I'm writing this for me. So if you are even thinking about "Delete--It's been diaried" jammit up the ol' giggy. I just saw "V for Vendetta." I thought it was an enjoyable movie. Nothing that it alleges, foreshadows or implies is new, different or revealing to me, however, or to anyone else who frequents this site. Is it an important film? Yes. But not in the way one might think.
About two years ago, sitting on a flight next to a young lady who recruited academic talent for a major university, we talked politics. For someone who would presumably have been exposed to a good deal of current and controversial information, she was remarkably detached and unenlightened. I explained a few things there were going on, things that had happened in the recent past, and things that would likely happen in the near future. My predictions turned out to be fairly accurate, my hypotheses about past wrongs conducted in the name of the U.S. federal government right in tone if, at times, wrong in specific content. I also told the young woman that nothing would really change unless we had mobs pouring into the streets. We were all just too comfortable.
There was nothing subtle about "V for Vendetta." George Lucas got more "blowback" from his most recent "Star Wars" episode, which was a largely stereotypical treatment of the rise of totalitarianism out of fear, the people themselves cheering wildly as their freedoms are confiscated. It's a fairly common storyline, be it "1984," "Brave New World" or any of innumerable clones, some good, most bad. I also recall that a very weak sci-fi effort about dangerously screwy weather was actually protested, if half-heartedly, because of its "doomsday portent" and implicit endorsement of environmentalism. The more recent "Good Night and Good Luck" is just as applicable to today's scenarios as it was to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Again, however, there was really not much of a stir in response. Of course, in terms of protest reaction, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and its intense anti-war, anti-Bush laser-beam focus is the clear winner, but did it really change the world? Look around. You be the judge.
I'm not saying anything new here about any of these movies--I understand that. What I am saying, is that as much as it tries to be so, "V for Vendetta" is not enlightening, offensive, or controversial--and that's not the fault of the film. It's our own fault because it simply is not enough to shock us compared to daily reality.
Any number of analyses will tell us, conservatively, that our federal government has killed about 100,000 innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well over 2,300 U.S. service men and women are dead and another 17,000 maimed from a war that should never have been fought and that violates all tenets of law and international relations. Americans died in large numbers on 9/11 though our government had been warned adequately enough to have made at least an attempt to prevent the catastrophe, and if "Operation Able Danger" was allowed to proceed as a full, unfettered investigation, federal culpability might actually be established. The President is not a dictator--not yet anyway--but it's not because he has failed to sow the seeds. It's because he has no need to be one. We've allowed murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, and heinous of chemical weapons to be used in our names to protect "The American Way of Life." The First Amendment is almost meaningless because the channels through which its power is conducted have been co-opted by sycophants and enablers. Corporations have nearly free rein. The richest among us are somehow "unfairly burdened" and need tax relief. We saw an American city almost obliterated and its most helpless residents suffer extreme and avoidable neglect. The last bastions of objective public debate and determination, the courts, are on a ruinous path toward irrelevancy. The progress made by women and people of color stand at the very brink of annihilation. Our national economic policy and prospective are sheer lunacy. All of it is presided over by a Unitary Executive, people who embrace a Unitary and Vengeful God and an opposition party of supplicants so cowed by fear that few will even speak publicly against these outrages even when the best of cause exists.
And none of it might matter because we are experiencing planetary-scale climate changes that will alter everything modern humans thought, wished or believed about Life on Earth.
In truth, even I did not imagine our nation to be capable of what we have wrought upon ourselves and the world--not, that is, incapable of inflicting such pain, suffering, destruction, disenfranchisement, waste, neglect, dishonesty and base deceit, but incapable of allowing it to continue so easily. Amazingly, the brazen wrongs of our government go on despite the total incompetence of the power structure perpetrating them. If the neocons holding the reins, with the turbo-charged support of the religiously insane and the powerful finances of global corporations behind them were in any way competent, we would, indeed, have the totalitarianism found in the England of the future in "V for Vendetta" but they are not.
They are idiots. So, as a people, apparently are we.
The majority of the people of England who were visible in "V for Vendetta" did not appear to be ill-fed, ill-housed or afflicted. Neither are we.
I'm disappointed, mainly, that "V for Vendetta" felt it had to be so obvious, and that it has been so obviously ignored, but I'm not disappointed in the movie. It was a good story and well-told. Long before movies there were other stories and storytellers. One was a fellow named Shakespeare who placed these words in the mouth of one of his most famous characters: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in our selves."
And so it has continued.