this is going to be a post-y day

[verbicide]

Because I do not want to be at work, still. So distractable. I'm starting to look at WebTrends, but it is a brain-suck.

So I will write about my weekend, briefly.

Friday: cleaning frenzy and book-reading
Saturday: Buffy: Season 1 and knitting with Jeanne
Sunday: Lunch and V is for Vendetta and Dinner with Sarah

Book: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. I loved it. For some reason this book really returned me to my love of reading. I felt, and I know this sounds cheesy, like I could bask in it. It felt nourishing. I ripped through it in a few nights, and spent a very happy Saturday afternoon on the couch, just reading. I haven't done that in ages, and it felt so damn good. I'm also finally out of the jungle in Locas, so that's exciting. I'm looking forward to more Maggie and Hopey.

Movie: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed V. Natalie Portman did a great job, and Hugo Weaving is wonderful in all that I see him in (I did not watch the second, third Matrix movies, and I have no idea how he was in them).



I did struggle with some of the violence. Especially to people who had the misfortune to be in V's path--like the random cops, just doing their job. I also found his imprisonment of Evey unforgivable. I don't know that I would have come back to see him at the end of the year. Any movie is enriched by Stephen Fry's presence, and I found this no different. God, I love him.

The comparisons to our world were disturbing. The idea of giving up our rights for safety is one that hasn't appealed much to me, it doesn't seem like it should be a choice our government should ask us to make. But I think all the alarmist naysayers who are protesting this movie as the glorification of terrorism are missing the fucking point. While V is an ambiguous character (neither wholly good nor evil), the government is clearly the villain to me. And people should unite to protest, peacefully, as we still can, to prevent our world from disintegrating any further into such disrepair.

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

For a long time I meant to write an essay on why The Matrix is evil. (Although I really enjoy it.) The root of my complaint is what you mention above -- they slaughter guards by the truckload. But this is even more reprehensible in Matrix, since those guards are real people that think they're guarding a bank or something -- they have no idea why they're about to become collateral damage.

It's a little different in V -- these are agents of a corrupt and vicious government. Of course, this doesn't mean that any of the rank and file individuals are actually guilty of anything -- it might have been the only job available, or they could have simply been duped by the government into thinking what they were doing was right. But we still have the trouble of a "just following orders" defense. (Have you read Grant Morrison's Invisibles? One of its most interesting points has a guard senselessly killed, then he later gets a whole issue all about him.)

What V is doing is not right on an individual level -- he's kind of a political antibody responding to a deeply diseased system.

[verbicide.livejournal.com]

It's true--we don't know if these guards are as corrupt and vicious as their government, but somehow since they didn't go out of their way to portray them as bad,I think the EveryMan Cop was fairly innocent, even in the V-world.

But no--I haven't read Grant Morrison, is that a graphic series or a book-book?

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Grant Morrison is one of those writers that alternates between writing some of my favorite stuff and some of the stuff that most annoys me. He does both in Invisibles, which is a comic series collected into TPB. (Hopefully the whole series is has been collected.) I think Kissing Mr. Quimper is my favorite storyline, but it may not be comprehensible if you start there.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

That bothered me, too. Do you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking about how Tim McVeigh thought of all the federal employees he was killing at the Murrah building as being like the people who worked in the Death Star in Star Wars.

Of course, McVeigh was a fanatic who thought that Clinton-era America was comparable to a police state, and I don't suppose that I can blame George Lucas for the fact that McVeigh was so out of touch with reality.

[coffeeinhell.livejournal.com]

I have a HUGE problem with this sort of violence in films. The troops/police who, on orders from above, enter the mansion in X-Men and are slaughtered by Wolverine; the policemen in V for Vendetta. These are not evil people -- they're guys doing a job who don't know what they're up against, and the "good guys" don;t care for a moment that they're killing them.

And yes, The Matrix. Especially the so-called "Burly Brawl" between Neo and all the Smiths. They've already established that the Smiths take over and use other bodies in the Matrix -- bodies that have corresponding people attached in the real world. So every time Neo kills a Smith he snuffs out one of the enslaved unfortunates that he's trying to free ... and that never occurs to him.

I wondered out loud the other day how so many people can parrot the whole "I hate the war, but I support our troops" line of thought but never think twice about Han Solo killing faceless Storm Troopers who are just following orders or, in this case, V slashing the throats of a bunch of cops responding to a call about a bomb threat.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was thinking of the agents, too, especially in the sequels. (Although I guess you could argue that the agent taking over the person may kill that person's individuality anyway -- but that's not exculpatory since, as you say, no one in the films ever wonder at that.)

The other big example, as mentioned in Clerks, is the whole workers-on-the-Death-Star issue.