V for Vendetta

[due spoiler alert...]


I had a different reaction to V than most of them I've heard since I was unfamiliar with the graphic novel going in--what I expected was a Wachowski brothers movie than made vague threatening gestures toward the Bush administration. Sounded like light empty fun, and that turned out to be what it was. I was frustrated by the end of the movie though, for all the promised illusion of freedom that turned out to be merely the illusion of fireworks. The plot had evidently been retouched greatly, and made little sense at points. The main character, V, is described as blind by a former doctor of his-"he had no eyes!"-and yet this same character is the martial artist who is also apparently an avid collector of oil paintings, chandelliers and books.

The action scenes were pretty neat, although there is not much new technology involved since what debuted in the Matrix. But I actually found the Matrix more inspiring. At least in the matrix there is a hope at the end, a rebuilding to be imagined because the characters were so much defined by how they were actively engaged in redefining their past present. But for V, the muse is stuck in midair like one of the characters...as knives are slowly hurled at him. Or maybe its just us at the end: stuck, unmoved. As the Hollywood Madam points out in her column: "the biggest failure lies in V's fear to really embrace the message of this story -- to rise up, to take arms. The problem, essentially, lies with Evey."* Evey, the female character played by Natalie Portman who acts as audience surrogate and frequent POV is meant to be the embodiment of action in the story. In her we see doubt, observation, and finally revolution taking place. The problem is, she doesn't rise up much. She pulls a lever in the end that will destroy what even she says are "a bunch of empty buildings."

The face of the terrorist is hidden by the Wachowski brothers, though it was laid bare in Alan Moore's graphic novel, in Evey (Eve(r)y?-as in "all of us"?). This is a major problem, because it is the crucial intelligence of the graphic novel and without it the entire tale of revolution is turned into McRevolution: harmless, uncritical, enjoyable. The crowds at the end of the story reiterate this point-like us, they are gazing up, watching the fireworks explode, having accomplished nothing themselves, and not being challenged by anything in the projected future. The sense of popular activism which the movie sets itself up at great lengths to deliver has died before it was born.

Incidentally the story is not a little a Christian analogue, with V at the end martyred in his own created doom, with Magdalyne-Evey witnessing his tomb, telling everyone he was really "all of us," and more importantly dying for the sin of our complacency. I like thinking of this Jesus figure, V, as a book nerd who listens to Antony and Johnsons, and John Hurt's performace seems fittingly satanic.

Here is the Hollywood Madam's worthwhile take on V:
http://www.bookslut.com/hollywood_madam/2006_04_008729.php