V for...Very close to the truth
Spoilers ahead
Hello all ...
I watched V for Vendetta this week, the latest film by the Wachowski brothers, the makers of the Matrix trilogy. If you haven't seen it yet, you might like to see this trailer before you read on ...
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/index2.html
From what I have been reading in the UK in the last few days, the film, and the Wachowski screenplay, have had quite a savaging from 'the critics'. One newspaper headline called it 'V for Vacuous' and the review said it was 'barking mad'.
But movies and art in general are not owned by the critics, nor even by their creators, except in the sense of copyright. What they are, and what they mean, belong to the observer. It doesn't even matter if what we see is not what the creator intended. When it enters our universe the meaning is ours and ours alone. We own the imagination rights.
From that perspective I liked V for Vendetta very much as a symbolic exposure of the world we are entering so fast - and what it will take for us to dramatically change direction.
The film was inspired by the graphic novel of the same name, written by Allan Moore and David Lloyd. Moore said the adaptation was 'imbecilic' and demanded that his name did not appear in the closing credits. Lloyd, however, likes the treatment and says that Moore would only be content if it had been a mirror of the book.
It is set a few years from now in a fascist Britain viciously ruled by a dictator called High Chancellor Adam Sutler, the leader of a party known as Norsefire. The parallels with George Orwell's 1984 are obvious as the Big Brother High Chancellor appears on giant TV screens telling his underlings and the largely subservient population what they will and will not do.
Weaved into the plot are many references to current events, and the torture at a prison, which the film calls calls 'Larkhill', is a clear reference to places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The prisoners even wear the orange suits, although the story is set in Britain, not the United States. There is actually a real Larkhill military camp in Wiltshire, England, which is home to a School of Artillery for the British army. The High Chancellor dictatorship also has the double cross symbol of the Illuminati House of Lorraine, often noted in my books.
The High Chancellor speaks amid the double crosses
The dictatorship in the film came to power when 100,000 people were killed after a deadly virus was released in a water treatment plant and a school. It later emerges that it was the High Chancellor's forces who released the virus (developed through human experiments at Larkhill) as a problem-reaction-solution to justify total power to 'protect the people'. The agent who discovers the truth says to a colleague: 'If our own government was responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand people ... would you really want to know?
Agents discover that their own government was behind the disaster used to justify absolute power
When the fascist control comes under challenge, the High Chancellor tells his council to 'remind the public why they need us' and the government-controlled television station, the 'British Television Network', then reports that Avian Flu is a pandemic. A similar structure is operated by the Illuminati, which the High Chancellor and co symbolise.
The slogan of the dictatorship is 'unity', which is often called in today's politics 'consensus'. Decoded, it means 'everyone doing and thinking what we say'.
There are curfews and cameras everywhere 'for your protection' and these are themes, not only of Orwell's classic, but of our society today as governments constantly parrot the need to take our freedoms away to protect us and, ironically, to protect our freedoms.
The 'Agent Smiths' of the Matrix and the government security thugs of today are called the 'fingermen' in V for Vendetta. They are the psychopathic numbskulls who police the people with no regard to fairness and justice. The only laws are the ones they decide in the moment and whatever they do there are no consequences. Far fetched? Well, in London, the city in which the film is set, an innocent Brazilian electrician was shot by police seven times in the head while being held to the floor and those responsible are still at large, not a single one of them charged.
The impositions of the State and its system servers are already targeting the fine detail of our lives. Recently in the UK, a guy was fined 50 Pounds for putting rubbish in a street litter bin because the litter was two pieces of junk mail that were said to constitute 'domestic refuse'. He was fined for 'misuse of a public bin'. Then there was the couple fined for feeding wild birds after council officials hid in bushes to 'catch them'. An 82-year-old woman was even ordered to remove her rain hat in a pub 'for security reasons' because it was claimed to 'restrict close circuit camera coverage'.
These might sound trivial and ludicrous examples to some, but it is in the apparently minor and insignificant that can be seen the true extent to which the State in all its forms has infiltrated our lives.
In the opening scene of V for Vendetta, three of the fingermen are about to rape Evey, an assistant at the British Television Network, when the film's 'hero', V, arrives on the scene and kills them. He is wearing a mask depicting Guy Fawkes, who was hung for attempting to blow up Parliament in 1605. The mask is more than symbolic. It hides V's burned features, the result from imprisonment, torture and fire at the Larkhill detention centre.
V is on a vendetta to kill all those who tortured him and to bring down the dictatorship by destroying the buildings symbolic of its power. These include the Old Bailey laws courts and, ultimately, the Houses of Parliament. The aim is to trigger a popular uprising by the oppressed people and his motto is: 'People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.'
As with the Matrix, there is some gruesome violence in the name of freedom when freedom is never won by violence. Freedom apparently 'won' by violence always ushers in another version of dictatorship and oppression. V believes that 'the only verdict is vengeance. The vendetta.'. But Evey disagrees:
Evey: 'You're getting back at them for what they did to you.'
V: 'What was done to me was monstrous'.
Evey: 'And they created a monster'.
Meeting violence with violence is a battle between two expressions of the same insanity. Tony Blair, or 'Oxymoron Man', once memorably used the term 'fighting for peace' when trying to justify the slaughter in Iraq. It is true that the need to avenge and punish in the name of 'justice' succeeds only in turning the avenger into that he seeks to avenge.
That whole 'eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth', thing has always bewildered me. It's like when the State says that killing is wrong yet has a law that allows it to kill the killer. The answer is not vengeance for those who would do us harm. That is not a solution to injustice, it is a life sentence for the vengeful.
V and the High Chancellor ... violence + violence = violence doubled
In V for Vengeance, the secret police who impose the will of the High Chancellor may be set slightly in the future, but they are already with us today targeting and torturing all those who refuse to cower and comply. In fact, they have always been with us, back to the Inquisition and way beyond. As V says: 'Fear became the ultimate tool of this government.'.
But the movie is not just a metaphor for a UK dictatorship, it is representative of the methods and ambitions of those who control governments across the world. And they all use fear, not just as their 'ultimate tool', but the first, second and last. Everything they do is based on fear.
The Evey character says at one point: 'I wish I wasn't afraid all the time'. But most people are, that's the idea. We fear the past, present and future. We fear the unknown, we fear not having enough, losing what we have, not having what we want. We fear what will become of us and those that we care for. We fear what others think of us and what they don't think of us. We fear, fear, fear and therefore we are controllable through the manipulation of all that we fear. The present War on Terror is the War of Fear. No Fear, no control.
Evey is eventually arrested for her connection to V and tortured and interrogated at Larkhill. There is a twist to this in the film, but it is not relevant here. Anyone who watched the documentary, The Road to Guantanamo, featured in a recent newsletter, will know that what is portrayed in the fictional Larkhill is already happening across the world every day.