The latest movie to send the
conservative crybabies sobbing into their bound copies of the Patriot Act
originates in, of all places, a comic book, or as they like to call them in the
higher literary circles, a graphic novel. For a political allegory to grow out
of so apparently plebeian a form suggests not only a new depth to the comics
themselves, but also the potential in popular art to mirror some of the
peculiar tensions of its time.
The film, and presumably its source,
threatens a number of contemporary assumptions — about politics, government,
conformity — in a boldly subversive story of tyranny and terrorism, hardly
the usual corroborative vision of so much popular entertainment.
V
for Vendetta takes place in a nation governed by a right wing theocracy
preaching a crazed nationalism that demands absolute loyalty, enforcing its
edicts with secret police, secret surveillance of the citizenry, and secret
prisons, where the authorities torture and punish the inmates without charges
or trials.
Although it sounds like America
today, in fact the film is set in an England
of the near future, where Tony Blair’s policies have spawned a dictatorship
reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. In the
great comic book tradition, a costumed and masked avenger appears,
a victim of the regime who calls himself V and wears the face of Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605 and was
hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason.
V (Hugo Weaving) rescues a young
woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) from potential
assault by a trio of police thugs and demonstrates his power by blowing up the
Old Bailey on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, to the tune
of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which
he has programmed on the government’s ubiquitous speakers. He announces to the
people of Britain
that he plans a greater demonstration a year hence, on the 400th anniversary of
Guy Fawkes’s attempt.
The picture then settles into a
number of plots, all connected to the search for V, which demand considerable,
often clumsy exposition in the form of flashbacks and the awkward device of
characters recounting personal and political histories to each other. Growing
increasingly hysterical, the Chancellor of England (John Hurt),
commands the Chief Inspector of Police (Stephen Rea) to find the identity and
location of the terrorist, a task that leads the detective (and thus the
audience) to an understanding of his quarry’s motivation and of the events that
created the current situation.
Some confusion results from the
mixture of the primary subject of V’s planned attack, the relationship between
him and Evey that consequently places her in danger,
and the progress of Inspector Finch’s investigation. The film often betrays its
debt to its original source in its curious combination of sophistication and
juvenility. The terrorist, for example, dwells in one of those lairs beloved of
comic book writers since Superman’s Fortress of Solitude; equipped only with a
battery of knives and some martial arts maneuvers, V constantly defeats whole
squads of heavily armed soldiers; by unexplained means, he manages to spirit
away a number of great books and historic artifacts to that comfy lair, and
accumulates enough explosives to complete Guy Fawkes’s
original plan.
Although, as the handwringers
complain, the movie makes a hero of a terrorist intent on blowing up public
buildings, those same whiners cheered Independence
Day‘s alien attacks on the White House and the Capitol back in 1996. The
greater relevance of V for Vendetta depends upon its numerous parallels to current history. It alludes to such
contemporary practices as rendition and waterboarding,
the sheeplike acquiescence of the populace in the
erosion of liberties, the bogus terror alerts, the demagoguery and sycophancy
of the media; in a nice touch, it even features a drug addicted television
bully reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.
Ultimately V for Vendetta may well influence as well as reflect some trends in
popular culture. The Guy Fawkes mask, with its
frozen, sinister grin could become a favorite this Halloween, and the defiant red
V that the title character’s followers paint over government proclamations may
replace the anarchists’ A as a symbol of disaffection and dissent.
Though frequently melodramatic and
silly, the picture also entertainingly suggests some important and subversive
truths for our dark time.
V for Vendetta (R), directed by
James McTeigue, is playing at Culver Ridge 16, Eastview Mall 13, Greece Ridge Cinema, Henrietta 18,
Pittsford Cinema, Tinseltown, Webster 12.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2006.
