(no subject)

[morwen]

So. Read this today. Didn't quite live up to my expectations. Although to be fair is quite nicely deranged. But.

The point of this sort of thing is that "it could happen here". And while the scenery of London (Parliament, the Old Bailey, Telecom Tower, Number 10, the Tube) is all there, the institutions are different.

The scary thing to me about fascism is how it usurps the state, not entirely replacing it - isn't it a bit of a waste to have a fascist leader in Britain who isn't Prime Minister, and surely the secret police ought to have been Special Branch? The only subverted state institution was the Church of England - we see the paedophile bishop (which is no longer really shocking either). Is this just because it would have been too radical/political for the 1980s? That the bad guys had to be racist, homophobic and Mengele-like bad guys, just so that nobody was in any doubt they were bad...

So, is anyone writing the V for Vendetta for the age of the War on Terrorism? Or are we in the end-times with no need for satire?

Comments

[foibey.livejournal.com]

V didn't reject the system, s/he's a direct product of it with very little if any free will involved. V doesn't even have a personality except as a logical conclusion (of Moore's) to the system.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

I also don't think the characterisation of the "bad guys" is actually quite as two dimensional as first glances may make it appear. Apart from humanising them in their belief that they "had no choice" about the fact that it ended up a litle like Nazi Europe there are other snippets around the book where the party facade creaks a little and they stop being just a bunch of evil people.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

Apologies for the many comments, but try comparing the attitude of members of the finger with the attitude of the screws in the movie Scum. The latter was widely praised as a gritty but accurate portrayal of the way similar sorts of situations would have panned out within the 80s political climate.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Hmm. So someone with no free will was trying to give it to others?

I'd imagined V as someone who was an anarchist before the war, was probably imprisoned for that, and was now, with nothing left to lose, just following in the finest tradition of Czolgosz and Grinevitski. But who knows - V's background is left deliberately vague.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

I thought the point was specifically that V was an everyman transformed through hideous extremes of oppression into a sort of almost messianic figure (with the difference from previous similar figures being that he's leading the flock without telling them directly what to do).