John David Ebert 2008-11-11
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Between 1982 and 1988, Alan Moore wrote one of the classic graphic novels while also simultaneously working on his famous Watchmen. This was V for Vendetta, a noirish thriller set in a near future England that had been transformed into a fascist state. The novel's protagonist was actually an anti-hero who went by the mysterious name of "V," and who was obsessed with destroying the fascist state of England. V's tactics are frankly, and unapologetically, terrorist in nature, for he is determined on blowing up the houses of Parliament and slaying the great Leviathanic monster which England has become.
During the course of the novel, V abducts a woman named "Evey," whose name is a homonym for the letters "E" and "V," the fifth and fifth from last letters of the alphabet respectively. The way in which the letter V is drawn by Moore's character and others as a graffiti symbol, however -- a V with a circle around it -- is suggestive of an upside down version of the "A" symbol for Anarchism, and indeed, Moore, in his deconstruction of the superhero myth has turned its traditional meanings upside down. For the purpose of the traditional superhero is to guard and protect the modern megalopolis from attacks by astral beings, whereas V's primary purpose is to destroy the modern megalopolis altogether. He is not an immune cell, but rather, like his prototype, the Phantom of the Opera, an antigen, for V's kidnapping of Evey, whereupon he spirits her away to his underground habitation which he calls the "Shadow gallery" very much recalls Gaston L'Hereux's famous villain, only instead of a phantom haunting an opera house, we have a masked phantom haunting an entire city, bent on its destruction.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has pointed out the parallel between V and Sutler (as Adam Susan is called in the film), the fascist dictator who rules England, suggesting that V's tactics in imprisoning and torturing (mentally) Evey in order to help her attain true freedom is as brutally totalitarian in nature as Sutler's cruel treatment of the British. There is thus, Zizek insists, a secret inward identity between V and Sutler.
However, the most important point to note - and it is absolutely basic - about superhero narratives and what they mean, is to discover what values the superhero represents and what are those represented by the villain, and in V's case, we note that his underworld habitation is a realm of art and culture, a miniature monastery filled with books, paintings, jukeboxes and other mementoes of the realm of the humanities. V himself tends to speak in iambic pentameter, the dialect of Shakespeare's characters, and he is incredibly eloquent and learned. The fascist state represented by Sutler on the other hand is an absolutely technocentric, inhuman state in which book burning and heavy censorship is enforced through a complete militarization of the society. We note that cameras have been mounted everywhere, for the society of this "future" England is under complete surveillance.
But these cameras which Moore was envisioning in the 1980s have now become our living reality, for nowadays they are everywhere: mounted atop traffic lights, Walmarts, convenience stores, banks, etc., we are indeed under constant surveillance. As artists often function as a society's Distant Early Warning system, V for Vendetta is even more relevant now than when it came out, for it envisions precisely the type of society which is presently emerging. Moore's picture of a centralized state in which the media is owned and operated by the government is exactly what is taking place before our very eyes with the merging of corporations and the federal government (especially with the recent corporate bailout package). Ever since 9/11, we are becoming the kind of fascist state (albeit a technofascism) which Moore was merely warning us about twenty five years ago.
V, though he is a brutal murderer and a terrorist / anarchist, nonetheless stands up for and represents the values of the humanities, which are indeed currently under threat by the new fascism emerging at the behest of the political right and the neocons. Moore was telling us, with his great graphic novel, that unless we wish to see things like art and music and literature (and this includes popular culture) disappear altogether, we are going to have to stand up and fight for it.
George Bush, jr. and his neocon buddies, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the usual suspects, have compromised more human rights and freedoms in America than ever before, and they have cut funding for the arts and slashed budgets in order to support their imperialist conquest of the Middle East, while local American cities are drained of the resources to fund things which the neocons regard as superfluous, such as libraries, schools, the arts, etc. Make no mistake about it: the world of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta was no mere hyperbole, but rather a metaphoric vision of what is going on in this society right now.
Take a look around you: the cameras are everywhere, and they are watching you; the freedoms which our parents and their parents once took for granted are dissolving. Public funding for the humanities is disappearing into an ever increasing militarization of the American way of life, which is fading at the very moment that I am writing this and you are reading it.
Soon, and not too far off, I may not be able to take for granted the very freedoms which yet still enable me to articulate these ideas and which allow you, the reader, to ponder them. How far away?
Well, I think that's the point of Moore's great novel: that's up to you.
Are you willing to fight for your freedom?
Or are you going to stand by, surfing the Internet and flicking apathetically through the channels on your television set while the tanks and trucks are rumbling past your windows in the street outside?
Which type of society do you want to live in? The one that America fought for during World War II? Or the one that it fought against?
Funny how things change.
--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
