It’s just entertainment
Why do some people always have to see a political motive behind every movie? Can’t they just enjoy it for the entertainment value?
‘Terror-supporting movie’ tops in weekend box office
‘Terror-supporting movie’
tops in weekend box office
‘V for Vendetta’ scores $8.35 million in opener.
A new movie characterized as a “terrorist-supporting, anti-Christian, neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda” film by one prominent critic led the nation’s box-office this weekend.
To say this movie is anti-war is ridiculous. It’s based on a graphic novel written in the 1990’s, well before the U.S. invaded Iraq. The producers started work on this while they were making the Matrix trilogy, which was released on DVD in 2003. You do the math, the whole project was conceived before we invaded Iraq.
This post has 8 comments
March 20th, 2006
The graphic novel was written in the early 1980s, actually. Makes your case stronger.
Funny how the conservatives look at John Hurt’s character and see a reflection of themselves. Tells you a lot, really.
March 21st, 2006
The reason people view this movie as being political is because the book it is based on and the author who wrote it are believers in anarchism. And since the heroes of the film are substate actors engage in violence against a state for political purposes, they are terrorists, and the movie thus glorified terrorism.
March 21st, 2006
This movie looks really good, partly because of the political motive. It can still be anti-war, even if it was written before Iraq. All imperialist wars are very much the same. He could be referencing to Vietnam, Korea or war in general.
It’s funny how things like Marxism, Anarchism and Terrorism can be called one of the same. Violent uprisings against unpopular governments aren’t terrorist acts. And calling a movie by an anarchist, ‘neo-Marxist’, whatever that means, is a little odd. I’m a marxist, and I happen to strongly disagree with anarchist theory. Also, there’s no such thing as neo-Marxism. It’s just some stupid term used by some right-winger with no clue.
March 21st, 2006
I tend to agree with LP Blog. I view the heroes of this movie as libertarians. Of course, there’s a fine line between libertarians and anarchists sometimes. The heroes are definitely not Marxists.
March 21st, 2006
Yes, I’d say Libertarian or Anarchists. Marxists don’t believe in taking it all upon themselves to change the world. We believe in the whole working class rising up. A strong marxist organisation in the midst of this uprising would transform a revolution into a socialist revolution.
April 1st, 2006
Benjamin, I would say a term like Neo-Marxism is legit. Neo-Marxism can refer to a number of different Marxisms, like Western Anti-Stalinist Marxism, or Althusarian/Structuralist Marxism, or the sort of attempts to reconcile the challanges Postmodernism posses to Marxism found in Fredric Jameson, who I guess could be called a sort of postStructuralist Marxist. Any of these types of Marxisms can be called Neo-Marxisms since they tend to build and evolve the Classic Marxism of Marx.
As for the Matrix being Libertarian, I’m not sure. I tend to agree that it is a cinematic representation of Baudrillard’s “Simulation and Simulcrum” which would make it more about Baudrillard’s Postmodernism sense of hypereality rather than a polemic for Libertarianism. But obviously, the movie can be read in a million different ways.
April 1st, 2006
Anti-Stalinist Marxism has been around since Stalin has. It’s called Trotskyism and we reject Stalin’s ideas of Socialism from above and Socialism in one country. And there is not Marxism that tries to reconcile with postmodernism. Marxists reject postmodernist theory because it’s a bunch of crap with no real meaning. Marxists gain their theory from a materialist understanding of the world.
Marxism does grow however. Marxism is deterministic of what’s going on in the world, and the theory can change. Marx or Lenin could not have predicted the evolution of the permanent arms economy. But adding these to the theory does not make it Neo-Marxist, just Marxist.
April 1st, 2006
Your right. But you should also take into consideration the Marxist variants of Lucaks, Althusser, the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and particularly Jameson. They are definately Marxist but take it in a different direction then just Trotskyism. What is particularly interesting is the interaction between Marxism and Structuralism and Poststructuralism. This interaction was only able to take place after the time of Trotsky. If you don’t like the term Neo-Marxist then you don’t need to use it. But it isn’t just useful for Rightwingers. It can be used to represent recent varients of Marxism besides Stalinism, Trotskyism, or Hegelian Marxism.
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