V for Vendetta
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
I first saw V for Vendetta in 2006 when I was 17 years old. It was pure happenstance that a film with the political and social ideologies it carries dropped into my lap when I was first coming online as a person with things to say about such stuff. In 2025 we’ve seen many news stories centered around the idea of what can radicalize an individual and cause them to act in the name of a belief system. But for all the violence on display in V for Vendetta it is at its heart a film about personal integrity and how that notion should impact our political lives.
Much of the script is rendered faithfully from Alan Moore’s graphic novel and spoke so much to the young man I was developing in to. On the verge of adulthood teenagers don’t really own very much. We’re still in a world in thrall to our elders. That’s why some of the films lines of dialogue spoke so powerfully to me: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we ever have - it is the last inch of us. The only inch that matters!”
Eighty thousand Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been blamed. The state has turned from 'nanny' to fascist; the media show a Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals, 'ethnics' and dissidents are mysteriously 'vanished'; the people are in the long sleep of fear and lethargy. The film takes place in a fictional 2020. Now, five years later in our real timeline, things aren’t looking all that different, are they?
Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown-mask who takes as his model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel's respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects - Fawkes was no truth-loving anarchist destroying in order to create but a Catholic with a grudge against the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince amongst men either, but then young people aren't sticklers for history.
What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that 'everything is connected', that 'a revolution without dancing isn't worth having', and 'truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words - they are perspectives'. They find it quite reasonable that V should come upon young Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to believe she will be executed if she doesn't give the state a piece of information - all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.
Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to find an integrity she didn't know she had, and to radicalize her.
The story she reads is a gift (the person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The critical complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the humanity is everything.
The film isn’t just an ethics seminar though. Director James McTeigue gives us dozens of reasons to cheer as V battles corrupt cops, blows up monuments, and takes his revenge on a system that those involved in it believed was too big to fail. This film understands that for all the thinking that is required for a story like this to be told you still need to let the kids out for recess once in a while.
The message of V for Vendetta is simple: change is possible. And despite the violence for the sake of entertainment present in this movie, change doesn’t have to be a violent act. It simply requires those who want change to stand up. To speak up. To commit to our beliefs and keep those who would hold us down from rising to power.
