V for Vendetta
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
V for Vendetta
It's sort of too bad we don't get to see more fascist propaganda. I mean, the real stuff, the stuff Hitler and Mussolini ordered up, blonde maidens struggling in the sweating grasp of Jewish usurers and that sort of thing. That way, we'd be able to recognize it when it's performing totally awesome backflips right in our faces.
Not that I'm not against diverting revolutionary impulses into pop entertainment. In fact, I'm not so sure one doesn't exist without the other. A revolution, no matter who it kills, is always more valuable as a spectacle, and movies are never that great unless it seems like they're really killing someone, or some thing, up there on the screen.
It's when everybody making the picture gets confused that I start to worry.
I think that when the Wachowski brothers first thought to make V for Vendetta they listened to a few Rage Against the Machine tunes, consulted face-to-face with Marilyn Manson on the subject of Freedom of Expression, and then started their movie secure in the knowledge that they were progressives, or something, and that they were sending up barbs at the Bush administration. Or scratch that, teenagers banging their doors really loud after being grounded. And so, with more than one hundred million dollars at their disposal, they reenacted the purging of weak, ineffectual nationalists who wear kind-of-scary uniforms by strong, folk-oriented fascists who wear really scary uniforms. You'll notice they do not burn the Reichstag. They blow up the Parliament building instead. You know, the big building in London where weak, ineffectual democratic processes take place? Bang. The special effects look totally real, too.
If you're like me, you believe first that a liberal democracy is the only society in which decent movies can consistently be made (not that fascists can't squirt out a great one now and again before backtracking over it), and secondly that a liberal democracy which requires vast quantities of cash or violence to keep up its skeleton is no longer liberal or democratic. Perhaps it even stops making good movies. Either way, it seems we've strayed far enough to have lost perspective on the alternatives. As in, for years I've been hearing that Dirty Harry is a fascist movie. On the contrary, Harry is grounded thoroughly in democratic traditions. Harry is a self-reliant man who just wants to clear space for himself. He wants justice in a world where there is only argument. We may disagree with him, I certainly do, but there's no doubt that Harry suffers for his independence. He's part of a conversation. And, so, if people in movies tend to converse with guns, what are you going to say, that they shouldn't? That they should use something less dramatic? Consider the alternative:
The protagonist in V for Vendetta does not use guns--he uses knives, for some reason, along with top-line weapons-grade bullshit, something about how in a "just" society people can sit around and listen to harmonious jazz, quote Shakespeare out of context, and watch quality action movies, or something like that, all of which activities are, and have been, as perfectly suited to the just as to the unjust. His name is V. He wears a hideous, grinning Guy Fawkes mask and a foppish cape, under which he ritualizes even the most banal activities, like frying an egg. He possesses unexplained (read: magical) superhuman strength and, along with a thorough knowledge of martial arts, he possesses the stock qualification of all martial arts films: mastery. Of knives, surveillance systems, his body, the bodies of others. All Dirty Harry had was a Magnum and an ability to bluff. In a V versus Dirty Harry fight, Harry would nearly have got up to the part about "I know what you're thinking..." before getting his eyeballs pried out of his head.
Anyway, V says he fights for freedom, which means that he murderously avenges the unconsummated rape of a blonde maiden, turns around and tortures said maiden in a torture-porn montage for her own good (apparently living under the oppressive regime of the bad guys had left her a bit soft), and then, having killed a few cops, chokes a rival to death while pronouncing himself the embodiment of some vague "idea" which never goes explained. If you were to replace the G-rated lesbian cuddling in Vendetta with G-rated male bonding in a Ypres trench, and replaced the highly caricatured right-wing Tories with highly caricatured big-nosed Jews, you'd have yourself an issue of Der Sturmer.
There's not much to gain from taking a movie like this seriously, and mostly I don't, in spite of the Wachowski brothers' humorless desire that we take this tantrum very seriously indeed. I still believe the Wachowskis think of themselves in vague terms as progressives (or as what? Labour party supporters?) and so it softens the blow a bit to know, then, that they have not the slightest idea what they're talking about. Up until the business about the torture, I was even enjoying the film as a heady and slightly more topical version of Star Wars, with the requisite Lukes and Darths spitting epitaphs and duking it out, and in which the Death Star has been more cannily dubbed Parliament by the Empire that built it. But once the confusion sets in, and all the ineffectual rage turns inward to torture and "ideas", V for Vendetta becomes something far worse, and yet far stupider, than all of that. It becomes a movie about freedom in which democracy is not even mentioned, much less taken to task.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:59 PM,
