(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2006)
I was already a little depressed on the day
I saw V for Vendetta, which means
that by the time the movie was over I was probably lucky not to feel suicidal.
Is it just me, or does every second movie now feel like a grim commentary on
the decrepit times we live in? The previous day I’d seen Joyeux Noel (see last week’s review), the French film about the
makeshift 1914 Christmas Day truce between French, German and Scottish soldiers
stuck in the front line trenches. The men are condemned for their actions, and
some of the rhetoric sounds uncannily contemporary. I’m thinking of course of
George W. Bush and his magnificent Iraqi adventure, although our own new
administration will probably spend progressively more time in that section of the
phrase book as well. The saddest thing about this, I realize, is that such
terms as “forces of good,” and “freedom” and “God’s help” have become
hopelessly loaded with undertones of mendacity and cynicism, so that I even
wonder how much of a future they have in their current form. We’ve been lied to
so persistently and thoroughly, on so many levels, that the term “truth” may be
in as much danger.
Our times
Not that it’s unhealthy to go through life
with a degree of engaged skepticism. But surely the ideal state would be one of
confidence in certain inalienable truths, tied to a consensual notion of
perpetuity and progress and general benevolence, against which we push and
agitate based on incremental rather than fundamental concerns. Well, we drift increasingly
far from that. On the most basic issue possible – our long-term survival and
that of our descendants – we have only drift and apathy. As Jeffrey Simpson
recently pointed out in The Globe and
Mail, Stephen Harper’s five key priorities – to which all cabinet
utterances must be directed – are largely useless, pandering sops. They do
nothing to address our long-term sustainability, whether economic or
environmental. And the sad thing is that even this mediocrity is almost
incalculably preferable to the wanton destruction of the US administration, a
body that I must admit I increasingly regard with the paranoia evoked by the
darkest science fiction fantasies.
Saddest of all, as I said, is Bush’s
perverse, completely unwitting, genius– time after time – in turning on their
heads even the most obvious building blocks of reality. Five years ago even
liberals like myself generally accepted the morality and “greater good” of some
notion of a war on terrorism. But now we must face the overwhelming reality that
no amount of cumulative terrorist activity would ever have been as disruptive
as the mess in Iraq. For sure, some lives that would have been lost under
Saddam have been saved; but the insurgency or strife or civil war (call it what
you will) merely substitutes the loss of others; a fragile democratic freedom
gained on the one hand, much basic stability lost on the other. I’m not making
a judgment on this calculus, only suggesting that there has been a criminal
lack of attention to the elements of the equation. Except for one thing of
course: that the neurotic fear of terrorism – regardless of the laughably low
odds of loss in any of our individual cases, compared to almost any of the
other hazards of living – is allowed to trump almost all other considerations.
We possess so much information, so much sense of irony and – to some extent at
least – complexity, and yet we flail in irrationality.
Killing ourselves softly
It’s at such times that I most wonder about
the time I spend on movies. I love them, but at least to the extent we’re
talking of Hollywood, they merely manifest the distractions and misdirections
that saturate our minds at the cost of any engagement with anything that might
matter. When you think about it, there is something truly frightening about the
fact that the outcome of American Idol
is a much more prominent issue in the minds of far more people than the
environment or even Iraq. Oh, I understand the mentality for sure – the easy
identification with the drama on the screen just seems more relevant, because
of its immediacy and accessibility and easy connection with understandable
circuits of pleasure and desire. Well, on such easy waves we're selling our
entitlement to a future. Foolish debt levels financing a consumer boom constructed
largely on the selling of pure crap, the way that the public agenda is hijacked
by minutiae and nonsense, the willingness to place neurotic agendas of morals
and values over any rational consideration of a future strategy – it’s all
easier than the alternative, for now.
I know some readers will agree with
none of this, or even if they do, will think that I have no particular
credibility in these matters (even compared to what little I may possess in
matters movie-related). This is fair enough, and my only justification - rightly or wrongly – is that this is what
is in my head after seeing V for Vendetta.
Which may, as I acknowledged, merely be the intensification of a preexisting
moroseness. In any event, in the little space I have left I should at least try
to justify this as more than an utterly subjective leap. The film, directed by
James McTeigue, is set in an England of the near future that is ruled by an
authoritarian, almost Fascist government that bases its power primarily on fear
fueled by lies. “V” is a masked insurgent, based on Guy Fawkes, who is
apparently the only voice of resistance. Natalie Portman plays a young woman
who falls into his orbit, and gradually becomes politicized.
V for Vendetta
The film looks stylish, but isn’t particularly
well put together otherwise, and even by the standards of the genre one has to
swallow almost countless unlikely achievements by its protagonist (from
single-handedly reclaiming a big stretch of the abandoned London underground to
– most oddly – finding the time to arrange thousands of dominos in the shape of
his personal logo). It can be seen, as David Denby put it in The New Yorker, as a “dunderheaded pop
fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction.” But this is the tragic
measure of our times I think, that such a celebration seems to me more relevant
to our circumstances than, say, Capote
or Brokeback Mountain.
“Only the West,” says Denby, “could have
made a movie in which blowing up civic temples (he means the Houses of
Parliament) is a ‘provocative’ media statement.” If so, I’d suggest it’s only
because only the West could misuse and pervert the use of those civil temples
to the extent that they seem to yield poison rather than enlightenment. Yes, V for Vendetta is another calculated product.
But at least its calculations might lead toward productive anger rather than
neutered exultation. The question is – what do we do now?
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