The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema

Abstract

This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the 2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.

Keywords:

• Visceral
• Political affect
• Cinematic rhetoric
• Embodied experience
• V for Vendetta

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented as the Keynote Address at the 2009 Undergraduate Communication Research Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author thanks Greg Dickinson, Donovan Conley, Bernard Armada, Carl Burgchardt, Robert Mack, Barbara Biesecker, and Ronald Greene for their helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Quoted in Seidler, 2001, p. 133. A different, though equally instructive translation of this passage appears in Driftworks: “What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy into other things—other texts, but also … political actions” (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 9–10).

2. V for Vendetta, explains Keller (2008), “signifies outside of its own context, serving as a caution to the actual governments of post-9/11 America and Britain that … [t]he surrender of civil liberties in the interests of national security is an ill-founded enterprise” (p. 34). See also Burr (2006), Chocano (2006), Corliss (2006), Holleran (2006), Smith (2006), and Vonder Haar (2006).

3. “About the Story,” V for Vendetta at WarnerBrothers.com, http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/cmp/prod_notes_ch_02.html (accessed May 11, 2009).

4. “[E]mbodiment,” explains Sobchack (2004), “is a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble. Thus we matter and mean through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought” (p. 4).

5. For an overview of this scholarship, see Blakesley (2003).

6. As Gunn and Rice (2009) note, the “the ‘affective turn’ in communication studies is more properly described as (an) ‘about face’” (p. 215).

7. Discourse and figure closely parallel Kristeva's (2001) distinction between “the symbolic,” which entails signification, and “the semiotic,” which entails bodily drives and desires 36–37).

8. See also Eleftheriotis, 1995, p. 104, and MacDougal, 2006, pp. 24–25.

9. “Aesthetic rhetoric,” clarify Whitson and Poulakos (1993), “focuses on the human body as an excitable entity … it forgoes the attempt to communicate a particular message exactly, and strives to convey an impulse” (p. 141). Elsewhere, they (Poulakos & Whitson, 1995) add, “An aesthetic rhetoric counts on, attends to, and takes into account the body and its senses” (p. 382).

10. On this point, see Readings, 1991, p. 4, and Slaughter, 2004, p. 236.

11. According to Lyotard (1989b), “the figure dwells in discourse like a phantasm while discourse dwells in the figure like a dream” (p. 33). As Rodowick (2001) elaborates, “figure and discourse cannot be opposed. … in Lyotard's view, figure and discourse are divided not by a bar but rather by only the slightest of commas. … Lyotard finds that the figural resides in discourse as the intractable opacity of the visible” 5, 6). For further elaboration on this point, see Lydon, 2001, p. 24; Slaughter, 2004, p. 233; Trahair, 2005, p. 177.

12. “Lyotard's ‘discursive’ is the Freudian secondary process, the ego operating in terms of the reality principle. The figural, by contrast, is the primary process of the unconscious which operates according to the pleasure principle (Lyotard 1971, 1984). Lyotard's notion of the figural is formulated partly as a critique of Lacan's dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lash, 1990, p. 177). See also Featherstone, 2007, p. 38.

13. It is worth noting that figure and ground as I (along with Lyotard and McLuhan) am using them differs markedly from Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) use of them. For Lakoff and Johnson, figure/ground concerns an observer's cognitive perception of the spatial relationship among objects in visual schemas (i.e., which one is perceived to be in front of the other).

14. Space, according to Hall (1959), “not only communicates in the most basic sense, but … also organizes virtually everything in life” (p. viii).

15. Presence has long been recognized as an important dimension of rhetoric because it “acts directly on our sensibility” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 116).

16. I am attempting to resist the crystallization of discourse, figure, and ground into a rigid method, for as Barthes (1977) so eloquently notes, “The invariable fact is that a piece of work which ceaselessly proclaims its determination for method is ultimately sterile: everything has been put into the method, nothing is left for writing … No surer way to kill a piece of research and send it to join the great waste of abandoned projects than Method” (p. 201).

17. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic fanatic, who along with cabal of co-conspirators, tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605 by placing 36 barrels of explosive beneath the building. Although the plot, known today as the “Gunpowder Plot,” was thwarted by the British government, the event is “commemorated” every November 5 in the U.K. with firework displays. The film's first spoken line is: “Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.”

18. The film's intertextual gestures alone, which range from George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Rowland Lee's 1934 film adaption of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, have already been the subject of a book-length study (Keller, 2008).

19. As Travers (2006) observed in Rolling Stone, “Setting indelible images to a deft score by Dario Marianelli … speeds us along to a thunderous climax at Parliament” (p. 10).

20. I am strategically avoiding the word “text” here, as it brings with it the metaphorical baggage of reading and interpretation. A film is not a text; it is an embodied, cognitive-emotive experience arising from the unique interplay of discourse, figure, and ground at/in a particular space and time.

21. I am specifically thinking here of the sensation Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call “the clinch,” which occurs “when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so tightly in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’” (p. 168). What I am calling an “affective embrace” might also be thought in Burkean terms. Kimberling's (1982) reading of Burkean form is instructive in this regard:

If form is a set of analogs to inner states of being (Burke mentions both the “concrete” functions such as the rhythm of the human heartbeat and the “ineffable” ones such as love, guilt, sorrow, etc.), then the task of the critical theorist must be to demonstrate how these analogs actually are developed in works of art involving different media of communication. (p. 45)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian L. Ott

Brian L. Ott is visiting Professor of Rhetorical and Media Studies at the University of Colorado Denver