The Verge is a place where you can consider the future. So are the movies. In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The movie: V for Vendetta (2006) directed by James McTeigue
The future: In V for VendettaMany things have gone wrong very quickly and there doesn’t seem to be much to do about it. The film is set in 2020, and London is now under the authoritarian rule of fascist High Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt), the leader of the extremely Nazi-looking Norsefire party.
The parallels to the real world 2020 are staggering: the “St. Mary’s virus” has unleashed a pandemic around the world, paralyzing the United States (which really disregards the film’s London-centric plot) and sending it on a path to economic ruin and civil war. The Norsefire party, which participated in a wave of neo-conservative support, locks up gay citizens, anyone who practices a religion other than the state-sanctioned church, and has state media support Surveillance is almost casual, with government vans sweeping the streets regularly to listen to citizens.
This is the world in which we meet Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), an unassuming employee of the British Television Network. One night, the secret police threaten her with sexual assault and she is later saved by V (Hugo Weaving), a superhuman terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Like Guy Fawkes, V has a plan to blow up Parliament and assassinate several members of the government responsible for the Norsefire takeover and, it is revealed, his own creation. The film ends before we find out if it succeeds, but not before the citizens of London get inspired to put on their mask and go outside.
Last: V for VendettaAlthough it’s not as bad a job as the Alan Moore and David Lloyd comic it’s based on, it’s an unapologetic movie about a terrorist. In March 2006, this felt radical for a highly successful film written by the Wachowski as their first major project after the Matrix trilogy. Reviewers were fascinated by this.
“The smartest aspect of the movie is how it turns a terrorist into a crusader hero while remaining politically correct.” guardian film critic Philip French wrote in his review. “What it fails to do is create a credible future or avoid pomposity.”
“By all rights, this should be the worst time imaginable to release V for Vendetta, a movie with – there’s really no polite word to say it – a terrorist hero prone to saying things like ‘Violence can be used for good’ and ‘Sometimes blowing up a building can change the world,’ ”begins Keith’s review. Phipps for the AV Club. “Then why V for Vendetta play as a crowd delight?
Just five years after 9/11 and the same number of years in the U.S. War on Terror, a blockbuster movie valuing a terrorist felt radical in a way that was almost immediately arresting. The film smooths this very obvious edge with open allusions to 1984, making it feel as much a tribute to George Orwell as Lloyd and Moore.
Alan Moore, the writer of the comic book the film is based on, declined to have his name appear in the film or any material promoting it. (Moore has made it clear that he opposes any adaptation of their work on principle, regardless of quality). Purists would either object to the film reducing the very specific response of the source material to Thatcherite England to a metaphor for the Bush era in the United States (in a story in which the United States is specifically marginalized) or the way the film turned V in a more handsome hero than a dead extremist in the wool. But time had a way of making all of these points effectively debatable. The movie looks very different now.
The present: In retrospect, both the great strength and the weakness of V for Vendetta it is in its lack of specificity. His Orwellian aesthetic gives him a kind of timeless veneer, and his old arguments about fascism and the progressive death of liberty become painfully relevant whenever there is a new attempt to undermine democracy by those in the world. power.
The film’s most enduring symbol is a mask, one that was adopted as a real-world protest signal by the hacktivist group Anonymous in the early 2010s, when Occupy Wall Street was the best-known activist movement in the States. United. Unfortunately, a smiling Guy Fawkes mask was intended to denote anonymous anonymous solidarity about something vital about institutional oppression: it doesn’t apply equally.
In 2020, attacks on democracy are blatant and forceful, and we know painfully well that subtlety is not a hallmark of the scope of authoritarianism. In fact, as critic Scott Meslow wrote in 2018, while V for Vendetta it has more bite than when it launched, now you could say it doesn’t go far enough.
“Imagine a universe in which the shooting death of an innocent girl could inspire an entire society to confront a militaristic police force,” writes Meslow. “Imagine the resistance to an undemocratic political movement that arose, in part, from powerful members but with principles of that political movement. A modern adaptation could dismiss all of those plot points as overly optimistic. “
V for Vendetta He is not particularly concerned with details: progressive concessions to fascists are counted in a grim cascade, and resistance is triggered by a single dramatic act. The universe of the film is small; The only perspective outside of Evey’s is that of Finch (Stephen Rea), a Scotland Yard inspector who tracks down V and discovers that the government designed the crisis that led to his takeover. Through Finch, we put it all together, and in the best touch of the film, everything is portrayed in a dramatic montage: corruption, domination, and revolution that exist side by side as the events that the film depicts intersect with scenes that They are about to happen in the last 30 minutes of the movie.
It affects a lot, but it overlooks how much job It is to defend democracy: how much do the people who need to be with you in protest prefer the government of fascism while the fascists align themselves with them, how the institutions are not built for democracy but for normaland how the people who run them will always choose the latter over the former.
