V Could Be Me

So I haven’t known how to put this into words until now, and it would have been a lot more timely to have published this blog last Friday, but I think it’s still within the window to freshly resonate with others if I get it out there within less than a week. 

So my wife and I watched V for Vendetta (2005) for the Fifth of November this year like we do every year. And I’ve always teared up at parts of it, but this year I full-on bawled at Valerie’s (Natasha Wightman) story as it literally unrolled to Evey (Natalie Portman) in her prison cell. Because this time it hit me with such force how very little it could take for that to be my fate someday now, and/or my wife’s for sticking by me. It could be my prison cell. A real one. It could me in the pile of bodies. 

Hear me out: despite my chemically depressive/anxious imbalances, I'm a pretty optimistic person. And I know, some of you read this and think, it’s just a movie based on a comic, it’s all fiction. Don’t be hyperbolic, don’t doomcast, etc. Look at how accepted you are, how much support you've received, how much society has changed to embrace you and other queer/trans people. You get to celebrate who you are and be celebrated for it. But the hope I may place in this “comfort”—with so many caveats—is always precarious. It can be snatched away in what feels like an instant because it can be chipped away at in a myriad of small ways in the meantime. 

Bills against trans athletes playing on teams that align with their gender are being introduced all over the country and are turning into laws. Same thing for those banning gender-affirming care for trans kids and one in Texas even vowing to label parents who help their trans kids receive the care they need as child abusers and then remove these kids from their care. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is on a witch hunt to remove books from school libraries which he labels as “pornography,” and they just happen to be the ones about LGBTQIA people. Other states are now following suit and the list of unacceptable topics only continues to grow. The burnpile stacks higher and higher. (No, seriously, a schoolboard member in Spotsylvania County, Virginia literally said just recently, “I think we should throw those books in a fire.” To slightly modify a quote from Parks and Recreation’s [2009 - 2015] Ron Swanson [Nick Offerman], “Son, people can [hear] you.”)

And it’s not just queer/trans people or the issues that affect them; we all know this. It’s the vilification of Critical Race Theory by people who don’t really know what CRT is, the banning of it being taught in schools where it wasn’t even taught, and the purposefully loosey-goosey definition of CRT to mean anything on the books that makes white people uncomfortable. The censoring of history, the further banning of literature by authors of color, and every other measure to maintain white fragility, which is of course white supremacy, and codify it into law. It’s the legitimate worry that Kyle Rittenhouse will get off scot-free. It’s the total disenfranchisement of voters—often POC often voting Blue—in all kinds of states where these issues hurt the most. It’s the complete ineffective handwringing of the current Democratic party supposedly “in power” who can’t seem to do anything to stop these things. It’s all of this and so much more (COVID-19 necropolitics, massive wage inequity, near total lack of social safety net, etc., etc., take your pick).

It’s the reality of any or all kinds of people who would read this and say, Chloe, you’re overreacting, and then continue to do nothing. It’s the despair among those of us who are most vulnerable to wonder, well what can we even do?

Which is why movies like V for Vendetta can be such a contradictory comfort to us. For all of its harrowing visions of a totalitarian society that could one day be ours, those of us in the States get to say, “Oh well all that stuff happens in the UK, not here.” (As for what’s happening in the UK currently, it’s no better than the US. Just read this recent article full of transphobic bias that the BBC refuses to retract even after strong criticism of its journalistic rigor, and then Google one of their main interviewees for the article, Lily Cade, if you dare.) Those in the UK get to say, “Oh well all that stuff happens in an alternate future, not here.” And of course, we all get to say, “Oh well all that stuff happens in a movie, based on a comic book, and all in fiction, not here.” But then at the same time, as we notice the striking similarities within to our current events, especially after four years of Donald Trump and the impending threat of another four in 2024, we can triumph in the (morally ambiguous) heroics and ultimate sacrifice of V (Hugo Weaving) that lead to the overthrow of all of these corrupt fascistic governmental confines. It takes a guy in a mask and cape to defeat the evil of the ruling powers that everyone in England, circa (we hope and pray alternate) 2027, feared so much. The movie makes us feel for a little over two hours that we can defeat the evil of our ruling powers giving into and spreading and governing with fear today. But, like I just said we all hypothetically said, it’s just a movie. It’s all fiction. “Superheroes”—especially if we define them according to the tropes of DC and/or Marvel—aren’t real.

At the end of the film, when detective inspector Finch (Stephen Rea) asks Evey “Who was he [V]?” to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s booming “1812 Overture,” she replies, “He was Edmond Dantes. And he was my father...and my mother. My brother. My friend. He was you...and me. He was all of us.” And we feel lifted up, empowered, identified with a greater cause, as if we too can stand up against fascism in all its forms. We can be the “superhero” with a cape and a mask—why do you think so many people keep buying Guy Fawkes masks and hacktivist group Anonymous rallies behind it as their identifying symbol? But I think we tend to identify too much with V the “dangerous killing machine with a fetish for Fawkesian masks,” as described by Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry). But not nearly enough with the nameless concentration camp prisoner with disfiguring burns all over his entire body who became him. And not enough with the pile of bodies of fellow prisoners who didn’t make it out. Not enough with Valerie. Not enough with everyone they all represent in our current culture, the different, the marginalized, the “least of these.” 

Before we get to any of the heroics for toppling tyranny, there’s a lot of overlooking and complacency and tardy pearl-clutching and then defeat and and vilification of everyone different from the default norm of straight white men (and women) and yet more people not caring because they get to rely upon the comfort of their privilege and then pain and suffering for everyone, often even those who who cheered on their own disenfranchisement, and despair. I know Nazi Germany is everyone’s favorite cautionary tale to bring up in cases like these and that people grow tired of the stretched and forced parallels, but it can still be informative. Nazi Germany didn’t just happen. America under Trump (or for that matter much of the worst parts of American history) didn’t just happen. What comes next won’t just happen. It’s arguably already happening. And we have to decide how much we will let chip away before the gains we’ve made are snatched away in an instant. 

So this time, when I heard that final question, “Who was he?” I focused a lot more on how much Edmond Dantes suffered to become the Count of Monte Cristo and how much his successful revenge scheme ultimately cost him, on the fact that Evey’s mother and father and brother are all long gone, on friends of mine who will be hit hardest by further erosion of liberties and vilification of intersectional diversity, including myself and those who stick by me. I thought, that could be me. It could be me. V—marginalized and cast out and rounded up and imprisoned and experimented upon and horribly disfigured—could be me. And to be honest, I feel a lot more like a Valerie than a V.

But even still, just like she says in her letters to anyone who would read them, “I love you.” I still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that people are inherently good. I want to do what I can to embody love and invest in what Richard Rohr calls the “original goodness” of them and all things (“original sin” is an invention of St. Augustine’s in the fifth century, it’s not in the Bible and definitely not real!) through my actions, how I see and treat others who are different from me as fellow image-bearers of the divine, if you’ll allow the theological phrasing. So I want to throw what very little weight I have around to try and fight off all of these acts of hate I’ve discussed at length here. I can only hope and pray that enough of you, especially with a lot more privilege than I have, love me too and want to do something about it. Otherwise marginalized people like (and unlike) me will be the first to pay the price of how much worse things could—at first incrementally and then dramatically—get while we continue to tell ourselves and others, “stop overreacting, don’t be hyperbolic, aren’t you being dramatic?” Valeries like me will disappear and die, and V won’t be there to save us. 

I know I said near the beginning of this blog post that I consider myself an optimist and a lot of this sounds rather pessimistic. But I do need something to be optimistic about (and don’t patronize me), before the next Fifth of November comes too late.