Jesse Archer

Sometime you wonder how much of the character there is in the actor who played it. Jesse Archer is the actor who played Luke in two romantic comedies, Slutty Summer and A Four Letter Word. Luke is a burst of colours, someone capable to love to an extreme level without the necessity to change his lover, probably since he himself is not someone who wants to change, not even for love.

You Can Run is the journal of Jesse Archer's adventure in South America, from 1999 to 2001, when he was in that phase of life where you decide what will be your future: a degree in hand you have a lot of possibility in front of you, but all of them expect you to settle down and decide something. You want to be an actor? You can, go to Los Angeles and work hard waiting table or doing something else while attending every possible audition. You want to be a writer? You can, go to New York and work in some related fields, learning the job and spending night after night writing the next Great American Novel. Or, in alternative, You Can Run, from all of this and from any possible commitment. But if you are Jesse Archer, you can't simple run with a backpack and two pair of shoes, you have to do that with style... and so I believe that Jesse Archer and his travel companion are the first persons I heard that start a trekking in South Africa with wine in the backpack instead of bottle of pesticide.

At 24 years old Jesse is on an on / off relationship with Zane. He loves Zane, but as you can love someone that knows you well, that was there with you when you were developing the man you are now. It's not brotherly love, since it would be border on incest, but nevertheless you know that it's not your true love, also since you still don't know if true love exists or if you are ready for it. But still Zane is the only man who will follow Jesse on this adventure without questions. If you are expecting reading this journal to discover that Jesse was wrong and that Zane is his true love, you are wrong. Since Jesse was not wrong from the beginning, he has no open ends with Zane, the basis of their relationship are clear: they are travel companion and when they are not travelling, they can have separate lives, always knowing that, when one of them is starting the travel again, the other will be ready to follow. It's not love that bonds them together, it's the travel. And when one of them is starting to be too serious with someone else met during the journey, it's not the betrayed lover who is jealous, it's the abandoned travel companion.

There is a logic time sequence in all the chapters, but not a continuum. It means that every single chapter is an independent little story, a little piece in the whole puzzle that was the entire journey. Sometime the story concerns a character, sometime a place. Hardly a place recurs for more than one story, since it reflects the fact that Jesse was often in motion, hopping from one place to the other, and the discontinuous trend is well reflected from that, at the end of a chapter Jesse is in a country, and at the beginning of the other he is in another one, the reason why he left one to move to another one seldom are explained, as often are not detailed all the work he had probably done to settle in a new place. It's like being inside Jesse's mind, reading is memory, and so, only the more important things are available; Jesse chose to 'run' not to write a travel guide, but to live, and I don't believe he spent most of his time taking notes of what he did or what he saw, probably he filled a journal of what in that moment made a great impression to him, and when years later he went through that notes, he filled the gap with something else from his memory. The result is a travel journey that maintains the eclecticism of the man who did it.

A bit of stability in the instability that essentially is Jesse, is given by the men in his life... how strange isn't it? But actually they are the only constant in his life and they are basically two. As I said before, Zane, his travel companion, that sometime took his own path but always came back, or Jesse went to him: their relationship as travel companions was like their relationship as lovers, in and off, open or exclusive, always without regret. There is a moment in which I wondered if Jesse or Zane said something, maybe that relationship would have changed in something else, but no one said something, and Zane took a bus headed on a direction opposite to Jesse, and that bus in a way set the path for their future life; it was not a physical farewell, both of them knew that they would meet again, but it was the definitely farewell to their relationship as lovers.

More or less at the same time of this farewell, maybe since Jesse felt 'free' (you can say with your mouth that you are not committed, but your heart maybe has other idea...), Jesse meets the second important man of this story, Walter. Walter is Argentine, and for a bit he will replace Zane; again for Jesse is not a real commitment, and again I think that if it was, Jess would have run on the opposite way. Even if Jesse is enjoying his time in South America, I always felt like this was a 'foreign' adventure for him, and that, sooner or later, he would return in the United States, leaving behind all his 'temporary' bonds, like Walter. Walter stands out from all the others only since, like Zane, he hops in and hops out from Jesse's life in more occasion than one, and Jesse considers himself 'involved' with him for more than a passing adventure, but on the contrary of Zane, Walter doesn’t conquer a special place in Jesse’s life; Walter represents the moment, Zane is the past, the present and the future, a future that is all to write.

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