I’m so impressed with the courage and thoughtfulness of <span style=”font-weight:bold;”><span style=”font-style:italic;”>V for Vendetta</span></span>. I went into the movie expecting a lame-o Hollywood castration of Alan Moore’s clever and powerful conceit. Given occasionally interesting but mostly abysmal adaptations of Moore’s work (<span style=”font-weight:bold;”><span style=”font-style:italic;”>From Hell</span></span> and <span style=”font-weight:bold;”><span style=”font-style:italic;”>League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</span></span>), I tempered my excitement and hoped for at least a few good explosions.
<img src=”/images/180px-Fawkes_portrait.jpg” align=right border=0>Well, in addition to a few good explosions — the final of which is almost heretical in its dramatic power — I got an eloquent script that dared me to call it inappropriate or politically incorrect. I got an Orwellian dystopia spit-shined for the 21st century, at once contemporary and futuristic without ever smelling like exploitation was on its mind.
Can a Hollywood movie ask you to question and challenge your government-sponsored society? More importantly, can it successfully remind you that you have a responsibility to keep your own government under control? When you’re no longer afraid, what are you willing to do? Of what are you capable?
Hugo Weaving’s V isn’t a superhero, despite his comic-book origins. He is the opponent of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, of Netanyahu and Sharon. He’s the young Yassar Arafat, not the old one. He’s General Sherman, the earth scorcher, not the military instrument of national righteousness. He’s a Shakespearean crystallization of the IRA, Shining Path, the PLO, the Weathermen, and even those guys in Idaho with guns who will <span style=”font-style:italic;”>not</span> be purged by a superior power. A little bit Patty Hearst, a little bit Timothy McVeigh.
The reason V is sympathetic and unambiguous (something most people could not say of McVeigh) is because his foe is not an option. This is why he differs from Hizbollah and Hamas, because their struggles revolve around seemingly viable choices: marginally acceptable condition set 1 and marginally acceptable condition set 2. We can’t and won’t support the English government of V’s world, nor will we shed tears when its preening, stentorian agents are destroyed. In this, the movie wildly succeeds at presenting terrorism in one of its historically noble forms: the terrorism of the righteous revolution. The amount of terror unleashed by Israel and American colonists in their wars for independence is a matter of record, but the History of Victors mutes most of the terrible things each group did to escape tyranny or annihilation.
As V would have us believe, terrorism, murder, and revenge are instruments the oppressed and maligned can wield with a moral certainty the oppressor can not.
When I was in high school, the fall bonfire was still around (last I heard, they are no longer popular or legal in the U.S.). I had no idea, no one I knew had any idea, that the fire we watched burn in the night was a celebration of an act of terrorism that never came to be: the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which would have destroyed Parliament. Alan Moore’s decision to revive terrorist Guy Fawkes’ in V during Margaret Thatcher’s England also went mostly unnoticed back in the 80s, although I remember how uncomfortable it made me feel given my life as a Reagan-era American.
Hollywood, despite its stunning powers of trivialization, squeaked out a small miracle of revolutionary entertainment. I hope a lot of little kids get to see this movie, and that it acts for them as a thread back to 1605, when blowing up government was the finest form of patriotism.
Oh, and if you think V is all fantasy, <a href=”http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-britain-terrorism,0,2803709.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines” target=”_blank”>get your head out of your ass</a>.