Well, although I’ve still got to get round to re-watching the 2005 dystopian thriller film “V For Vendetta”, I stumbled across some random clips of it on Youtube in mid-April and suddenly noticed a brilliant small detail which really shows the hypocritical nature of the story’s totalitarian regime.
If you haven’t seen the film, it was based on a comic of the same name by Alan Moore and David Lloyd from 1982-85. Set in a near-future version of London which is ruled by a far-right dictatorship, both the comic and the film focus on a Guy Fawkes-style masked man called “V” who has made it his life’s mission to overthrow the evil regime. Although the original comic is slightly more of a nuanced “anarchy vs. totalitarianism” thing, the film is more of a simple “Good vs. evil” type thing, an eerily prescient warning against the dangers of things like right-wing populism, treating people as less than human etc….
And there are lots of clever details in it, such as how – in the fight scenes – the regime’s forces always use guns (crude, mechanical, impersonal etc…) whilst “V” fights using daggers and martial arts (which require skill, athleticism and extensive training to use). But the one I want to talk about in this article is all of the imported technology and armaments that show up in the film. And how this shows the film’s hyper-nationalistic regime to be complete and utter hypocrites.
Yes, in practical terms, it was probably because the props department only had popular/famous action movie guns to work with – in the clips I saw, I spotted both Austrian and Italian pistols. It’s also possible that there may potentially have been product placement deals as well, given just how prominently the logo of a Japanese television manufacturer is shown at certain points in the film. All three of these countries were also part of the Axis during WW2, so this might be a subtle thematic detail in its own right (or am I reading too much into this?). Realistically, the practical process of making the film probably explains why so many things made across the world show up in the film’s dystopian setting. Because we live in a world which relies, and thrives, on free international trade.
Still, even if it was an accidental practical compromise in order to get the film made, it actually sort of enhances the film. Because one of the main rhetorical tools that the evil regime uses is rabidly fanatical nationalism, repeating the phrase “England prevails” (God knows what has happened to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the storyline of this film. Probably nothing good…) and sneering at the rest of the world and stuff like that. And, yet, they are subtly shown to be literally nothing without trading with the rest of the world. It’s a brilliantly subtle detail which I totally missed when I watched the film for the first time on DVD back in about 2006 or so.
The regime presents this idea of England being somehow “special” or “better” and yet, for so many things, the regime still has to rely on the rest of the world. It subtly shows one of the many ways that the regime lies to its citizens. Twenty years after the film was made, it’s easy to see this element as a criticism of US economic policy this year (eg: protectionist tariffs). But at the time the film was made, it was probably more of a subtle/indirect criticism of the whole “American exceptionalism” thing, but moved to an English setting in order to avoid alienating parts of the US audience for the film.
Of course, I’m possibly reading way too much into what was probably just “Well, we’ve got this in the props cupboard already…” or whatever. Still, it wouldn’t have been that difficult for the props department to mock up some fictitious “English” guns for the villains to use or to put a fake brand logo on the televisions – but they didn’t. And this could possibly be a subtle way of showing that the film’s regime isn’t as economically stable or as industrially powerful as it claims to be. And this is a brilliantly subtle piece of film-making 🙂
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
