This review of V for Vendetta originally appeared in Sequential Tart on November 1, 2006. If you’ve not yet seen the movie, you may not want to read it, because it contains spoilers.

Studio
Warner Bros. Pictures
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

Credits
Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman
Rating: R

Grade: 9

The movie V for Vendetta is based upon the eighties comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. The Wachowski Brothers wrote the screenplay. Hugo Weaving plays V, the larger-than-life revolutionary behind the Guy Fawkes mask. His character is a master of guerilla theatre as much as he is of one-man guerilla warfare. He has been compared to Batman, but unlike Batman, he does not protect the status quo. His largest mission is to inspire rebellion against the extreme right-wing, totalitarian Norsefire regime that has come to power in a future United Kingdom. When watching this movie, the audience is immediately confronted with both V’s subversiveness and the movie’s political relevance. As we are faced with the movie’s provocative challenge to decide how we will relate art to life, we can immediately pass negative judgement on V for Vendetta. Alternatively, we can choose to suspend our judgement of V, working through our cognitive dissonance in a very intense viewing experience. Throughout this riveting story, the psychological journey of the character Evey can be our guide and touchstone.

Evey is played by Natalie Portman. She seems much more like a real person than V, who is more of an idea than a man. She is a character who learned fear of her government at a very young age, when she watched her father become a political prisoner. She could be taken to represent a psyche processing the ideas represented by V. We watch her grow from fear to fearlessness during the course of her very complex relationship with V. When she first encounters V, he rescues her from being raped and murdered by the secret police, as punishment for her violation of curfew. V grooms Evey to be his ally, but she feels ambivalent towards him. Out of a mixture of both fear and conscience, she betrays him. As the plot unfolds, we learn with her of V’s plans to re-enact the failed plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up the parliament buildings 400 years ago. He also murders, one by one, corrupt government officials without compunction. At one point, Evey asks him, “What the hell are you talking about?” He answers without a hint of hesitation or apology, “Justice.” At this point, she still has too much fear and confusion to dare to help him restore justice.

The pivotal part of Evey’s transformation involves her capture and torture, and it is also one of the more confusing parts of the story. The audience is led to believe that she has been captured and is being held and tortured by the state. When she is finally released, it is revealed that V has actually been the one who has been torturing her all this time. While in her prison cell, she reads an autobiographical story written on toilet paper by a woman named Valerie. The lesson of Valerie is that even if we have only one inch of integrity, in this space, we are free; and we have nothing if we give this up. Evey believes Valerie to be her adjacent cell-mate. Valerie’s story is real, but it is V, not Valerie, who has been passing it through the wall to Evey. V finally releases Evey once she has become completely fearless. This fearlessness is his paradoxical gift to her. V taught fearlessness to Evey the way he had learned it, himself, during his own incarceration, when Valerie passed her life story through the prison wall to him. At the climax, Evey has to choose whether or not to help V blow up the abandoned parliament buildings. She decides that her country needs an idea more than it needs a building.

Though it is commonplace to say that V is a terrorist, this label is not wholly accurate. The aim of a terrorist is to inspire terror in the body politic. The ultimate end result of V’s actions is to inspire fearlessness in the people. In fact, it is the state that seeks to keep its people in a state of fear. V achieves his objective. The people become fearless, like Evey. One by one, people choose courage, as they converge in a crowd to watch the building blow up. Valerie is alive and with her girlfriend, in the crowd, smiling. The movie is never more symbolic than at this moment. We know that Valerie is actually dead. We know that we’re seeing something about ideas and that we’re not supposed to take it completely literally. When the building blows up, the feeling is victorious, happy and celebratory, like 4th of July fireworks.

The resemblance between art and life, whether deliberate allusions or not, have not been missed by critics of this movie. Some critics have even made the case that it is directed specifically at the Bush administration, but these people seem unaware that the movie is based upon a comic book series that was written well before George W. Bush was elected. Instead, a case could be made that the comic book series was prophetic in its dystopian vision of a government that has degenerated into a protection racket, under cover of piousness and patriotism. Make no mistake about it, though. Yes, V and Evey blow up a building, but this movie is not about blowing up buildings. Nobody supposes that The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was about terrorism, even though the main protagonist Howard Roark blew up a building in the story. Like The Fountainhead, V for Vendetta is about ideas. In the case of The Fountainhead, the idea was the creator’s right to destroy his own creation if his creative vision was compromised. In the case of V for Vendetta, the idea is just as the movie’s slogan says: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”