Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (New York: Vertigo, 1995), 286 pp., $19.99.
V for Vendetta, 130 min., Warner Brothers, 2006.
Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird (New York: Free Press, 2006), 288 pp., $26.
LIKE OTHER clichéd Hollywood marriages, unions between major motion pictures and politics tend to be superficial and overexposed. And they typically end in divorce--most often from reality. This past year's engagements were no different. There were a slew of films focusing on terrorism ranging from the historical Munich to the more contemporary Syriana; the most audacious, however, was widely expected to be the futuristic V for Vendetta.
While Munich was based on George Jonas's true-story thriller Vengeance (1984) and Syriana was adapted from Robert Baer's memoir See No Evil (2002)--books that are at least ostensibly about real events--V for Vendetta finds its roots in a graphic novel written during the 1980s about the Cold War. The film, produced by the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix fame), fits within the perennially lacking genre of pseudo-cerebral actions movies meant to make audiences ask "profound" questions--in this case, what it means to be a terrorist. But it also comes pre-packaged with its own agenda. (Hint: It has to do with the Bushies being evil and the film's protagonist, "V", being cast in a distinctly heroic light.) And in the process of spewing its jeremiad, the movie becomes tangled in a mess of fantasy and reality.
