Police and thieves in the street.

David Den­by’s Tory take on V for Vendet­ta came as some­thing of a sur­prise. Ignor­ing anar­chism alto­geth­er, Den­by takes the Dad­dy War­bucks short-course in lib­er­al democ­ra­cy, the sort of good for the goose blath­er that reach­es equal­ly abrupt and sim­ple-mind­ed con­clu­sions about rad­i­cal vio­lence as it does the per­va­sive good of the sta­tus quo.

What I thought was some­thing else entire­ly. Draw­ing on what I could remem­ber from Alan Moore’s rev­e­la­to­ry graph­ic nov­el, and bring­ing to it every­thing impor­tant about Lip­stick Traces’ punk iconog­ra­phy of re-imag­ined maps and the tin-whistler play­ing his out-of-tune song in Lon­don’s rainy streets. Den­by’s reduc­tion­ist eval­u­a­tion redounds with the sim­plis­tic nar­row­ness of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics: there’s this par­ty, and there’s that one; ergo, a democ­ra­cy! Let a thou­sand flow­ers bloom!

In the past year, much was made of ter­ror­ist chic, a fact Den­by acknowl­edges, but by lam­bast­ing straw­men for what he per­ceives to be in bad taste, he does a greater dis­ser­vice to polit­i­cal dis­course than to the film itself. It’s safe to say that recent events indi­cate that with suf­fi­cient will, ter­ror­ists will destroy what they wish, so how do images of The Old Bai­ley burn­ing change any­thing? Should fluff like Inde­pen­dence Day be cen­sored in the way the World Trade Cen­ter was edit­ed from our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry in the after­math of Sep­tem­ber 11th? It’s as though Den­by would pre­fer explic­it­ly escapist fare, but the ques­tion remains: cui bono?

As an aside: is it mere coin­ci­dence that the sto­ry’s cen­tral pro­pa­gan­dist, the mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal Lewis Prothero (played deft­ly by Roger Allam), bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to Christo­pher Hitchens?

The Kinks — “Vic­to­ria”