Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Is V for Vendetta A Drag?

A couple of observations.

l. V is about the gayest superhero of all time.

I mean he makes Batman look like Tarzan by comparison. An outcast who cannot be himself in the ultimate ways, he is at the same time a dedicated gourmand, lover of 40's torch songs, a great dancer, an unrepentant high culture aesthete, an exceptional interior decorator and an enthusiast of 1930s black and white period costume tear-jerking swash bucklers - and maybe he's just tomorrow's with-it metro sexual - but given his lack of nostalgia for nuclear family or lost love, and given that he can only warm up physically to Natalie when she's bald, it would seem to me that, well ... you get where this is going.

2. The film spends an enormous time nudging and winking on the similarites, in temperament, style, affinity and practice between V and Stephen Fry's doomed gay guy aesthete-entertainer.

Almost everything about Fry/Gordon, from his secret library of priceless art and cultural objects, down to the meals he cooks for Natalie/Evey are identical to V's way of existing and treatment of Natalie/Evey. But then, if there was a chance we missed the point of their virtual sameness, Frye makes a joke about it himself. This tells us that the Wachoski's insist we notice it. We're not supposed to mistakenly think that V and Gordon are literally the same guy, we're supposed to read this sameness SYMBOLICALLY, and what has to be read SYMBOLICALLY rather than literally, d'ya think?

3. The most moving thing in the movie for me, personally, is the narrative of Valerie in prison, the story of her history of doomed gay love as the prequel to her death at the hands of the Fascist state.

Thus where The Matrix made symbolic racism the key symbol of the fascist state, with disproportionate african american heroes as a partial so-obvious-it-doesn't-need-to-be-said, way of symbolizing the meaning, so profusions of homo-friendly signs make oppression of gay people the true significant marker of the totalitarianism in the world of V for Vendetta. This "learning" about gay love and the need to be "out" to live an authentic life is Natalie's medium for coming to political maturation and integrity and becoming her true self, i.e. the one worthy of V and becoming his instrument, and sharing in the same lesson in gay-love-as-truth that enabled V to go beyond mere hate-filled revenger to revolutionary inspirer of All the People.

Yup, it's love that makes the world go round, or in this case, makes the world go forward against reactionary repressive forces. And, you know, very specifically which kind of love it is. It's gay love which knows, as it were, - by dint of historical experience the lessons of opposition-marginality - the new kind of revolutionary proletariat with the right instinctive take on what needs to happen historically.

The fact that the Valerie narrative is key to inspiration/enlightenment has two confirmations. It is, as we've said, the one true empirical link between V's experience-evolution and Natalie's. This is underlined when Evie walks out on the balcony, raises her arms, a resurrected being, and repeats Valerie's motto, "God is in the rain."

I offer none of these observations in the spirit of defining the film as good or bad, or making any comment on the authors' personal psycho-sexual content. There was a scene in Black Heart White Hunter where, after attacking a white racist, Eastwood's character steps up and attacks a wealthy anti-semite. He mutters "Last night we stood up for the niggers and tonight's for the kikes." As far as the filmmakers go, they may simply have reasoned that they took on the racists and foregrounded blacks as those who would lead the opposition to racism, and this time they took on the homophobes, and celebrated persons inspired by homosexual desire as the agency that would undo this evil System.

In any case, V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did. But I wonder if the gay community wants this kind of almost apocalyptic gesture any more than the Democratic party wants Feingold to push a censure motion against Bush, (despite the fact that support for it is in the 40 percentile, including 20% of Republicans polled?)

All in all on a scale of one to ten, I'd give the movie a six-and-a-half.

The flaws:

The pretty underwhelming staging and shooting,

The fact that the potentially fascinating sub-plot about the infighting between Der Fuhrer and the head of the Gestapo, (which is probably based more on the filmmakers knowledge of the late stages of paranoid infighting between Stalin and Beria) is just reported but not actually dramatized in any plausible detail, leading to a denouement that just doesn't "play" between those elements,

The woefully under-reported fact that Natalie, babe though she is, STILL CAN'T ACT. I'm sorry. I want there to be a Harvard-educated Jewish sex goddess up there on screen as badly as anyone else but the gal STILL CAN'T ACT.

On the pro-side:

Luckily, about sixty percent of the movie focusses on Stephen Rea's investigation of the past of the Regime. This material is the most familiar stuff in the film and also by far the best. Rea learns the truth about the world and we can see him reluctantly learning the truth about his own distaste for being involved with it. This is moving. This is even accurate politically and psychologically. And this, by the way, is the very same technique the filmmakers used so brilliantly with the character of Neo in the first Matrix, the structural harmonic chord that made the first film so much better than its sequels. The character in learning the logic of his world, changes, plausibly, and becomes a living character without tedious "character" scenes. I wish Natalie's shock therapy were as plasubile.

The actual detailing of how the regime came into being, and how it "works" in the present seemed very convincing to me (not to mention frightening) and the way that fear becomes just an ordinary complacent way of living with obscene injustice is very very well done. (This has its precedent in Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, where an alernative America run by victorious Nazis and Japanese, is pretty much like conformist, materialistic, status-driven 50's 60's America anyway)

In all of this, the other successful structural thing is the relatively small role that V plays in the action, and I didn't find the mask a problem. (It certainly is part of what makes this a smart action film rather than a typical one. It is not interested in servicing the hero all the time). The fact that V is on screen so little is, in fact, where the movie is most adroit about itself as a purely symbolic construct. My favorite precedent to this is Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in The West. Artists with some sense of dramatic logic know that a character who is really one-note by his essence mustn't be at center stage too long or too uninterruptedly, and that the "arc" or "drama" must lie elsewhere.

In V for Vendetta the elsewhere, luckily, is Stephen Rea and Rupert Graves, plodding along, doing everyday investigative police work and gradually putting all the pieces together, but stepping into something that is, as the saying goes, bigger than themselves. Graves's simple dejected remark "It's all gone wrong, hasn't it?" is one of the shrewdest rendering of a moment of political awareness on a character's part I can recall. The scene where Rea mournfully thinks through what the chain of events will be -- how action will create counter-action, edited together in a montage, uniting the past of the movie with the present of V's domino game (a kind of magesterial symbol of masturbation, no?) is really MAGNIFICENT, (I recall a slightly similar, though less spectacular speech given by one of the protagonist's of Costa Gavras' State of Siege, where he analyzes the stages in an uncontrollabe "revolutionary situation") and that's where the movie briefly steps up in class into something great.

- Larry Gross
March 23, 2006

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.

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