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Dorkafork opines:

Here's a thought experiment: Try to imagine V for Vendetta being released anytime in the year after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Of course you can't, and not just because it would have been distasteful. V is being released just eight months after the 7/7 subway attacks, and the opening scene features him using the subways to blow up Parliament.

No, such a film is unthinkable because it would tend to suggest that Timothy McVeigh was justified. Sometimes blowing up a building can change the world, V says. McVeight thought so too.

No film like this would be released during a Democratic administration. If Hillary! becomes President, do you imagine Hollywood cranking out a movie suggesting domestic terrorism against a left-wing socialist fascist government is justified? Of course not-- because even if in the fictive world of the film, such actions are justified, they would recoil from the suggestion that such acts were justified against Madame President Hillary!'s government.

Hell, even I, as a conservative, would object to such a film. (Unless, of course, Hillary! really did become a fascist tyrant and dismantled the democratic system, which I really don't think she'll do.)

In an era where psychopaths really are blowing up buildings to make some sort of satanic political point, is it a good idea to give such bastards ideological and moral succor by making a movie featuring a noble hero that they may find sympathetic?

The movie suggests that terrorism is justifiable, and it does so through a romantic, charismatic, heroic and noble figure of mystery. Am I crazy to have a problem with this?

Incidentally, the Wachowskis ultimately concluded their Matrix series by suggestig that violence was not the answer. Even when the foes were conscienceless machines that had genocidally slaughtered 99% of humanity and enslaved another .9% (while the remaining .1% had underground raves), the Wachowskis ended the film with a truce. War was not the answer, Neo realized, as did the machines (finally). Peaceful co-existance was the answer, even if it meant that a good number of humans would be left in a comatose captitivity to provide energy for the machines.

So, in that case: War is not the answer.

But in the case of a right-wing government meant to be suggestive of Thostaer's England and Bush's AmeriKKKa: War is definitely the answer, baby.

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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