The Fuel of the Demagogue

Having been mildly intrigued by the commercials for it, I recently watched V for Vendetta, and as Christian conservatives often observe in the world of contemporary art and entertainment, the particular fantasy most emphasized in film was the liberal fantasy of standing up against conservative tyranny.

The basic outline of the story is compelling (if common) enough. A budding dictatorial politician, while seeking to develop a biological weapon, creates a superhero who will one day topple his regime. The dictator follows a clichéd Hitlerian model both of method and of aesthetic and, in an absolutely believable progression, begins rounding up and executing opposition and activists. Even his portrayal as a religious demagogue is, if predictable and unimaginative, not distracting within the plot (perhaps because it is so completely predictable).

The jarring imposition of the writers' ideology makes its appearance, however, with the unexplained revelation of a homosexual holocaust. One can suppose that the authors leave it as understood that the dictator villified gays in order to tug at public sentiment and redirect proper righteous feelings away from himself. That's believable enough, given all that must be accepted for the sake of the story to that point, but what disrupts the theatrical illusion is the emphasis on the tribulations of that small group.

It also doesn't comport with trends that we actually find in reality (especially in England), which the writers would have us believe could in fact lead to the fantasy world that they have created. Witness:

A police force was caught up in a freedom of speech row after its officers arrested an anti-gay campaigner for handing out leaflets at a homosexual rally.

South Wales police admitted evangelical Christian Stephen Green was then charged purely because his pamphlets contained anti-gay quotations from the Bible. ...

In recent months incidents have included a Metropolitan Police warning to author Lynette Burrows that she was responsible for a 'homophobic incident' after she suggesting on a BBC Radio Five Live programme that gays did not make ideal adoptive parents.

Another warning about future behaviour was delivered by Lancashire police who visited the home of a Christian couple after they complained about their local council's gay rights policies.

The Met Police in London also investigated former Muslim Council of Britain leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie after he gave an interview saying homosexuality was harmful. However, no prosecution followed in that case.

The Hollywooden would do well — not the least because it would make them better artists — to realize that emotions can be stoked from more directions than the right.

ADDENDUM:
I should temper this post with an acknowledgment that the source of my quotation, the Daily Mail, is also recently notable for apparently having concocted friction — or at least unjustifiably embellishing it — between Pope Benedict and an evolution-believing priest, Father George Coyne, Vatican Observatory head for nearly three decades. Indeed, the Mail article in question exposes itself as shoddy work by the incoherency of its storyline's logic.