V for Vacuous

“V for Vendetta” is the latest chapter in Hollywood’s newfound effort to be taken seriously. The past year has seen several films that try to speak not to the audience’s base instincts but rather to their intellects.

However, Hollywood, for all its professed liberalism, does not change easily, and the quintessential icon of brainless entertainment has found the transformation into a sober critic a rather difficult one.

The failure of “V for Vendetta” as political commentary, however, does not come from artlessness—there are moments of true beauty and transcendence in the movie. Rather, “V for Vendetta” is destroyed by sheer pettiness.

Need a reason for the world’s collapse into anarchy, a basic premise of the movie’s storyline? Easy, blame it on the Iraq war (“America’s war grew worse and worse” the script ominously tells us). Need a ready-made authoritarian figure? Make him white, conservative, and religious, and make his party’s symbol the Christian cross. Need targets of discrimination? Easy, make them racial minorities and homosexuals. Need a criminal conspiracy? Easy, use big business.

It is only pettiness that can explain why, in a world under serious and unremitting threat from Islamic extremists, it is Christianity that is depicted as intolerant, spiteful, authoritarian, and power hungry. It is only pettiness that can explain why, in a world where Christians are routinely tortured, murdered, or forcibly converted for possession of the Bible, that the Koran is banned and proscribed.

While it is not overly surprising that a movie based on a book—a “graphic novel” to be precise—that damned Thatcherism as racist, authoritarian, and even fascist, is often juvenile, my disappointment stems form the fact that the movie could have been great.

The parts of the movie that dealt with the stifling woodenness of totalitarian vocabulary, the weariness bred by constant exposure to lies, and the indestructibility of human dignity were extremely well done, but were in many ways superceded by the childish desire to score cheap political points against Bush.

I take solace in the fact that the flaws of “V for Vendetta” are a sign of England’s and America’s historical privilege, and our distant removal from any lived totalitarian experience. Images of real totalitarian systems—people forced to eat their own feces, people thrown into blast-furnaces, people eaten alive by rats—these are, of course, not acceptable to our pampered senses: they would make most of us sick to our stomachs.

Accustomed to rational governance, we cannot imagine what an irrational system would look and sound like. The dictatorship in “V for Vendetta,” for all its evil, attacks entirely predictable targets in entirely predictable ways. What we do not see is random and senseless terror directed at shifting categories such as “anti-Aryan,” “kulak,” or “counter-revolutionary” elements. Never do we see the government in “V for Vendetaa” kill people merely to show it can, merely to spread fear: the glue which holds a dictatorship in place.

Even the number of people that the government oppresses during the movie are, in a certain historical sense, quaint. The high chancellor’s government killed almost one hundred thousand people? Amateurs! Even the half-baked Khmer Rouge killed over two million, while the Soviets would have considered a hundred thousand dead a mere warm-up.

That we can not imagine the true scale of evil capable of being wrought by mankind is telling, far more telling than anything on display in “V for Vendetta.”



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.