(no subject)
Mar. 17th, 2006 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verushka70I'm really posting this on 5/10/06, but I'm backdating it to 3/17/06, the day V for Vendetta opened in theaters. It's in response to a comment made here:http://community.livejournal.com/adults4vendetta/5024.html
Just jumping in here. Please, let me just say, all this is just my 237 cents, and it is all, of course, opinion. Also, I'm a sporadic poster, erratic LJer, so I may not read any comments to this for... I dunno, days... until I'm done with my final exams. (And yes I am an adult, someone who perhaps bit off more than she could chew by starting nursing school at the age of 37, after having gotten a BA 14 years ago...)
I, like you, was disturbed by my first viewing of V for Vendetta. I, unlike you, was also exhilarated by it. Being disturbed warred with being exhilarated for a while, and I had to see it about three times to understand what about it was so compelling, and what about it was so disturbing. By that third viewing, I became a huge fan. I'm still figuring out my reactions to some things, but the thing I like best about V for Vendetta is that it makes people really think and it's also made everyone I've seen it with really talk about the issues in the film.
Your points:
(1) "V is as much a tyrant as the government"
Is that really true? If you tally up the body count of people V kills, all by himself, and the people killed by High Chancellor Sutler's corrupt, fascistic government, who has killed more people? Is there a difference between killing/blowing up stuff to free oneself or free others, and killing/blowing up stuff to terrorize and oppress others?
If you just say, "Killing people for any reason is wrong" -- then of course, V is just as bad as Sutler's corrupt, jackboot state. And by that same logic, America was wrong to get involved in WWII. Allied soldiers killed so many Germans (about 5 million, according to Wikipedia).
But Allied soldiers were, among other things, trying to kill off a genocidal maniac and his army. So most people would argue that, No, it was not wrong of America to get involved in WWII and to kill so many German soldiers. And the reason it was not wrong was because of the scale of killing. So about 5 million Germans (Wikipedia) were killed. But the Nazis killed about 12 million people in the Holocaust, in their concentration camps.
So was it just as wrong for the US to get involved in WWII as it was for Hitler to start the concentration camps?
Logically, we would say no.
So by that logic, then, V is not just as much a tyrant as the people he's trying to overthrow. Just do a body count throughout the film. Although he's good with those knives -- no doubt about that -- by himself there is no way he can have killed as many people as were killed in Larkhill Detention Camp where he was held and experimented on, let alone the 80,000 people Chancellor Sutler's government killed -- of it's own people.
So what we're talking about are two things, then: the scale of killing (by Sutler's government: large; by V: small), and the motives for killing. Motives are murky, so I'll get back to that later. But in terms of sheer numbers, once you break away from the black and white thinking of "Killing is wrong, so V is just as wrong as the tyrant he's trying to overthrow!", you start to see the shades of gray.
And that's one thing I think V for Vendetta excels at: portraying the shades of gray, and showing that not all heroes are innocent (V certainly isn't), and not all bad guys (such as Dr. Delia Stanton) are purely evil. But, as V says to her, "I've not come for what you hoped to do... I've come for what you did."
Initially, I probably had the same reactions many people did: Evey got Stockholm syndrome, V was no better than the torturers who tortured him, etc. The only way I could sympathetically understand what V did to Evey was to see V as having taken on the qualities of his oppressors (thank you, Paulo Freire), and then perpetuating them on Evey -- as well as on the corrupt government and high officials of High Chancellor Sutler's England in the film.
Then I realized that there's a difference in the way the torture is portrayed in V for Vendetta, as opposed to the portrayal of torture in other films. A good example would be the torture that George Clooney's character in Syriana goes through. That's just torture, and we see it happen. Conversely, in V for Vendetta, we don't see a lot of Evey being tortured (just the hair shaving, and the face-in-the-cold-water-drowning torture). It's not all that graphic; and the majority of the screen time during Evey's captivity and torture is actually spent giving us the story of Valerie Page, the actress who wrote the notes to V who then gave them to Evey as they'd been given to him, through a hole in the wall of the cell.
And there is a difference between spending the majority of the visual time on suffering vs. spending the majority of it on torture.
The point, I think, is the idea of personal transformation through suffering and loss. It's not just Nietzschean ("what doesn't kill me makes me stronger"); it's also the realization that, when you think everything has gotten as bad as it can get, and you think that everything meaningful has been taken from you, you still find something deep inside you that is untouchable by anyone. It changes your consciousness. Hopefully, it raises your consciousness because you realize that life, stuff, things, other people, are not all you have; you also have yourself, that tiny piece of integrity that is, we hope, in all humans and is part of what makes us human -- and, more importantly, humane.
And, the other point (I think) is that, yes, V does take on the qualities of his oppressors. And, at the end of the film, he also admits to Evey that she was right, and he was wrong: he admits that she was right when he said "What they did to me was monstrous" and she replied "And they made a monster." That is why he leaves the final choice up to Evey, as to whether or not to set the train (and destruction of the Houses of Parliament) in motion. He realizes that his torture perhaps didn't raise his consciousness as much as he thought it did; and he realizes that Evey's consciousness might have been raised more than his was.
There's a lot of parallelization of characters in the film; and they spend a lot of visual time comparing and contrasting V with Evey -- and also comparing and contrasting V with Gordon Dietrich. Gordon and V both greet Evey the same way ("Bonjour, mademoiselle!"), both make her "eggy-in-a-basket" for breakfast, and both tell her mirror versions of the same thing: V tells Evey that his Shadow Gallery of forbidden and censored art is "the least of his worries" if the government finds him; whereas Gordon tells Evey that harboring her, as a known terrorist, is "the least of his worries" because of his huge collection of forbidden objects and art. And, neither Gordon nor V has any overt romantic relationship with Evey. (It's not until after he's been fatally wounded that V tells Evey he fell in love with her; and she never sees his face or kisses his actual lips.)
V and Evey are also paralleled -- they're visually paired by intercutting V's scenes of escaping from the explosion fire of Larkhill Detention Center after he's blown it up with Evey's scenes on the roof of wherever V lives, with the rain falling on her, after she realizes that her incarceration and torture weren't "real."
There's a reason why V's post-torture persona is born of fire and Evey's is washed by rain. The fire bakes in whatever is there -- or forges it, or burns it in, or brands it in, or (insert any metaphor that fits). But, symbolically, water cleanses... purifies... washes... refreshes. When we're born, we're all born from a sack of water, not fire. It's like Evey is born again into a new life with a new consciousness -- and no fear. Whereas whatever V was before they tortured him, he's forgotten; and, as he himself says, all that he wants, and all he deserves, is to meet his maker (the creepy Mr. Creedy) and pay him back for all he deserves.
The other reason I think it's no accident that Gordon and V are visually paralleled so much in the movie is because both are, essentially, doomed to die. You don't realize it the first time you see it, but Gordon's death foreshadows V's -- especially when Gordon says, "You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were under it." And that's the essential point with V: whatever he was before, even after he became fearless and free from having been tortured and reading Valerie's autobiography on toilet paper, he has worn the mask he wears too long, and he's forgotten who he was under it. This is why, in some respects, what he does is not much different from the tyrants he's trying to overthrow.
On the other hand, he does kill a bunch of jackboot thug, corrupt, power-mongering and power-abusing bastards, and (presumably) he blows buildings up when there is no one in them. So unless you're going to put everything in pure black-and-white terms, V has done comparatively little killing compared with the government and corruption he is trying to overthrow. In fact, V could be viewed as the chickens coming home to roost, or as Sutler and Creedy reaping what they themselves have sown.
Now... what's profoundly disturbing about V torturing Evey "for her own good" and so that she can live without fear is that (1) he is totally convinced that it is the only way to do that for her ("I wish there were another way, but there wasn't"), (2) he does it because he loves her and wants her to be free, unshackled, to actually have no fear of anything that her government or society can do to her, and (3) he does it knowing that by doing so, he may be setting Evey free, but he has made it impossible for her to stay with him.
I liken it to a line from Fight Club: "It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything." As V takes everything slowly away from Evey during her captivity and torture, he is freeing her (if you can stretch your mind to see it that way). I'm NOT saying it's right or good; but I can see his twisted logic, in the same way I could see it in Fight Club. Evey, obviously, does not see the logic, although she comes to appreciate the fact that it has irrevocably changed her. And I can see her perspective too.
As to your other point (2):
In actuality, the Wachowski brothers wrote this movie before they did any of the Matrix movies, so I don't think they are specifically referencing 9/11. The original graphic novel was written during Margaret Thatcher's ultra-conservative reign in Britain in the 80s. So I don't think the original authors or the Wachowski brothers or the director were specifically trying to tie V for Vendetta to the events of 9/11.
However, I didn't know all that the first time I saw V for Vendetta; I found all that out later. I wasn't clued in to the graphic novel, had never read it; didn't know the genesis of the V for Vendetta screenplay; didn't even know the Wachowski brothers are from the same place I am: Chicago. I found all that out later.
I can see how you connected it up with 9/11. I didn't quite connect it with the 9/11 specifically, but I did see the portrayal of Chancellor Sutler's fascistic, opressive government as having certain things in common with our current government in the US -- the double speak, the way they spin things, the way they refuse to allow any American news outlets broadcast video or even photo coverage of American soldiers' funerals (but our Spanish-speaking fellow citizens were able to watch them on Spanish-language news -- until the US government tried to pressure Telemundo and other stations to stop doing so).
Then later, I got more of a SDS/Weatherman/Black Panthers feel about V than a feeling the filmmakers were trying to sympathize with the terrorists who blew up the WTC.
On the other hand, V makes a point of saying violence can be used for good. And while I think that point can be debated, I think one of the aims of the film was to make people think about whether or not that is true. If you use a gun to shoot someone you dislike, that's bad. If you use a gun to hold up a convenience store because you're broke and your kids are starving because you've lost your job, you don't qualify for unemployment, and you have no way to feed or clothe them or get medicine needed right now, that's more understandable. The wholesale slaughtering of people done by the government V is bent on overthrowing (as portrayed when they are testing the virus on prisoners and dumping their bodies in mass graves) is much closer to the genocidal end of the spectrum than what V does; the sheer numbers are shown in frightening visual echoes of the actual films of Nazi concentration camp victims.
Eddie Izzard has a riff about governments killing their own people in his Dress To Kill special, and how Western powers are sort of "fine with that." He says, "And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. “Ah, help yourself,” you know? “We've been trying to kill you for ages!” So kill your own people, right on there. Seems to be… Hitler killed people next door... “Oh… stupid man!” After a couple of years, we won't stand for that, will we?"
(I'm indebted to http://www.auntiemomo.com/cakeordeath/d2ktranscription.html for that quote; I used to have a transcript of the subtitles on my hard drive, that I ripped myself, but I couldn't find it...)
But then, black-or-whiteness is part of the problem -- with our government and many others before it. V for Vendetta takes what we've been told is black and white, and shows us all the shades of gray that are really there between the two extreme positions. History has shown us that people can be both freedom fighters and terrorists. And V for Vendetta shows us that what determines much of our unthinking black/white, good/bad judgements of people is greatly determined by what our government and it's propaganda machine tells us is black and white, "right" and "wrong."
I remember seeing a segment on FSTV (Free Speech TV, when I still had satellite TV) about the WTO protests in Seattle (at which perfectly nonviolent protestors, like my younger sister, were tear-gassed for exercising their civil right to assemble). They were doing a "man in the street" interview with a woman. And the interviewer said to her, "So what do you think about the people who smashed in the windows of the Gap and Starbucks?" And her reply was words to the effect of "I think they're violent animals, and they should be stopped." And the interviewer said, "Why?" and she said, "Because they destroyed a lot of property, they broke and destroyed things." And then the interviewer said, "So you think they're criminals because they destroyed a bunch of stuff?" And she said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "So then what do you think about the Boston Tea Party?" And she beamed and said, "Oh, I think it was wonderful!"
The point being that the Boston Tea Party was just as much about protest and the subsequent destruction of stuff, of corporate property, as the black-masked anarchist kids' destruction of the Gap and Starbuck's in Seattle during the WTO protest. But we've been told again and again that the guys who threw all that tea in the Boston harbor were patriots because they got us on the road to nationhood as the USA. And we've been told again and again that the black-masked young people smashing insured corporations' store windows (which were closed anyway) were home-grown terrorists. So we as a nation believe, as that woman believed, what we're told to believe; we think what we're told to think.
This is why V points out that if people are unhappy with the way things are and they are seeking who to blame, they might as well look in a mirror, because it can't happen without your unthinking consent. And this is also the movie shows the BTN executive's assistant saying to him, "You think people will buy it?" (the fake story about the destruction of the old Bailey), and him replying, "Why not? We're the BTN. Our job is to report the news, not fabricate it. That's the government's job."
The lady being interviewed about the Seattle WTO Gap window breaking vs. Boston Tea Party didn't get it. Many people, I suppose, wouldn't.
And I guess that's one of the reasons I finally decided that I loved V for Vendetta: because the movie draws those kinds of parallels. It asks, well, how do They (a corrupt, fascistic, oppressive and Orwellian government) like a taste of their own medicine? It asks: don't They deserve a taste of their own medicine?
It also asks, if you give them a taste of their own medicine, do you become like them? I think it also asks if violence begets violence.
I think, in the end, V realizes that in giving them what they deserve, giving them back a taste of their own medicine, he has unfortunately become like them. And in meeting Evey, and falling in love with her, he had a chance to rediscover something in himself he thought was dead. And that in doing what he did to Evey -- the fake capture and torture -- he killed his own last chance to "find (his) own tree." As he says to her in the underground station, "I have no tree waiting for me. All I want, all I deserve [my emphasis], is at the end of that tunnel." (Where he'll meet his "maker", the vicious Creedy, and "repay him in kind for all that he's done.")
On V's deathbed, he admits that falling in love with Evey was something he'd no longer thought possible for himself. But it is in falling in love -- not in exacting revenge -- that V finds his humanity again. By then, of course, it's too late for him, and he's already set his vengeance in motion. And it's up to Evey, then, to finish what V started. She has the power to stop it and let things continue as they have, or to finish what V started.
And she chooses to complete V's vengeance.
I think the reason she does is because she realizes that, whatever her personal feelings about V, his actions are larger than him and her. Evey realizes -- and says -- "he [V] was right." Evey always knew how fucked up everything was in her country: she personally experienced it through tragic loss after loss (her brother, then her father and mother, then herself in the youth re-education camp she gets thrown in), and all at the hands of her government's law enforcement.
So even if you leave V out of the equation altogether, even if you change the story so that Evey never met V, it would still be true that Sutler's government and his Norsefire party are fascist oppressors who've committed horrible atrocities and must be stopped. And while it's true that two wrongs don't make a right, it is also true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that V for Vendetta illustrates both of those aphorisms... beautifully.
To me, V for Vendetta is an impressive accomplishment on a number of levels. I've seen much more seditious films, but I've never seen them open so wide and play so long in so many theaters. It's probably the single most subversive film I've seen open mainstream since Fight Club, which was badly (and misleadingly) marketed and, if I recall right, didn't last too long in theaters.
But aside from all the political and philosophical aspects of V for Vendetta, there were two things about it that grabbed me right off: (1) it was visually stunning, just elegant and eye-popping; and (2) it was almost operatic in terms of the plot, characterization, and flow of the story. It's even sort of delivered in three "acts:" Act I would be everything up until Evey is captured escaping from Gordon's house; Act II would be everything from Evey's capture to her opening her arms to the dark rainy sky after she finds that last inch of herself; and Act III would begin with Evey leaving V and continue to the end of the film when he goes off to meet his maker and she completes his vengeance.
And although V for Vendetta is not a musical, the deployment of the music, the coupling of it with the visuals, and the types of music chosen (from Tchiakovsky to Beethoven to the Stones and that mashup at the end with everything from Bollywood samples to samples of Malcolm X), works beautifully. I'm a former film student, and I also love opera. So V for Vendetta, for me, was like a film opera. Political intrigue, wounded characters, machinations on both sides, a dark "hero" seeking justice, some bad guys who aren't totally, a tragic love story... it's totally operatic.
(After I found out the Wachowski brothers were from Chicago, I wondered if they had attended the yearly 3rd of July classical concerts that the Grant Park Orchestra would play, before Taste of Chicago ruined them, which usually included Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and real cannons and fireworks fired off at exactly the right moments that Tchaikovsky wrote into the piece. They're about my age; they very well might have... although the use of the music is portrayed in the graphic novel, it's slightly different than it turns out in the film.)
In fact, when I first saw V for Vendetta (and knew nothing about when the Wachowski brothers wrote it, or when the graphic novel was written), it made me think of what Verdi went through in writing Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) -- beset by censors of the Italian government, he was forced to change the story's setting in order to get it produced in Italy. I thought that was what had happened with V for Vendetta -- that it had originally been set in America, but that bean-counters forced them to move the setting to England to make it less upsetting to Americans. I was wrong, but the aspects of the film that make it operatic still come through!
Well, okay, instead of my 237 cents worth, this was more like 2,370 cents!
But I haven't really written about V for Vendetta before now... so it all just came out at once.
Oh, and: Natalie Portman's English accent is way better than Winona Ryder's was in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. And she's turned out to be quite a talented young actress.
As for Hugo Weaving, he did a truly amazing job of indicating V's state of mind and emotions despite the mask, using subtle body language, neck and head moves, and gestures... as well as tantalizing with his voice. Through my entire first viewing of V for Vendetta, I was being driven nuts by his voice! I kept thinking, "I know this voice, I've heard this guy before... why can't I place him?" (of course, it was because I couldn't see his face!). Then I realized it was Elrond... and Agent Smith! I guess I knew he had a good voice before, but I hadn't realized how compelling it was until everything else was covered up and there was only that voice.
And Stephen Rea. I've loved him ever since The Crying Game, and those sad brown eyes are used to such great effect. V for Vendetta has some really great ensemble casting, that's for sure.
Just jumping in here. Please, let me just say, all this is just my 237 cents, and it is all, of course, opinion. Also, I'm a sporadic poster, erratic LJer, so I may not read any comments to this for... I dunno, days... until I'm done with my final exams. (And yes I am an adult, someone who perhaps bit off more than she could chew by starting nursing school at the age of 37, after having gotten a BA 14 years ago...)
I, like you, was disturbed by my first viewing of V for Vendetta. I, unlike you, was also exhilarated by it. Being disturbed warred with being exhilarated for a while, and I had to see it about three times to understand what about it was so compelling, and what about it was so disturbing. By that third viewing, I became a huge fan. I'm still figuring out my reactions to some things, but the thing I like best about V for Vendetta is that it makes people really think and it's also made everyone I've seen it with really talk about the issues in the film.
Your points:
(1) "V is as much a tyrant as the government"
Is that really true? If you tally up the body count of people V kills, all by himself, and the people killed by High Chancellor Sutler's corrupt, fascistic government, who has killed more people? Is there a difference between killing/blowing up stuff to free oneself or free others, and killing/blowing up stuff to terrorize and oppress others?
If you just say, "Killing people for any reason is wrong" -- then of course, V is just as bad as Sutler's corrupt, jackboot state. And by that same logic, America was wrong to get involved in WWII. Allied soldiers killed so many Germans (about 5 million, according to Wikipedia).
But Allied soldiers were, among other things, trying to kill off a genocidal maniac and his army. So most people would argue that, No, it was not wrong of America to get involved in WWII and to kill so many German soldiers. And the reason it was not wrong was because of the scale of killing. So about 5 million Germans (Wikipedia) were killed. But the Nazis killed about 12 million people in the Holocaust, in their concentration camps.
So was it just as wrong for the US to get involved in WWII as it was for Hitler to start the concentration camps?
Logically, we would say no.
So by that logic, then, V is not just as much a tyrant as the people he's trying to overthrow. Just do a body count throughout the film. Although he's good with those knives -- no doubt about that -- by himself there is no way he can have killed as many people as were killed in Larkhill Detention Camp where he was held and experimented on, let alone the 80,000 people Chancellor Sutler's government killed -- of it's own people.
So what we're talking about are two things, then: the scale of killing (by Sutler's government: large; by V: small), and the motives for killing. Motives are murky, so I'll get back to that later. But in terms of sheer numbers, once you break away from the black and white thinking of "Killing is wrong, so V is just as wrong as the tyrant he's trying to overthrow!", you start to see the shades of gray.
And that's one thing I think V for Vendetta excels at: portraying the shades of gray, and showing that not all heroes are innocent (V certainly isn't), and not all bad guys (such as Dr. Delia Stanton) are purely evil. But, as V says to her, "I've not come for what you hoped to do... I've come for what you did."
Initially, I probably had the same reactions many people did: Evey got Stockholm syndrome, V was no better than the torturers who tortured him, etc. The only way I could sympathetically understand what V did to Evey was to see V as having taken on the qualities of his oppressors (thank you, Paulo Freire), and then perpetuating them on Evey -- as well as on the corrupt government and high officials of High Chancellor Sutler's England in the film.
Then I realized that there's a difference in the way the torture is portrayed in V for Vendetta, as opposed to the portrayal of torture in other films. A good example would be the torture that George Clooney's character in Syriana goes through. That's just torture, and we see it happen. Conversely, in V for Vendetta, we don't see a lot of Evey being tortured (just the hair shaving, and the face-in-the-cold-water-drowning torture). It's not all that graphic; and the majority of the screen time during Evey's captivity and torture is actually spent giving us the story of Valerie Page, the actress who wrote the notes to V who then gave them to Evey as they'd been given to him, through a hole in the wall of the cell.
And there is a difference between spending the majority of the visual time on suffering vs. spending the majority of it on torture.
The point, I think, is the idea of personal transformation through suffering and loss. It's not just Nietzschean ("what doesn't kill me makes me stronger"); it's also the realization that, when you think everything has gotten as bad as it can get, and you think that everything meaningful has been taken from you, you still find something deep inside you that is untouchable by anyone. It changes your consciousness. Hopefully, it raises your consciousness because you realize that life, stuff, things, other people, are not all you have; you also have yourself, that tiny piece of integrity that is, we hope, in all humans and is part of what makes us human -- and, more importantly, humane.
And, the other point (I think) is that, yes, V does take on the qualities of his oppressors. And, at the end of the film, he also admits to Evey that she was right, and he was wrong: he admits that she was right when he said "What they did to me was monstrous" and she replied "And they made a monster." That is why he leaves the final choice up to Evey, as to whether or not to set the train (and destruction of the Houses of Parliament) in motion. He realizes that his torture perhaps didn't raise his consciousness as much as he thought it did; and he realizes that Evey's consciousness might have been raised more than his was.
There's a lot of parallelization of characters in the film; and they spend a lot of visual time comparing and contrasting V with Evey -- and also comparing and contrasting V with Gordon Dietrich. Gordon and V both greet Evey the same way ("Bonjour, mademoiselle!"), both make her "eggy-in-a-basket" for breakfast, and both tell her mirror versions of the same thing: V tells Evey that his Shadow Gallery of forbidden and censored art is "the least of his worries" if the government finds him; whereas Gordon tells Evey that harboring her, as a known terrorist, is "the least of his worries" because of his huge collection of forbidden objects and art. And, neither Gordon nor V has any overt romantic relationship with Evey. (It's not until after he's been fatally wounded that V tells Evey he fell in love with her; and she never sees his face or kisses his actual lips.)
V and Evey are also paralleled -- they're visually paired by intercutting V's scenes of escaping from the explosion fire of Larkhill Detention Center after he's blown it up with Evey's scenes on the roof of wherever V lives, with the rain falling on her, after she realizes that her incarceration and torture weren't "real."
There's a reason why V's post-torture persona is born of fire and Evey's is washed by rain. The fire bakes in whatever is there -- or forges it, or burns it in, or brands it in, or (insert any metaphor that fits). But, symbolically, water cleanses... purifies... washes... refreshes. When we're born, we're all born from a sack of water, not fire. It's like Evey is born again into a new life with a new consciousness -- and no fear. Whereas whatever V was before they tortured him, he's forgotten; and, as he himself says, all that he wants, and all he deserves, is to meet his maker (the creepy Mr. Creedy) and pay him back for all he deserves.
The other reason I think it's no accident that Gordon and V are visually paralleled so much in the movie is because both are, essentially, doomed to die. You don't realize it the first time you see it, but Gordon's death foreshadows V's -- especially when Gordon says, "You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were under it." And that's the essential point with V: whatever he was before, even after he became fearless and free from having been tortured and reading Valerie's autobiography on toilet paper, he has worn the mask he wears too long, and he's forgotten who he was under it. This is why, in some respects, what he does is not much different from the tyrants he's trying to overthrow.
On the other hand, he does kill a bunch of jackboot thug, corrupt, power-mongering and power-abusing bastards, and (presumably) he blows buildings up when there is no one in them. So unless you're going to put everything in pure black-and-white terms, V has done comparatively little killing compared with the government and corruption he is trying to overthrow. In fact, V could be viewed as the chickens coming home to roost, or as Sutler and Creedy reaping what they themselves have sown.
Now... what's profoundly disturbing about V torturing Evey "for her own good" and so that she can live without fear is that (1) he is totally convinced that it is the only way to do that for her ("I wish there were another way, but there wasn't"), (2) he does it because he loves her and wants her to be free, unshackled, to actually have no fear of anything that her government or society can do to her, and (3) he does it knowing that by doing so, he may be setting Evey free, but he has made it impossible for her to stay with him.
I liken it to a line from Fight Club: "It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything." As V takes everything slowly away from Evey during her captivity and torture, he is freeing her (if you can stretch your mind to see it that way). I'm NOT saying it's right or good; but I can see his twisted logic, in the same way I could see it in Fight Club. Evey, obviously, does not see the logic, although she comes to appreciate the fact that it has irrevocably changed her. And I can see her perspective too.
As to your other point (2):
The British government constantly refers to V as a terrorist. And the audience, of course, is meant to recognize the stigma of the loaded title and the government's attempt to discredit him. Good. I like it. But then, V protests a corrupt government by blowing up buildings. ... Now, if the movie was asking its audience to try to sympathize with the 9/11 attackers, I would say it was a gutsy, radical, probably premature move for most people, but I don't think that's the case. So I just don't know what to make of it.
In actuality, the Wachowski brothers wrote this movie before they did any of the Matrix movies, so I don't think they are specifically referencing 9/11. The original graphic novel was written during Margaret Thatcher's ultra-conservative reign in Britain in the 80s. So I don't think the original authors or the Wachowski brothers or the director were specifically trying to tie V for Vendetta to the events of 9/11.
However, I didn't know all that the first time I saw V for Vendetta; I found all that out later. I wasn't clued in to the graphic novel, had never read it; didn't know the genesis of the V for Vendetta screenplay; didn't even know the Wachowski brothers are from the same place I am: Chicago. I found all that out later.
I can see how you connected it up with 9/11. I didn't quite connect it with the 9/11 specifically, but I did see the portrayal of Chancellor Sutler's fascistic, opressive government as having certain things in common with our current government in the US -- the double speak, the way they spin things, the way they refuse to allow any American news outlets broadcast video or even photo coverage of American soldiers' funerals (but our Spanish-speaking fellow citizens were able to watch them on Spanish-language news -- until the US government tried to pressure Telemundo and other stations to stop doing so).
Then later, I got more of a SDS/Weatherman/Black Panthers feel about V than a feeling the filmmakers were trying to sympathize with the terrorists who blew up the WTC.
On the other hand, V makes a point of saying violence can be used for good. And while I think that point can be debated, I think one of the aims of the film was to make people think about whether or not that is true. If you use a gun to shoot someone you dislike, that's bad. If you use a gun to hold up a convenience store because you're broke and your kids are starving because you've lost your job, you don't qualify for unemployment, and you have no way to feed or clothe them or get medicine needed right now, that's more understandable. The wholesale slaughtering of people done by the government V is bent on overthrowing (as portrayed when they are testing the virus on prisoners and dumping their bodies in mass graves) is much closer to the genocidal end of the spectrum than what V does; the sheer numbers are shown in frightening visual echoes of the actual films of Nazi concentration camp victims.
Eddie Izzard has a riff about governments killing their own people in his Dress To Kill special, and how Western powers are sort of "fine with that." He says, "And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. “Ah, help yourself,” you know? “We've been trying to kill you for ages!” So kill your own people, right on there. Seems to be… Hitler killed people next door... “Oh… stupid man!” After a couple of years, we won't stand for that, will we?"
(I'm indebted to http://www.auntiemomo.com/cakeordeath/d2ktranscription.html for that quote; I used to have a transcript of the subtitles on my hard drive, that I ripped myself, but I couldn't find it...)
But then, black-or-whiteness is part of the problem -- with our government and many others before it. V for Vendetta takes what we've been told is black and white, and shows us all the shades of gray that are really there between the two extreme positions. History has shown us that people can be both freedom fighters and terrorists. And V for Vendetta shows us that what determines much of our unthinking black/white, good/bad judgements of people is greatly determined by what our government and it's propaganda machine tells us is black and white, "right" and "wrong."
I remember seeing a segment on FSTV (Free Speech TV, when I still had satellite TV) about the WTO protests in Seattle (at which perfectly nonviolent protestors, like my younger sister, were tear-gassed for exercising their civil right to assemble). They were doing a "man in the street" interview with a woman. And the interviewer said to her, "So what do you think about the people who smashed in the windows of the Gap and Starbucks?" And her reply was words to the effect of "I think they're violent animals, and they should be stopped." And the interviewer said, "Why?" and she said, "Because they destroyed a lot of property, they broke and destroyed things." And then the interviewer said, "So you think they're criminals because they destroyed a bunch of stuff?" And she said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "So then what do you think about the Boston Tea Party?" And she beamed and said, "Oh, I think it was wonderful!"
The point being that the Boston Tea Party was just as much about protest and the subsequent destruction of stuff, of corporate property, as the black-masked anarchist kids' destruction of the Gap and Starbuck's in Seattle during the WTO protest. But we've been told again and again that the guys who threw all that tea in the Boston harbor were patriots because they got us on the road to nationhood as the USA. And we've been told again and again that the black-masked young people smashing insured corporations' store windows (which were closed anyway) were home-grown terrorists. So we as a nation believe, as that woman believed, what we're told to believe; we think what we're told to think.
This is why V points out that if people are unhappy with the way things are and they are seeking who to blame, they might as well look in a mirror, because it can't happen without your unthinking consent. And this is also the movie shows the BTN executive's assistant saying to him, "You think people will buy it?" (the fake story about the destruction of the old Bailey), and him replying, "Why not? We're the BTN. Our job is to report the news, not fabricate it. That's the government's job."
The lady being interviewed about the Seattle WTO Gap window breaking vs. Boston Tea Party didn't get it. Many people, I suppose, wouldn't.
And I guess that's one of the reasons I finally decided that I loved V for Vendetta: because the movie draws those kinds of parallels. It asks, well, how do They (a corrupt, fascistic, oppressive and Orwellian government) like a taste of their own medicine? It asks: don't They deserve a taste of their own medicine?
It also asks, if you give them a taste of their own medicine, do you become like them? I think it also asks if violence begets violence.
I think, in the end, V realizes that in giving them what they deserve, giving them back a taste of their own medicine, he has unfortunately become like them. And in meeting Evey, and falling in love with her, he had a chance to rediscover something in himself he thought was dead. And that in doing what he did to Evey -- the fake capture and torture -- he killed his own last chance to "find (his) own tree." As he says to her in the underground station, "I have no tree waiting for me. All I want, all I deserve [my emphasis], is at the end of that tunnel." (Where he'll meet his "maker", the vicious Creedy, and "repay him in kind for all that he's done.")
On V's deathbed, he admits that falling in love with Evey was something he'd no longer thought possible for himself. But it is in falling in love -- not in exacting revenge -- that V finds his humanity again. By then, of course, it's too late for him, and he's already set his vengeance in motion. And it's up to Evey, then, to finish what V started. She has the power to stop it and let things continue as they have, or to finish what V started.
And she chooses to complete V's vengeance.
I think the reason she does is because she realizes that, whatever her personal feelings about V, his actions are larger than him and her. Evey realizes -- and says -- "he [V] was right." Evey always knew how fucked up everything was in her country: she personally experienced it through tragic loss after loss (her brother, then her father and mother, then herself in the youth re-education camp she gets thrown in), and all at the hands of her government's law enforcement.
So even if you leave V out of the equation altogether, even if you change the story so that Evey never met V, it would still be true that Sutler's government and his Norsefire party are fascist oppressors who've committed horrible atrocities and must be stopped. And while it's true that two wrongs don't make a right, it is also true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that V for Vendetta illustrates both of those aphorisms... beautifully.
To me, V for Vendetta is an impressive accomplishment on a number of levels. I've seen much more seditious films, but I've never seen them open so wide and play so long in so many theaters. It's probably the single most subversive film I've seen open mainstream since Fight Club, which was badly (and misleadingly) marketed and, if I recall right, didn't last too long in theaters.
But aside from all the political and philosophical aspects of V for Vendetta, there were two things about it that grabbed me right off: (1) it was visually stunning, just elegant and eye-popping; and (2) it was almost operatic in terms of the plot, characterization, and flow of the story. It's even sort of delivered in three "acts:" Act I would be everything up until Evey is captured escaping from Gordon's house; Act II would be everything from Evey's capture to her opening her arms to the dark rainy sky after she finds that last inch of herself; and Act III would begin with Evey leaving V and continue to the end of the film when he goes off to meet his maker and she completes his vengeance.
And although V for Vendetta is not a musical, the deployment of the music, the coupling of it with the visuals, and the types of music chosen (from Tchiakovsky to Beethoven to the Stones and that mashup at the end with everything from Bollywood samples to samples of Malcolm X), works beautifully. I'm a former film student, and I also love opera. So V for Vendetta, for me, was like a film opera. Political intrigue, wounded characters, machinations on both sides, a dark "hero" seeking justice, some bad guys who aren't totally, a tragic love story... it's totally operatic.
(After I found out the Wachowski brothers were from Chicago, I wondered if they had attended the yearly 3rd of July classical concerts that the Grant Park Orchestra would play, before Taste of Chicago ruined them, which usually included Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and real cannons and fireworks fired off at exactly the right moments that Tchaikovsky wrote into the piece. They're about my age; they very well might have... although the use of the music is portrayed in the graphic novel, it's slightly different than it turns out in the film.)
In fact, when I first saw V for Vendetta (and knew nothing about when the Wachowski brothers wrote it, or when the graphic novel was written), it made me think of what Verdi went through in writing Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) -- beset by censors of the Italian government, he was forced to change the story's setting in order to get it produced in Italy. I thought that was what had happened with V for Vendetta -- that it had originally been set in America, but that bean-counters forced them to move the setting to England to make it less upsetting to Americans. I was wrong, but the aspects of the film that make it operatic still come through!
Well, okay, instead of my 237 cents worth, this was more like 2,370 cents!
But I haven't really written about V for Vendetta before now... so it all just came out at once.
Oh, and: Natalie Portman's English accent is way better than Winona Ryder's was in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. And she's turned out to be quite a talented young actress.
As for Hugo Weaving, he did a truly amazing job of indicating V's state of mind and emotions despite the mask, using subtle body language, neck and head moves, and gestures... as well as tantalizing with his voice. Through my entire first viewing of V for Vendetta, I was being driven nuts by his voice! I kept thinking, "I know this voice, I've heard this guy before... why can't I place him?" (of course, it was because I couldn't see his face!). Then I realized it was Elrond... and Agent Smith! I guess I knew he had a good voice before, but I hadn't realized how compelling it was until everything else was covered up and there was only that voice.
And Stephen Rea. I've loved him ever since The Crying Game, and those sad brown eyes are used to such great effect. V for Vendetta has some really great ensemble casting, that's for sure.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:06 pm (UTC)thank you
Date: 2006-06-13 03:25 am (UTC)I strolled over to your LJ briefly, but, alas, I'm in research paper hell right now for a class. I hope to get back there & read your & others' V4Vfic "real soon now..." -- actually in a couple days, after the 14th I am FREE of this class...
So terribly tempting to read V4Vfic, but I can't, or I'll never finish this damn paper. Sigh.