sabotabby | V for Vendetta

Hey, a bunch of you went and saw it and are now posting reviews. Here’s mine.

As you might recall, I really loved the graphic novel. And as you also probably know, the book's author, Alan Moore, wanted nothing to do with it after post-production. There's a good reason for it, as the movie, while keeping the shell of the story, guts much of its nuance and meaning. It's an entertaining action movie, like The Matrix, but it manages to be more of a comic book than the comic book itself.

For those of you who haven’t seen or read it, the gist goes something like this: England goes fascist. V, a survivor of a concentration camp, horribly disfigured and insane from Mengele-esque experiments and a fire, dons a Guy Fawkes mask and embarks on a mission to blow shit up for great justice (and track down the high-ranking politicians, doctors, and media figures who were responsible for torturing him). Along the way he meets a young woman, Evey, who becomes drawn into his plan to free England by means of big explosions.

In the book, V is a Kropotkin-quoting anarchist who, while mad, follows a rather coherent political line. He’s certainly pursuing vengeance, but not blindly, and not without a larger vision. The movie obliterates that vision, substituting a vague “freedom” for “anarchy,” and by simplifying the villainous government, turns V’s struggle from a fight against the State to a parable of liberal democracy versus the Bush Administration. And for good measure, the script throws in a conspiracy theory.

To understand what’s wrong with the movie, we need to look at the difference between a political theory and a conspiracy theory. A political theory identifies real structures and examines how they can be changed, who can change them, and how a better system would function. Any political theory worth its salt provides some sort of action plan for its adherents.

The narrative of the conspiracy theory story, in contrast, is fundamentally disempowering, because it relies entirely on cryptic, unbeatable forces. In a conspiracy story, the Bad Government is hiding a Big Secret from The People. Only a select few, rebellious individuals know the Big Secret, but The Masses would be outraged if they learned it. It’s the duty of the rebel individual to somehow broadcast The Truth to The Masses, whereupon they will rise up in huge numbers against the Bad Government. The ideas that The Masses may prefer to cling to their illusions and security, or that even a Good Government can do Bad Things, is never a consideration, which is why so many conspiracy theorists can still cling to nationalist and capitalist notions (c.f., Rense, Pat Buchanan.)

A reviewer at some point commented that the movie is about Bush's America, transplanted to a futuristic England. In a sense—although the reviewer had clearly not read the book, which is set in England and written well before Bush's election—this is quite true. In Moore's dystopia, it isn't nefarious elements within the Conservative (read Republican) Party that form the dictatorship, but the Labour Party. The difference is significant, because Moore's V doesn't just struggle against a Really Bad Government, but against the idea of a State itself.

This is the theme that the Wachowski brothers fail to grasp, because they're conspiracy theorists, not political thinkers. Instead of Moore's subtle erosion of democracy, combined with apathy on the part of the populace, we have a new and utterly insulting subplot. The Norsefire (fascist) Party, composed of Conservative up-and-comers, engineer a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people, blame it on Muslim terrorists, and use it as an excuse to crack down on civil liberties. (If you're thinking "Bush planned 9-11!", you're on the right track.) V's violence is then utterly excusable, because the government is a Nazi government, the people are all against them, and they're just waiting for a hero to come along and show them the way.

In Moore's book, there's no conspiracy besides the cover-up surrounding the Larkhill Resettlement Camp. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy, because The People collude in their own oppression and accept a certain degree of authoritarianism as necessary for their own protection—in this sense, it’s far closer to Bush’s America than the Americanized movie version. They don't wait anxiously by the TV for V to save them.

Few people besides the most ardent pacifists would deny an oppressed people the right to violently resist. By providing the excuse of the virus to show just how bad the Norsefire government is—not just for queers and Muslims, but for white, middle-class citizens with no political leanings whatsoever—V can be de-politicized and stand for anything. Imagery that reassures us that Norsefire=Republicans aside, this struggle could just as easily be that of the U.S. army “liberating” the people of Iraq from an evil dictatorship.

Another difference, which feeds into de-politicization, is class. Because this is a film about America, where one can't use the C-word, the class struggle themes in the book are completely eliminated. (We're allowed to talk about oppression of queers and Muslims, but only in the most liberal sense—they are being persecuted because "they're different.") Moore's Evey is a factory worker turned would-be prostitute. In the movie, she's a journalist, the truth-seeking hero of every liberal narrative. Her parents are still political activists, but not because of leftist sympathies—their activism is justified only after they've lost a son to the evil government-engineered virus. When Movie-Evey escapes from V, Gordon, the man who shelters her, is not a petty criminal who gets killed by slightly meaner petty criminals because the world is a dangerous place, but rather a popular TV-show host who meets a tragic and heroic death resisting the government.

The book ends with uncertainty. We don’t know whether V’s propaganda-by-the-deed tactics were effective; they might be, and Evey, donning the Guy Fawkes mask in order to continue the struggle for as long as it takes, is certainly a spark of hope. That fantastic final image of Finch, wondering if his entire life has been a waste, wandering off into the countryside, is gone. (Finch is utterly sanitized in the movie. Sigh.)

By contrast, there is something reassuring in the movie that’s absent from the book. In a bizarre cinematic decision, Evey gets voiceovers at the beginning and the end of the movie, first to give away the ending (V dies), and then to assure us that after that night, the world changed forever—and presumably for the better. We know that the hero’s violence, which somehow managed to not kill any innocent people, was justified. There’s no way things could possibly get any worse, because nothing is worse than Nazis, even a spot of chaos.

The movie did a few things well: It was pretty, perfectly cast (even in an ironic way, since pro-torture Natalie Portman gets tortured in it), mostly well-acted, and Parliament blows up good. If I hadn’t read the book, I’d highly recommend it. Instead, do yourself a favour and read Moore's graphic novel if you already haven't.

England prevails!

It looks like I may be away from LJ for a few days, depending on how Real Life goes. See you on the other side.

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From:

ocicat-bengals.livejournal.com

>England prevails!

Oh noooooooooo.....
Would that be the English people, or the government?
The former okay, the later can get stuffed.
I think I'll read the graphic novel before I take a shot at the movie because the book sounds far better than the glossed over flick.
But mainly, because it takes us months because we finally get it together enough to make plans to go to a film. I'm finally watching the Constant Gardener on DVD.

From:

sabotabby

Oh, you have to read the book. That's where "England prevails!" is from.

From:

tmcm.livejournal.com

I've noticed that most 'anti-establishment' movies and anti-corporate movies focus on the evil of an individual and the evil of the system. I think you hit the nail on the head when you point out that Moore was focusing on the system while the movie focuses on the evils of individual conspirators.

Saw your review on

nihilistic_kid's site and added you. Hope that's ok.

From:

tmcm.livejournal.com

meant to say 'focus on the evil of an individual rather than the evil of the system.'

sorry.

i'll tell you all my secrets but i'll lie about my past

V for Vendetta

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