I saw V for Vendetta this weekend with the wife and some friends. Everyone but me wasn't sure what to expect but on Friday I had checked out some reviews and synopsis of the movie and kind of knew to expect a cultural critique of current world transdoings.
Overall i thought the movie was really well done, very interesting and engaging. It was really hard to watch and figure out which "side" to root for. Basically V is a terrorist/hero/revolutionary. And there always seems to be a fine line between heroic revolutionary and fundamentalist wacko terrorist. The movie seems to want to dance on that fine line and make the viewer contemplate whether they see V as a revolutionary or a terrorist. I'd argue that the movie makes V a hero because he stands against the fascist regime and through his acts of terrorism awakens the britons spirit to stand up for what they believe in.
Its a hard movie to digest and i'm still working through its social critique. For the most part i disagree with alot of its critiques. It seems exagerated in most of its complaints. I mean standing up against a fascist regime is good. Likening our current government to a fascist regime however is a joke. So if you don't connect the movie to america i think it has a lot of good stuff, but when you start trying to draw those connections, which the wachowski brothers want you to do, I think the movie's critiques are so flawed and one sided that they lose all relevance.
I recommend the movie for people who want to be challenged on various ideas from terrorism to gay rights. Its a hard movie to watch at times, seeing parliament blow up was very frusterating as in a lot of ways its a symbol of freedom and representation and i felt blowing it up in reality doesn't convey the meaning it does in the movie. In the movie it is a symbol of destroying the oppressive government, however in our world, in reality its a symbol of what is good in Great Britain. I feel like if they had made a false headquarters of this oppressive regime that blowing up that would have made more sense and conveyed the message better. To me its like blowing up the Lincoln monument it makes no sense to blow something up that is a symbol of freedom.
Man i'll have the FBI and CIA all over me for this post. FYI I'm not a revolutionary or a crazy man. I like our government and will not do anything bad. I have a very nice tax return coming and i don't want to jepordize that. USA all the way.
In a lot of ways i see this movie like Million Dollar Baby. I went to it with my own opinions about the subject at hand... the movie challenged those opinions, I rethink my opinions, and in a way become more sure of those held opinions. Its a lot like resistence training, by challenging me i become all the more assured of what i believe.
Posted by holtonian at March 20, 2006 11:50 AM | TrackBackThere are a myriad of problems with this movie, but being that you're a fan of history, I'll share with you just one:
"...Guy Fawkes, who is at the emotional center of the movie as well as of the graphic novel, was no liberator but a Catholic dissident who, in 1605, wanted to destroy the Protestant aristocracy by blowing up the House of Lords and killing King James I. Captured beneath Parliament with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, Fawkes was tortured and hanged, and, ever since, on November 5th (the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot), he has been burned in effigy all over England in celebrations both merry and ironic. If Guy Fawkes has become a sympathetic figure, it’s his failure—his incompetence as a mass murderer—that has made him so."
from the The New Yorker here. The point is that The Wachowski's clearly have little to no understand of Guy Fawkes and his relationship to the contemporary British collective consciousness. The British celebrate Guy Fawkes Day not out of sympathy for revolution, but out of sympathy for a person so deranged he felt the need to destroy a symbol of the British politik, tradition, and freedom.
Perhaps the point of the Wachowski's was that V was subsersive and revolutionary himself in choosing Guy Fawkes as his costume, but then that would mean V was stupid, and altogether un-British. So I'm inclined to go with the former.
Which would fit, of course. Is there any Western culture less likely to degenerate into brutual racial and religious intolerance and fascism that England? Plausibility is a central tenant of all good dystopian fare: the idea that it is possible for it to "get that bad". At that point the audience finds its moral import: that we should be on the lookout for where and when we can fight the possible evil future.
Unfortunately the Wachowski's punt this, coupled with a non-existent understanding of history and the British psyche, along with style, coherence, any sort of real moral subversion and thought, bla bla bla...
Posted by: JosiahQ at March 20, 2006 12:56 PMI was wondering about fawkes... seemed sort of mis-used. But they've always sort of been happy at rewriting truth in the name of entertainment or at least construing truth.
I saw this movie as a more entertaining Farenheit 9/11. It seemed to have the same trumped up arguments but put them into a framework that at least was fictionally entertaining.