V for Vendetta (and Chiwetel Ejiofor)
Let me start this by saying I was predisposed to like this movie because it had a trailer for Inside Man which meant I got about three and a half seconds of footage of Chiwetel Ejiofor, on whom I have developed a HUGE and largely embarassing crush.
Seriously, this crush is, like, the most teenage-girly-crush I've ever had on anyone. One day I was watching Serenity (not for the first time or anything) and "OH MY GOD CHIWETEL EJIOFOR IS THE MOST GORGEOUS MAN WHO'S EVER BEEN SEEN ON MY TELEVISION SCREEN!" just hit me upside the head.
Were I *actually* a teenage girl, and not, you know, co-habiting with my boyfriend who does *not* have a crush on Chiwetel Ejiofor (he's more of an Admiral Ackbar kinda guy), I would plaster my room with pictures of him. Still, for the three or so people who will actually read this entry, behold:
http://www.whedonsworld.com/files/pix/serenity/operative/theoperative03.jpg
I apologise, this is long, but this movie blew my mind that much.
I get the feeling that I'm going to see different things in this film that most people will. That's based on nothing but my *guess* on how the critics will perceive it; how the general public will perceive it.
What I think people are going to make of this movie is: It's a political allegory about how our times (or the eighties, when it was written) are full of controlling governments and this is bad and how we shouldn't give up our freedom of speech for safety.
This is true - it is. But that's not what makes this movie brilliant. Because I'm starting to think you can't make an allegorical film like the one I just described during times like these. You can't make an allegorical film about any polarising issue when that issue is polarising people. The people on the film's side of the issue are going to go, "Wow! That's so true to life!" (which won't change their views) and the people on the other side of the issue are going to say, "But this is an *allegory*, it's not *real*, it's an extreme view of safety before freedom, and it'll never actually *get* that far," (regardless of times that's happened in history, and again, their views will remain unchanged).
All films like this do is get both sides dug into their trenches.
There's this line, and on one side of it, you haven't proved that a political direction is "bad" and on the other side of it, you're resorting to cartoonish extremes to prove it's "bad", and can you ever walk that line?
This movie is about Evey Hammond, and, to a lesser extent, Valerie. In a way, it's also about "V", but I'll also get to how it's not about him at all.
What's genius about this film is the way it lets the totalitarian regime and the political posturing and grandstanding *be* the cartoonish, atmospheric backdrop to the film. It's two dimensional, and knows it. While it makes a point, and while it makes one I like and believe in (if you create a system where the government can screw you over, where it can choose to attack its own people with impunity, it's *dangerous* even if the current government doesn't intend to utilise that aspect of the situation) - it's too vulnerable to attack to be the point of the film. All you need to do is say, "Yeah, but do you really believe that our government would murder 80,000 citizens so John Hurt could be the Grand High Chancellor," and, you know, we're back to allegory land. Back to the trenches.
Back to how it's all about the individuals.
In a rather heavy-handed moment, V acknowledges his monstrosity, because he was created by monsters. But that's very true, and this film's ultimate strength. This film is about fear and its effects on the individual. It is about how a political system based on fear affects its citizens. The way the big picture affects the little person.
By making this about Evey Hammond, a girl trapped between a government she fears and a vigilante she fears, and her journey through this dark world of politics and propaganda and ideology, and the way those affect her, the film circumvents the problems it would have faced if it were simply trying to draw direct and generic political parallels.
It is also a fabulous look at terrorism as a vengeful response to a desperate situation, a look at assassination as a political tool, as a means for revolution. But even though the revolution is desperately needed, neither method is portrayed as heroic. V is not the hero, he is only another kind of villain. Evey, our true hero, deplores V's methods, is afraid of him and tries to thwart his murder of the bishop, before fleeing. In a political climate that loves to polarise issues, this is a nice touch - it is possible, like Evey, not to agree with either method, and to just be stuck, in the middle, afraid.
V for Vendetta, for Vengeance, for Vindictive, for Vicious, for Vigilante, his name is well-chosen. Like the character in his favourite movie, The Count of Monte Christo, he loves revenge more than the girl. He loves revenge more than his much vaunted desire for a better world. V does not really want a better world, he recognises this in his gift to Evey, the train of explosives. The decision to instigate revolution does not belong to him. It belongs to the girl who *lived* in the world and will have to continue living in it, not him - raised in shadows, belonging to the government (if anyone), not the populous. Ultimately, he can give up both the girl and the revolution, but not his vengeance on the Chancellor and Creedy. That is what he dies for to get his peace.
Unlike most movies, with Evey as our heroine and viewpoint, we are allowed to recognise the danger in this mindset, as is V himself. Unlike, say, Batman (though I love Batman) we see the dangers of a vigilante motivated by anger and pain. But we see this because of nuanced Evey. In a way, V is as two-dimensional as the political landscape.
I said that the film was not about him. I maintain that. In many ways, he is a cliche - the masked man with a tragic past - oh so much more tragic than yours, neener neener neener - who's all *stoic* and *dark* and *brooding*. We never find out, for instance, how he knows so much about the inner workings of the government, how he has so much money (8,000 of those masks sent out), how he taught himself his skills, how he got together the manpower he must have needed to clear the tracks of the underground - many things. He never ceases to be an enigma. He does not only hide behind his mask, he hides behind words and attitudes and the fact that he pretends to be an idea. He hides behind his ruined face. "I am no more the flesh beneath this mask than I am the muscles, or the bone under them." But he is all of these things, and denies them, as he denies the human parts of himself, because it's easier to be an idea. Ideas don't feel guilty and smash mirrors when they are hurting, selfishly.
So V is 2D, interesting because of what he represents, not so much as a character. This leads to one of my only gripes about the film. The *spectacular* scene where Evey realises the deception of her captivity, when they're on the roof, and V watches Evey reach the same moment he reached when he escaped the facility, burning, is slightly intrusive. It should be Evey's moment. I know the film makers wanted to say something about the connection between them. But I already got it. It's implicit. They were both lead there by Valerie's toilet paper biography. Cutting in the footage of V on fire with Evey in the rain was overkill and too much. It made me dislike V in that instant because I wasn't ready to finish being mad with him for torturing Evey. Because his overly enigmatic angst was intruding on the gorgous moment the audience was sharing with Evey. Who, I maintain, this film is all about.
After the travesty of Star Wars III, it's brilliant to see Natalie Portman getting the chance to act. I mean, really *act*. The scene where she realises what V's done is astounding. The part where she breaks down to the point where she can't breath and gets dizzy - sweet lord that was real. I've seen people reach that place, and I've been to that place; we all have. She almost took me there again. The place where no noise is coming out of your mouth, because no noise your body can make is adequate to the task of expressing your devastation.
The heartbreaking way she connects with Valerie - the way that *that* at least is real. This is the closest we will ever get to connecting with V on a human level, because this is the closest he ever got to connecting with anyone else. It's all we *need*, because that's horrific and beautiful at the same time. V is capable of inhuman things, and it is through these things that he can offer Evey his only gift - not a train of explosives, not really - but freedom from fear. The last inch of herself.
That quote kills me. "Our integrity sells for so little, but in the end, it's all we have. It is the last inch of us. And in that inch, we are free."
This is the core of the story, the *point*. It's not the Matrix-like revenge climax where V takes out Creedy. It's not even the way hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people turn up on the fifth of November to watch parliament burn. Because that story didn't really get enough development either. We see, slowly, a couple of families' and viewing groups' faith in their government falter, and from that we decide that people are willing to step up and get *shot*?! I *wish* that were true, that people believed in democracy and freedom of speech that strongly, but it would take a lot more development than that if it were the *point* of the film.
It's not.
Every single person who ordered the Guy Fawkes mask and put on the cape had a personal epiphany, a story that turned them into political creatures, into activists. Each one as important as Evey's and as Valerie's.
Because that's the real point of this film. Individual choice, individual responsibility. Because in the end it was a whole damn series of individual choices that allowed this two dimensional puppet government to rule in the first place.
It's like the reverse of what V says during his TV transmission. He says, the blame is everyone's because they stood by and did nothing. I think the point of the film is the importance of something, anything, to destroy that apathy, to push people towards their own personal epiphanies, to force them to a point where they can stand up, and be confident enough to make a decision about what to do with a train of explosives, and then live with it.
To say, "No thank you, I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds."
To say, "I love you," and mean it, to someone you've never met.
What gave V the right to push Evey to that point? Absolutely nothing and he knew it, and she did, and that's why she left, regardless of what he gave her. What gave him the right to murder those people and to push the citizens of Britain towards revolution? Nothing. He recognised a part of that at the end, when he put the responsibility onto Evey's shoulders. And maybe she had no right either. Until V came back, and died, I thought perhaps she wouldn't pull that lever. That she would stick to her belief that V was *wrong* (and he *was*) and terrorism was not an acceptable answer, and that passive protest of the millions outside would be enough. But then when he died, it seemed inevitable that the train would be his funeral pyre.
A good choice? I don't know. What's the message there? That there comes a point where you are willing to turn to violence to be heard. That this is not a pretty or even noble point, but that we all have one. How far is yours? What do you believe in? What would you die for?
At the end, Evey says that V was "all of us." No, V was an idea, a man who turned himself into an idea, and an idea cannot be human, and can afford to be absolute and unsympathetic. Evey is all of us. Every last one.
So yeah, this film makes all kinds of points about the dangers of governments, because they are dangerous, and it's too easy to give them too much power. But this film takes that as a given. It's already happened. What this film is about is personal responsibility, freedom from fear, the courage to choose, the need to share yourself with others lest you become another V.
This is a movie about the *effects* of totalitarian regime, and the *effects* of terrorism. About what it does to ordinary people regardless of who's *fault* it is that it's happened, regardless of which side is *right* or *wrong*. It's about how we're all right and we're all wrong, and it's all of our faults because we are all responsible for the world.
And yes, I'm an anarchist, thanks for asking. :)
One final question, sorta - I'm still wondering, on some level, why V tortured Evey. Was he trying to find out if she'd give away his identity? He could have simply kept her prisoner. Did he truly believe this was what she wanted? I think so. Like Valerie, he wanted to share his story with someone, but his story was experiential (is that even a word?) not linear from his childhood to now. Her torture was his toilet-paper autobiography.
Love,
Becka.
Seriously, this crush is, like, the most teenage-girly-crush I've ever had on anyone. One day I was watching Serenity (not for the first time or anything) and "OH MY GOD CHIWETEL EJIOFOR IS THE MOST GORGEOUS MAN WHO'S EVER BEEN SEEN ON MY TELEVISION SCREEN!" just hit me upside the head.
Were I *actually* a teenage girl, and not, you know, co-habiting with my boyfriend who does *not* have a crush on Chiwetel Ejiofor (he's more of an Admiral Ackbar kinda guy), I would plaster my room with pictures of him. Still, for the three or so people who will actually read this entry, behold:
http://www.whedonsworld.com/files/pix/serenity/operative/theoperative03.jpg
I apologise, this is long, but this movie blew my mind that much.
I get the feeling that I'm going to see different things in this film that most people will. That's based on nothing but my *guess* on how the critics will perceive it; how the general public will perceive it.
What I think people are going to make of this movie is: It's a political allegory about how our times (or the eighties, when it was written) are full of controlling governments and this is bad and how we shouldn't give up our freedom of speech for safety.
This is true - it is. But that's not what makes this movie brilliant. Because I'm starting to think you can't make an allegorical film like the one I just described during times like these. You can't make an allegorical film about any polarising issue when that issue is polarising people. The people on the film's side of the issue are going to go, "Wow! That's so true to life!" (which won't change their views) and the people on the other side of the issue are going to say, "But this is an *allegory*, it's not *real*, it's an extreme view of safety before freedom, and it'll never actually *get* that far," (regardless of times that's happened in history, and again, their views will remain unchanged).
All films like this do is get both sides dug into their trenches.
There's this line, and on one side of it, you haven't proved that a political direction is "bad" and on the other side of it, you're resorting to cartoonish extremes to prove it's "bad", and can you ever walk that line?
This movie is about Evey Hammond, and, to a lesser extent, Valerie. In a way, it's also about "V", but I'll also get to how it's not about him at all.
What's genius about this film is the way it lets the totalitarian regime and the political posturing and grandstanding *be* the cartoonish, atmospheric backdrop to the film. It's two dimensional, and knows it. While it makes a point, and while it makes one I like and believe in (if you create a system where the government can screw you over, where it can choose to attack its own people with impunity, it's *dangerous* even if the current government doesn't intend to utilise that aspect of the situation) - it's too vulnerable to attack to be the point of the film. All you need to do is say, "Yeah, but do you really believe that our government would murder 80,000 citizens so John Hurt could be the Grand High Chancellor," and, you know, we're back to allegory land. Back to the trenches.
Back to how it's all about the individuals.
In a rather heavy-handed moment, V acknowledges his monstrosity, because he was created by monsters. But that's very true, and this film's ultimate strength. This film is about fear and its effects on the individual. It is about how a political system based on fear affects its citizens. The way the big picture affects the little person.
By making this about Evey Hammond, a girl trapped between a government she fears and a vigilante she fears, and her journey through this dark world of politics and propaganda and ideology, and the way those affect her, the film circumvents the problems it would have faced if it were simply trying to draw direct and generic political parallels.
It is also a fabulous look at terrorism as a vengeful response to a desperate situation, a look at assassination as a political tool, as a means for revolution. But even though the revolution is desperately needed, neither method is portrayed as heroic. V is not the hero, he is only another kind of villain. Evey, our true hero, deplores V's methods, is afraid of him and tries to thwart his murder of the bishop, before fleeing. In a political climate that loves to polarise issues, this is a nice touch - it is possible, like Evey, not to agree with either method, and to just be stuck, in the middle, afraid.
V for Vendetta, for Vengeance, for Vindictive, for Vicious, for Vigilante, his name is well-chosen. Like the character in his favourite movie, The Count of Monte Christo, he loves revenge more than the girl. He loves revenge more than his much vaunted desire for a better world. V does not really want a better world, he recognises this in his gift to Evey, the train of explosives. The decision to instigate revolution does not belong to him. It belongs to the girl who *lived* in the world and will have to continue living in it, not him - raised in shadows, belonging to the government (if anyone), not the populous. Ultimately, he can give up both the girl and the revolution, but not his vengeance on the Chancellor and Creedy. That is what he dies for to get his peace.
Unlike most movies, with Evey as our heroine and viewpoint, we are allowed to recognise the danger in this mindset, as is V himself. Unlike, say, Batman (though I love Batman) we see the dangers of a vigilante motivated by anger and pain. But we see this because of nuanced Evey. In a way, V is as two-dimensional as the political landscape.
I said that the film was not about him. I maintain that. In many ways, he is a cliche - the masked man with a tragic past - oh so much more tragic than yours, neener neener neener - who's all *stoic* and *dark* and *brooding*. We never find out, for instance, how he knows so much about the inner workings of the government, how he has so much money (8,000 of those masks sent out), how he taught himself his skills, how he got together the manpower he must have needed to clear the tracks of the underground - many things. He never ceases to be an enigma. He does not only hide behind his mask, he hides behind words and attitudes and the fact that he pretends to be an idea. He hides behind his ruined face. "I am no more the flesh beneath this mask than I am the muscles, or the bone under them." But he is all of these things, and denies them, as he denies the human parts of himself, because it's easier to be an idea. Ideas don't feel guilty and smash mirrors when they are hurting, selfishly.
So V is 2D, interesting because of what he represents, not so much as a character. This leads to one of my only gripes about the film. The *spectacular* scene where Evey realises the deception of her captivity, when they're on the roof, and V watches Evey reach the same moment he reached when he escaped the facility, burning, is slightly intrusive. It should be Evey's moment. I know the film makers wanted to say something about the connection between them. But I already got it. It's implicit. They were both lead there by Valerie's toilet paper biography. Cutting in the footage of V on fire with Evey in the rain was overkill and too much. It made me dislike V in that instant because I wasn't ready to finish being mad with him for torturing Evey. Because his overly enigmatic angst was intruding on the gorgous moment the audience was sharing with Evey. Who, I maintain, this film is all about.
After the travesty of Star Wars III, it's brilliant to see Natalie Portman getting the chance to act. I mean, really *act*. The scene where she realises what V's done is astounding. The part where she breaks down to the point where she can't breath and gets dizzy - sweet lord that was real. I've seen people reach that place, and I've been to that place; we all have. She almost took me there again. The place where no noise is coming out of your mouth, because no noise your body can make is adequate to the task of expressing your devastation.
The heartbreaking way she connects with Valerie - the way that *that* at least is real. This is the closest we will ever get to connecting with V on a human level, because this is the closest he ever got to connecting with anyone else. It's all we *need*, because that's horrific and beautiful at the same time. V is capable of inhuman things, and it is through these things that he can offer Evey his only gift - not a train of explosives, not really - but freedom from fear. The last inch of herself.
That quote kills me. "Our integrity sells for so little, but in the end, it's all we have. It is the last inch of us. And in that inch, we are free."
This is the core of the story, the *point*. It's not the Matrix-like revenge climax where V takes out Creedy. It's not even the way hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people turn up on the fifth of November to watch parliament burn. Because that story didn't really get enough development either. We see, slowly, a couple of families' and viewing groups' faith in their government falter, and from that we decide that people are willing to step up and get *shot*?! I *wish* that were true, that people believed in democracy and freedom of speech that strongly, but it would take a lot more development than that if it were the *point* of the film.
It's not.
Every single person who ordered the Guy Fawkes mask and put on the cape had a personal epiphany, a story that turned them into political creatures, into activists. Each one as important as Evey's and as Valerie's.
Because that's the real point of this film. Individual choice, individual responsibility. Because in the end it was a whole damn series of individual choices that allowed this two dimensional puppet government to rule in the first place.
It's like the reverse of what V says during his TV transmission. He says, the blame is everyone's because they stood by and did nothing. I think the point of the film is the importance of something, anything, to destroy that apathy, to push people towards their own personal epiphanies, to force them to a point where they can stand up, and be confident enough to make a decision about what to do with a train of explosives, and then live with it.
To say, "No thank you, I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds."
To say, "I love you," and mean it, to someone you've never met.
What gave V the right to push Evey to that point? Absolutely nothing and he knew it, and she did, and that's why she left, regardless of what he gave her. What gave him the right to murder those people and to push the citizens of Britain towards revolution? Nothing. He recognised a part of that at the end, when he put the responsibility onto Evey's shoulders. And maybe she had no right either. Until V came back, and died, I thought perhaps she wouldn't pull that lever. That she would stick to her belief that V was *wrong* (and he *was*) and terrorism was not an acceptable answer, and that passive protest of the millions outside would be enough. But then when he died, it seemed inevitable that the train would be his funeral pyre.
A good choice? I don't know. What's the message there? That there comes a point where you are willing to turn to violence to be heard. That this is not a pretty or even noble point, but that we all have one. How far is yours? What do you believe in? What would you die for?
At the end, Evey says that V was "all of us." No, V was an idea, a man who turned himself into an idea, and an idea cannot be human, and can afford to be absolute and unsympathetic. Evey is all of us. Every last one.
So yeah, this film makes all kinds of points about the dangers of governments, because they are dangerous, and it's too easy to give them too much power. But this film takes that as a given. It's already happened. What this film is about is personal responsibility, freedom from fear, the courage to choose, the need to share yourself with others lest you become another V.
This is a movie about the *effects* of totalitarian regime, and the *effects* of terrorism. About what it does to ordinary people regardless of who's *fault* it is that it's happened, regardless of which side is *right* or *wrong*. It's about how we're all right and we're all wrong, and it's all of our faults because we are all responsible for the world.
And yes, I'm an anarchist, thanks for asking. :)
One final question, sorta - I'm still wondering, on some level, why V tortured Evey. Was he trying to find out if she'd give away his identity? He could have simply kept her prisoner. Did he truly believe this was what she wanted? I think so. Like Valerie, he wanted to share his story with someone, but his story was experiential (is that even a word?) not linear from his childhood to now. Her torture was his toilet-paper autobiography.
Love,
Becka.