Love and Violence in V for Vendetta

Abstract

In the Norsefire regime of James McTeigue’s 2006 film, V for Vendetta, we come face-to-face with the corporate-military monster we’ve only sensed lurking in the background of King Kong and 300. It should come as no surprise that figured in this near future, British totalitarian regime is the Bush administration of 2000-2008. Where Alan Moore, in his original graphic novel series, envisaged Norsefire as an expansion of the conservative Thatcher government in England during the 1980s, McTeigue and the screenwriters/producers of the film, the Wachowski siblings, do not disguise their updating of the story to a post-9/11 political landscape or their depiction of fascism as the neoconservative Republican party of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century. Like the Republicans, Norsefire embodies neoliberal, “free” market, commodity capitalism; it enacts hyper-acquisitive xenophobic militarism; it decrees Christian fundamentalist religiosity; it exudes hegemonic masculinity. High Chancellor Adam Sutler is a distinctly more articulate version of George W. Bush; Security Minister Peter Creedy is the ruthless and sinister power-behind-the-throne á la Dick Cheney; hate-T.V. host Lewis Prothero on BTN (British Television Network) is a spitting image for any number of fear-and-hate-mongers on FOX News—from Bill O’Reilly when the movie was first released to Glenn Beck subsequently, with the godfather of broadcast bigotry, Rush Limbaugh, distinctly in view.