V for Vanity, for Veracity, for Vicious, for Void, for Vulgar

Rating: 5/10 (10 November 2006)

With V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers illustrate the presumptuous vanity, the lack of veracity, vicious, void-ly vague and vulgar ignorance that pop culture cultivates about the "system".
In one of the oldest James Bond films, at the end of the 70's, there is a delicious scene for the south American audience (there is resentment in this because i'm brazillian): 007 entered with his motor boat an Amazon river and, out of the blue, came out by the Iguaçu falls, at the border with Argentina. Except for the fun, it is like that as well that works out the reasoning of V for Vendetta - the starting point has no connections with the finishing line, and the path covered from one to the other is a mystery. Example: the masked V (Hugo Weaving), in solitary and secret fight against the totalitarian regime that dominates 2020's England, teach his pupil Evey (Natalie Portman) that men don't need buildings, but ideas. Where the hack, concludes him in a imaginary jump even more acrobatic then James Bond's boat, that blowing up the Parliament to smithereens will certainly make his ideas reach the mind of his fellow contemporaries? It is not even worth spending time and space arguing about a film with no manners where the hero is a terrorist carrying explosives. What calls attention in V for Vendetta are its stubborn ignorance and non-reflected affiliation to the thought of that the "system", whichever is, is corrupt and harmful.
Even more curious then V's logic, for example, is the person he imitates in clothes and mask: Guy Fawkes, a catholic that, in 1605, planned to decimate the protestant aristocracy by blowing up the Chamber of the Lords. Fawkes was discovered at the basement of the Parliament with 36 powder barrels and was hanged for it, providing to the English a joke similar to the threshing of Judas Iscariotes. Every 5th of November, date called Powder Conspiracy, Fawkes dolls are hanged and burned and fireworks pop up all over England. What, in 2006 or 2020, that somebody thinks Fawkes as an inspiring figure is intriguing. Four hundred years ago, the Parliament building was a symbol of absolutism. Today, in contrary, it represents another kind of "system", - the constitutionalism, and in one of the most successful versions. It is hard too to imagine that, in 2400, similarly 400 years from now, Americans will have fun as well threshing figures of Osama bin Laden. If Fawkes fits for the joke is because he didn't have the competence of his Saudi counterpart to commit mass murder. But well he tried. Great antidote his example could be, so, against the regime of permanent crisis instituted by the dictator and "big brother" Adam Sutler (a choice that the producers must have found the epitome of irony, interpreted by John Hurt, exactly the same protagonist and victim of the Big Brother in 1984).
The brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, of Matrix, wrote and produced V for Vendetta (the direction was given to a subordinate of them, a certain James McTeigue), and answer for the most of the nonsense seen on screen. The idea didn't come from them though, but from the English graphic novel artist Alan Moore, an idol of the genre (that, by the way, demanded to not have any mention of his name on the credits of the film). Moore and illustrator David Lloyd started to publish the V for Vendetta series at the first mandate of Margaret Thatcher and finished at the third and last therm of the prime-minister. The V for Vendetta comics overflows the violence and violation feeling that a good amount of the British people had while crossing the thatcherist deconstruction - and breaths as well a little bit from the obscure. Certainly nobody would call Thatcher a sweet, but what she did wasn't concentrate the power of the State, but dried it, and stimulated the English (even with her peculiar cruelty) to take care of their own lives. The more the citizen depends financially on the State or from the decision-making point of view, the more s/he will be subject to kiss the hand that feeds it. Economical liberty is, thus, a requirement for other kind and more valued freedoms, such as political, social and of customs. The trick is, until today, the only environment that it flourished was the capitalist. And, even due to a culture matter and decades of marxism fantasy, is more common to see in capitalism a "system" destined to create and spread injustice then of a regulated system, in manners some time spontaneous, by mutual advantages and dependency. The pop culture - and V for Vendetta is a legitimate unit of it - prefers to assume that the system is all bad; if interested in a debate, it will maybe come to the uncomfortable verification that it doesn't have any alternatives to consider (bomb the Parliament or assassinate prime-ministers are not alternatives).
Happilly, not all States are like so impetuous to discussion, and some of them, even the English and the Scandinavian, developed efficient instruments to minimize the injustices that, yes, are of capitalist nature. And happily as well that not all film makers that approach this subject live so satisfied in their own ignorance like the Wachowski brothers. Removing some simplifications, films like Wall Street, The Constant Gardener, Syrianna, The Informer or even Robocop offers sagacious and pertinent opinions about the world they came from. One thing, however, they have in common with V for Vendetta: all of them, the good and the bad ones, were made the way the producers wanted them to be made, without the interference of States or governments. It is to try to repeat the same feat in Cuba or China to understand, at first hand, what really is to live under a totalitarian regime.
Just my two cents