Matthew Sinclair: V for 'bloody awful'

Matthew Sinclair, a student at LSE - who has his own blog - reviews the new film - 'V for Vendetta'.

I won't deal with the technical flaws with V for Vendetta here. If you want a decent account of the film's flaws as a film you can take a look at the BBC movies website review. The BBC's account of a film that is essentially lifeless is accurate but misses the main problem with the film. This is not just a poor, vapid, attempt at intelligent critique but a part of the paranoid left's apology for terrorism and deserves far more strident criticism on those grounds.

The film is based upon a cartoon set within a dystopian future where the Conservative Party have been elected and all hell has broken loose. A "high chancellor" has been elected and is kicking out minorities, making homosexuality illegal, 'disappearing' dissenters and experimenting on prisoners (clearly the makers haven't heard that we're Cameron's Conservatives now). Essentially the country is being run by utter fascists and this sets up the moral case for V and his campaign of bombings (including a particularly distasteful scene with bombs on the tube) which are hailed as heroic. The original cartoon was a response to Thatcher but has been adapted to serve as a polemic for the modern conspiracy theorist.

This film's history is questionable. It has set up Guy Fawkes as a people's hero (the 5th of November is a recurring theme) but seems not to understand that the most likely result of success in his plan of killing off our parliament would have been an ugly religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. While Guy Fawkes may have been responding to genuine discrimination against Catholics he was doing so on behalf of a far from blameless community (the reign of Mary wasn't pretty) and in a clearly counterproductive manner. Such historical distortion isn't terribly important but an attempt to render Guy Fawkes the new Che Guevara is hardly the most sensible of starts to a film.

More important and harmful are the constant attempts to associate the fascist regime in the film or the actual Nazis with complaints about our present government. First, this film constantly uses words, such as "Belmarsh", "rendition" or "spin", to associate the abuses in the film with less pernicious facilities used by our actual governments. Second, it features a regime banning the Koran in an allusion to the abuse reported in, false, stories such as those in Newsweek which have caused so much suffering. Third, it makes a major show of a conjoined US and UK flag with a Swastika at its centre. Finally, a major feature of the plot is the revealing of terrorist outrages as having been not the fault of terrorists but, rather, a government plot in order to scare the public into submission. This is an idea that has serious currency in radical circles and the Middle East where most think that either United States or Israeli secret services were responsible for 9/11. Feeding these conspiracy theories and blurring the line between the regime of the film and our government makes the rest of its message, about violent resistance, utterly awful.

This approach is not unique; blurring the line between fascist government and our current leadership is a common strategy of the far left and a central tenet of Noam Chomsky in particular. It is invariably based upon spurious "evidence". Oliver Kamm has done a fine job of exposing the flaws in Chomsky's assaults on Pat Moynihan, allegations of UK government censorship and attempts to distort other issues. Calling someone or a government fascist is largely used as a dishonest rhetorical device but has ugly consequences when combined with a celebration of explosive opposition to fascism.

Neither calling our government fascist nor calling for violent resistance to fascists are rare or particularly problematic stances. The problem is that this film combines the two premises:

1) If you are being persecuted by fascists you should respond violently.
2) Our current government behave like fascists.

The two combined send the message that terrorist attacks are morally justified in the here and now and for this reason V for Vendetta is an utterly awful political statement. As the New Yorker reviewer has noted, the Houses of Parliament are a symbol of liberal democracy and blowing them up on film does not signal the support of freedom. This film has, through its desire to make its message relevant to today chosen the side of tyranny and has no claim to be representing "Freedom Forever!".

The only defence that has the slightest traction is that the two premises can be separated and that as our current government are not fascists this film is simply making the case that attacks would be justified were our government Hitler's. Such a defence does not stand up, though, as associating conspiracy stories about our current government with one worthy of terrorist response leaves a film thoroughly unable to talk about questions of means and ends with any subtlety.

An IMDB reviewer hailed the honesty of this film. Let's hope it isn't remembered that way; this film is far from honest and far from pleasant.

Comments

[EU Serf]

The Left, of which the BBC is the most powerful cheerleader, is much more abivalent toward political violence than the right.

The reason is simple, whilct we spent our youth dreaming about successful careers, they spent their dreaming about bloody revolution.

Even though most of them get over it, the damage is done.

Thus in later life they are alway eager to "understand" why brutal psycopaths murder innocent people, whilst we are far more interested in stopping it happening.

[Louise]

Yes, yes. But would I want to spend £6 on a ticket to go to see it for a bit of relaxation on a Friday night?

It's a film. It's entertainment. And that's the way the x thousand people who go to see it will regard it.

[Editor]

I'm sure the Nuremberg rallies and all those Kremlin-commissioned films extolling Stalin were a lot of fun, too, Louise. I don't think that's Matthew's point, though.

[James Maskell]

LOL. Comparing the Nuremberg rallies to a Hollywood movie! Thats stretching the point a little too far I think Editor.

[Selsdon Man]

My friends who have seen it the film say that it is left-wing, anarchist propaganda. By paying to see it, you are sanctioning and funding our enemies.

[Editor]

You may be right, James, but you get my point. Good propaganda best achieves its effect when people least know/ understand how they are being manipulated.

[Louise]

Have to agree with James. Comparing a Hollywood film in 2006 to the Nuremberg rallies and Soviet propaganda is a tad extreme. Perhaps even paranoid.

Maybe the film-makers do have a political motive, perhaps it is one that we don't agree with. But, will this sink into the minds of the majority of people who go to see it? I very much doubt it.

I can't see people coming out of the cinema feeling so wound up that they are prepared to blow up Parliament because of the rapid loss of civil liberties that we are experiencing.

Remember Braveheart? No great Scottish revolution followed that.

While I agree that glorifying terrorism is a bad thing, I can't help feeling that highlighting some of the destruction of our freedoms isn't.

Perhaps its time instead of relying on the left to make statements about the extraordinary rendition, this government's rubbishing of anyone who dares to speak out against it, dentention without trial and so on, we Conservatives should be doing it.

[Guido Fawkes]

Clam down dears, it's only a movie.

[Matthew Sinclair]

There may doesn't need to be a Scottish revolution the next day or anyone blowing up the House's of Parliament for this kind of thing to be unpleasant. Firstly, any film which is designed to make a political statement, as this one is, should be judged, to some degree, on the relevance of that statement. Second, this film and others like it can make subtle changes to people's response to terror, particularly abroad where the consequences aren't so obvious. By equating us with the terrorists it also undermines our moral case in confronting them.

[malcolm]

I'll be interested to see what the professional film reviewers made of it,personally not too interested in the politics.I managed to enjoy Ghandi even though it was historically inaccurate and typically for Attenborough anti British.Braveheart on the other hand was crap on every level as was the Patriot and just about every other Mel Gibson film since the Year of Living Dangerously.It seems in Hollywood these days it's not alright to be nasty about anyone except the Arabs and of course the British.

[Graeme Archer]

I echo "calm down dear it's only a movie" ... but I'm rarely calm ... so... Matthew - you seem to suggest there's something wrong with a fictional view of a dystopian near-future where the government has morphed into fascist totalitarianism. Something *wrong*?! We are living under a government that has crapped all over our gentle and vulnerable constitution; starts wars by lying to the people to whip up proletarian indignitation ("45 minutes!!") and then hounds an innocent man to his death - and then uses the establishment to produce a whitewash; has no problem with identifying the state with the Party and promoting a cult of the leader; that criminalises activities that once were lawful and encourages citizens to snitch on one another to the police; that promotes an "education" system where free thinking is banished in favour of rote-learned parroting about environmental and similarly PC isshoos; that simultaneously dramatically increases immigration while employing a Home Secretary to bang on about flooding and thus stoke populist outrage; that has emasculated the independence of the police service and replaced it with armed servants of the state, willing to shoot dead innocent people, smash truncheons in their face at demonstrations and then lie about it to the media afterwards ... I don't know how I would fictionalise Blair and his crew as I'm no artist, but totalitarian fascist seems not a bad charge to me. If nothing else, the defining paradigm for this government is Doublethink ("We believe in a whiter than white government!". Response: David Kelly is still dead, prime minister. Jean Charles de Menezes is still dead, Met Commissioner).

I note that the original author of this comic book distanced himself from the movies ... maybe because he was horrified to see how his 1980s anti-Thatch agitprop had found a much better target in Blair.

Speaking of Blair, have you reread 1984 recently? I was struck that the only thing that Eric Blair got wrong was that the government won't require us to keep telescreens on all the time ... the citizenry we have actively desire it anyway, whether it's to appear in some drivel and so somehow authenticate their personal identity in this age of nonentity, or to support the extension of CCTV everywhere.

Having said all that, it sounds like a crap film with some tasteless guff about integrity-through-abuse. Brokeback Mountain's back on at the Barbican, I'll go and see that instead. Keith wouldn't let me go when it first came out because the foyer looked like Compton Street on a Friday evening.

[Rob Largan]

Just got back from watching V for Vendetta.

Of course it isnt perfect.

But the film does raise interesting questions that need to be raised. My flatmates who watched it with me, are be no means political, but the film got them thinking, debating about the balance of freedom and security. Whether if there was a successful revolution in this country, if you found yourself living in a totalitarian regime, what would you do? How would you justify it?

Most importantly, I thought, it was great entertainment, totally compelling, good fun.

[Jon White]

Does anyone else think that Mel Gibson's remake of the classic 'Life of Brian' wasn't nearly as funny as the original?