Last week I watched the movie V for Vendetta, and then watched it again, certain that this was the greatest political movie made in a very long time, perhaps ever. It is set in Britain in 2020, where the chaos of war, plagues, terror and “godlessness” have been replaced by the absolute order of pseudo-religious totalitarianism. But the movie is not about any particular political message. It’s not about a moment of history, a piece of legislation or a policy agenda. Rather, it’s about the reason why politics matter, about the human forces behind the machines of power, about the power of ideas to overcome brute force, about freedom without fear.
History shows that no country is immune to fascism. Every state, no matter how free, sees crackdowns on liberty and abuses of power in difficult times, and it does not take a great stretch of the imagination to see where that road leads. This country is great not because the government will never go down that slippery slope, but because there will always be people who stand up to stop it.
The sun keeps rising because, despite all the times when the masses sat complacently with hell burning all around them, someone stood up to the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Someone stood up with an orange flag in the Ukraine and someone is standing up now in Belarus. Someone fought in the French Resistance and the American Revolution. Someone agreed with V, the movie’s hero, that “people should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” Many a tyrant has learned the hard way that this species doesn’t like to be told to sit down and shut up, and watching a movie like V for Vendetta, I’m proud to be a member of that species.
The movie has been criticized by some for glorifying terrorism. In a world in which deliberately ambiguous terms are branded as political swords whenever convenient, it doesn’t matter that the violence in the movie doesn’t fit any reasonable definition of terrorism — namely, targeting innocent civilians. Still, the critics miss the point. V’s destruction of Parliament — a reenactment of the infamous, failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — is fireworks, not warfare. As V himself says, the revolution is not in the exploding building — it’s in the hundreds of thousands who march fearlessly through lines of soldiers as the gunpowder goes off and the triumphant music blares.
At one point in the movie, when V has been cornered by armed henchmen, he declares, “What you have are bullets. But behind this mask is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof.” This is a lesson we wish others would follow, not in order to blow up parliaments — that’s art, not a policy proposal — but to rise up. Maybe freedom will come to Belarus through European sanctions, to China through the Internet and to Iran through a bloodless coup d’état. But none of that would be possible without people who believe that freedom is more than rhetoric, who wake up one day and decide to stop being afraid.
Indeed, there is no word with more power to inspire than “freedom.” The thirst for it is in our bones. People don’t change the world by making cold calculations of costs and benefits; they change it by deciding it needs changing. By saying out loud, as V put so simply, that “there is something very wrong” with the world. V for Vendetta is about that inspiration; everything else in politics is just the means to the end.
Freedom is, however, in danger of becoming a cliché — when we eat “Freedom Fries,” and every war is “defending freedom,” and “Freedom, freedom, freedom” becomes a monotonous drone by preaching bullies who scarcely understand the concept. Freedom is also not a one-size-fits-all package of capitalist democracy. South American socialists like Evo Morales are being elected as millions stand up to corrupt corporate-government alliances. Millions of immigrants come to this country every year seeking economic freedom. The dictionary that defines freedom as synonymous with U.S. Defense Department interests is a tragically flawed edition.
V for Vendetta is also about the limitations of symbols. The Parliament building in the movie is a symbol of oppression. Our Constitution is a symbol of liberty. But neither of these has any meaning in itself. The building, standing or destroyed, is only as powerful as the soldiers protecting it and the protesters marching on it. The Constitution is only as meaningful as the people who fight for it. If groups like the American Civil Liberties Union did not obsess over every mass murderer getting a proper legal defense, the Constitution would be no more than ink on parchment, and we could bet our boots the Bill of Rights would not grow legs and stand up to defend itself.
We are lucky that we don’t have to fight a revolution. Our liberties are ensured by others, and for that credit is due both to the symbols and to the patriots who make them real. But this movie is a reminder that such fortune is never guaranteed, and that the path to losing it is an easy one to go down. The year 1984 came and went without George Orwell’s dystopia becoming reality. Let’s make sure 2020 arrives the same way.
