Bookraft

V for Vendetta is a reversal of roles tale. The hero is as bad as the villain. And the villain is a Modern-day Machiavellian Manipulator installed as Prime Minister in a Britain gone right-and-straight-thinking as a Karl Rovish Republican campaign slur tactic. But the good old USA has already slipped under the weight of an imported Iraqi-inspired religious civil war - and has become a wasteland. In a counter-reaction, Britain, through a desperately-seeking-security public, embraces 1984-style pure-and-righteous government. Think Koran-banned, gay-bashed, rich-is-wonderful philosophical ZeitGeist and political mafia.

Does this sound almost like a comic book story line - hopelessly off-the-scale ? Extremes carried to their absurd conclusion? You guessed it. But in its defense what V for Vendetta does is give plausibility to its stupor-vision with disturbing echoes to our modern day Swift Boat Veterans campaigns or South Carolinians Willingly Being Duped By Karl Rove and George Bush into Thinking John McCain had a Nigger Baby. This is the thread of political right think with chilling plausibility - how else can you explain America's embracing of a Herbert Hooverian dim wit in everything but getting elected as their President not once but twice.

V for Vendetta also gives us Natalie Portman. No small deal. For she again does a Star Wars I, II and III. Natalie as Evie adds more than a soupcon of plausibility to the proceedings - she is the feminine yes-this-makes sense counterbalance to events and ideas spinning out at the edge of darkness. She also is the essence of Don Juan and Casanova, an actor that can give a momentary want-to-believe reel substance - to carry off otherwise dead wood scenes. This dont-pass-her-by can't wait until Natalie gets a Sophie's Choice or Million Dollar Baby role - hopefully pastry is not her preferred movie confection.

But the other idea that V for Vendetta and Matrix Trilogy writers the Wachowski's brothers have going is that Britain, America and the West, in order to survive this century, are going to have to break allegiance with national treasures of grand self deception. V for Vendetta's seminal idea is that in order to survive the century the vox populi can't take a Roman Holiday on political savvy. The populace cannot afford to trust their governing classes to operate with virtual blank checks to dictate the direction and rules of national and world economic and social progress. This is going to take a lot more active participation and repudiation of the status quo that well over 200 years of "democracy" has proved the West has a stomach for.

That is why Britain and the British, who have an eccentric predilection for whats governing, are the perfect setting for V for Vendetta. Chillingly the Wachowskian Perfect Wicked Storm of Problems are brewing right now on the World Horizon:
1-25% of the World's Rapidly Diminishing Energy Resources being consumed by North America's 5% of the World population;
2-Every middle to advanced nation environmentally imbalanced by consuming by at least 2 to 1 more than they restore;
3-The consequences of that imbalance coming home to roost with Global Warming's Planet-scale Devastation, Susceptibility to Contagion's Rising and other Natural Limits to Growth;
4-Globalization providing the key to the other 2/3rds of the World's population to eat cake like prolifigate North Americans;
5-Science as the engine of change so poorly understood and managed as the security slack and natural buffers in systems get reduced to nil;
6-Religion and scriptural absolutists replacing Liberal Science or National Despots as go-here-for-an-easy-alternative choice for political "leadership".
So sure V for Vendetta is Hyde Park Soap Box Shrillness laced with Bruckheimer Cinematech Finesse - words and ideas in full-blown-to-bits typecast. But it is a cautionary tale that has gotten more public awareness than say Limits to Growth or An Unconvenient Truth. Irony - comic book makes sober treasties look real and believable.