V4V4ME

I don't recall the last time I was truly excited about seeing a film, but "V For Vendetta" has been on my mind since seeing the trailer a couple of months ago. Even not knowing a thing about the graphic novel from which the film was adapted, the imagery was eerie and visceral and all too real when one ponders Abu Grahib and the CIA's secret prisons dotting the globe.


Expect howls of outrage in the coming days. I'll be surprised if our Fascist brothers and sisters can restrain themselves from issuing fatwahs against theater operators showing the film. And, of course, there will be the usual tsk-tsk-tsk'ing from their "centrist" enablers.

James Wolcott writes:

V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed “controversial” (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth. Cultural conservatives will loathe it without seeing it (they love not having to leave their houses to lament the latest installment of civilization’s decline and fall) once they hear of and read about the movie’s disturbing political parallels (a fascistic TV host with a witty resemblance to Berlusconi, fertilizer explosives a la Timothy McVeigh; torture, renditions, and subway bombings; black hoods that will be forever associated with Abu Ghraib). Yet lots of cultural liberals with educated tastes will find it anxiety-producing and irresponsible too, not only because they’re more comfortable with humanistic stories and documentary techniques than with pop spectacle (as Kael discovered whenever she praised upstart movies like DePalma’s Carrie or The Warriors and received letters from profs and Ph.D couples complaining about her soiling the New Yorker’s space on trash), but because V for Vendetta doesn’t just depict a 1984’s dystopia--it advocates radical remedy, and illustrates what it advocates with rhapsodic, operatic, orgasmic flourish. It follows the course of its own logic to its Kubrickian conclusion, but this isn’t a clinical exercise, like Kubrick at his most voyeuristically detached. This movie is fully engaged."

As humans, our very consciousness is shaped by myth. This movie will make a lot of people seriously question, at long last, the nature of resistance and moral sanction in a way no documentary or other medium can. Candid speech is the number one threat to our post-Constitutional authoritarian society, and, as such, a lot of innocent people clinging to a non-existent First Amendment will be surprised when the Homeland Security Goon Squad shows up on the porch to administer a loyalty test because of some overheard conversation or unAmerican internet post.

In the meantime, check out this piece on actor Stephen Rea:

Stephen Rea – no stranger to the thorny world of politics, and terrorism, having been married to convicted IRA bomber Dolours Price (mother of his three children) – wasn’t one of those actors who ran away screaming from the big-budget adaptation of Vendetta. Did the politics of the story attract him, or does he view this as just, well, comic-book stuff? “Well, I don’t think it would be very interesting if it was just comic-book stuff,” he answers with a wry smile. “The politics of it are what gives it its dimension and momentum, and of course I was interested in the politics. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Why not, indeed.

When I've seen it, you'll be the first to know.