I purchased the DVD of
V for Vendetta some months ago, but never could make myself pop it in the DVD player and watch it. I finally did the other day, and it holds up well to repeat viewing. Well, I say that, but my love-hate relationship movie remains unchanged. With most movies, love-hate typically means a movie you love to hate, but with
V for Vendetta it's harder, because it's a movie I hate to love.
The reason I have an admiration for the movie is that it actually gives an understanding about how a fascist dictatorship actually functions. Orwell once famously remarked (in "Politics and the English Language") that the term fascism "now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable,'" a judgment that remains spot-on to this day, but
V gives you a more direct idea of what fascism really is, often in subtle ways. One of the primary reasons fascism had sympathizers was because it promised to make the trains run on time. From the outside, it makes the workings of government look like a military organization- the guy at the top makes decisions and gives his orders, and the underlings then obey them diligently, and the bickering and pettiness that characterizes democratic politics is done away with. In reality it works quite differently- with fascism, you're dealing exclusively in terms of power. When you're the guy at the top of the pyramid, you have the power, but at the price of never being able to trust your underlings. The consequence is that everyone must be spied on, which is the biggest source of inefficiency- you need a secret police to monitor everyone, particularly those in your government, but you can't give them a monopoly on the spying or the muscle, else you risk your security chief having power independent of your own (this of course was the Achilles heel of the government in
V). Furthermore, the principal extends to all functions of government- the boundaries of jurisdiction within the bureaucracy are deliberately left vague, so as to ensure jealousy prevents any individual person from getting too big for his britches. The first time you run into this in
V is during the initial investigation of the Old Bailey bombing- Finch's biggest worry is that he needs to find Evey "before she disappears into Creedy's black bags." It's not a moral objection, but a practical one- his worry is that Creedy is hampering his investigation on a matter of critical importance, a complaint he makes more than once.
Secondly, it imparts a good understanding about how the character of different agencies varies- police departments are primarily interested in stopping regular crime, and regardless of regime will be generally populated by decent people. It's the secret police who are the scary, scummy ones. This dichotomy has its parallel in every fascist & communist regime- The Gestapo, Stasi, NKVD, etc- all filled with nihilistic scumbags, top to bottom. You see this very clearly between the regular police and the fingermen in
V.
The third major point that is implicitly admitted in
V is that dictatorships, or frankly repressive government of any type, do not fall because of internal pressure. They fall because they lose the will to repress (or are overthrown by a foreign power, but this is not touched on). Once they lose the will to power, they lose the power. Modern autocratic governments generally do not fall to revolution from within- either they are overthrown by a foreign power (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Khmer Rouge, Hussein's Iraq, etc.) or they lose the will to repress and give up without a shot fired (most of the Soviet Bloc, apartheid South Africa, Chile). Not once but twice in
V we see this- first when the commander orders his men to stand down rather than massacre the crowd, secondly when Finch allows Evey to start the train with explosives. Compare the above to Tienanmen Square. Deng Xiaoping retained the willingness to gun down protesters, and hence he kept his government. It's an important lesson to remember when dealing with say, Iran. While the average Iranian might have lost the revolutionary fervor, Mr. Ahmadinejad likely retains the stomach that let him send
brigades of teenagers to clear minefields.
Despite its pretty accurate portrayal of how a fascist government works, comparing the dictatorship in
V to Mussolini's Italy is not really what the Wachowskis intended with the script- it's Bushitlerhallichimpburton that's the target here. It's never really an excusable offense when lefties accuse conservatives (at least in America) or Bush of fascism, but it's usually an offense of ignorance- if you think Bush is a fascist, then you either know nothing about fascism or you know nothing about Bush, typically both. But as I've spent much time noting above, clearly the Wachowskis
do know something about fascism, which means to make a movie like this is to plumb the Michael Moore depths of manipulative mendacity with regards to anyone simultaneously opposed to both gay marriage and becoming a dhimmi (particularly egregious is the US/UK/Swastika "Coalition of the Willing to Power" poster).
The first problem is with the character of Adam Sutler. He's supposed to be a composite of Bush and Hitler, but the mixture doesn't work. By trying to make him both, he ends up being neither. Hitler would never have put up with a slogan like "Strength through Unity, Unity through Faith" because Hitler was a pagan. He was obsessed with Germanic and Norse myth, with Wagnerian Opera on those subjects, and saw himself as purifying and strengthening a Volk of the Master Race. When I
wrote about the Wachowskis and
The Matrix series, I noted, "The totalitarians were engaged not in social engineering, but in social art. It was never about 'the people' or 'the masses' or 'the proletariat', it was about their own aesthetic desires." So it was with Hitler. His failure as an artist with paint and canvas prefigured his failure as an artist with flesh and blood. We never see this type of motivation behind Sutler (we see it in Prothero, so we can perhaps conclude that it has sanction from the top, but we never see Sutler endorse it). We are told he was a fanatic, and we see him briefly pound a podium Hitler-style, and there's a brief hint of the paganism (The Norsefire party, which conflicts with the description of him as a man "with deep faith," presumably in God), but every time we hear him speak, his concern is always order. Perhaps the cues I just mentioned are supposed to be sufficient to establish his evil, but I can't help but be reminded of
The Greatest Piece of Movie Criticism Ever Written, where Jonathan Last gives his verdict on the Empire in Star Wars:
Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.
But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
[...]
But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.
It seems to me Adam Sutler, at least as presented in the movie (as opposed to the comic books, which I've not read) is a character in the same vein. The Wachowskis give us the Hitler cues, but his behavior doesn't jive with it. Like Palpatine and Vader, his controlling impulse is order, or rather fear of chaos. Fear of chaos befits a man like Sutler, because the only times we see him off his video screen he is a slight person and a physical coward, quite unlike Der Fuhrer. Adolf Hitler in the flesh was compelling; Adam Sutler needs an enormous jumbotron. Very little of what we see from Sutler on screen gives the impression that he is a fascist at heart; instead, most things distinctly fascist in his government emanate from Creedy (who really is the consummate fascist). This is not to excuse Sutler, since he is ultimately responsible for the heinous crimes of his regime (which are distinctly worse than those of the Star Wars empire in moral terms if not in scope), but instead to say that he could be the subject of a good tragedy along the lines of Macbeth, doomed for listening to and to falling in with the fascists. Given the state the rest of the world is apparently in, one could even sympathize with the temptation.
The contrast with George W. Bush could not be starker. If there's any controlling impulse in Bush, it's personal loyalty. It certainly isn't order. If Bush cared about order above all, Iraq would have turned out much better than it has. In fact it's closer to the opposite- if Bush is to be accused of fanaticism, it is in his apparently unwavering belief in freedom and democracy for all. This could very well damn him to tragedy, but of an altogether different kind. Even his personal management style bears no resemblance to Hitler or Sutler. His is a combination of MBA exec and frat-president- avoiding micromanagement (Hitler on the other hand was a ferocious micro-manager), and reminding people of their place through semi-derogatory nicknames.
Where
V for Vendetta gets really bothersome--offensive, actually-- is on the subjects of homosexuals and religion. We hear of Muslims or Islam only on a few occasions: one is when Voice-of-London Prothero refers to them in his list of degenerates England had to rid herself of,
another is when Dominic shows Evey his copy of the Koran, noting its "beautiful images and moving poetry" and ignoring its injunctions to slay the infidels, and a third is when we see a brief clip of a propaganda show. In the show, we see a towelhead caricature sharpening a pair of machetes, apparently about to slice up some blonde girl before Aryan superhero Storm Saxon busts in to rescue her. Now, we only see it briefly so it's not crucial to anything in the film, but it's obviously meant to illustrate the type of propaganda show such a regime would put out. Here's the problem- that kind of thing actually happens (minus the rescue). There really are barbarians out there who saw of heads shouting, "
Allahu Akbar!" and pick their victims for no other reason beyond the fact that they're Western and there for the taking (well, sometimes they pick them to extort money). It's a sad reflection on a movie when a TV-show-within-a-movie intended to be transparent propaganda of a fascist regime reflects the real world more than the movie itself does. A further point on the minimization of Islam in the movie: by the brief glimpses we get it looks like the rest of the world has completely gone to hell. The "former United States" is mired in civil war as a result of "its war," and from what else we see the rest of the world doesn't look like it's much better off. Now, I think we can allow ourselves a moment of honesty to admit that if in twenty years the world looks anything like it does in
V, then Muslims (or at least people claiming to be Muslims) will have had something to do with it, and they'd still be the hot topic in any place still clinging to what's left of modern Western life. On the flip side, if as Prothero hints they've been either expelled or exterminated, then I suppose not seeing them much would make sense. The problem with this interpretation is that we now have the paradox of a movie implicitly saying there's no problem with Islam, that anyone claiming otherwise is a fascist, and yet demonstrating that fascist methods are what will get us into no-problems-with-Islam land.
As annoying as its treatment of Islam is, where I really get offended is how the movie handles homosexuality. Now, on one level it's historically accurate to show homosexuals snatched up and "processed," as the movie puts it-- Hitler did after all round them up and gas them along with the Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and others. But by dwelling on it so much, I felt like the movie was pointing a finger saying, "You! You who aren't to thrilled about the idea of gay marriage! You're oppressing gays! You want them herded into a lab so a latter day Mengele can have his way with them!" More to the point, I felt the movie was accusing
me of that. I'm opposed to gay marriage, but I have no desire to use the power of the state to do anything to gays. At some point I'll elucidate my views more, but that's the bottom line, and when a movie is accusing me of what I think it's accusing me of, I take it personally and consider it borderline slanderous. I get even more offended when I remember that
there really are people who want that, and there really are countries where homosexuals really do have to fear for their lives. Anyone want to take a guess who those people are? Here's a hint: they're the beautiful-images-and-moving-poetry wielding, Allahu-Akbar shouting types. Settling for a civil union is not Sharia. The only union gays get under Sharia is the one between a dynamited wall and the ground. What aggravates me even more is that in
V, it's
the highly sympathetic gay character, the one who's forced to live his life in frustration while putting on a smile and keeping appearances, who coos over the moving poetry! It takes an astounding obtuseness on the part of the filmmakers to get things that backwards.
Going back to the religion angle, it's repeatedly shown that anyone espousing Christianity (at least we assume it's Christianity- we hear of God and faith, but never Christ) is either a nut or cynically hypocritical about it. The C of E apparently exists solely to molest children. It hurts the movie because it makes hash of so many other things. There are people who call the wrath of God down on their enemies, and claim a divine right to do whatever they want to others, but not fascists. In the West, the idea that God gave special providence to your country just because you were born there died somewhere on the way to the German trenches at the Somme. Fascism was what rose in its place, just as Nietzsche predicted. I'm tired of harping on it more, but there still are people in the world who believe they have a divine obligation to kill you. Again, they ain't Baptists.
However, all that being said, I'm still in the position of hating to love this movie. My begrudging admiration lies ultimately in its ultimate subconscious honesty about what the character V really is. When I say subconscious, I mean that you have to ignore Evey's Stockholm-syndrome eulogy and look at his actions. The one line that haunts this movie, that cuts through all the theatrics and gets to the truth of the matter, is the observation by the arch-fascist Creedy, "you're like me." Stripped to its core,
V for Vendetta really is about vendetta. There is an age-old tradition that in a revenge drama, the hero must be a tragic hero who dies as a result of his revenge- a comment on the inherent moral problem of revenge. The filmmakers (and I assume the comic writer as well) was wise to stick to this convention, as V himself is forced to come to terms with the accuracy of Creedy's (and for that matter, Evey's, when she called him a monster) judgment. He is a romantic, so he needed to tell himself that it wasn't just about him, that instead he was a modern day knight avenging his wronged lady, or that underneath his mask there was some bulletproof idea, but he had to eventually admit that in the end, it really was just about him. What I self-quoted above about the totalitarians goes equally for V, "It was never about 'the people' or 'the masses' or 'the proletariat', it was about their own aesthetic desires." When I originally wrote that, I had intended to add, "The masses were merely props in their own personal drama." I now really wish I had written that back then, because it's as close to the literal truth about V as such a statement could be-- for him the masses were just there for him to foist his own image on them.
What really brings him down to the level of the fascists is what he does to Evey. By splicing it with the story of the actress and (on first viewing) leaving the audience to assume she's been captured by Creedy's goons, the movie pushes your emotional response against the government. As a narrative device, it's perfect, but it does obscure the essential point that V had no justification whatsoever to do it. His only weak defense is, "you wanted to live without fear," which mendaciously attempts to place the blame on Evey rather than himself. What was his real purpose? Self-protection. Evey was sympathetic to his goals, but had attempted to escape. He could not trust her to roam the world freely, and said so himself. Sympathy wasn't sufficient for V; he needed complete submission. So he broke her, 1984-style, so that she would love Big Brother when she was let free. How is this in anyway different from a fascist regime that behaves the same way? They break people because they are deemed threats to the regime, out of the same sense of self-preservation. That they do such things is one of the primary knocks against them. V remarked that Creedy was a man "for whom the ends always justified the means," but could the same not be said of V? Can we point to any means which V did not believe were justified by his ends? "You're like me." The barb sticks.
With V, we also have the added complication of his explicit admission of being a liar, and more to the point lying to serve his ends. The reason this complicates things is that most of what we see of the government's crimes is filtered through him. When he pretends to be the former bagman and tells Finch the story to match the facts he's gathered, how much can we believe? He needed Finch to order surveillance of Creedy, presumably so that he could use it to get access to him (as an aside, it's never explained how he has infiltrated the police network- Creedy suspects an inside source, but the issue is never resolved. How, for example, did he know so quickly that he needed to kill the bishop? He tells Evey that he had to move things up, but that only makes sense if he knew Finch was in a position to find the bishop, which had only happened within a day or so?). Is it, as Finch suspected afterward, bullshit? Some? All? Furthermore, how is it V came to this knowledge? In Dr. Surridge's diary, we learn that V had entirely forgotten his identity, so not only can we not trust that what he says is in good faith, on account of psychological damage we cannot even trust that what he does say in good faith is true. For some events, there is sufficient corroborating evidence for the crimes of the government (the aforementioned diary), but even where they are not in doubt, by systematically killing everyone associated with the detention center and making a point to do it before Finch could glean any information from them, he prohibits any possible witness outside of his own. It's puzzling at best, since if he had failed in his attempt to bring down the government he would have successfully helped it it cover up its greatest crime. If the reason is simple desire for revenge, we then have to consider that his revenge motive not only brought his methods down to the level of the fascists, but they additionally jeopardized the ability to demonstrate a real crime in favor of self-indulgent theatrics, which only succeeded by virtue of human decency on the part of government agents. If things went as normal "when people without guns stand up to people with guns," as Finch put it, the theatrics certainly would have failed. That V succeeded in bringing down the government is to his credit, as we are left to assume things got much better afterwards, but to his discredit is that he did it for entirely selfish reasons.
I am left with the same opinion of the Wachowskis I expressed over a year ago before I saw
V for Vendetta. When they let their characters be themselves and trust the audience to "get it," they are brilliant. When they put their own words into their characters mouths- which is to say, when they simultaneously try to have their characters both take part in the action and enunciate their commentary- they make hash of things. At the lowest level, that of concrete action, they imply a number of truths that lefty artists ignore, and what sets them apart as filmmakers is that fundamental artistic honesty. Again, I find myself repeating what I said then- Hoping for them to explicitly admit what they implicitly admit is almost certainly in vain. In fact, even if they began to do so in their films, it would probably end up with similar results, except that the ponderousness and contradictions would merely grate less on me and more on others. What they really need to do is remember the discipline they kept when they made
The Matrix. Just tell the story! Doing so adds to, rather than subtracts from the richness of it. Resist the urge to comment on the story in the telling! Such comments will be at best superfluous, and at worse contradictory. If the Wachowskis can ever manage that again, they will create great movies.
