Watching V for Vendetta in 2024 is… Uncomfortable

Don’t hate me, but I only watched V for Vendetta for the first time last week. I know it’s a beloved movie and even considered a classic by some, but you have to understand that I’d only been exposed to it through the internet, which meant that it was in the same mental category as Joker used to be : movies for cringey edgelords, if not outright incels.

Really, it’s only thanks to the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination that I actually decided to watch it. After all, if a revolution is coming, might as well get prepared, right? Little did I know, things were about to get very, very uncomfortable for me.

You’ve probably already watched V for Vendetta, but here’s my summary highlighting a few… interesting details. The film tells the story of Evey Hammond, a young woman living in a fascist Britain where the government controls people through fear, promoting hatred and repulsion towards queer people and ethnic minorities through. In fact, that’s how they came to power in the first place, manufacturing a biological weapon and pinning it on “foreign terrorists”. By the time the film starts, they’ve sharpened fear into a formidable weapon, constantly spreading hateful propaganda through the bombastic talk show host Lewis Prothero.

Now I want to be clear here : I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so don’t expect me to start saying that COVID was deliberately created to control the populace. That being said… I won’t say that some governments didn’t take advantage of the situation. But that’s only the start of some rather eerie similarities between Evey’s world and our own.

As I’m currently in the US, you can imagine where my mind went : Trump, a demagogue propped up by the Fox News propaganda machine, more than happy to throw whatever minority they can under the bus if it means gaining and maintaining power. It’s far from a uniquely American issue, though. I can’t even say it’s terribly modern, since the disappearance of Evey’s parents is painfully reminiscent of the Dirty War’s desaparecidos.

The more I watched, the more I found that V for Vendetta is worth watching (or rewatching) because it’s so uncomfortably relatable. At the very least, it’s a good warning of the future we might be spiraling into. At the same time, though, I don’t think that it should be taken as an example of what to do during a revolution. For all that V for Vendetta’s version of “how we got here” can help us recognise the danger we’re in, its version of “how we get out” might be what keeps us stuck - let me explain.

In the film, V is the face of the revolution. He is at once a symbol of everybody and nobody at all, an amnesiac completely divorced from connection or past. We don’t even truly know what he looks like, just that he’s suffered extensive burns.

Now, I understand why V is portrayed in this way - it’s basically the Hello Kitty effect. Without any expression or personality, he’s a blank slate waiting to be projected on, someone anyone can identify with. The problem, though, is that he’s just one guy. I love the UnitedHealthcare assassin, don’t get me wrong, but no single person starts a revolution. Individual action and sacrifice will occur, sure, but at the end of the day a revolution needs people collectively deciding to risk their present for the possibility of a better future.

V for Vendetta isn’t the only film that makes this mistake - the hero’s journey is one of the oldest narratives around, and we’re all a sucker for stories about “the chosen one”. But the problem is that idolising characters like V risks leaving us with the impression that we just have to wait and then one day our saviour will come and lead us out of the darkness.

And so we sit.

And we wait.

And the darkness keeps growing.

It might sound corny, but the world is in a weird and uncomfortable place these days. It’s not normal that a fictional fascist dictatorship resembles our future at all, let alone on so many points - it’s no wonder, really, that so many of us feel a sense of impending doom. I just hope we don’t keep whining and waiting forever for a storybook hero to come save us, because life isn’t a storybook.

V isn’t coming to save us. Neither is the UnitedHealthcare assassin. They might be symbols to rally around, but of we really want things to change, we’re all going to have to stand up and accept the fact that we might be the heroes that history forgets.