"Whoa."
First of all, cinematically: so fucking good. The cornball, Phantom-of-the-Opera-y masked hero, and the layers of his heroism and monstrosity; the softly pretty girl, transformed by inner flame into a creature without softness whose beauty is all in her strength, inner and outer*; the imagery of the roses, of the fireworks, of the dominoes, of the Guys, of the everything: just absolutely sandbaggingly stunning. Just beautiful, and spectacular, and wow.
Thematically: also really fucking good, but thematically I also felt like I'd, well, seen this movie before. Not that I mind seeing it again, because I loved it the first time (and the zillion times I've watched it since), but, well:
a) Normal Person goes about his/her business in a world that, while somewhat worryingly constrictive and bleak, is considered by the person to be the world in which he/she kinda has to live.
b) Normal Person is accosted and threatened by evil agents of the repressive regime of the world, and rescued by a scary, awesome, larger-than-life type person with only one name, obviously an alias, and a number of arcane skilz,
c) who apparently recognizes in Normal Person something awesome and more-than-normal,
d) and who then explains to Normal Person that the world in which he/she lives is a bad world, and an unnecessary world, and attempts to recruit Normal Person to fight back against it.
e) Normal Person is totally freaked out and resists One Name's version of events,
f) whereupon One Name puts Normal Person through an extremely physically and psychologically traumatic experience, involving total hair loss, terrible clothes, and near drowning, and designed to "free [his/her] mind" of its learned constraints,
g) which works, and the person is all transformed,
h) partly by the power of romantic luuuuuurve,
i) and takes up One Name's battle and finishes it,
j) after lots and lots of crazy fights involving astronomical odds and long swirling black coats concealing massive amounts of weapons and civilian casualties and slow-mo and arcs of bullets/blood/raindrops and such awesomely choreographed violence that it causes small wimpy girls otherwise inclined to hide inside their hoodies for the duration of any given fight scene in a movie to very nearly cheer.
Okay, so there's that. Vendetta, obviously, was less universally applicable and more... literal. I mean, it was pretty clearly meant to be read on the political level, whereas The Matrix could be read, as a philosophy, on any level you wanted to read it on. But the message is basically the same, including the tertiary message that the lives even of "innocent" bystanders who collude, knowingly or unknowingly, with the Big Bad are an unfortunate but necessary expenditure in such extreme times, as well as the entirely laudable primary message that Fight the Power, Man.
There's one big difference, though, and maybe that's why it's the heart of this movie for me. It consists in the execution of Step F. With Neo, though he didn't exactly know what he was getting into when he took the red pill, this trauma was arguably something he consented to since he was given the choice at all and at least knew that it was Morpheus he was going to have to trust. With Evie,** it was very definitely not. Morpheus apologized to Neo for not being able to explain to him what was going to happen beforehand, presumably because Neo would not have consented if he had known the full extent of what he was getting into beforehand. Likewise, Evie's consent to or comprehension of what was actually happening to her would have rendered the whole process pointless. V tortured her (in retrospect, I wonder if he actually did anything worse to her than dunk her in a bucket of water, or if that's all we saw because anything else would have made V seem too monstrous to us, and that's kind of pussyish either way actually), not, as it turns out, for information, but to get something from her-- her pure, unadulterated courage, her fearlessness, her visceral encounter with what really mattered to her. According to him, he could not have found any other way to achieve this end, and according to him, the end justifies the means-- in this case, torture of a helpless, unconsenting victim.
Throughout the movie, and especially at this point, I kept thinking about Hitherby Dragons, a self-described "webcomic without pictures" that I read kind of obsessively and often link to here. Especially this story. Also especially one of the major premises of the work, which is that in the Hitherby universe, when someone tortures a child, the child creates from him/herself a god, which can take any form, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, but which is supposed to be in some way an answer to the child's suffering, and which the torturer can then use for his own ends. In Hitherby, there are, in fact, institutions (temples, houses, corporations) whose business is to torture children and harness the power of their gods for the ends of the institutions. These tortured children are, inevitably, eventually destroyed by the continual torture and god-production, but Jane, the central protagonist and often-narrator of the story, was a tortured child herself and, by some transformative process initiated by a being named Martin who may or may not be one of Jane's gods himself, became herself-- a child whose stated goal is to "change the world." Before "the monster" caught and tortured her, Jane's name was Jenna; the monster changed her name to Jane, and she has kept the name now that she is free of him. And she says that the monster and his torture has made her what she is.
But.
"I can feel everything he did to me," she says. "It sits there in my core, and it does not go away. And it lets me be Jane."
The monster threads his hand out of Jane’s, and looks the hero up and down. "See?" he says. "She’s mine. You could try to fight me, but then I’d just take you too."
"Isn’t he a bit old for you?" Martin says.
"I’m not actually yours," Jane says.
Martin’s question annoys the monster, but Jane’s words hit him like a bolt of lightning.
"Pardon?" the monster manages.
"If you trip over a dog and break your leg," Jane explains, "the dog doesn’t own you."
"That’s you," Martin notes. "The dog, I mean."
What V does to Evie transforms her and creates her anew. His torture-- an evil, destructive act-- has good, creative consequences. And though Evie is good, and strong, and though his torture does not create this goodness or strength in her, it could be argued-- and I think it's a premise of the movie, so I won't actually bother to argue it-- that there was no other way to bring it to the fore than by torturing her.
Does the fact that these consequences were what he foresaw and intended make his act not evil or destructive? Does the end really justify the means, if the end is necessary and there are no other means possible-- because the data is the suffering, because only pain can catalyze this kind of good transformation? Evie wouldn't have thanked the evil agents for giving her her strength as a by-product of their torture, any more than Jane would admit that the monster had any hold over her just because he transformed her into what she most truly is now; but should Evie thank V for what he's done for her because what he meant to do was give her this strength, and what he did in fact do was give her that strength?
Because the transformation is good not just because strength is good in the abstract but because Evie has to be strong and fearless in this particular way to fight back against the particular evil that really does exist and do this kind of thing to people in her world. Could V justify himself by saying, "If I did not interfere, Evie would suffer exactly as I am going to make her suffer, except that her suffering would have no redemptive result; the evil of the act I am committing is cancelled out by the fact that it would occur anyway without my interference, so that I can claim the good results without claiming responsibility for creating the evil"?
I don't have any conclusions, just a whole lot of questions. But I really, really, really liked that movie, and I will think a lot more. And if anybody else has any opinions or perspective, I would value them.
*goes off to think some more and reread lots of old Hitherbies*
*Natalie Portman hasn't stunned me so since The Professional. That girl is grown up now, and she moves like lightning. That kind of transformation is the one thing I really value in and took away from the first two Terminator movies (I haven't seen the third): the visual transformation of Sarah Connor from the soft, pretty everygirl of the first movie to the hard-muscled live wire of the second: that's what she needed of herself, so that's what she became. That's a concept I find underrepresented in movies.
**I saw somebody spell it "Evey" in a review, and I don't know if that's correct, but it looks crazy to me so I'm spelling it my way.
Thematically: also really fucking good, but thematically I also felt like I'd, well, seen this movie before. Not that I mind seeing it again, because I loved it the first time (and the zillion times I've watched it since), but, well:
a) Normal Person goes about his/her business in a world that, while somewhat worryingly constrictive and bleak, is considered by the person to be the world in which he/she kinda has to live.
b) Normal Person is accosted and threatened by evil agents of the repressive regime of the world, and rescued by a scary, awesome, larger-than-life type person with only one name, obviously an alias, and a number of arcane skilz,
c) who apparently recognizes in Normal Person something awesome and more-than-normal,
d) and who then explains to Normal Person that the world in which he/she lives is a bad world, and an unnecessary world, and attempts to recruit Normal Person to fight back against it.
e) Normal Person is totally freaked out and resists One Name's version of events,
f) whereupon One Name puts Normal Person through an extremely physically and psychologically traumatic experience, involving total hair loss, terrible clothes, and near drowning, and designed to "free [his/her] mind" of its learned constraints,
g) which works, and the person is all transformed,
h) partly by the power of romantic luuuuuurve,
i) and takes up One Name's battle and finishes it,
j) after lots and lots of crazy fights involving astronomical odds and long swirling black coats concealing massive amounts of weapons and civilian casualties and slow-mo and arcs of bullets/blood/raindrops and such awesomely choreographed violence that it causes small wimpy girls otherwise inclined to hide inside their hoodies for the duration of any given fight scene in a movie to very nearly cheer.
Okay, so there's that. Vendetta, obviously, was less universally applicable and more... literal. I mean, it was pretty clearly meant to be read on the political level, whereas The Matrix could be read, as a philosophy, on any level you wanted to read it on. But the message is basically the same, including the tertiary message that the lives even of "innocent" bystanders who collude, knowingly or unknowingly, with the Big Bad are an unfortunate but necessary expenditure in such extreme times, as well as the entirely laudable primary message that Fight the Power, Man.
There's one big difference, though, and maybe that's why it's the heart of this movie for me. It consists in the execution of Step F. With Neo, though he didn't exactly know what he was getting into when he took the red pill, this trauma was arguably something he consented to since he was given the choice at all and at least knew that it was Morpheus he was going to have to trust. With Evie,** it was very definitely not. Morpheus apologized to Neo for not being able to explain to him what was going to happen beforehand, presumably because Neo would not have consented if he had known the full extent of what he was getting into beforehand. Likewise, Evie's consent to or comprehension of what was actually happening to her would have rendered the whole process pointless. V tortured her (in retrospect, I wonder if he actually did anything worse to her than dunk her in a bucket of water, or if that's all we saw because anything else would have made V seem too monstrous to us, and that's kind of pussyish either way actually), not, as it turns out, for information, but to get something from her-- her pure, unadulterated courage, her fearlessness, her visceral encounter with what really mattered to her. According to him, he could not have found any other way to achieve this end, and according to him, the end justifies the means-- in this case, torture of a helpless, unconsenting victim.
Throughout the movie, and especially at this point, I kept thinking about Hitherby Dragons, a self-described "webcomic without pictures" that I read kind of obsessively and often link to here. Especially this story. Also especially one of the major premises of the work, which is that in the Hitherby universe, when someone tortures a child, the child creates from him/herself a god, which can take any form, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, but which is supposed to be in some way an answer to the child's suffering, and which the torturer can then use for his own ends. In Hitherby, there are, in fact, institutions (temples, houses, corporations) whose business is to torture children and harness the power of their gods for the ends of the institutions. These tortured children are, inevitably, eventually destroyed by the continual torture and god-production, but Jane, the central protagonist and often-narrator of the story, was a tortured child herself and, by some transformative process initiated by a being named Martin who may or may not be one of Jane's gods himself, became herself-- a child whose stated goal is to "change the world." Before "the monster" caught and tortured her, Jane's name was Jenna; the monster changed her name to Jane, and she has kept the name now that she is free of him. And she says that the monster and his torture has made her what she is.
But.
"I can feel everything he did to me," she says. "It sits there in my core, and it does not go away. And it lets me be Jane."
The monster threads his hand out of Jane’s, and looks the hero up and down. "See?" he says. "She’s mine. You could try to fight me, but then I’d just take you too."
"Isn’t he a bit old for you?" Martin says.
"I’m not actually yours," Jane says.
Martin’s question annoys the monster, but Jane’s words hit him like a bolt of lightning.
"Pardon?" the monster manages.
"If you trip over a dog and break your leg," Jane explains, "the dog doesn’t own you."
"That’s you," Martin notes. "The dog, I mean."
What V does to Evie transforms her and creates her anew. His torture-- an evil, destructive act-- has good, creative consequences. And though Evie is good, and strong, and though his torture does not create this goodness or strength in her, it could be argued-- and I think it's a premise of the movie, so I won't actually bother to argue it-- that there was no other way to bring it to the fore than by torturing her.
Does the fact that these consequences were what he foresaw and intended make his act not evil or destructive? Does the end really justify the means, if the end is necessary and there are no other means possible-- because the data is the suffering, because only pain can catalyze this kind of good transformation? Evie wouldn't have thanked the evil agents for giving her her strength as a by-product of their torture, any more than Jane would admit that the monster had any hold over her just because he transformed her into what she most truly is now; but should Evie thank V for what he's done for her because what he meant to do was give her this strength, and what he did in fact do was give her that strength?
Because the transformation is good not just because strength is good in the abstract but because Evie has to be strong and fearless in this particular way to fight back against the particular evil that really does exist and do this kind of thing to people in her world. Could V justify himself by saying, "If I did not interfere, Evie would suffer exactly as I am going to make her suffer, except that her suffering would have no redemptive result; the evil of the act I am committing is cancelled out by the fact that it would occur anyway without my interference, so that I can claim the good results without claiming responsibility for creating the evil"?
I don't have any conclusions, just a whole lot of questions. But I really, really, really liked that movie, and I will think a lot more. And if anybody else has any opinions or perspective, I would value them.
*goes off to think some more and reread lots of old Hitherbies*
*Natalie Portman hasn't stunned me so since The Professional. That girl is grown up now, and she moves like lightning. That kind of transformation is the one thing I really value in and took away from the first two Terminator movies (I haven't seen the third): the visual transformation of Sarah Connor from the soft, pretty everygirl of the first movie to the hard-muscled live wire of the second: that's what she needed of herself, so that's what she became. That's a concept I find underrepresented in movies.
**I saw somebody spell it "Evey" in a review, and I don't know if that's correct, but it looks crazy to me so I'm spelling it my way.