly published 11/07/05
George and Hilly published 10/24/05
George and Hilly published 10/17/05
George and Hilly published 10/10/05
George and Hilly published 10/03/05
George ’n’ Hilly, Back in Couples, Turn on the Doc published 09/26/05
But Should We Get Married? Part III published 08/29/05
But Should We Get Married? published 08/15/05
Should I Get Married? My Hilly Joining Me In Couples Session published 08/08/05

Hence, I’m not as privileged as some of my colleagues in ascertaining the accuracy of casting Gael García Bernal as the 23-year-old Ché and Rodrigo De la Serna as the 29-year-old Alberto Granado. I was nonetheless moved by their initial easygoing camaraderie and their subsequent immersion in the sufferings of those they encountered while exploring the continent. Ché, particularly, has been described by some as more macho and muscular than the delicately featured and slightly built Mr. Bernal, who gained our attention in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000), Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and Carlos Carrera’s The Crime of Father Amaro (2002). He’ll be seen later this year in Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, a highlight of this year’s New York Film Festival. By any standard, he is a hot talent in Latin-American cinema. The criticism of Mr. De la Serna as Alberto Granado—still active in his 80’s as the health minister in Fidel Castro’s Cuba—has less to do with Mr. De la Serna’s physical appearance than with his portrayal of Mr. Granado as a comically relentless skirt-chaser. This is presumably no way to treat a revered icon of the Cuban Revolution.

The fact that Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera have taken these liberties with such a politically sacred subject makes The Motorcycle Diaries all the more emotionally complex and universally accessible (especially in the United Sates, where the shifting winds of Cuban exile opinion in Florida may help decide the choice of our next President). However, I must confess somewhat mixed feelings towards this very skillful resurrection of the Ché Guevara legend.

On the one hand, I have never believed that the lying slut Chiquita Banana should shape our policy toward Cuba. (I say "lying slut" because for years she persuaded me never to put a banana in the refrigerator; the avoidable spoilage that inevitably occurred put more money in the pockets of the United Fruit Company, her corporate pimp). But on the other hand, my memory of the late, great gay cinematographer Néstor Almendros flashes before me as a reminder of the repression of civil liberties and political freedoms in Castro’s Cuba. Even so, the horrors of an earlier Marxist experiment gone awry in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union were well on the way to being exposed before Ché launched his quixotic crusade to unify Latin America into one indivisible People’s Socialist Republic.

What then is the answer to this political quandary? Must we replace the economic exploitation and injustice of global capitalism with the seemingly inevitable totalitarianism of global Marxism—or is there a third way? A wishy-washy centrism with a little less exploitation and injustice seems to be one of the few remaining options for the Kerry campaign, and I’m afraid that this is where this reviewer is ideologically stranded. Unwilling to surrender my bourgeois lifestyle, which permits me to express myself with comparative freedom, can I really look into the eyes of the oppressed farmers and workers that Mr. Bernal and Mr. Serna encounter at every turn in The Motorcycle Diaries, more than half a century after the real-life Guevera and Granado went on their journey? Nothing much has changed in all that time—and, as things are going, will anything change in the next half-century?

There’s an aesthetic danger rife with pathetic fallacies in this particular territory. Cinema magnifies every facial signifier of abject misery into a howling accusation, leaving the inescapably voyeuristic viewer guilty of callous indifference at the very least. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, indeed!

Fortunately, Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera have rescued the viewer from compassion fatigue with long interludes of hedonistic high spirits fueled by youthful energy. Several of these interludes are entertaining group-dance spectacles in which communal feelings of solidarity transcend the lechery of macho ego-trips. On one occasion, the high spirits get out of hand and our two youthful protagonists have to run for their lives from a jealous husband and his Chilean friends, none of whom like Argentineans. In another episode, Ché is teased good-naturedly for mistakenly dancing the tango in Brazilian rumba territory.

On a more serious note, Ché persuades a morbidly depressed young woman to have an operation to save her arm by talking about his own depression over having been born with asthma. Even here, Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera avoid the tedium of those obligatory scenes when turning points are achieved. Hence, when Ché receives a letter from his girlfriend, we have only to look at the expression on his face to know that he’s been jilted; there is no need to read the letter to himself, his friend or the audience.

Some of the scenic wonders of South America are paraded before us with a fitting sense of existential irony as our youthful protagonists take the so-called Western route through Argentina, Chile, Peru and the Amazon Basin and across mountains, deserts and rivers; for part of that way, they travel on an oil-guzzling wreck of a motorcycle that eventually breaks down completely, and for the rest of the journey via a tiring combination of walking and hitchhiking.

The point is that if I was moved despite my ingrained skepticism about Ché Guevara and Castro’s Cuba, you probably will be too. Mr. Salles expresses his thoughts on making the film thus: "If there’s one thing I can tell you about this experience that we shared—‘we’ being the group of people who went on the road together for two years to do this project—it’s that, like Ernesto and Alberto, we were very different when we got to the end of our journey in comparison to where we were when we started."

In the final analysis, The Motorcycle Diaries is the kind of movie that can change us all for the better, and I can think of no higher praise.

Anyone for Tennis?

Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon, from a screenplay by Adam Brooks, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, is a pleasant enough entertainment at a time when movies either pleasant or entertaining are in short supply. Yet by the time the farfetched but utterly predictable plot reaches its preordained climax (with a particularly silly coda at the end), I am reminded of why I am a sports fan, but not a sports-movie fan. This is to say that the suspense and excitement generated by the greatest of the Connor-Borg, Connors-McEnroe, McEnroe-Borg, Sampras-Agassi and Agassi-Federer matches can never be fabricated in a mere movie. For one thing, there is no moral to any of these titanic real-life contests: On a given day, one superlative player simply is superior to another superlative player. That’s all, folks. Yet in Wimbledon, we are asked to believe that a 119th-ranked British player would win Wimbledon over a hot-shot, bullying American player who has rolled over obstacles like Messrs. Federer and Hewitt (just in the movie, of course) without losing a set. As the answer to Britain’s long famine in men’s tennis at Wimbledon, Paul Bettany’s Peter Colt cuts a more romantic figure than poor Tim Henman, the real-life, gallant Brit overachiever with limited talent who fails, year after year, to get to the finals at Wimbledon despite much hype.

Fortunately, Mr. Loncraine, the sophisticated British director of such films as Brimstone and Treacle (1982) and a politically updated Richard III (1995), has a light enough touch to take the sting out of tweaking the Yanks, represented by Kirsten Dunst’s Lizzie Bradbury, a win-at-all-costs tennis champion incongruously drawn to a sweetly self-doubting Brit loser type like Peter. Also in the Yank contingent invading the hallowed, grassy playing fields of Wimbledon are Dennis Bradbury (Sam Neill), a mildly overbearing member of that fierce kamikaze tribe of women’s-tennis fathers; Ron Roth (Jon Favreau), a terminally cynical player’s agent clutching the Union Jack in one hand and the Stars and Stripes in the other; and finally—and most egregiously—the smirking, sneering American tennis champ, Jake Hammond (Austin Nichol). Boo! Hiss!

Peter is blessed, or cursed, with a feisty family consisting of his mother, flaky Augusta Colt (Eleanor Bron); her often estranged, in-the-treehouse husband, Edward (Bernard Hill); and Peter’s singularly disloyal brother, Carl (James McAvoy), who regularly bets against his sibling. Still, all’s well that ends well when Peter wins Wimbledon and retires with Lizzie, who (we’re told in Peter’s voice-over) has gone on to win two Wimbledon championships of her own. So everybody’s happy; Ms. Dunst and Mr. Bettany have the right chemistry; and the tennis action is speeded up to provide the equivalent of an entertaining video game. What more do you want for your 10 bucks—popcorn with a pickle?

Pulp Sci-Fi

Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is such an interestingly silly movie that I found myself idly wondering what particular audience was being targeted with its peculiar conceits and infinitude of special effects. Its A-list cast has been reduced to cartoonish stooges who may as well have been animated to fit more snugly into the wildly conceived backgrounds of far-flung places like New York City and Nepal, as well as the oceans and mountains in between. Just as curiously, this is not exactly a futuristic sci-fi film: All the action takes place in 1939, and "the world of tomorrow" refers not to the future, but to some crazy scheme of a pre–World War I German scientist ghoulishly "played" through stills and old movie images by the late Laurence Olivier. (The idea sounds more offensive before you see the movie than it actually turns out to be—except in its anticlimactic feebleness as a publicity-seeking device.)

The movie begins with a zeppelin flying over Manhattan and docking atop the Empire State Building, and a German scientist descending from the dirigible with two vials in his hand. I was 11 years old in 1939, and I remember the Graf Zeppelin burning up at its New Jersey landing site a year or two earlier. Later, when I saw newsreels, I noticed that the zeppelin sported a conspicuous swastika. Of course, 1939 was the year in which Europe was plunged into World War II. What, then, were all those clambering mechanical giants stomping through the streets of Manhattan in a direct steal from George Lucas’ Star Wars series (the single most anti-Bazinian step in sending movies away from their realistic roots and into the fantasy factories)? Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie and Giovanni Ribisi do their best with the self-consciously pulpy and campy material, but all the parts are written at what used to be known as the "B-picture" level.

And in the fall, we'll have a brand-new Che movie, an adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries , Guevara's record of his seven-month motorbike trip across South America in 1952. The director is Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of Central Station and producer of City of God , who employs Mexican heartthrob Gael García Bernal as the charismatically fragile Che (who suffered from chronic asthma). American audiences will not be especially surprised: Mr. Bernal, star of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También , already played Che in Showtime's Fidel miniseries last year. As the rising Latin star of his generation, the 24-year-old Mr. García Bernal will undoubtedly do for Che what Antonio Banderas did for him in Andrew Lloyd Weber's Evita : make him, yet again, a Reinvented Hero.

None of this is new, of course. Che got his first big-screen glorification in 1969, just two years after his death, in 20th Century Fox's Che! , with Jack Palance as Castro and Omar Sharif as a sultry Che. We didn't exactly see Omar-as-Che dealing with the vexing problems of sugar production as a Cuban minister, but we did get a voluptuously endearing and idealistic social reformer not unlike Doctor Zhivago. Olivetti even used Che for one of its ads, with the caption: "We would have hired him." (As what? An enforcer?)

Current vapid commercializations of the Che mystique include the cover of Madonna's new CD American Life , on which the venerable pop star strikes a Che pose. Meanwhile, the iconic Korda image of Che adorns the key rings, rolling papers and fridge magnets that drip from a thousand sidewalk stalls, along with copies of his dozens of books, especially The Motorcycle Diaries . All this is in addition to Che beer bottles and a Che Smirnoff vodka ad campaign. A Steven Soderbergh Che project has also been rumored, with Benicio del Toro in the title role.

The refusal to see Che for what he really was is proving to be a strangely obstinate phenomenon. You never know where it will turn up next. Three years ago, for example, Presidential hopeful Gary Hart published a novel called I, Che Guevara under the pseudonym John Blackthorn. It's a thriller set in Cuba, in which a shadowy figure somewhat resembling the long-dead Che roams that miserable isle looking for a "third way" between Castro's Communism and Miami vice. But oddly, given Che's actual history of affection for totalitarian methods, this fictional Che turns out to be a fan of Thomas Jefferson and the ideals of the Republic. Mr. Hart's fantasy of Che Guevara, in other words, is a suave projection of the average, decent, middle-class white American liberal's political sensibility. Then again, how could he be anything else?

Cold War historian Robert Conquest commented on the "rebirth" of Che in his 1999 book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century , citing the "persistence to this day of an adolescent revolutionary romanticism, as one of the unfortunate afflictions to which the human mind was and is prone." It's being demonstrated "yet again with (hardly credible though it may be) a revival of the cult of the totalitarian terrorist Che Guevara," Mr. Conquest wrote.

He also notes a conversation he once had with Adam Watson, the former British ambassador to Havana, who commented that while Castro was an "amiable rogue," Guevara was a "cold-blooded hypocrite." But who among the avid consumers of Che memorabilia and cinematic epics would echo or even understand such sentiments? Omar Sharif as a cold-blooded hypocrite? Cute and sympathetic Gael García Bernal as a totalitarian terrorist?

Mr. Bernal, for his part, seems to speak for his generation when he expresses his admiration for Che. In a January interview with the Daily News of Los Angeles , he remarked that the role meant a great deal to him. "To play Che Guevara," he said, "he was an amazing character. He's a person that changed the world and really forces me to change the rules of what I am." In a December interview with the Los Angeles Times , Mr. Bernal told a reporter that to prepare for the role, he'd been reading Karl Marx and Pablo Neruda. And, he added, "I feel a lot of responsibility. I want to do it well because of what [Che] represents to the world. He is a romantic. He had a political consciousness that changed Latin America."

Mr. Salles himself, meanwhile, thinks Che has been revived in Latin America because he is ever more relevant to the continent's problems, which are composed of the same "structural problems and injustices" that Che addressed 50 years ago: "If anything can change our perception of the world," Mr. Salles has said, "it's the possibility of proposing an outlook proper to this continent, which doesn't mimic that of Europe or the United States."

And let's not overlook the words of Mike Tyson, who has a tattoo of Guevara, next to those of Arthur Ashe and Chairman Mao. "An incredible individual," Mr. Tyson says cheerily of Che. "Someone who had so much, but sacrificed it all for the benefit of other people."

Which other people would that be? Cubans?

A Budding Errol Flynn

Ernesto (Che) Guevara de la Serna was born in 1928 in the Argentine city of Rosario, into a slightly decayed but respectable bourgeois family. Part of the family was Irish, part Spanish, and their politics could be described as a genteel left-leaning liberalism, anti-Nazi and anti-Peronist in equal measure. Guevara studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1953 and hanging around in Communist circles. Meanwhile, he had embarked on a series of voyages across the continent, two of them by motorcycle, with his friend Alberto Granado, who ran a dispensary at the leper colony of San Francisco del Chanar near Cordoba. Che's encounter with Granado's lepers on the first trip in 1951 is often cited as having radicalized his social conscience. And during the second voyage, in 1952, while in Lima, Peru, he met Dr. Hugo Pesce, the head of the Peruvian national leprosy program and an avid Marxist.

Che's long conversations with Pesce had a profound effect on him, as he himself later avowed. Leprosy, poverty and Marx: They made for a powerful moral cocktail in the mind of a privileged medical student from Rosario. He promptly wrote a letter home quoting the words of José Martí: "I want to link my destiny to that of the poor of this world."

It would be obtuse not to admit that part of Che's charm is his successful breakout from middle-class routines. Che lived out a fantasy to which few of us are immune. The social pathologies of Latin America are also real enough. To be radicalized by a Peruvian leper colony is neither perverse nor beyond comprehension. Not to be so radicalized might be the worse sin.

This second trip provided the material for The Motorcycle Diaries . It's a slight but charming book, alternating breathless bursts of social zeal with lyrical sensitivity and catty portraits of the locals. The young Che comes across as something of a feckless social climber, good at buttering up useful people, ever ready to drop the family name, charming but also socially ruthless. He's part stereotypical shallow Argentine playboy, part budding Errol Flynn.

All of Guevara's books seem to come with sheaves of photographs, as if everything in his life were constantly being prepared for mythology. And in these, we see Che as he probably was: a pretty, convivial, quick-tongued Latin American prince off on a peripatetic lark. He sizes up people according to whether they are "useful" or not; he badgers his mother for supplies of mate tea. Aside from small-town networking, Che's two principal interests are mines and archaeological sites.

Perhaps the most famous declaration of the young Che comes from a letter he wrote from Costa Rica to his aunt Beatriz:

I traversed the vast dominions of United Fruit. Once more I was able to convince myself how criminal the capitalistic octopuses are. On a picture of our old and bewailed Comrade Stalin, I swore not to rest before the capitalistic octopuses are destroyed.

But it was Che's journey to Guatemala in 1953 that would ultimately provide him with his road-to-Damascus moment. The following year, he witnessed firsthand the C.I.A.-backed coup that toppled the country's Socialist president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and replaced him with the more amenable Carlos Castillo Armas. For Che, the 1954 coup was a crucial event-a symptomatic intervention by the U.S . government to protect the interests of American companies, in this case the dreaded United Fruit. Fleeing to Mexico in the coup's aftermath, Che met a young student gangster named Fidel Castro and quickly talked his way into being the medical officer for Mr. Castro's 1956 invasion of Cuba aboard the Granma . His transformation from roaming medical student into guerrilla was swiftly completed.

Of course, it was Che's role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba's Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce. A Cuban expedition to Congo to prop up the anti-Mobutu forces fighting there ended similarly. Che, in fact, failed at anything requiring real ability and perseverance. He was a charismatic dilettante, like most professional revolutionaries, but in between he lived the activist high life: the Bandung-generation Third World conference circuit, dramatic speeches at the United Nations, clandestine peregrinations from country to country, murky deals, love affairs and connections in high places. None of it amounted to anything, however. In the end, Che had to foment real revolutions or nothing. And so, in the ultimate tilt at windmills, he set off in 1966 to start one in Bolivia.

It was yet another fiasco, but this time one that cost him his life. After a disastrous Keystone Kops campaign in the foothills of the Andes, his little band was cornered by a Ranger Battalion of the Bolivian Army near the town of Vallegrande on Oct. 8, 1967. Che was summarily executed the next day. His body was then publicly displayed on a laundry sink, providing him with his last and most provocative photo op.

The Dreary Language of Revolutionaries

But the sex appeal of dubious, semi-fraudulent characters like Che and Castro goes beyond images-if not very far beyond. It's clear that Cuba, the society they manufactured together, is as oppressive and miserable as any on earth. But we seem not to care. Or, at least, our filmmakers seem not to care. They can latch onto a rhetoric of "social justice," ever vague and undefined. After all, as Jane Fonda once said, "To be a revolutionary, you have to be a human being. You have to care about other people." That's sexy. But what about Che's genuflections to Comrade Stalin? A bit less sexy. He once signed a letter "Stalin II." Will that be in the movie? Probably not.

Mr. Salles is actually sorely mistaken in thinking of Che as something "indigenous." His thought was a hackneyed rip-off of the European revolutionary tradition, about as indigenous as the East German notebooks he wrote his Bolivian diaries in. Guevara's early Stalinism had implications for his lifelong public attitudes and actions. What appealed to him in Marx, Stalin and the young Mussolini, after all, was a strain of visionary apocalypse, of globalized conflict, which effortlessly opened the door to jejune gangsterism.

As it is, the language of revolutionaries, from Lenin to Osama bin Laden, with its metaphors of weaponry, trenches and assaults, is as dreary in Che's bad prose as it is anywhere else. Here, for example, is Che's Tricontinental Speech of 1965:

Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

It's pure, derivative Lenin.

At Home on a Bottle of Vodka

Then again, we are constantly being told what a shame it is that Che's idealism and seriousness are being corrupted by capitalist merchandising and Hollywood makeovers. A recent piece in The Guardian by Zoe Williams lamented the crassness of Madonna's hijacking of Che's "epic human vision."

But Che flirted with the media from Day 1. The so-called "guerrilla war" that toppled Batista was as much a media event as anything else. Afterward, Che admitted in a moment of candor that "the presence of a foreign journalist, American for preference, was more important to us than a military victory." Both Castro and Che were lionized in the Western press, and they were perhaps as much deluded by it as they were by Marxist-Leninist dogma. In any case, miniseries and refrigerator magnets are hardly betrayals of either man: Alas, they are entirely appropriate incarnations of both. Che belongs on a bottle of vodka.

And herein lie the seeds of Che's own destruction in Bolivia. He wanted to create "a hundred Vietnams" all over the continent, beginning with Bolivia. If a few thousand Bolivian peasants died in the process, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, as thugs always say. Bolivia was a suitable place for launching the continental revolution because, as Che and Castro saw it, its cities and its mining centers were ripe for revolt. What the Cubans hadn't bargained for, however, was that the Bolivians didn't want a Cuban Revolution. Who can blame them? Men like Che don't build happy societies.

In fact, Bolivians had their own Revolucion Nacional , which began in 1952. It was one of the few genuinely popular uprisings in Latin American history (no Hollywood films planned on that one, though), and, by 1964, it had produced the wily, Quechua-speaking Bolivian president, René Barrientos. The poster boy from Rosario and his band of foreigners stood no chance. Besides, the Bolivian Army spent most of its time building roads in rural areas and was therefore actually popular with the peasantry. Che was furious-and dumbfounded-that they actively preferred the army to his merry band of insurgents.

But in the end, perhaps the most fitting epitaph for Che will not be provided by his cinematic admirers and pop-culture sycophants. Gen. Jeannot Ruharara served with Che during the Congo war in 1965; he's still a member of a roaming, pointless, gun-toting guerrilla band called the Mayi-Mayi in Congo. In a recent interview with The Independent newspaper, General Ruharara remembered Che. "We used to call him Ernesto," he recalled fondly. "A giant of a man. Big, thick hair. Smoked a lot. Guevara taught us a lot. We hope he can come back to help us someday."

Lawrence Osborne is the author of Paris Dreambook and American Normal . His book The Accidental Connoisseur will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2004.

1) Question: What do you get when you combine Che Guevara and Liberace? Answer: Liberache, a revolution in rhinestones. A company in San Francisco called www.thewrongelement.com has merged these two 20th-century icons into one gorgeous image and applied it to the fronts of 100-percent-cotton T-shirts ($18). Apart from being a guaranteed cheerer-upper, the "Liberache" T-shirt is a great gift for male friends who like to leaven the rigorously butch atmosphere of their gyms with a bit of upbeat frivolity. Female recipients might prefer the Mahatma Blondie: Give Bleach a Chance! model.

2) Buy gifts while hanging out with cheery, optimistic sailors! The Target Holiday Boat is moored at Pier 62 at the Chelsea Piers now through Dec. 1. My pick: the kid's wooden art easel ($29.99) with large paper roll ($9.99), the perfect gift for control freaks whose only moments of calm occur after they have left insanely emphatic don't-forget-to-clean-under-the-sink-type messages for their loved ones and domestic support staff.

3) Cheer up an aging baby boomer: Buy him a Vespa ! Yes, the star of such movies as La Dolce Vita and Quadrophenia is back and more resonant than ever … and more expensive than ever. So, if your partner is having a poignant-but very mod-midlife crisis and you have about $3,000 bucks to spare, head to the new Vespa boutique at 13 Crosby Street. ("Dragon Red" or "Verde Carducci" are my recommended colors.) Don't let your doddery boomer ride his new toy in the city. Position it in your apartment as a ragingly hip decorative accessory, and then, when summer comes, throw him on the back and drive out to your beach rental where he can safely go stark-raving mod in the backyard, under your supervision.

4) Send a message to Martha: Tell her you love her by purchasing gifts willy-nilly from her Catalog for Living-800-950-7130. Support her! She's a good woman who is being witch-hunted for stuff that male cigar-smoking corporate muckety-mucks do all the time. During her career, La Stewart has created jobs for thousands and, almost more importantly, she has taken schlumps like you and given them domestic savoir-faire and style. Free Martha! Avoid the gooey edibles and cookie-making kits: Inflicting calorific temptations on people who are struggling with their weight (i.e., everyone) is sadistic and unseasonably hostile. The Chiffon Wire Bug Kit ($28)-an incredibly Martha-ish gift which sentences the recipient to days of obsessive hard labor making his or her own gossamer-insect tree ornaments-will provide soothing occupational therapy for any friend who is addicted to watching Showdown Iraq on CNN.

5) Here are two reasons why you absolutely must purchase a significant number of your holiday gifts from Jonathan Adler's shop at 465 Broome Street. First, he has great stuff. And second, he is my husband and if I put him in this gift guide I will win much-needed brownie points in our relationship, which is important to an aging poofter with a boyfriend 14 years younger than himself. My 2002 pick from the Adler oeuvre : a $165 meticulously needlepointed Seven Deadly Sins pillow . Choose from yellows, pinks, blues and black/gray.

6) If you are the kind of boozy funster whose idea of a Yuletide greeting is to slur "Who d'ya have to fuck to get a drink around here" as you push your way past the carolers and dive headlong into the Christmas tree, you are no doubt increasingly frustrated by the diminishing emphasis on alcohol at Manhattan holiday gatherings. Here's a holiday hostess gift which obviates the need to drop heavy hints: Lilly Pulitzer cocktail napkins , $38 from the God's Love We Deliver holiday catalog. Force your hostess to open them upon your arrival and yell, "let's try 'em out!" Re the morning after: Beg Santa to bring you an Amemand Divadourian luxe cashmere hangover pack , $98 at Barneys. You supply the ice.

7) Fellas! Ever wondered why your girlfriend weeps copiously when you present her with those twinkly pieces of jewelry every holiday? I hate to break it to you, but those are sobs of disappointment, not joy. Yessiree, she is completely and utterly horrified by your depressingly ditsy selections. Bring a smile to her face this season with a giant diamond-, pearl- and amethyst-encrusted Duchess of Windsor–ish Pagoda brooch ($17,600) from Mish at 131 East 70th Street and buy it now before some lunatic decides that pagodas are defamatory to our Asian community.

8) Are you married to a mogul/entrepreneur whose ascension in the business world is being retarded by a lack of charisma? To become really successful your bland bloke needs a memorable idiosyncrasy or perhaps a tick or two. Even Amazon head Jeff Bezos has that annoying laugh. Enhance your breadwinner's image with a stainless-steel designer yo-yo from Prada ($184 at Prada, 724 Fifth Avenue). Make sure he practices before unfurling his new image-enhancing toy at the next board meeting.

9) Legendary photographer William Claxton's new book of work entitled Photographic Memory (Amazon, $45.50) is extremely soothing, unless you happen to be a highly strung Judy Garland fan. His shot of a pre-performance, panic-stricken Judy captures her agony just as a bottle of rubbing alcohol is torn from her hand by one of her caretakers. Bottoms up!

10) Foist an extra-long "Isadora strangulation" scarf -the accessory du jour-on a really short friend who is prone to colds or flu. Banana Republic purveys a luscious cable-knit number for $88. Your tiny friend can wind it round and round his/her neck, thereby soothing a sore throat or even protecting a gland or two.

Happy Holidays!

The conversation, at least the one end of it I could hear, seemed charming and precious enough, until that moment came, that moment I knew would arrive sooner or later as the heiress made her way outside the cocoon of hearth and home. She was listening intently to her friend, and then she turned to me and, without excusing herself (I must teach her telephone manners), she asked me what a movie theater was.

Later research would show that the heiress is alone among her friends in having never seen the inside of a movie theater. That no doubt qualifies as little more than child abuse in some quarters of this city. I prefer to consider it a case of cultural disobedience: I'm not quite ready to cede my values and parental power to entertainment moguls whose products seem to define our very existence.

I knew what was coming next: She returned her attention to her friend, listened for a more few minutes, and then directed a flood of inquiries to me concerning movie stars I barely could identify, followed by equally earnest questions about singers whose names meant nothing to me. (She mentioned something about something she called "In Sync" and someone called Britney something-or-other. I'm far too uninterested to find out Britney's last name.)

The heiress awaited my reply. "What do I look like, a candidate for president?" I said, finally. This seemed to amuse the heiress, and successfully shifted the conversation back to more familiar ground-school projects, swimming lessons and the like.

If she continues to go through life as blissfully ignorant of pop culture as she is now, the heiress had better forget about a life in public service. As long as smirking, jaded baby boomers are in charge of the nation's dialogue, candidates for public office will have to be better informed about sitcoms and movie stars than they are about, oh, stuff like national defense and social policy.

The pop quiz is all the rage this year. Don Imus subjected an all-too-willing Rick Lazio to questions about television shows the other day. And, of course, George W. Bush was held up to media contempt when he had trouble with a magazine writer's questions about television shows, including Sex and the City , a program that apparently concerns itself with vacuous New Yorkers and their sex lives. This led certain quasi-political columnists to assail the governor as a pop-culture ignoramus. In the rarefied circles of the elite media, there can be no harsher charge.

When Americans were saving the world from the Nazis and leading the Free World against communism, presidential candidates who professed ignorance about television shows no doubt would have won praise for their gravitas and sense of priorities. Today, a candidate who can't identify sitcom characters can expect nothing but scorn and loathing from those who can't seem to summon an opinion on, say, the death penalty or a tax cut or the future of Social Security.

The media-obsessed boomer commentators no doubt think they've created something original with their ironic pop quizzes. Ah, but if their taste in pop culture were any better, they'd know that the Monty Python troupe had them beat by three decades. Of course, the Pythons' goal was satire, not empty irony. In a skit the Pythons produced in 1970, Eric Idle was the pompous-looking moderator of a show called "World Forum." His "guests" were Karl Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. After introducing the four grave-looking commies and expounding on their historical importance, Mr. Idle fired a question at Guevara: "Che Guevara-Coventry City last won the F.A. Cup in what year?" It was a trick question: Coventry City, in 1970, had never won England's Football Association Cup!

The skit ended with Karl Marx answering a series of questions in hopes of winning a lounge suite. He got two right, about the political origins of the class struggle and the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. But he missed Mr. Idle's last question: "Who won the Cup final in 1949?" (It was the Wolverhampton Wanderers, who beat Leicester 3-1.)

Poor Karl never got the lounge suite.

The quizmasters who would control the tenor of American politics think they're mighty funny people, indeed. And they figure we're laughing along with them.

Personally, though, I'm pretty happy George W. Bush doesn't spend his time watching sitcoms. Maybe there's hope for the heiress after all.