V is for Vendetta

V is for Vendetta

This is one of those movies that I briefly considered going to see when it came out, since I am a big fan of dystopian fiction, and it's nice to see totalitarian thugs lose. Part of what put me off was that some of the reviews tried very hard to make it sound as though it was about the evil that George Bush (the man with horns on his head) causes.

My guess is that the original "graphic novel" (as comic books with literary pretensions are now styled) was probably indeed ferociously hostile to American values--and that these were toned down substantially for the movie. If so, it could be one of those examples of a movie being better than the novel.

The essential problem of totalitarianism is about the very human desire for power and control. It doesn't matter if the justification is socialism (as in 1984), or religious and moral conformity (as in this film), or capitalism (which doesn't seem to yet have a dystopian novel of any note--for good reason).

Power attracts evil people, and it doesn't matter what the underlying justification is--the power to control and to hurt others is the real reason. Some ideologies are better suited to the will to power than others. Anyone with the desire to control others who hitched his star to libertarianism would qualify as too stupid to be dangerous! Socialism represents the obvious danger, as 1984 points out.

The justification of control by obscene wealth--plutocracy--is a bit less direct, but there's no question that if you are rich enough, you can control and destroy people. Hollywood is perhaps the best example of how obscene wealth does this. There's a reason that the casting couch and rape has long been a problem of the entertainment industry (for example, this charming example in Doe v. Capital Cities, 50 Cal.App.4th 1038, 58 Cal.Rptr.2d 122 (1996):

An aspiring actor is first drugged and then gang-raped by a casting director and four other men one Sunday at the casting director's home. Can the actor successfully allege causes of action for sexual harassment and negligent hiring against the casting director's employers? The trial court ruled against the actor, sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend. On this appeal, we analyze the allegations in the actor's second amended complaint in light of pertinent statutory and decisional law and conclude that he has adequately pled a cause of action for sexual harassment but that the allegations for negligent hiring are insufficient as a matter of law.

Or this suit:

Dede Harris, one of the most famous producers in New York, has been landed with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit after half the cast of her latest play walked out.

Harris, the award-winning producer of such previous hits as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Hairspray, has been sued for $5m by the partners of her venture Dog Sees God, a satire on the Charlie Brown comic strip Peanuts. Legal papers filed with a Manhattan court claim her conduct has resulted in cast members leaving the show.

The lawsuit claims Harris is 'sexually obsessive and compulsive and is unable to refrain from sexually harassing cast members of productions with which she is affiliated'. It alleges that Harris asked one female cast member to 'feel her up', groped another's breast in a bar and made sexual advances on several other men and women. It describes a game of 'truth of dare' played with the cast in which Harris asked some of the male actors to touch her.

The scandal over Harris's alleged behaviour certainly marks a new shift in a profession notorious for the the sexual abuse of young actresses - usually it is ageing male directors who are accused of promising parts in return for sexual favours to young starlets.

Could the men in the Capital Cities suit not have found a young man willing to have sex with them? Of course. Can casting directors find pretty young women for sex, without having to mix it up with business? Of course. But in both cases, the objective is power--to use wealth and influence to control actors and actresses, and degrade them. It's more subtle than monsters like Nicu Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein's boys, but it is still fundamentally about the desire to hurt people.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that the bad guy (played by John Hurt, who played the good guy in 1984's 1984) is ostensibly doing horrible things because he is some sort of devout Anglican (which seems almost oxymoronic), and that the victims seem to be disproportionately well-scrubbed and emotionally stable homosexuals, I still found it a powerful film. (In the next ten years, I can guarantee you that more homosexuals will be executed, tortured, and degraded by Islamic governments than governments in Christian nations will do in the next ten years--or have done in the last one hundred years.)

What I find rather bizarre is that the reviews of the movie that I read when it came out claimed that the graphic novel upon which it was based is apparently motivated by the Thatcher government, and in the movie, the bad guy is described as leading the Conservative Party--even though one brief clip shows that the winners of the election are actually a fascist party called Norsefire.

I confess to being confused why reviews implied that this was an attack on the Thatcher government. If I had to pick words to describe Thatcher's government, "religious" is not one of those words. And while Conservatives generally were not supportive of repealing the law against homosexuality, "Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality and voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion...." In reading the Wikipedia description of the novel, it appears that it was not primarily an attack on Thatcher at all, but is set in a post-nuclear Britain in which Conservatives lose the 1982 elections, and the Michael Foot-led Labour Party gives up nuclear weapons--with predictable results, leading to a post-war fascist government.

Anyway, it's a bit bloody (the hero uses edged weapons, throughout--this is Britain), but quite interesting.

UPDATE: A reader tells me:

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I remember an interview (or maybe just something that mentioned an interview) about the original book in which Moore said he set the story in a totalitarian version of a Thatcher government basically because there was a conservative government in power at the time. He said had there been a Labour government when he wrote it, the book would have reflected that--basically demonstrating the universality (not quite the word I'm looking for) of the totalitarian impulse that you mention in your post.

Considering when it came out, I'm not surprised that the film makers might have missed that universality.