George Bush Ruins Another Movie

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George Bush Ruins Another Movie

What Terry Gilliam's Brazil reveals about the Wachowskis' V for Vendetta.

By Matt Feeney

 

March 23, 2006, at 4:59 PM ET

 

Hugo Weaving as V and Natalie Portman as Evey in V for Vendetta

Poor Great Britain. You'd think it would enjoy the presumption that its

parliamentary institutions—having survived roughly eight centuries,

through civil war, world war, aerial bombardment, nuclear cold war,

imperial dominance and imperial decline, decades of IRA terrorism, and

the late unpleasantness between Oasis and Blur—would have a strong

immunity to autocratic takeover.

 

But instead, the favored dystopian setting for our best-known works of

anti-totalitarian art has been poor old stubbornly liberal Great

Britain. There's Orwell's 1984, Patrick McGoohan's riotous 1960s TV

series The Prisoner, and the Sex Pistols and the Clash, with their

apocalyptic rants against the U.K.'s " fascist regime " and its

ever-impending " clampdown. "

Now the Wachowski brothers have taken V for Vendetta, Alan Moore's

mad-at-Margaret Thatcher graphic novel, and updated it to express their

present political rage.*

The Wachowskis are very angry at George W. Bush, but still, for some

reason, it's Britain's Parliament that gets blown up.

 

Because V for Vendetta is the most expensive

Britain-as-totalitarian-dystopia film ever made, it provokes comparison

with the greatest BATD film ever made, Terry Gilliam's bleak 1985 comedy

Brazil. In Brazil, which Gilliam co-wrote with playwright Tom Stoppard,

Britain has become a bureaucratic tyranny run by sadistic paper-pushers

and ruled by the well-mannered but vicious interrogators at the Ministry

of Information Retrieval, who not only torture you but force you to pay

the interrogation expenses.

Brazil follows an unambitious bureaucrat from the Ministry of Records

named Sam (Jonathan Pryce) who's obsessed with a mysterious woman named

Jill (Kim Greist) he's never met but whom he dreams about constantly.

 

V for Vendetta takes place 50 years in the future after the world has

been messed up in some grave but undefined way by " America's wars, " and

a Christian-fascist dictatorship has taken over Great Britain in

response to a terrorist onslaught.

 

In the Wachowskis' adaptation (they also produced; the film was directed

by James McTeigue), the hero V (Hugo Weaving) seeks vengeance on the

regime that, through brutal radiation experiments, transformed him into

a hideous (but powerful and articulate and exceptionally well-read) mutant.

While V for Vendetta marks the Wachowskis' continued slide into

mediocrity and self-importance, Brazil is Gilliam's most fully realized

work. In no other film has Gilliam been able to put his penchant for

baroque set design and elaborate comic digression to such exquisite use.

The coils of pointless ductwork that come spilling out of walls and

ceilings, and ultimately consume Sam's apartment, are a tangible emblem

of the bureaucratic entanglement that chokes pretty much everyone's

lives. Indeed, for much of the film, the atmosphere of frustration and

thwarted longing is so pervasive, and so perfectly evoked, as to be

almost unbearable.

 

This profound frustration is the solid foundation for Brazil's memorable

dream sequences, which in their slapstick grandiosity are among the best

in movies. Placing the relationship between Sam and Jill within a scheme

of frustration and dream-yearning gives the film its potent romanticism.

There are few films in which you root harder for hero and heroine to

finally get together.

But the funny thing about Jill is what she stands for in the real world.

Unlike the longhaired nymph of Sam's dreams, Jill is in reality a truck

driver with chopped hair and a tomboy's brusqueness. In the world of

Brazil she is a compelling object of erotic longing not just because

she's really cute but because, well, she has a truck. Sometimes, when

you've been repeatedly thwarted by implacable bureaucrats, you just have

to run things over.

 

This tight, almost psychoanalytic focus points to a telling difference

between V for Vendetta and Brazil. Whereas V for Vendetta adopts the

highly movieish perspective of an avenging Übermensch who has himself

escaped the tyranny that ensnares everyone else, Brazil observes the

totalitarian order from within.

It presents the subjective experience of administrative tyranny. And it

presents this tyranny not as expressing the conscious design of an evil

omnipotent dictator everyone can wholesomely hate, but as an inexorable

process that slowly envelops the individual trying to navigate it.

This plays to another of Gilliam's tics as a director. Gilliam loves the

gawking fisheye, the distorted and limited—and highly unstable—visual

frame. We follow poor Sam as he first consults, and then ultimately

joins, Information Retrieval in order to track down his beloved Jill.

But the higher he climbs in the bureaucratic order, the more absurd and

incomplete the world appears.

 

McTeigue's framing in V for Vendetta, on the other hand, is relentlessly

explanatory. It's a series of didactic visual inventories and static

setups for V's speeches, which the film pays far too much attention to.

Though Natalie Portman's Evey is allowed to express some reservations

about V's methods, the Wachowskis basically adopt V's standpoint as

their own. They clearly think this angry mutant is onto something.

(They have half a mind to blow something up themselves.)

The problem is that despite V's burning anger at Georg Bu—I mean, the

scientists and politicians who turned him into a freak—he is a

world-class bore (another Wachowski specialty).

 

Nothing better illustrates the simplism of V for Vendetta, or better

highlights the unflattering contrast with Brazil, than V's motto: " There

are no coincidences. " The comic beauty of Brazil's portrait of

totalitarianism is that everything rests on random coincidence, which

nudges the bureaucracy into its own blind and murderous momentum: A dead

fly falls into a computer printer and—voilà—poor law-abiding Buttle is

mistaken for dangerous subversive Tuttle.

 

In V for Vendetta, there are no coincidences because, of course, it's

all a big, seamlessly executed conspiracy. The fascist supreme leader's

(John Hurt) total control dates back to a terrorism crisis that the

government itself concocted, and he gilds his power with an ongoing

barrage of manufactured threats and televised propaganda.

 

This—the fact that everything bad is being consciously orchestrated by a

fanatical tyrant—would be enough to make any comic book hero righteously

vengeful.

But V is angrier than that, even. The regime's very evil propagandist

Prothero (Roger Allam) is also the former commander of the concentration

camp where V was experimented on.

So, V kills him.

And the camp's indifferent chaplain is now not only a high-ranking

Anglican bishop, but also a vicious pedophile.

So, V kills him, too.

(In other words, there are coincidences. Very convenient ones.) These

things are mustered to justify not just V's several murders, but his

ultimate plan to bomb Parliament as well.

 

The funny thing about this ostensibly subversive setup is how closely it

hews to the standard plot structure of reactionary revenge thrillers

like Man on Fire and The Punisher.

But these awful films are redeemed in a way by their cynicism. Their

manipulations are transparent.

Maybe the audience is fooled, but you can be sure that the filmmakers

aren't.

When you're watching V for Vendetta and you're absorbing the mix of

paranoia and gullibility that makes up its worldview, you get the

unpleasant feeling that the Wachowskis actually believe this crap. And

this naiveté ultimately is the biggest, most basic difference between

Brazil and V for Vendetta.

Underlying Brazil's antic nightmare is a rigorous understanding of the

bureaucratic totalitarianism that dominated much of the world for much

of the 20th century. Underlying V for Vendetta is yet more magical

thinking about that evil omnipotent genius, George W. Bush.

 

 

Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Oakland, Calif. He can be reached

at mattfeen.

 

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