V for Verisimilitude

Today’s missive is a small offshoot of my movie tirade from last week. I want to bring to light an interesting article I found here.

This is an interview with Natalie Portman, an arguably decent actress who appears in the upcoming (and much anticipated by yours truly) V for Vendetta.

In the movie she plays a citizen of a modern London where a totalitarian government squeezes it’s vise like grip more and more each day, cutting off any remaining freedoms from it’s citizenry. Her parents were taken by a Gestapo like group of government thugs, never to be seen again. When she herself becomes the target of governmental harassment she find a savior in a masked vigilante calling him self ‘Code name V’.

What makes this film interesting for me even before I’ve seen it is that it’s the first thing to come out lately that could remotely be considered a non left wing propaganda film. In story line alone it more resembles the works of Orwell, Huxley, and several other futurist writers. Around my group of friends and family we’re all betting that the Hollywood types somehow found a way to make ‘evil corporations’ the ones making the government do all those horrible things…but we’ll see.

Ok, back to Ms. Portman. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ms. Portman I’ll fill in some crucial blanks for you:

She’s very bright, speaks several languages, was born in Israel and attended Harvard. Most of you have probably seen her in the Star Wars travesties, or in one of the many feel-good movies she’s done with her buddies like Susan ‘I hate America’ Sarandon. In an interview a few years ago Ms. Portman, when asked who she admired, said that she really admired women like Hillary Clinton who were smart and politically savvy and strong. (pardon me while I gag).

So to put it lightly, Ms. Portman is a flaming liberal. Taught from childhood in the ways of the hippy, and sheltered from the truth.

So how is it that someone like Natalie ends up as a main character in a movie about what government becomes when liberal and communist ideology take control? I thought it strange too. Here are a couple of excerpts from the interview in question about the film and her feelings towards it’s subject matter:

CS: What first attracted you to the part of Evey Hammond?
Portman: I was really excited about the movie as a whole; just the prospect of making a really entertaining two-hour action movie that actually had substance in it. And for the character, I think that I've always been so interested by what would lead someone to commit violence. What would bring someone to the point where they thought that violence was a justifiable means to express their political beliefs and that was an exciting sort of mindset to try and understand.

So in her 20’s she still doesn’t understand why people resort to violence. Brilliant.

CS: What kinds of things did you do to prepare for this role?
Natalie Portman: Well, the graphic novel is an amazing place to start. It's such a great thing to have an almost storyboard of the movie and to have David's illustrations of what she goes through physically. It was an incredible place to start. And then obviously there are so many things you can refer to from history that have related storylines. There are many totalitarian regimes and those who rose against them to sort of draw from, you know documentaries on people who were in Nazi Germany or people who rose against the United States from inside during Vietnam. I read about someone from a Siberian prison. These things were very helpful.

Ah, there it is, she got a shot off at the good ol’ U.S. of A. way to tow the line. Sister Sarandon would be proud.

CS: Did you see this movie as pure fiction or do you see parallels to things going on in the world?
Portman: I think the luck of having it take place in an imaginary future is that it sort of respects the audience to make their own connections to real historical and current events. And so people see so many different things in it. Joel tells this story about this South Korean reporter who was convinced it was about North Korea and was like, "Is this movie going to be shown in North Korea?" So you see how people, what context they come from, they bring to the story.

Aha! Wait, we have a breakthrough here. Apparently some people ARE aware that there are regimes like the one in the movie in our world and understand how they came to power…but only because it comes from their ‘context’. So in another ‘context’ you could say that removing a terrorist dictator who tortured, raped, burned, gassed and generally cut a bloody path through Mesopotamia for four decades makes the U.S. a ‘totalitarian regime’. Nice cognitive leap.

CS: Have any of your own political opinions changed since making the movie?
Portman: I don't know about political (thinking), but my thinking about violence has definitely deepened. I guess the main thing I thought about was what it would take for me to become violent, and I thought, "to defend my family." You realize how that can be extended on such a large scale if you think your religion's your family, or that your whole country's your family, and if the threat you're perceiving is just perceived or if it's real, and how that can turn into wars, which is something that I think all of us have had the feeling of "Why can't they just talk it out"? (laughs) It's naïve certainly, but it's in imagining how violence starts that the whole thing starts. I don't know. There are questions that don't have answers, but that you can get more complicated understandings of, I guess.

*Gasp* Did she just learn something? Better yet, did she just begin to THINK instead of FEEL? It seems that Ms. Portman no longer looks around her at the violence of our world and assumes that people are just not talking about their problems enough. I do love how she recovers her commi-composure at the end by saying that the question of violence doesn’t really have an answer, so she’ll just dwell on the question a bit more. Bravo


CS: Do you think that some of the things in Evey's past made her rife for the transformation she goes through?
Portman: Absolutely, but I think she has an innate aversion to it because of what happened to her parents too. That's always a really interesting conflict, where people have to sort of think about what they would want to do to help make the world better. She obviously was in a position where her parents chose their political ideals over her in a way, and there is also always the argument that by doing nothing you're doing a sort of violence, too, because its conforming to the status quo and allowing that violence to occur. So she goes from one kind of violence to another.

Oh, my bad. Apparently I was wrong in thinking that she had a grasp on reality. I think she needs to take a long look at real violence and get a good idea of the vast difference between nothing and something. I understand what she’s trying to get at, and generically I agree that sometimes to do nothing about a problem makes you a part of that problem. I think her misguided ideas about the existence and place of violence in society are really the culprit here.


I won’t bore you with any more from the interview, the rest of the questions are softballs and have nothing to do with her misunderstanding of life. What I find shocking is that Ms. Portman, an Israeli born Jew with a king sized brain and unlimited education at her fingertips fails to grasp certain aspects of reality, such as violence in the Middle East and America’s part in it. This leads me to wonder if she knows the truth about these things or would even recognize the truth if it walked up and forced her to wear a burka.

As I’ve said before, people who have never had violence visited upon them often do not understand it. It is unfortunate that many must learn this lesson the hard way. It’s even more unfortunate that there are those among us who incapable of understanding conflict and therefore seek to undermine American efforts to create peace and security among the nations of the Earth. They are a festering cancer on the face of freedom and the only means by which we may expunge this cancer is TRUTH.

I sincerely hope that Ms. Portman learns more about this topic the easy way, and one day goes on to tell others. That’s really all that any of us can do.