[lbo-talk] V for Vendetta and New Labour

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Mar 30 21:11:41 PST 2006


I read Brian's and Dennis' reviews of V for Vendetta, as well as the November 3rd Club roundtable, with interest. When I first read about the film in the making, I thought it would be fascinating. But when I saw the film, there was one thing that especially struck me as "off the mark" (even more so than the film's lack of visual inventiveness that Brian points out). On one hand, the film seeks to be "timely," by making visual allusions to Abu Ghraib, for instance. On the other hand, the power that be in the film are clothed in fascist aesthetics. Fascist aesthetics would have been arguably a credible way of evoking the menace of the National Front of the 1970s (when Alan Moore reportedly conceived the novel: "Moore developed the V character over a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s" [at <http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta>]) and Thatcherism of the 1980s (which stole the xenophobic thunder from the National Front). But today's power that be in the UK, Tony Blair's New Labor, not only functions entirely with a different politics of aesthetics (Cool Britannia) but also survives by feeding on the liberal and leftist fear of the return of the Right. (George W. Bush, with his folksy manner, too seems aline to fascist modernist aesthetics.) An effective criticism of power at one point in time -- as the comic book was, as Dennis argues -- can't be easily translated into an effective criticism of power at another point.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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