Wednesday, May 16, 2007

V for Vendetta: preliminary notes for a review

Wikipedia article. Actually belies, somewhat, the notion that the Norsefire regime is intended as a direct outgrowth from the Thatcher government.

I prefer Spooner and the early Herbert Spencer to Bakunin. Hell, I prefer Nietzsche and Stirner to Bakunin.

I like what Moore says about the movie, "[The movie] has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

I haven't read the graphic novel. I think I will.

Update Mon. 5/21/07: Got it Saturday, read it by 5:00 Sunday - it is illuminating. Moore is right. It seems hard to believe that the movie is actually a milk-toast (must I use a "que"?) version of the story, but, yeah, it does cut out the harder edges of the fascism and anarchism in the movie. And in doing so in the case of the latter, eliminates the need for V's important distinction of the difference between anarchy and chaos.

As I say, I'm not sanguine with the Bakuninist idea that the current society must be destroyed before we can rebuild a better world, but in the case of a totally fascist world, as presented in V, I can see it.

One of the funny ironies is that they show the decapitation of a fascist state. Where have we seen that before? If you're going to be wishy-washy about it, you wind up in Iraq.

The flaw in the Bush invasions, is that the rebuilding has been undertaken using collectivist, centralized control methods. I'd like to think that they were trying not to make the mistakes in privatizing that were made in the former Soviet Union, but simply retaining centralized control of Iraq's resources hasn't proven too efficient either. Any more than it did for the Soviet Union.