V for Vendetta

Sunday, February 19, 2012

V for Vendetta

“‘You’re like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman.’

‘Never seen it,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It’s your autobiography, so far as I can tell’”(Green 17).

Hazel gives a brief synopsis of V for Vendetta (which is also a book) in chapter two, saying, “The movie was about this heroic guy in a mask who died heroically for Natalie Portman, who’s pretty badass and very hot and does not have anything approaching my puffy steroid face” (Green 25).

The emphasis on heroism in Hazel’s summary addresses the varied definitions of heroism throughout TFIOS. Augustus admires the depiction of heroism in V for Vendetta, connecting with the meaning attributed to a life sacrificed for the sake of a person or ideal. This quest for meaning illustrates the struggle of trying to define the purpose of existing while accepting the inevitability of oblivion.

Hazel’s response to the film characterizes gender perspectives Green makes throughout TFIOS, declaring, “It was kind of a boy movie” (Green 35). The sacrificial heroism and heightened passionate violence in V for Vendetta appears to make it “a boy movie,” in that it suggests a connection between what boys view in culture and what subsequently becomes the obligatory response to opposition and fear. Green seems to emphasize an inversion in gender roles with how he portrays his characters and the way they address the world around them. Even in the structure of the story, Hazel’s role as narrator challenges a common stigma of epic love stories in which men narrate the tale.

[An aside: The picture above is a scene of symbolic rebirth for Evey (Natalie Portman), where she is metaphorically washed clean of all the injustices committed against her and her fears. The rain here becomes a positive symbol. In TFIOS, water is a recurring symbol, and it too retains positive connotations depending on its context. Hazel’s interaction with water throughout the novel connects back to the epigraph, in which water is both a positive and negative force of nature.]