A Strip-Cartoon for Middlebrows

Rating: 4/10 (6 January 2009)

"V for Vendetta" is a dystopian satire along the lines of Orwell's "1984", set at some unspecified future date, probably during the 2020s or 2030s. The world has been ravaged by war, and America has collapsed into anarchy. Britain has become a neo-Nazi dictatorship ruled by the Norsefire party and its leader Adam Sutler (a name doubtless chosen because of its similarity to Adolf Hitler). Most of the population is cowed by the regime and its secret police; only one man, a mysterious revolutionary known only as "V", continues to resist the dictatorship. We never learn V's real name or see his face, as he wears a Guy Fawkes mask at all times. At the beginning of the film, one November 5th, he succeeds in blowing up the Old Bailey (London's central criminal court). He announces that on the same date the following year he intends to achieve the original Guy Fawkes' ambition of destroying the Houses of Parliament.
Many of those who have reviewed this film have done so on the basis of their own political views. Left-wingers have praised it, seeing Sutler as a thinly-disguised portrait of President Bush and his regime, which persecutes minorities such as Muslims and homosexuals, as based upon the American Religious Right. Right-wingers tend to dislike it for the same reasons. I too disliked the film, although for different reasons; I am no great admirer of George W Bush or of the Religious Right. Insofar as the politics of the film are "Democracy good, dictatorship bad", I found them unexceptionable.
My main reason has to do with the characterisation of V himself. The film was based upon a "graphic novel", a phrase which normally translates as "strip cartoon for highbrows, or at least middlebrows", and, although V does not actually wear his underpants outside his trousers, he suggests that even when strip cartoonists (sorry, graphic novelists) try to deal with serious political issues they still think in terms of Superman-style superheroes. V has powers verging on the supernatural, not only superhuman strength and agility but also an uncanny ability to evade his enemies. He is able to penetrate government security, not only to destroy landmark buildings but also to kill high-ranking members of the regime with impunity. This reliance on the standard clichés of the superhero genre undermined any serious political intent the film may have had. Orwell's hero, Winston Smith, also fought a one-man war against the system, but in his case in vain. Orwell wanted to make the point that dictatorships, once established, are not easily overthrown.
Some actors can succeed in the difficult task of wearing a mask throughout a film- Edward Norton did so in "Kingdom of Heaven" and John Hurt did so brilliantly in "The Elephant Man". Hugo Weaving, however, never succeeds in making V interesting; he remains little more than a mask reciting his political ideas in a bland, upper-class voice. Even his ideas are not very interesting; there is no serious attempt to explore the ethics of using violence against a repressive regime. The Norsefire regime is so vile that the use of virtually any means to overthrow it is justified. The link with Guy Fawkes is also unconvincing, as Fawkes was not a freedom-fighter but a religious zealot. At most he was one of those who wanted freedom for himself but not for others.
Some of the other characters were also unsatisfactory. Natalie Portman plays Evey, V's love-interest and sidekick, with just two expressions, wide-eyed incomprehension and wide-eyed terror. Her accent was far too posh for her supposedly working-class character; like a number of foreign actors called upon to play a British role she simply opts for an RP accent without considering whether it is appropriate to her character. Stephen Fry plays a closeted gay chat-show host arrested for keeping a copy of the Koran, not because he is a Muslim but because he "admires the beauty of its passages". Which passages would those be? The ones proclaiming the wrath of Allah against homosexuals? (The film's tolerance towards Muslims does not extend to all religions; a Catholic priest is portrayed as a paedophile).
Some have praised the film for showing how the "politics of fear" can be exploited, but this argument misses the point that dystopian satire is a paranoid literary genre which itself relies upon the politics of fear. The essential message of all such works is that there are people out there- fascists, communists, neo-cons, the Religious Right, whoever- who are to be feared. Orwell wrote "1984" in the late 1940s as a warning against the dangers of totalitarianism. The trouble with "V for Vendetta" is that it seems more like a warning against the dangers of the past than those of the present. Overt fascism has very little support in modern Britain; if the neo-fascist BNP has achieved limited electoral success it has only done so by watering down the fascist elements in its ideology and posing as the voice of the white working class abandoned by New Labour. The palaeo-fascist National Front, which has refused to water down its ideology, enjoys virtually no support.
This does not mean that a dictatorship is not possible in a future Britain, but such a regime would almost certainly not be a carbon-copy of the Third Reich. Nor would it resemble a Stalin-style Communist regime. It would probably be a bureaucratic, centrist dictatorship which would not come to power through a revolution but through a process of gradual erosion of our civil liberties. It might even permit some sort of elections, although it would ensure that the tolerated parties did not offer any real choice to the voters. It would take away our freedom in the name of some impeccably worthy ideal. And it would probably justify its actions by claiming to protect us against horrid neo-Nazis like the ones we see in this film. 4/10