Lose Your Illusions

I'd like to pick up the thread I started last time and discuss V for Vendetta in two additional ways: (1) how it critiques the notion of 'happiness' as an ideological supplement to an unfair rule of law (2) how it argues that only through the realization of shared human vulnerability to exclusion from the protection of the law does one potentially join a revolutionary collective.

Perhaps the most well known sequence in V for Vendetta relates how V, under the disguise of the totalitarian state, kidnaps and tortures Evey Hammond. After having been abandoned by V in a city street, Evey finds refuge with a man named Gordon with whom she imagines having a contented relationship. When agents of the state kill Gordon and Evey conspires to take revenge, V, unknown to her as well as the reader, conspires to play a trick of his own.

Recreating the conditions of his own incarceration, V tortures Evey. He shaves her head bald, drowns her, beats her and leave her alone in a dark rat infested room. All the while, impersonating agents of the state, V inquires as to the whereabouts of the 'codename V', offering Evey her freedom in exchange for the information. The alternative is to be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot.

In this sequence, Evey is reduced to the lowest possible level of human existence. She is deprived of even the most basic anchor points for her identity, a fact indicated by her head being shaved and her clothes exchanged for rags. When she refuses to provide the information asked of her, even at the expense of her own life, she is released only to discover that it had been V who tortured her all along.

When she confronts him with taking her happiness from her, V argues that 'happiness' is a prison which blinds her to the suffering visited on those closest to her: 'You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside' (170.4).

Paradoxically, he argues, only by renouncing the imaginary support of 'happiness' can she face the real of her trauma and the true contingency that actual freedom entails. Here V assumes the position of the 'analyst'. He draws Evey's own suffering out from her and forces her to face it. He does not try to reinforce her ego but rather strips it away and traces the contours of something as yet unrealized in her: 'Good. You're almost there. Go closer. Feel the shape of it... Your mother died. They took your father away. There's a little girl Evey, and she's screaming...' (170.8). Evey's cry in the following panel, in an extreme close-up, emphasizes the pain in her expression, the release of long ago repressed emotions.

With her cry, Evey realizes what her apparent happiness concealed. In doing so, she enters the world without illusions and as I will touch on next time, with a renewed sense of revolutionary purpose.

V proceeds to take Evey on to the rooftop naked in the rain, an acknowledgment of common human vulnerability and an embrace of her own contingency. With nothing left to lose she has undergone a complete subjective destitution, renouncing all of the illusions which had kept her attached to the law. She finds this empowering, raising her arms in victory (a white stain against a black background).

The parallel between this scene and V's emergence from the flames engulfing Larkhill is not accidental. Both experiences are a sort of transfiguration where an excremental excess reverses into a revolutionary one: the revolutionary derives his or her power from the complete loss of the self, of her personal fulfilment, in the name of all who suffer like she has.

Next time I want to pick up on the question of 'love' as the alternative to fear through Evey's encounter with the story of Valerie as well as the final realization of her revolutionary desire.