March 15, 2006

Beware today.

Remember, remember the fifth of November.

I'm not feeling the urge to fight the lost souls taking swipes at the Wachowskis' latest, V for Vendetta. But before it opens in regular and IMAX screens, and before I head off to a columnless week in Bermuda, I want to explain again (the first time is here - V For Vucking Vantastic) just why I love the movie.

V for Vendetta is a fantasy story about elements of the human condition that are profoundly real. We all tend to sleepwalk through the layer of life that is too big for us to easily consider. We didn't think about the Rwandan genocide while it was happening not because we couldn't find out and not because Americans are inherently uninterested in the suffering of others and not even because Rwandans are black. We missed that moment in history because it was too hard to conceptualize in easy bites and the media understood inherently that the public would rather see OJ on a freeway. We slept through it.

V for Vendetta is, simply, a wake up call.

America is not off the world map, trying to deal internally with a contagious disease that has killed most of its population.

England is not a fascist state.

The film is not about terrorism, though it is about terror. The film is not about threatening civilians to make a political point in any way. It is about threatening a state that has lost control of its self, absolutely corrupted by absolute control. But for control to be absolute, the people must remain asleep.

Of course, it would be unreasonable for me to suggest that V for Vendetta is not political. But the graphic novel was written well before 9/11 and, like any good piece of fiction, the circumstances of the world have changed how people reflect on the story, but whatever the circumstance, there is a powerful reflection worth considering.

It is, perhaps, instructive that the extreme right wing - which I never realized had a representative in Newsweek's Jeff Giles - feels compelled to pull out all kinds of rhetoric to kill the movie. "Out, out damn film!"

To see sequences about, but not showing, torture in Vendetta and to compare then to Abu Ghraib is utterly myopic. I am not proud of my government's behavior in Abu Ghraib, but I read those sequences as reflective of the Nazis or Chinese water torture or something more colorful and dramatic. There are, at one point, dead bodies piled up, the image of which can suggest almost nothing but the Jewish Holocaust. Surely there have been makeshift mass graves in Iraq at the start of this war and in many other places before, but the filmic imagery is WWII.

It is equally remarkable to me - perhaps more remarkable - that there have been complaints and snickers about one sequence of oppression focusing on a lesbian couple. In my opinion, whoever wrote the Time Europe story that felt compelled to bring up Larry Wachowski's sex life should be fired for bringing something so completely irrelevant into the magazine and so should the editor, if not for complacency, for not finding out that the gay sub-story was not invented by the Wachowskis, but by Alan Moore in the early 80s, before the Wachowskis saw even a screenplay produced, much less made a movie.

What was brilliant about Alan Moore's use of a gay woman to take the brunt of the cruelty almost 25 years ago when he wrote it, was that she did not have the baggage of blacks, jews, asians and other groups whose pained histories have been so well rummaged over. This is not to say that homosexuals have not suffered, including in the Nazi death camps. But it is an unexpected example. Moreover, it has the power of the feminine, both to seduce, cause empathy, and allow for a belief in the vulnerability that will end up being representative of men and heterosexuals of all kinds as well.

Some audiences will be sure that there is a direct attack on George W Bush. Others will make no connection at all. But the truth is, until we are all wide awake most of the time, this film will be relevant forever. Like the Brothers Grimm, Shakespeare, and the Bible, V for Vendetta is a work of parable.

It is also a kick ass comic book movie, with more of the ambiguity of Batman than the sure-mindedness of Superman. In certain ways, V for Vendetta is the natural step after The Matrix, unencumbered by Neo's status as a near god, and without the expectations of further raising the bar of visual effects. The action in V for Vendetta is strong, but it isn't the center of the film.

V himself is a lot more the ambiguous Batman than the cocksure heroic Superman. He kills and the question of whether there is any enjoyment in the murder is up for grabs. But that kind of ambiguity is also at the center of Oscar nominated films like Capote (where he hopes for death to come so he can finish his book) and Brokeback Mountain (in which marriages are broken) and, most overtly, Munich, though Munich concludes with a clear message that violence is not the solution. But Munich is of the real world and the battle between countries and cultures is a lot more complex than the fascist isolationism of Vendetta's England.

But there is a clearer conflict that seems to inspire some people to extreme reactions to the film. What is terrorism? Was the Revolutionary War a terrorist uprising? It was to the Brits. Is American investment in Saudi Arabia terrorism? It is to Osama bin Laden. Perception is a bitch. The only historic difference between a terrorist and a revolutionary is that one gets to write the history. What seems bothersome is that V kills people and not machines or, for lack of machines, Nazis or werewolves.

What I would ask anyone disturbed by V for Vendetta is, simply, how should someone respond in the face of absolute fascism? With compliance?

How ironic that people on the right are angry about V for Vendetta when they are, in general, the same people who might argue that America should use its might to keep the world safe from, say, communism or these days, angry Middle Easterners on the political fringe. (I would argue that most of the population in the Middle East is more concerned with raising their kids than destroying America… which dos not make those who want to destroy America any less real or committed.)

Here's a tough version of the same question…. One you've likely heard before. If you were alone in a room with Adolph Hitler in 1935, knowing what we know now, would you kill Hitler?

Do the ends justify the means?

What scares me is that while some people got suckered into seeing Munich as an attack on Israel because it dared to question whether the ends justified the means… or whether the means even lead to the ends… V for Vendetta wears its politics on its broad stroke metaphors.

It is perfectly reasonable to dislike V for Vendetta simply on the merits of it as a movie. But it seems to me that the people who are angered by its perceived politics perceive it as being critical of their own politics. (See: Hamlet catching the conscience of the king.)

Of course, that is why I love it. You get those big action movie jollies… even bigger and louder on the IMAX screen. But that finger gets pointed and it gets poked in the chest and you can argue the joy of murder in V's heart. But in the end, the central target of V's efforts is a building, not people who might be in it. It is a symbol.

And if the people showed signs of waking, even the building could be spared.

Or maybe we'd all prefer going back to sleep.

EMe.