Bulletproof Ideas: The Importance of V for Vendetta

In many ways, it barely seems relevant to describe the narrative of this movie. The story is merely its shape. The ideas that it embodies are what V for Vendetta is really about.

However, human beings have always warmed to ideas wrapped up in stories and songs. The mage and the muse are forever interlinked in our psyche. Our childlike souls reach for heroes; our ancient minds allow us to be them.

But sometimes it takes the damaged people to see through the cracks of conformity, to see where change might benefit the whole. In V for Vendetta, the visage and voice shaking the status quo is V.

V for Vendetta is set during the 2020s. War and the St. Mary's Virus pandemic have ravaged the whole world, collapsing civilizations and creating a lawless wilderness of some of our greatest cities.

Southern Britain is one of the few regions still standing, but it's in the grip of a totalitarian fascist dictator.  Norsefire - or merely The Party - owns everything. All sources of information. All decision making for the whole nation. People are told what to think, what to believe, what to read, see and hear. Classic literature is censored out of existence. Music is proscribed down to the military tattoos and patriotic Party tunes. Art is locked away. All human expression beyond the most rigid channels is suppressed with an iron fist.

Muslims and immigrants are rounded up into concentration camps and killed. Homosexuality is banned - medical experimentation unto death is the Fate of those intent upon following their natural inclinations. All political dissent ends in a hail of gunfire. Anyone outside their homes after night fall is deemed an enemy of the state and instantly Disappeared.

But, you know, at least the terrorists are kept at bay and everyone is safe...

Enter V - a man? A woman? A ghost? An idea made flesh? - who collected the prohibited past sum of all human knowledge, thought and notions, and learned their lessons well. Who reached into historical instances to discover how to defy tyrants. Then applied it to the present.

In doing so, V showed a terrified population how to overthrow those who imposed terror.

The terrorists of mass media and government need a flesh and blood man to kill; a real world name to reduce; an individual's reputation to ridicule, ruin and disempower. It proves impossible when the man's face is so easily multiplied; when the name is symbolic; and when the reputation is a timeless idea surging in the last inch of freedom that resides untouchable in everyone's hearts and minds.

Even slaves sang redemption songs. Even the solitary may dream. Even a frightened and suppressed people may rise en masse and don the mask of freedom. Ideas are bulletproof.

Written by the Wachowskis and directed by James McTeigue, the movie V for Vendetta isn't the first to tell this story.

The pat answer is that Alan Moore's graphic novel, upon which it is based, was the first. It's certainly the better rendering. But it's not the first.

Characters, context and dialogue change, but the story is told over and over for each new generation. Plato told it, when he described the death of Socrates. Here was a man who always asked 'why?', who challenged authority even at the very dawn of democracy. He willingly drank the hemlock which killed him, rather than retract his philosophy.

It's a story recounted in endless Arthurian legends, as a revolving cast of individuals ask the Grail questions - what does this mean? Whom does it serve? And most importantly of all - who owns the Grail?

It's a tale told by the poet Shelley, stripped of all spirituality in an Atheist guise, as he exhorted his Men of England to question their lives - what is it ye buy so dear, with your pain and with your fear?

These are sentiments screamed from Chartist lips, echoed by Suffragettes, trade union workers, Civil Rights marchers, revelers outside the Stonewall bar and the Occupy Movement. Plus so many more that I have neither the scope nor time to record them all. Only the respect is infinite.

V for Vendetta is by no means the first - graphic novel nor movie - but it's certainly the most powerful modern repetition of this vital advice for populations.

The baton got passed in millions of minute ways throughout history. Our ancestors kept it safe. This is our time. What happens on our watch is down to us. From the future, a shadow gallery of hands reach back to take the baton from us and carry it on.

And there's no doubt that they'll receive it etched with a Guy Fawkes mask and the defiant cry that ideas are bulletproof. Then mold its form to match their times too.

As I write, my series of livestreams and Twitterfeed show me that a mass of people in Amsterdam are chanting for the freedom of Julian Assange.

In Britain's Birmingham, a passionate speech warns of the perils of trusting mass media. Manipulation of information is the primary tool of any who would subdue and control a population.

Across in Washington DC, hundreds of people are reciting the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights in unison. They are surrounded on all sides by armed police officers.

The statuesque smiles of Padraig Pearse and Daniel O'Connell look down upon Dublin's marchers. Without fear of being shot, they are waving the Irish tricolor, while a marble angel in the background still bears a bullet scar upon its breast - a centenary hole courtesy of the Easter Rising. Irish voices are now raised in condemnation of austerity cuts.

Up in Helsinki, people line the steps of the Parliament Building. With no Finnish, for shame I cannot tell what they are telling the populace.

A darkened photograph taken at a British bonfire party shows a lone individual surrounded by families and fireworks. Saying nothing, merely making the point that they are there, everywhere, even in local gatherings outside of the cities.

Every single face thus far described is adorned with a Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta.

The power of the idea is paramount in the movie. The message that it encompasses is not. That changes from person to person, place to place, epoch to epoch. It mutates to fit the circumstances perfectly, in each environment in which it is embraced.

The idea is simple. We each have the right to question, to know, to refuse or accept, to speak up and be heard. We are each our own governments. We are the arbitrators of our own conscience. We may defend even those whom the media would direct us to attack. We may attack those whom our politicians smoothly guide us into accepting. 

This is our world too, and what we do with it is down to us. Our responsibility. Our inheritance and our legacy. Keep the idea fresh and the rest will follow, flavored locally like the taste of tofu.

Hence we'll never pin down V. Nor even what that letter stands for. It stands for everything. From the outset, he makes this clear. In his very introduction, he switches constantly what V represents, and at the conclusion, Evey sums it up, 'He was all of us.'

Nor will V direct the nature of the rebellion against the presented status quo. That too will alter from time and place, on and on, throughout history and into the future.

Wat Tyler will lead the Peasant's Revolt with pitchforks. Rosa Parks will refuse to leave her seat on a bus. Mahatma Gandhi will pan for salt. Guy Fawkes will affix a fuse to 36 barrels of gunpowder. Men will throw crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Emily Wilding Davison will (accidentally perhaps) throw herself under the king's horse. An unknown man will stand with shopping bags before tanks in Tiananmen Square. Martin Luther will pin articles of faith onto a church door.

In the face of them all, the authorities will assert that their reality is the only one. That civilization remains static, unchangeable and stuck within the vision presented by their party line.

"And yet it still moves," whispers the ghost of Galileo, discerned by all who share V's worldview. The one which states that change is not only a constant, but the birthright of the human condition.

V for Vendetta in itself isn't important. It's merely that the idea was given expression once more, only this time in language understood within a modern context. The idea was the first domino flicked. Illusions toppled where it touched revealing a much, much bigger picture. One still unfolding as we speak, outside the silver screen and onto our streets.