Shades of Gray at the Movies: V For Vendetta

So I went to the movies Tuesday night, initially intending to see Capote and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar winning performance and so forth, but I left the house too late and by the time I got to the theatre the only thing that hadn't started yet was V for Vendetta, which was okay, because I had been planning to see that anyhow at some point.

I have mixed feelings about it now, having seen it. The overriding impulse is to say that it was a decent comic-book movie on the surface-I like a good comic-book movie, immature though they are, and while I don't agree with some of the more rhapsodic raves I've seen on some of the blogs I read, I thought it was a competently executed bit of action popcorn.

At least, of course, on the upper levels of the film. Or the lower levels. I don't get exactly what this metaphorical stratification of levels is supposed to look like. But I do know, as does everyone who's seen the picture, that the Wachowski Bros. intended to write a dystopic film about the future specifically relevant to our time, and I have to say that I find myself uncomfortable with the implications of applying the conventions of a superhero movie to what's meant, I believe, as a cautionary tale about our current political disposition.

First, the obvious boilerplate that I hope everyone takes for granted: Neither we, up here in Canada, or our friends and neighbours in the States and Britain live in a fascist dictatorship. Second, terrorism in the current political situation, and for any situation forseeable for at least the time period envisioned by the movie (the fascist dictatorship is well established by 2020, when the movie is set) is reprehensible and evil.

All of that said, I'll admit that I could easily be convinced that in a situation where we actually did find ourselves existing in a totalitarian state, terrorist actions against the state similar to those portrayed in the movie would be a correct course of action. That's not the issue I take with the movie. First, I think we can all agree that the best think to do would be to, well, not vote in the proto-fascist dictatorship in the first place. To be fair, V himself indicts the citizens of Britain for the existence of said fascist dictatorship early in the flick, but the whole assignment of responsibility is, I think, undercut by the whole concept of the character of V to begin with.

My father once argued that he thought that superheroes were an essentially fascist archetype-the ubermenchen who fly in and save the rest of us, effete, decadent wretches that we are, from malevolent and overpoweringly evil villains who are irretrievably Other from us. The Wachowski brothers, of course, are old hands at messianic tales of humanity being redeemed by The One, but I have to say that it's a dramatic device that I grow increasingly suspicious of as I move further away from my adolescence.

Also, I find it a little weird to be watching a film about resistance to fascist oppression that is so clearly in love with violence in and of itself. The glorification of violence for its own sake is, of course, one of the defining features of fascism, and it rings weirdly false to be asked to cheer on a protagonist (I'll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt when they say that V is not a "hero") for his feats of violent derring-do.

What irritates me about this is that there was a better way to tell the story. Stephen Rea plays an inspector in the regime's ordinary police (the guys who catch thieves and murderers, rather than the dudes in black leather rounding up dissidents) who gradually uncovers the truth behind the regime's rise to power as he investigates one of V's murders. This is not, of course, an original storyline-Martin Cruz Smith did it for the Soviets in Gorky Park and the other Renko books, while Robert Harris did it for a victorious Nazi regime in Fatherland, the book that tops my List Of Pulp Fiction I Must Read Sometime. But it's been done before, and well, because it's a fundamentally interesting question: In a criminal state, what's an honest cop to do? So I was annoyed that that particular plotline was in there as a subplot, because it was a constant reminder that there was a better, more humanistic way to treat the story, and that it had been passed over for knife-wielding superheroics.

Finally, I wasn't wild about the adulation for mercenary terrorist Guy Fawkes. The other guys in the Gunpowder Plot may have been admirable-it's hard to get behind Catholic Emancipation, after all-but Fawkes, at least as far as I can tell, was in it for the money and the explosions.

Anyway, for all of this, it's not a bad movie. It's well acted-Rea is excellent, Stephen Fry is always a treat, and Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman are both good-and I think its heart is in the right place. It's just that its head isn't.