Michael Moore has been advertising for “V for Vendetta” on the front page of his site since it’s been released. After seeing the movie, I can easily understand why. Mike wields dynamite, so does V. Directed at the White House or at the Old Bailey – the symbol of the democracy which failed us. “V for Vendetta” conveys the same message as “Fahrenheit 9/11”, but under the form of a superhero rather than one of a story.
V is essentially a mask, like Mike is essentially a blue collar gear. As he says himself, there’s a face under this mask, but it wouldn’t be him. This mask, Guy Fawkes’s, is the face of the anger of the people : neither good nor bad, half-freedom fighter, half-terrorist. V for Vox Populi.
V is essentially a product, too. He was spawned by totalitarianism like Mike’s character – blowhard, biased, critical, scathing, inquisitive – was begotten by the American media’s “fair and balanced”, lethal sleep. Neither right nor wrong, but necessary.
Less obviously, but essentially still, V is a cultured man and a borderline artist. I could picture the dreamy smile on Mike’s face, and the sigh in his soul, as V delivered his cue : “The artist lies to tell the truth, the politician lies to hide it”.
And finally V is a miracle, like Mike. He happens in spite of, or perhaps because of, the dark forces whose sole purpose is to make sure that someone like him never happens – like the cry in the throat as it is strangled. And as he happens motionless crowds set out to march, like the hooded kids in Eminem’s “Mosh” clip, like the dominoes under V’s “flick” (pun intended…).
Of course it’s only a movie, and Mike is only a filmmaker. But the film tells that, too : V must die so as a crowd of masked Vs can emerge and reveal the thousand faces of their humanity, just like Mike’s character has to be assassinated so that people could feel the murder of America.
Of course, what everybody will ask first is whether V is “good” or “bad”, even though it’s a stupid question : V is less a hero than an ongoing mechanism and a warning against his very existence. Pointless issue, but a mandatory one, since the modern brainwashing partly consists in turning politics into morals, and the oppressed into delinquents. Pointless issue, but real problem too, since V is nonetheless not universal unless you want to fall into moral relativism and moral equivalence, and settle for the facile, unsatisfactory and unpleasant philosophy that a freedom fighter is just your enemy’s terrorist, and vice versa.
And then there are all the peripheral questions, even trickier to handle and even to phrase : those revolving around the possibility of liberation through its opposite, the relations between vengeance and justice, the necessity or the contingence of the people’s sympathy for this kind of devil.
As these questions are carefully avoided in the real world, and impossible to really ask anyway because people have forgotten the art of debating (okay they have been helped). Thanks to them, and like “Fahrenheit 9/11”, “V for Vendetta” is not a manichaean movie. Rather, a clear cut movie. A movie with a question, a stake, a plot, a model, and lots of debates. I don't go for the Wachowskis' fast-paced, baroque, dense and still conventional style, but their new opus raises exactly the issues I want to see raised. It's a syllabus for a course on the questions that President Bush doesn't wish to see raised.
With the increasing dispossession of the teaching power in the places where it normally belongs (I'm referring to the ongoing McCarthyist persecution in the academia, but also to the fashionable confusion between authority and the authority argument and the supremacy of entertainment over thought and of industry over knowledge which make it possible), the spiritual needs or if you prefer the demand for sense has moved from classroom to pictures, in an accessible but also "democratized" fashion. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was such a movie and Mike commends and recommends this evolution. He has always claimed the need for intelligent socially significant entertainment, and he likes to see himself as the heir of Capra and Chaplin. And that's what he is, indeed.
But Mike is a genius, and the others are not. There's no cure for that. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is informative and educational, like Capra, angry and funny, like Chaplin, AND a syllabus, like "The Matrix" or "V". And more. It's a world movie. It's total. It has ideas, facts, story, myths, style, unity, diversity, simplicity, complexity, answers, questions, everything. Entertainment AND thought. That's what they all find so unforgivable about it (and him), deep down. The genius. The genuine popular genius. A prole with genius. Nothing more devastating, disturbing and dangerous.
"V" is no such thing. It's unfulfilling because it's just a restless bar where customers meet, socialize and say anything about anything not trying to get anywhere while feeling philosophical or political. Still, better than nothing, and it can polarize the energies on the relevant issues. A good question is half a good answer.
So, what’s “V for Vendetta”’s good question, if we dismiss the good guy/bad guy red herring ?
Well, in our “V for Michael Moore” perspective… It’s all about personal responsibility, of course. Heh. What else ?
V may be a consequence and a product, but this doesn’t mean that he has no personal responsibility. Rather that his personal responsibility is alienated, pre-determined and doomed. He’s still a subject, but no longer a man. He’s a mask. A personal vengeance sublimated into an impersonal lust for justice.
The relation between justice and vengeance is neither simple nor clear. Israel has used both. Justice against Eichmann, when the situation allowed it, but vengeance against Black September, when they felt that the international community would let them down and that they needed to show that they could manage on their own anyway, and that you don’t fùck with the Jews.
I believe in justice
I believe in vengeance
I believe in getting the bastard
I like this verse from a song by New Model Army and I find it both truthful and psychologically satisfying. The song is called "Vengeance", not "Justice", like the movie is called “V for Vendetta”, not “J for Justice”. Because vengeance is primary. The need for justice is grounded in vengeance, in a personal sense of wrongdoing. With a little imagination, a lot of American citizens will recognize themselves in V’s path.
As a democrat, justice is what you want first, and to get it you first try legality and dialogue. Then you find that “there is no justice”. It happens silently and flatly, on a blunt and daily basis, and it's hardly personal, without glory, and not a bit as romantic as in Alexandre Dumas's novels. You find that Bush is laughing at Richard Clarke, at Patrick Fitzgerald, at the DSM, - at you -, that Bushco is only playing cats and mice with the activists who want to get him impeached, that it only exhausts them like hounds on the trail of a dummy, only stages stunts to keep them occupied and discredit them and make them look ridiculous, that there is no hope, that there never was any hope, because they have everything and you have nothing, because they have no intention to play fair whatsoever, and no intention to stop until they've crushed you to death, cut you down to nothing, some way. You are then left with despair or vengeance.
When there’s no justice, if there’s no vengeance, there’s nothing at all and the hero is crushed (as it happens in “1984”, in Terry Gilliam's “Brazil”, and in reality).
When you're ripe for vengeance, it’s because you have acknowledged the death of what meant the most to you, in you - democracy and humanity in V's case, and that you won’t get any justice through what makes sense to you - democratic means. Rather than dying alone, you decide to find the sense in killing what has killed you. Which is why V could care less about the coroner being sincerely remorseful. He feels like the tool of a mechanical retributive karma, and what acts in him is both impersonal and already dead, and therefore can't be reached.
Vengeance is at the cost of democracy (V's project is to pulverize the Houses of Parliament, ie the symbol of democracy). Which is a paradox in the sense that you kill what’s already dead – but a fake one : in fact, you stage the death of democracy as you acknowledge it, AND you kill the very democracy that you want, in the same breath (since there’s no other democracy than the one the Houses of Parliament stand for). You destroy the reality of the corrupt mockery AND the symbol. And if you don’t take this step, well, you destroy none – the symbol is safe, but so is the mockery, and with lasting and devastating effects.
Vengeance is just and ethical, in my opinion, but in a "No future" perspective. To reach justice and gain redemption status, it needs the others. And here the determining element is THE ATTITUDE OF THE POPULACE. More than a terrorist or a freedom fighter, the mythical archetype that V stands for (Robin Hood, Monte Cristo, Phantom of the Opera, Michael Moore) is a gambler. An optimistic gambler, who believes that people will like, follow and imitate him. A Kantian superhero.
In the movie, the populace is supposed to follow, Evey is supposed to understand, neither is a problem, whereas of course it's not only far from being a given - but there would have been no need for V for starters if the populace was THAT enthusiastic over V. In a really advanced, sophisticated fascist government, the government ALSO makes sure that the populace is on its side – ie numb, apathetic, or deliberately siding with it and relaying its constructions. Which is the meaning of BUSH WON. So, the consensual harmony is a postulate, an ENORMOUS postulate. Easily settled in the movie. Well, if they hadn't been, it wouldn't have been a political thriller, but a film d'auteur.
A Kantian superhero who succeeds causes a revolution or is at least part of the resistance. That’s what V means when he says that governments should fear the people and not the opposite. And that’s the promise that he keeps on behalf of Michael Moore, who made it two years ago, at Cannes, at a time when the face behind the V mask was his.
V… because “someone had to do it”.
V… for Michael Moore.
