[lbo-talk] V for Vendetta and New Labour

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

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>