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, ,
Battlestar Galactica
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
In Space, No One Can Hear You Vote
The problem of bad television is widespread and complicated: it's as aware of its own frailties as we are, which is to say not at all. Watching a bad TV show is like watching a senile relative, one who looks a little like you, groan about phantom aches and pains in order to get at what's killing him. Good television, on the other hand, as with good art in general, is a simpler matter: it falters on the basis of a few context-specific controls. In the case of a good show like the new Battlestar Galactica, running on the Sci-Fi network and now available on DVD, the creators face down dangers on two fronts. On the first front you've got the nervous corporate types, who want to ensure the profitability of an extremely volatile commodity (TV) and therefore demand more tasteful near-nudity and bareknuckled suit-on-suit action. Galactica gives this up with aplomb. Yet on the second front you've got your schoolmarms, who want to uphold a public-oriented Edward R. Murrow-like standard of public utility, and bury us underneath a lot of bulk-issue wet blankets about racial harmony and believe in your self-family-constitution-etc.-fill-in-the-blank. Here's where Galactica gets itself in trouble. But not too often.
I haven't seen every episode available, but the story as reiterated at the beginning of every show goes something like this: one day the Cylons (robots to you and me) rebelled against their human mommies and blew most of them up. The remainder of the human race act more or less like Americans and fly in the mere tens of thousands in a caravan of mismatched space cruisers waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it does (and it does in just about every episode) it moves the overall story arc and develops an entertaining, if not new, political dimension. The Cylons sometimes look like Mercedes Benzes but more often they look like people and are confused with friends. Some of them appear only in the mind. Some of them believe in God. The President publicly vows to stand resolved against them but admits privately that she doesn't understand the complete dimensions of the problem. She keeps secrets from the space-press.
The Cylons don't quote from the Koran but you get the idea. In one episode a Cylon-person gets dunked into a bucket of water by a cute-as-a-button lieutenant who just wants to know where the nuclear bomb is hidden. She spits into the Cylon's ear: "you're not human." The Cylon creepily quotes from scripture. So you've got your torture covered. In comes the president to pardon the offender. The offender breaks down into human-sized tears and tells her everything: there was no bomb, I just didn't want to die, and you're thinking, maybe this guy's all right, maybe he's like a person after all. Yet the credits don't roll. Instead the President gets all tough and glinty-eyed and says, "Right. Throw this thing out the airlock." Zip, out he goes into the vacuum of space, his mouth a black boomerang of worry. The President shrugs, says, "it posed a threat." End of story. The last image before the credits roll finds the cute lieutenant in her lockerroom, praying to some weird totem (religion has evolved in the future, apparently) for her own soul to be saved. Will she be capable of torture in the next episode?
As with other wars: you'll have to tune in next week to find out. And this is, finally, the advantage of a television show. It has time to show you the casualties. 90 minutes just isn't enough anymore.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:26 AM, ,
