Rather than working this afternoon the ever slothful and indolent Geeklawyer skived off and went to the Cinema to watch V for Vendetta. Derived from a comic book by David Lloyd & Alan Moore (thanks Lilian), the latter of whom who was unaccountably unhappy with it, and with screenplay by the Wachowski Brothers it revolved around a Guy Fawkes theme involving the blowing up of Parliament by a ‘terrorist‘ called ‘V‘.
V is, in reality a good, albeit complex, chap fighting a tyranny who gets to define the word ‘terrorism‘ to its own advantage and who contrives atrocities to blame on them as a justification for depriving the populace of their civil liberties. Sounds somewhat familiar?
Geeklawyer’s blogging of the film is driven, irresistibly therefore, by the civil liberties themes within it. The primary slogan of the film is “the people shouldn’t be afraid of the government, the government should be afraid of the people“: a delicious aphorism who’s origins Geeklawyer is unaware of, but which slogan Neo-Labour should, in its own interests, rapidly outlaw as promoting sedition and dissent.
Supposedly this is England after German victory in some World War but frankly one could only possibly see this as the masturbatory fantasy of Blair: a population required to offer a loyalty oath to the State, where the Media delivers Fox style state propaganda masquerading as news, where the citizen is tracked day and night wherever they go and where they can be ‘disappeared’ if they express but the mildest dissent: into Belmarsh Larkhill or some other Guantanamo style death camp. Several dialogues within the film made mention of “the Registry“, an omniscient database, which was consulted whenever the state wanted to know even what colour shit the citizen passed that day. Perhaps only Geeklawyer is sad enough to see the parallel with the threatened ID Card database called, co-incidentally, the National Identity Register.
The most amusing point came at the end of the film when the disconsolate populace marched into Parliament Square to protest at the tyranny. Geeklawyer reflected to himself, as he munched his popcorn, that this form of democratic protest would be an offence under The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which outlaws democratic protest around Parliament. Sometimes even satire can’t keep up with Neo-Labour. Geeklawyer cheered as the supposed terrorist blew up Parliament.
Geeklawyer thought all the way through the film that, because of its impressive but derivative style, it was from someone who had watched a few too many Matrix films, and then he saw the credits. He can only say that the Wachowski Brothers have gone some way towards rehabilitating themselves from the cinematic atrocities which are the Matrix sequels.
The film has, despite numerous plot holes and detail errors, far fewer Hollywood cliches than usual or traditional; so suspend disbelief and go and watch it. Thoroughly recommended.
Geeklawyer did, of course, pretend that he was in a meeting with a client all afternoon.
“Supposedly this is England after German victory in some World War ”
Sounds a lot like America in 2006 to me…
In the film America was dispatched swiftly by the device of a viral plague that rendered it into a state of civil war where it was unconcerned with the rest of the world and thus not interested in “WW2 the sequel”.
As for “Sounds a lot like America in 2006 to me…”: I tend to think that Britain is what America would be without the protection of a written constitution and a vigilant and independant judiciary.
ER, it’s not David Lloyd who was unhappy, but Alan Moore the writer and main visionary of V (yes, i know way too much about this.)
What it does strike me as is the perfect test case of the offense of “glorification of terorism” (since like you, and like almost everyone I know who has seen it, I too cheered the blowing up of the H of P). If only they would get on with passing it we could have some real fun!
Thanks for the correction lilian. I dug out this link http://www.alanmoorefansite.com/news.html#moorevfv which discussed the shifting of the film’s dichotomy from Fascism v Anarchy to Fascism v Democracy. That certainly made a few things in the film click into place.