V for . . . oh, whatever
I’m resisting the trend of titling my V for Vendetta post “V for Victory” or “V for Virulent” or anything silly like that. It gets old after a while.
And that’s kind of how I feel about all the reviews of V that I’ve been reading. Critics who celebrate it and critics who abhor it alike have been highlighting the supposed references to our current U.S. government. Various reviewers claim to see overtones of Bush, Cheney, Abu Ghraib, the Twin Towers attacks, and anything else current, you name it, in the film.
For cryin’ out loud, people, it’s a comic book movie! And it’s a comic book movie based on a British comic book from the 1980s. The original creator, Alan Moore, apparently had some beefs with Thatcherism, and no doubt this influenced his work (I’ve never read it, so I can’t say for sure), but I would guess that he was simply imagining what a totalitarian state would look like if it happened, say, 40 years down the line, in Britain. Hence the much-commented-upon government oppression of Muslims (which is actually barely mentioned in the film): Muslims of Pakistani origin make up one of Britain’s more visible minority communities, so if a totalitarian government were to arise, they would be likely victims.
Though the movie is set in the twenty-first century, the totalitarian regime is pretty old-fashioned. It’s clearly based on Nazism and Stalinism, as the film’s red-and-black color scheme suggests. Why does Sutler’s government oppress homosexuals, in addition to religious minorities? Probably because that’s what Hitler did, too. It has little to do with Bush, and I would suggest that those who make that comparison, either from a liberal or a conservative perspective, are guilty of watering down the true horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag. I’m no fan of the Bush administration, but it isn’t guilty of genocide.
So V for Vendetta is a comic book movie, plain and simple. Most of its faults are inherent to the genre. Yes, it glorifies violence, and if I watched the movie from an almost-pacifist perspective, I would have a problem with that. But I have to admit that even almost-pacifists like watching buildings get blown up on the screen, as long as no one’s in them (which is the case in V for Vendetta—we wouldn’t want V to have to face any actual moral dilemmas).
This almost-pacifist also likes to watch strong women take on fearsome foes, and for me this was the greatest disappointment of the movie. Natalie Portman’s Evey, though well acted, was annoyingly passive for most of the movie. This isn’t Portman’s fault: it’s the screenplay’s (and perhaps the original comic book’s as well). Same thing happened to her in Revenge of the Sith. For goodness sakes, Natalie, if you’re going to keep taking roles in action movies, insist on ones where you get to kick people!
The one intelligent review I’ve read (and now I can’t remember where I saw it) of V for Vendetta agreed that the film’s antagonist was old-style fascism, not any contemporary situation. But the reviewer also suggested that, in the wake of 9/11, it’s naïve to make a hero, sans complexities, out of a terrorist. The Wachowski brothers began working on V long before 2001, but, as the reviewer suggested, they can’t avoid its shadow. Even in a comic book movie, you could make room to explore the issue of using corrupt means to tackle corruption.
SPOILER ALERT! Do not read past this point unless you’ve already seen the movie, or you never plan to see it, or you do plan to see it but you don’t care about suspense.
So, my biggest problem with the movie is one that I can’t talk about with people who haven’t seen it, because it would ruin a crucial surprise. You know the ubiquitous images of Natalie Portman’s head getting shaved on screen, after she’s been captured by (we’re led to believe) the government? Well, Evey thinks it’s the government who’s torturing her, too, in an effort to get her to reveal V’s whereabouts. But it turns out that it’s V. He is torturing her and interrogating her and threatening her with death in order to make her into a strong and “free” person. (Yes, he seems to have constructed a fake prison cell and interrogation room adjoining his lair. He is cuckoo, and he resembles the Phantom of the Opera more than a little.)
When Evey, threatened with execution, says that she would rather die than give them the information she wants, V lets her go and reveals that the whole thing has been a ruse. She is understandably quite a bit miffed, but the movie never really develops what she does with that anger. She’s just supposed to swallow it and use it to fuel her newfound strength. And how does she use that bravery? Not really at all. At least not that we see. By the end of the movie, she’s spouting all sorts of stuff about how V gave her the most important gift of all—freedom from fear—but never really addresses the awful means he used to bring that about.
It may be the pacifist idealist in me (not to mention the Christian), but I would have liked to have seen strength grounded in love rather than anger. Of course, that wouldn’t have fit the movie’s genre or its title, so I would settle for at least some good character development. How exactly does Evey transform anger into strength? And can we PLEASE see her using that strength? Perhaps using her strength by rebelling against her mentor and refusing to continue his violent means? The latter might be too much to ask, but the former two seem necessary, especially since in the first half of the movie, we are bombarded with images of Evey as victim.
The film’s naivete lies not only in its willful ignorance of 9/11, but also in the way it deals with the victimization of women. That’s my two cents.
6 comments March 24th, 2006