| Evey:
“Does it have a happy ending?”
V: “As only celluloid can deliver.”
The quote above is not simply a moment of convenient self-reference
in which cinema sits in as a proxy for all storytelling —
movies are being distinguished here and elevated above the
oral and written traditions. Against the disembodied ghost
of a voice and the silent residue of text is the ultimate
audio-visual medium: movies take the illusion of historicity
and play it out in real time, fusing temporal disjointedness
and narrative retrospect into an immediate moment that is
then encapsulated on a flat screen, one that we enter by letting
it enter us. For $10.75 we can trade in our personal lives
for the celluloid experience, that of historical (no matter
how specific) memory, in which a lifetime can play out over
two hours. It’s as if, with only the day-to-day of our
identities to sustain us, we become historically anemic, so
that one needs the occasional infusion of narrative, structural,
and cultural lies in order to remember what it is to exist
inside a happy ending — one in which we feel both larger
than life and larger than our individual lives, walking out
of the dark theater and into the light of day as not just
a new person but many people all at once.
Of course what infuses us is almost always a
bunch of “nonsense, dangerous nonsense,” [1]
and movies, as a commercial artform, are necessarily compromised
by all the capital that sustains them, which they in turn
perpetuate and promote — but it’s precisely this
complicity, because it mimics our own, that allows them to
say something complicated and honest, if unintentional; and
if acknowledged and taken as a given, it opens up a space
of potentiality in which movies might maximize their inherent
and unprecedented exploitive capabilities so as to engage
in a cultural war of ideas and motivations. But all of this
requires adequate conduits to be effective, which means it’s
up to us to be a better audience, and not just sit there passively
accepting the flatness of the screen as its only message to
and about us. Even the worst poops in the world awaits our
active facilitation of all the calculated and accidental frames
of contingency playing out at 24 fps. But V for Vendetta
is among the best poops, and it links the temporality specific
to cinema with historical convergence so it can then amalgamate
them into a flat artifice that is both mask and movie screen.
V, the titular character, literally conducts
his first terrorist bombing from a rooftop, his hands orchestrating
the explosions synched to the diegetic Tchaikovsky booming
out of the Emergency Broadcast System he’s co-opted
— as if to say, via this explicit merging of artist
and terrorist, that art isn’t worth a damn unless it
shocks us out of our complacency. [2]
He then co-opts the regularly scheduled programming so as
to deliver his message that the real bombing (of Parliament
— last night was just preamble) will take place one
year later should anyone care to join him — as if to
say that terrorism isn’t worth a damn unless its effects
persuade a mass revolt. Which doesn’t happen when masses
themselves are targeted. This is the difference between acting
on the frustration of a particular community, in which one
uses the language of the State (the slaughter of unelected/unappointed
peeps) in order to communicate that frustration, and acting
on a frustration for the entire situation, in which one challenges
not just all States but the perpetuation of State-approved
forms of addressing and remedying woes.
What V is instigating is a symbolic, not visceral,
war, and in the realm of the symbolic, it's the tools of artifice
— masks, stories, songs — that decide who wins
the war. This is parallel to the informational netwar currently
being waged by governments in an attempt to outmaneuver and
preempt potential subversives (a foreign policy of military
preemption being just the most overt manifestation of this)
— but what V recognizes is that these symbolic tools
originate not out of mechanized networks but between individual
people; it’s only later that the State appropriates
them in an attempt to control and therefore diffuse their
potency. If the ultimate act of artifice is to willfully adopt
a persona, to become your own story, then in the context of
V for Vendetta all revolutionaries are actors. Evey
hints as much after being saved and therefore captured (as
an accomplice) by V: she responds to his Shakespearean line-reading
by stating that she has always wanted to be an actress,[3] ever
since reading Macbeth as a child — and her narrative
arc across the movie is the complete demolition of her personal
identity so as to clear space for an assumed identity capable
of enacting traumatic historical change.
And yet, this assumed identity is not a new
personalized name, but a lack of one: like the similarly themed
but tonally divergent Fight Club, [4]
the protagonists of V for Vendetta must reach a state
of fearlessness in which they no longer view themselves as
having any value as individuals. If we were to follow the
titular character, for example, we would ditch the charred
human being that remains after the temporal anomaly of any
personal tragedy, and adopt a historical persona in its stead;
in this case, the name V (phonetically the English letter,
but symbolically the Roman numeral) is both the room in which
his personal life was tortured out of him (the erasure of
personal memory) as well as the Fifth of November (the appropriation
of historical memory), the date Guy Fawkes was arrested and
subsequently tortured for his part in the plan to kill off
King James and most of the Protestant aristocracy by blowing
up the Houses of Parliament during its State Opening.[5]
This kind of personal forgetting crossed with
historical remembering is offered as an antidote to the State’s
assertive policy of personal immediacy and historical forgetting.
For example, the lead investigator on the V case is warned
by men known as “Fingers” (of the State) to only
investigate the present, not the past, as if time itself will
puncture their web of control; but it is Evey’s lockdown
in solitary confinement that makes this temporal paranoia
most explicit. With its imposition of an enclosed darkness
that annihilates all contextual differentiators, solitary
confinement is designed to temporally dislocate and disorient
the dissident beyond the capacity for any action whatsoever,
and with permanent residual effects. [6]
This parallels, to a less damaging degree (since most of us
are still functional), the perpetual media blitz of fleeting
information designed to create a plateauing of all history
into an undifferentiated yet constantly changing present,
like a kaleidoscope we can bugger till the cows come home,
the consequence of which is a world becoming passively self-reflexive
(insular) so as not to become actively self-aware (contextual).
V’s accomplishment (and what he imposes
(like the State) on Evey) was to embrace the personal annihilation
forced upon him by the State and to equate his own void with
all politico-historical suffering. The mask he wears is a
direct affront to both the American mythos of the rugged individual
as well as its extension into global multi-culti celebrations
of difference; what it celebrates instead is our essential
sameness, as when his Badiouian maneuver of mailing out hundreds
of thousands of cape & masks across Britain translates
into a rise of the masses — not a faceless horde, but
people all wearing the same face, historically infused and
marching defiantly toward Parliament.
Like Fight Club, V for Vendetta
ends with a bloodless destruction of symbolic buildings, as
if what the Wachowskis and David Fincher want is a revolution
without a revolution. One could dismiss their narrative tie-ups
as corporate compromise, wishful thinking, or self-congratulatory
Hollywood cowardice — and yet still wonder if what they’re
calling for is a new precision warfare without the casualty
of bodies: some kind of post-millennial Armageddon between
soft targets, that is, every human being ever, and the hard
targets that comfort and distract us into a collective state
of solitary confinement, one in which we forget not who we
are but what we are, and what it is we’re going to do
about it. If celluloid can deliver our happy ending, it will
do so not with a kiss and a sunset but through its infusion
of history into the real-time present; so that we might realize
happy endings aren’t endings at all, but those moments
in which we believe the future is already here, and act accordingly.
_________________________
[1]
To quote Sean Patrick Thomas in Save the Last Dance.
[2]
It’s also making explicit the commercial spectacle of
acts of terrorism, in which what happens in the movies (i.e.
our collective dream) is transposed onto our immediate lives;
as if modern terrorism is a kind of appropriation appropriate
to an era of increasing virtuality, in which the irreality
of Hollywood is intended to validate a very real point.
[3]
In fact it is the notes left behind by an actress who
was previously tortured that sustain Evey during her incarceration/transformation
into a revolutionary.
[4]
Though they end on a similar catharsis of music and symbolic
demolition, Fight Club is less a Leninist tract and
more a study in the problematics of appropriating facscist
technique to combat fascism. It’s not without its problems,
not the least of which is its overconfidence in its own tonal
approach, but a dismissive criticism of its boys club posturing
will overlook some subtle complications, such as how its implicit
misogyny is undercut by the story itself, in that the fictitious
alpha-savior Tyler (Brad Pitt) is created out of behavioral
appropriations of the only female protagonist in the movie
(Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter), e.g. we see Tyler
hop in a car and drive away, only to realize, after a man
runs after him, that he was stealing it, just as a few scenes
earlier Marla takes clothes out of a dryer that we assume
are hers until she walks across the street and sells them
to a pawn shop [both instances are played as background or
incidental events]. So that the void at the heart of the movie,
to which Edward Norton aspires, is actually Marla. This also
subverts the initial audience reception of her as a crazy,
codependent nympho (since her behavior in retrospect is totally
understandable), and acts as a kind of preemptive ironic critique
of any "this movie is sexist" criticism —
as if those critiques, in their presumptions of both Marla
and Fight Club, are themselves sexist. But yeah I
agree that its quasi-dada machismo kind of ruins the movie.
[5]
In the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, orchestrated by Robert
Catesby.
[6]
See “Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological
Torture by US Forces”, a 2005 report by the Physicians
for Human Rights: http://www.phrusa.org/research/torture/pdf/psych_torture.pdf
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