V for Vendetta: Irresponsible? (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Does V for Vendetta advocate violent overthrow of the Bush administration?

Is there a danger in promulgating the idea that blowing up a government building is nothing more than a symbol, when in fact it’s also a government building?

Is V4V a love letter to Oregon anarchists, or a rallying cry to paranoid militias? Both? Neither?

I personally am still pondering this. At this point in my ponderment, I’m at that condescending stage where I’m like, “Well, **I **get it, but maybe there’s some cracker with a shed full of fertilizer who’s not as sophisticated as me, who won’t distinguish between metaphor, or satire, and literal justification of his political paranoia.”

I understand that this has the potential to become a very heated discussion, and one of the likeliest hijacks will be debate about the differences between the movie an the comic. But I have not read the comic, and a large number of moviegoers will not have seen the comic. My question is about the movie. And let’s all make an effort to minimize the “heated” part, K? (Do people think I’m paranoid?)

2

People tend to forget that, at its core, V for Vendetta is the knee-jerk reaction by a liberal comic book writer to the Margaret Thatcher administration. Nothing deeper than that.
People are going all Matrix over this film. but just like the Matrix turned out, there’s no “there” there.

3

No, it’s not.

It’s a MOVIE about a near-future civilization that, both implicitly and explicitly, has very strong parallels to Bush’s policies, and extrapolations speculated from them.

The MOVIE has zero to do with Thatcher. In the same way the Good Night and Good Luck is, to most audience members, more about the Patriot Act than it is about HUAC, *V4V *is far more about possible aftermaths of Bush’s “War on Terrorism” than it is about Margaret Thatcher’s policies. The context of the comic is NOT the context of the movie.

4

If anything, V4V advocates getting the Bush administration to violently overthrow itself, perhaps by talking Condi into killing W before being herself righteously executed by a wronged Guantanamo inmate.

I see your point, but I think the differences with the Bush administration are significant enough so that you couldn’t justifiably argue that this is a plan of action rather than a cautionary tale.

Moore is and was an avowed anarchist, so calling him a “liberal” is misleading. And I don’t see what’s gained in any discussion of any work of art by trying to reduce it to one thing that is the only thing it can be – art by its nature is open to interpretation, and dismissing efforts to interpret art strikes me as incurious at best.

5

Yeah, I thought that part, assassinating the Chancellor, was a bad idea storywise. It rendered what followed anticlimactic and, well, unnecessary. I wanted him to live to be deposed and disgraced. Instead, we get: problem solved, but let’s still blow up a building!

6

Well the first question is whether responsibility is a virtue we demand of art. (I say no.)

Secondly, I think there’s plenty already out there which might give a whackjob the idea that blowing up a government building is a worthwhile pursuit, so no skin there, IMO. What this movie might conceiveably do is spur the apathetic and those who think one person cannot make a difference into something other than sitting on the couch.

–Cliffy

7

I haven’t seen the movie, but according to David Denby’s review in the New Yorker:

Of course, the review doesn’t say how much of that original script remains in the filmed version…it would be helpful to know if the parallels between today’s world and the film are specific, intentional allusions or descriptions of a general totalitarian state.

8

I do not think the film advocates the violent overthrow of the government. V is an anarchist superhero. Where Batman is an impossibly well-equipped right-wing vigilante, V is an anarchist vigilante. It’s political message* is something like “This is what the tools of totalitarianism look like. If this looks familiar to you, it’s because left to their own devices, government use these tools to their benefit and your detriment.” And frankly, I think “people shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people” is as concise a summation of the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as you’re likely to see in the cinema.

9
  • “You want to send a message? Call Western Union!”
    -Jack Warner
10

nicely put.

so what happens to the US? did i hear correctly in the movie that disease nearly whipes the country out?

11

That’s your opinion, but the fact that the story is basically the same argues against you. The story of the graphic novel, which is the story of the movie, has not been altered significantly as far as I can tell. Perhaps the Wachowski Bros had different things in mind when they made the movie, but the story they told was inspired by Moore’s reaction to Thatcher. Throwing in a Koran here and there and mumbling something about America doesn’t make it a different story.
Not that the Wachowski Bros can claim to be deeper or more philosophically or ethically serious than Alan Moore, for that matter. We aren’t talking about high art here.

12

So we’re in agreement that the Bush Administration is indistinguishable from the fascist government in the movie?

You must be new here; Rik thinks anyone to the left of Bill O’Reilly is a “liberal.” After all, Bill tells him so. :wink:

13

But are Thatcher and Buch really so different that the same basic characters can’t be an allegory for them both, when the details are tweaked? It’s a piece about tyranny, and the proper response to it, not about specific economic initiatives.

14

I think that both the book and the movie are more of a cautionary tale than a call for violent overthrow. Both are, after all, set in the future. (Or, well, it was the future when the book was written in the 80’s, anyhow.) It doesn’t call on us to the overthrow of the contemporary government, but to exercise our rights as citizens to prevent the situation from getting to the point where we have to blow up buildings to throw off tyranny. Today, right now, we have stop allowing our leaders to nickle and dime our freedom into oblivion, stop trading liberty for security, stop turning a blind eye to abuses of power.

One of the significant differences between the movie and the book is that in the book, the ascendence of the fascists occurs in the chaos following a nuclear war, whereas in the movie the come to power in an environment very like today’s. The plagues that replace WWIII in the movie arrived after Sutler took power! Long before the plagues, certain politicians had exploited fear of religious extremism and the global instability caused by “America’s War” to control the people. The concentration camps, the loss of freedom, all this occured, not because something terrible had happened, but because the people allowed themselves to be whipped up into a frenzy of fear toward the rest of the world, toward the foreign, and the different. In that sense, the movie is a lot more daring than the book. It’s easy to imagine the rise of fascists to power after a catastrophe. It’s more uncomfortable to see it arising out of circumstances very much like our own.

I think it’s significant that in the movie V’s televised soliloquy is much less condescending, much less patronizing, and more direct.[sup]*[/sup] It emphasises the personal responsibility these people had, in the past, and the power that they, as citizens, let slip away. He tells them: you let them take over, and you let them do it because you were afraid—and now you are living with the consequences of that.

So is he talking to our future selves or is he talking to us today? I think that the movie strives to make clear that V, in a meta sense, in the sense of V as a symbol, is trying to give us the benefit of his hindsight. He’s saying, do not stand for this, or you are giving up your own freedom, you are condemning the innocent, you are destroying your society.

[sup]*[/sup] My husband thinks it’s because the speech was dumbed down for a mainstream American audience, so maybe I’m just full of bologna.

15

Um, no, you pulled that out of your non sequitur.

16

Um, okay, I should have previewed.

Make that “It doesn’t call on us to overthrow the contemporary government . . .”

And V’s televised address wasn’t a soliloquy, which would have been him talking to himself. :smack:.

17

Somehow, I think that is more wishful thinking on your part.
V for Vendetta is typical of Dystopian sci-fi fare right down to the Orwellian imagery I’ve seen in the trailers. Like all Dystopian fiction, the England in VfV extrapolates from our own society. You SHOULD be able to recognize elements of the facist fictional government in our own government.

18

Yes, I think they are very different. Either way, the point wasn’t “this movie is about Thatcher, not Bush” but that it’s not that significant either way. It’s not a Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf. It’s not even The Turner Diaries. It’s just an action movie based on a comic book. Whether or not it advocates terrorism, it will not spark some popular uprising.

19

No, not at all. The Bush government is not nearly as evil as the Sutler government in the film, and realistically will never be on par with the openly fascist, ethnic-cleansing regime of the movie. To the extent that the Sutler government represents a scaled-up version of the “evil” of the Bush government, the appropriate reaction to that government has also been scaled up. I don’t see any reasonable way to interpret the movie as a call to violence against the current government. A call to action, certainly, but not violent action.

Eh. Possibly, but (and this is likely due to my own political biases) it seems that the sort of person who is most likely to try to blow up a government building is not going to find much to like in V for Vendetta. It is, after all, a film decrying atrocities committed against blacks, Muslims, and homos. I don’t really see the Timothy McVeighs of the world rallying around any of those causes, and the Osama bin Ladens are going to find the movie’s emphasis on that last group a pretty huge stumbling block in embracing the film.

That aside, I don’t think an artist can (nor should) censor himself out of fear that some crazy will interpret their work as an instruction to commit violent crime. Ultimatly, such a thing is impossible to predict: who could have seen “Helter Skelter” leading to the Manson murders, or Cather in the Rye to Lennon’s shooting? Crazy violent people are crazy and violent regardless of what sort of media they consume. A man who is going to commit murder is going to commit murder wether he reads The Anarchist’s Cookbook or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

We’ve been discussing this behind your back, and have decided that it’s all in your head.

20

I haven’t seen this movie or read the graphic novel on which it is based yet so I won’t comment on it but, judging from the reviews and previews I’ve seen, it seems a lot the plot elements in V for Vendetta (e.g., a terrorism-obsessed totalitarian state employs hyperconsumerism to distract the populace while a shadowy bomb-throwing revolutionary tries to undermine the state) were covered in Brazil more than 20 years ago. For those who’ve seen both movies, I was wondering how they compare with one another?