In his introduction on his website, director Peter Waktins states that “The production and the organizing of [The Journey was] on a scale that I had never undertaken before, nor have since; it involved a great many people in at least a dozen countries around the world, and resulted in a work with a highly complex internal structure, and multiple themes.” Indeed, there is far too much within The Journey’s 14-and-a-half hour runtime to cover in depth in one short article — and the whole masterpiece absolutely deserves its due — but here I would like to focus in on some of particular resonances that come from Watkins’ approach to the subject matter, most of all how people react to clear information about the world and the ways in which mass media obfuscates that, and how Watkins’ formal inclinations reshape both the viewer’s and subjects’ relationship to the world in which they live in.
Peter Watkins is best known for his hybrid fiction films, wherein the language of televised news coverage and documentary is employed in historical recreations (as in Culloden [1964] or La Commune [2000]) or near-future “what if” scenarios (The Gladiators [1969], Punishment Park [1971]) to lend his situations both authenticity and force the viewer to reflect critically on the presentation because of the inherent dissonance between its mise-en-scene and its form. While The Journey (1987) plays, at times, like more of a standard documentary in that Watkins spends the majority of the 14-and-a-half hour runtime filming interviews, conversations, and presenting arrangements of archival footage, it’s far from being straightforward — at every step it prevents the viewer from engaging with mass audiovisual media (MAVM, as Watkins refers to it) in the way that MAVM wants you to, and instead asks its audience to sit down and seriously consider the information that is being presented about the nuclear arms race in the same way he has his interview subjects do. What this journey leads to — despite the structural complexity, where his deceptively simple interviews are threaded around the physical tracks left by the arms industry, as well as a sequence following a Canadian TV news crew filming the Shamrock Summit between Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan — is something surprisingly simple: when average people are earnestly presented with information about how the world works, they tend to come to similar conclusions: we should spend money on people, not tools for their destruction.
Watkins’ interviews are predominantly with families, over a dozen of them from across the world, from the U.S. to the USSR, from Mexico to Mozambique, Japan to Germany, Norway to Tahiti. Early on, Watkins presents them with images of the destruction caused by the United States’ nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — presenting people with blown-up images of close-up civilian death and destruction, and questioning the parents about if they had seen these images before in the media, or asking the children if they talk about this in schools. This evolves to Watkins very plainly presenting financial facts about the nuclear arms race, and comparing them to issues of hunger, healthcare, or general poverty — and then linking them back to cultural issues further enabling these systemic problems like racism and sexism. One of the most striking examples he asks the various families to react to is how, at the time of filming, the dollar amount it would take to feed the whole world for a year is what is spent on the global arms race in just two weeks. Naturally, everyone presented with this fact is horrified.
“The Journey has been running for approximately one hour and a quarter. During this time, we have spent—on the world arms race—at least $112,000,000,” Watkins interjects, as he will continue to do for the rest of The Journey’s massive runtime, iterating what has been spent since his last time he interrupted. This constant restatement of facts can come off as repetitive, as can the similar reactions across the board from the interview subjects, and this is with purpose—Watkins both sees importance in the exercise of sharing information and in the reaction to that information. One of the key elements The Journey implies about MAVM is that not only does its hyper distracting form (emphasized by Watkins adding bleeps and bloops every time there is a cut, chiron, or other effect used in a piece of news footage) work to suppress facts about the arms race, but also deprive ordinary people of the chance for discussion—the case is closed before it is even opened. But when people have the time to sit and think, they tend to draw strong conclusions against the apparent insanity and inhumanity of nuclear armament.
Credit: Peter Watkins
Watkins takes this a step further, too: we the viewers are not the only ones allowed to draw conclusions about how the interviewees from all corners of the Earth are similar; he actually allows the subjects to do that themselves. In the latter stages of the film, Watkins starts to show interviews with families from one side of the world to another on the opposite end, have them respond, and then bring that back to the original family, and so forth. Watkins, here, isn’t just examining the rhizomatic structure of the global arms race and pointing out how all the points are connected, but is building a new structure of community that can break out of the helplessness this situation creates and instead reach to reshape the world through community. It is the filmic equivalent of what one Peace Movement activist living near the Bangor Base in Washington says early on in Segment 3:
“It turned out that [the Trident Missile System] was going to be home-ported right here in Kitsap County, which was only about 90 miles from where we lived at the time. And so that put the whole question into our laps again: the question of violence and non-violence and resistance. And we met with a number of other people to try and decide whether there was any point anymore in resisting. And what we found was there wasn’t any point in resisting one weapons system, but there was a point in learning to live differently, and a part of that was resisting a weapons system.”
Watkins then weaves this activist’s interview back in in Segment 4, talking about the “White Trains” that bring the nuclear warheads to the base twice a year:
“When we saw the first train go on these tracks, it was pretty scary because it was just the two of us, and we came out and watched the train go by, and it looked like something out of Star Wars or out of your nightmares. It made us feel cut off and fragmented and alone. But we realized that the tracks connect to towns — that’s why they’re there — and it would be possible to build a community along the tracks of other people that also believed that nuclear weapons were wrong. And so we began to phone back down the line. We’d get a name from a friend, phone that person and say, ‘Did you know there was a train with 200 hydrogen bombs going through your town?’ and they would be very horrified, usually. And then we would give them some ideas about things that they might do. They might go out and watch the train, they might vigil, they might leaflet, so that people in their town would know. And in time, a chain of maybe 250 little communities has grown up all along these railroad tracks from here to Pantex — which is in Amarillo, Texas — which is where the weapons are assembled. And from Pantex back to the East Coast again, where the weapons are also loaded on submarines. And so what used to be a sign of division and separation and powerlessness has become a real sign of hope and connection, because as the trains move now, these little groups — maybe one or two people, even, in some towns — will go out and watch the trains and draw public attention to the fact that they’re going through the towns. And in some places people resist by sitting in front of the trains to stop them, feeling very much as though they were trains in Nazi Germany taking people into the concentration camps… somebody needs to be on those tracks in front of those trains.”
Watkins’ politics — if one is to try to state them as plainly as he does information about the global arms race — are centered on radical democracy, on listening to people and taking them seriously, and believing that they can make up their own minds. The Journey implies that this is what systems of power are ultimately afraid of.
Credit: Peter Watkins
To be sure, The Journey is an activist film, one that calls to the future. While the credits roll, the film implores viewers to get in touch with their local peace movements, and children read letters they are going to send to Reagan, imploring him to end the arms race. “It seems to me every time you hear about President Reagan’s spending, it’s always referring to having nuclear war materials,” says Tonya Hendricks, as her mother proudly looks on, “But I never hear anything about you spending money on helping underdeveloped countries or something useful instead of trying to fulfill your Hollywood dream. In case you don’t know by now: you’re the President of the United States and not a movie star of Hollywood. I think it’s terrible. You should give the poor some of the surplus cheese and milk and other products that you usually let go to waste. I think it’s about time you did something about this before it is too late.”
The War Game 2 was The Journey’s initial working title, with the film working to bring Watkins’ breakout, Oscar-nominated 1967 film into the present, seeing the procedures of that film as no longer up-to-date (perhaps that is why, more often than not, Watkins either did his films as re-enactments of the past or predictions of a recent future — he may have felt less secure in talking about the present, specifically). There is still some of that DNA in The Journey — in fact, one of the most striking sequences in the entire film is a staged enactment of what nuclear evacuation procedures in a small Norwegian town would look like, where cinematographer Odd Geir Sæther (probably the best cameraman Watkins ever worked with, having also shot Edvard Munch [1974] and worked with him again on La Commune) runs along behind children looking for refuge as all the shelters have started to fill up, culminating in a stunning image of faces and bodies huddled together in the dark. One imagines, however, if Watkins were still active as a filmmaker — his last film was nearly 25 years ago, and according to his website he is not even doing interviews anymore — it is possible he would want to update his analysis about MAVM again.
I will extrapolate a little bit here: I first watched The Journey this winter while cooped up with bronchitis, away from work for weeks with no meaningful connection to the outside world beyond the Internet. I started my days watching a segment or two of The Journey (they average about 45-minutes long — for one of the literal longest movies ever made, at least outside of the “experimental” realm, it is quite approachable in the era of docu-series), and then would spend much of my day on social media seeing how the events of the world were unfolding. At this point, Israel’s genocide in Gaza had reached such a fever pitch that it seemed completely impossible to deny it as one of the clearest moral crises of our time, and yet it’s still mired in controversy. Much of this psychosis in addressing the genocide can be understood through Watkins’ deconstruction of MAVM. “This [TV news] crew did not seem to be very interested in the demonstrators themselves,” Watkins narrates during a sequence shot at a protest outside the Shamrock Summit. “They never engage them in conversation, and they tended to remain isolated from them, often taking positions near the police.” Mass media has not progressed past this: even in an age of free accessibility of information, they still take the institutions they are aligned with at their word.
In 2024, the most egregious example of this is traditional and legacy media’s alignment with the state of Israel, leading to a blatant disregard for the lives of Palestinians and their systematic murder. New media, namely social media, has to an extent democratized information-sharing, and created a stark split in realities for generations that broadly consume their information from television and newspapers to those that receive a wider, less outright regulated (although still algorithmically catered) swath of images. The strong reaction against the genocide in Palestine by a massive chunk of the social media-inclined lends credence to Watkins placing so much importance on broad information sharing. However, social media also dampens one’s ability to gestate, as it is rife with even more aggressive distractions than any incarnation of MAVM before it — and this, too, is complicated by algorithms intentionally bubbling together the like-minded, further separating individuals rather than allowing people to realize, as the interviewees do by the end of The Journey, that humans have more in common than they think, and the more realize that, the more they understand our current order of things is a mandated psychosis that will ultimately destroy us all. Yet in The Journey’s revelation of how similar humanity is across the world, in that innate solidarity people feel when they too realize this, there is a fundamental optimism that the world can change for the better, and that people can decide to live differently.
