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Mar 20, 2006 09:46 AM What comes is better than what came before? by Stefan Beck
Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It includes an essay about Virginia Woolf, in which she is quoted: The guinea [solicited from her to rebuild a Cambridge University women’s college] should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows" . . .Substitute "Parliament" for "college" and you have, more or less, the plot of the Wachowski Brothers’ V for Vendetta. Why does "V" (Hugo Weaving) want to blow up the Houses of Parliament? We know why ur-terrorist Guy Fawkes gave it a try, but V for Vendetta--whose insufferable, Shakespeare-quoting anti-hero wears a Guy Fawkes mask--is set far in the future. There is talk of "America’s disastrous war," but evidently there is no more America. Britain is in the bony grip of a barking fascist demagogue (John Hurt) who, though the Wachowski lads surely didn’t intend it, fittingly resembles an aged and emaciated George Galloway. Allusions to the Third Reich abound, right down to Britain’s red, white, and black flag. There is a moment in the film when Evey (Natalie Portman), V’s accidental disciple, plays a song on an antique Wurlitzer in V’s secret lair. It’s a Cat Power cover of The Velvet Underground’s "I Found a Reason," which plays just long enough to hear the lyric: "What comes is better than what came before." This is the not-so-subliminal message that the movie intends its audience to take away. As I wrote of the Woolf quote above, "It is incredible . . . how frequently grievances petty or significant, when coupled with impatience and vanity, will admit of no solution but to tear down the whole edifice (literally, in this case) and ’start fresh.’" It’s the antithesis of conservatism, and my friend is absolutely right--conservatives will be all over this like Catholics on The Da Vinci Code. But I suspect that people overestimate the impact of films--and that goes both for the liberals making them and the conservatives complaining about them. As a piece of propaganda, V for Vendetta isn’t Riefenstahl; it isn’t even Michael Moore. It’s just too boring. For a movie made from a comic book, that’s unforgivable. The important thing, however, is why it’s boring, and why it’s part of a worsening trend--if not necessarily in politics, at least in movies. (And isn’t that bad enough?) Namely, it doesn’t ring true. As Douglas Murray noted, "The present war’s movies range from Kingdom of Heaven (’there are a lot of fundamentalists about, Christians are the worst’) to Munich (’if someone hits you and you’re a Jew, stay perfectly still’) and Flightplan (’if you’re on a hijacked plane, odds are these days that the flight-crew, not Islamists, are to blame’)." Now we can add to that V for Vendetta, which transforms Blair’s Britain or W’s America into, as Rolling Stone put it, "a police state ruled by . . . a fear-mongering, gay-bashing, Islam-hating dictator who strips citizens of their civil rights and religious freedoms." Why look to a hypothetical Britain, when present-day Iran has all that and more? If that’s what the Wachowskis expect of our future, they’d better not hold their breath. Who, exactly, is doing the fear-mongering here? Unfortunately, they’ve violated the first rule of the thriller or the horror flick: It’s not scary unless it seems a little plausible. Don’t waste your money on V for Vendetta, but don’t lose sleep over it . . . after all, that’s exactly what They want.
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