Metal Regression

I want to expand on my previous post and reflect a bit more on V for Vendetta, I thought it would be a good exercise given the current political climate. Perhaps some underlying truth can be gleaned from the things I write, or perhaps I’m just nerding out. V for Vendetta is many things but at it’s heart it’s a story of revolution. V’s play is to strengthen the people to take back the power of government into their own hands. So the most important thing he does is wear the mask, and it could have been any mask. But by doing so you remove the man from the idea. Who is V? who cares? Everyone can be V (as Natalie Portman points out), the people need to band together under an idea to take back the power.

This notion is kind of paradoxical though because V’s plan would have never worked if he didn’t take matters into his own hands as someone willing to do things that an average person wouldn’t; he had to be the superman while all the while convincing the people that he was no different from them.  Maybe something else would have sparked the revolution although from the way future Britain was portrayed everyone was happy just complacently existing. So what really triggered it is what created V and empowered him to take action and that is personal tragedy. Whoever V was is gone: imprisoned, experimented on, and baptized in fire V literally had his identity burned away. All that remains is rage and hatred, and this is tempered over time into what becomes his purpose, a Vendetta against those who destroyed him. V perhaps correctly comes to the conclusion that simply dispensing “justice” to those who wronged him, while personally satisfying, will not fix the real reason he was persecuted: The government, or more specifically the Norsefire party that manipulated these events to ensure a fascist victory. So he has to ensure the downfall of the party as part of his Vendetta or his work will not be done.

So what’s the take-a-way from this? There are no supermen in the real world. No one’s going to swoop in and inspire us to take back the power. Instead we got Anonymous who much like V himself has suspect motivations at best. These groups who have sprung up around us act more like world police acting in spite of the people as opposed to on their behalf and by their will. The symbolic gesture of Evey pulling the lever that would explode parliament needed to happen, if V himself had done it then he would be no different from the fascist dictator he was trying to overthrow. But even Evey wasn’t a total representation of the people because V himself stripped her of her identity and fear in the jail cell, and was baptized by rain washing away the doubt that remained.

But do we need a revolution? It’s easy to take arms when you’re being unequivocally oppressed. When your liberties have been taken away, your freedom of expression is gone, and there are no checks and balances among those in power. You could say V only had but to suggest the idea of a revolution to get the people on his side. But society today is a little more complicated, it’s hard to have conviction unless you have personally suffered at the hands of injustice. So now we hit on the theme again, personal tragedy leads to revolution, but not as easily as is portrayed in the film. The hard part in today’s society is convincing those unaffected by an issue to make a stand in favor or against it. In the movie every citizen was being actively oppressed and that led everyone to revolt. In the world today there are different areas of oppression and they overlap in confusing ways. Are you more oppressed for being black or gay or is being both worse than the sum of its parts? So instead we have movements and those movements are revolutions in and of themselves. These movements seek to bring awareness to issues and to convince the people outside of those directly affected to join their ranks.

So ask yourself this: Are you trying to enact change or are you resisting it? Is that change trying to oppress a section of the population who has no control over the issue? Do your feelings come from a place of fear? Are you letting the fascists win? Don’t vote for a politician, vote for the issues they represent. Don’t vote out of fear, vote out of conviction. Attain that conviction by burning away all the layers of yourself and exposing nothing but the raw core of your humanity underneath. You may feel your vote doesn’t count but you can’t be part of a revolution by staying on the sidelines.