your future dream is a shopping scheme cos i wanna be anarchy!

from dictionary.com:

• ven·det·ta (vn-dt) n.
  1. A feud between two families or clans that arises out of a slaying and is perpetuated by retaliatory acts of revenge; a blood feud.
  2. A bitter, destructive feud.

warner's v for vendetta drops this friday. this looks to be the first bonafide tent-pole pic of the year and i think it's appropriate to take a look at the word-of-mouth. as a rule of thumb i don't like to know too much about films before stepping into a screening, however vendetta has been stirring up a lot of shit online so i figure that i should look into it. a small faction of right wingers are upset about the film and, specifically, the line "Blowing up a building can change the world" and the philosophical baggage that comes with the aforementioned statement. of course, i don't lend much credence to the fox-news mentality, thusly i headed right over to high-brow cohorts denby and hoberman. minor spoilers ahead.

denby concludes that "Vendetta doesn’t parse," suggesting that the film "doesn’t have any ideas, except for a misbegotten belief in cleansing acts of violence," which sounds a lot like fight club (not a good thing?). hoberman's more so on the fence; he refers to the film as both "tasteless" and "absorbing." he notes that the wachowski's "betrayed" baudrillardian principles with their matrix films, however, by making their current protagonist a terrorist that blows up buildings, it seems the filmmakers have conjured a character that adheres to baudrillard's philosophy of "event strike."

specifically, baudrillard wrote that an event like 9/11 is, by definition "the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened," or, socio-semantically, the event that renders the 'other' uneventful. what baudrillard means here is that 9/11, while by no means more 'relevant' than, say, the balkans war or rwandan genocide, is a cultural phenomena that we collectivly anticipate and, essentially, covet. he writes:

"... we have dreamed of this event [9/11], that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because
everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree—this is
unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly
measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it."

i.e., viewers sees imperial omnipresence and, collectively, we anticipate—even desire or "suicide"—its destruction. it appears that the wachowski's have tapped into this mind set (or, possibly, have bastardized it) with v for vendetta. regardless, it appears that hoberman continues to be off his rocker. perhaps he's sweating getting a pink slip from new times?

FFT will report back after seeing the actual film.