 As a lot of you know, I read the comments on every episode of this show. I love seeing people discussing and debating ideas, and I'm always happy to answer questions and go deeper into issues that I couldn't cover in the video itself. Facilitating those kinds of conversations is a big part of why I do this. But one question that comes up again and again is why I bother to talk about fiction at all. People often say, you know this is a movie, right? Yes, yes I do. But as I wrote in reply to one such commenter almost a year ago, movies are about the human experience. We tell each other's stories in order to communicate our values and ideas in a format that is entertaining and emotionally moving, and therefore memorable. And lately, as I've looked out at the world from the bubble I've been forced to inhabit for the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about dystopian fiction. Perhaps more than any other genre in literature and film, it helps us peer into society and see it for what it is and imagine what it could be depending on which values we choose to accept. These stories can be set in the most unrealistic of worlds and feature the most unbelievable characters and yet still manage to expose raw truths of humanity more powerfully than the most accurate documentary. My father was a writer. You would have liked him. He used to say that artists use lies to tell the truth while politicians use them to cover the truth up. A man off to my own heart. Dystopian fiction is both a repository for our fear and anxiety and one of our most effective means of warning about different pathways to terrifying authoritarian societies we'd never want to actually experience. There are so many great films in this genre, from Brazil and Blade Runner to Total Recall and Judge Dredd, Akira to Watchman, THX1138, Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange going all the way back to 1927's Metropolis. But today, I want to focus on the idea of dystopia and on one film in particular, V for Vendetta. Take a second to hit the subscribe button, click that bell icon and welcome to Out of Frame. As crazy as this seems to me, V for Vendetta came out 15 years ago, but in a lot of ways it's still shockingly relevant today. For those who haven't seen it, it's absolutely worth a watch. Based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore, V for Vendetta was the first film produced by the Wachowskis after The Matrix trilogy. It's set in the UK in a bleak future after a virus ravages their population, creating turmoil and terror. People look to their government for protection and their fear opens the door to the rise of fascism led by the Norse fire party and its dictator Chancellor Adam Suttler. Played perfectly to type by John Hurt, who you might recall also played Winston Smith in 1984. It paints a world in perpetual lockdown with strict nightly curfews enforced by abusive Gestapo-like police. The government fills British society with propaganda designed to foment social mistrust and hatred of religious and cultural differences, keeping citizens in a state of compliance. It's a deeply totalitarian world, blatantly modeled off of the Nazi Third Reich, where any speech that criticizes the state or rejects its values is censored and those who government officials deemed to be threats disappear in the night. After a brief prologue, the film introduces us to its main character, Evie Hammond. She's a young woman of no particular importance who works for the state-run British television network. One night she's caught out after dark by a pair of corrupt police officers, and it is V who comes to her rescue. An enigmatic masked character, V's brutality against the officers quickly turns to gentle kindness with Evie. Evie remains under V's protection for the rest of the evening, as he brings her with him to witness the event that will set the film's plot in motion. The next day, V hijacks a BTN broadcast to take credit for the bombing and announce his intention to blow up the British Parliament building in exactly one year. His speech is anthemic and bold. It's one of the most vibrant monologues I've ever heard in a film, and I think it's a huge part of why people resonate with the character. And the truth V wants to expose is dark. One of the more interesting facets of V's statement is that he ultimately places the blame for this turn of events, not on political leaders who manipulated people into allowing them to amass authoritarian power, but on the complacency of the people themselves for not standing up for their freedom. Having lived through the last couple decades, his words are eerily familiar. V finally, as V concludes his broadcast, his call to action initiates a ticking clock for British society. V is, by any definition, a terrorist. He's also a freedom fighter, and as the film reveals more and more of his backstory, it becomes easier to empathize with his motives. But at the end of the day, what V really is, is an allegory. When Alan Moore wrote the original story in 1982, he was writing from his standpoint as a Marxist, socialist, and self-described anarchist who hated Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and religious fundamentalism. He used his art to attack what he saw as a future that would be marred by nuclear war and fascist nationalism if his political enemies retained power. And I think that V's speech in the book was Moore's way of expressing some of his most radical ideas through fiction. But like any film, V for Vendetta is a product of its time and the perspectives of its creators. And the changes the Wachowskis made to the story reflect that. Instead of a nuclear attack, the initial threat that ushers in totalitarian rule is an engineered virus. And instead of subtle references to UK politics in the 80s, the political criticism seems more to be directed at George W. Bush and the civil liberties being lost as a result of the new war on terror. Of course, one thing that remains entirely consistent is the criticism directed at Christian theocrats who would have the government impose their religious values on everyone by law. V is the self-appointed antidote to this brand of totalitarianism, and his existence as a character is designed to shine a light on these same kinds of injustices present in the real world. Everything he does is meant to help us as audience members understand and identify with the underlying themes in the film itself. And even if, like me, you're not a socialist and you recognize that real dystopian societies are just as often the result of people's supposedly good intentions as they are a product of malevolence, there are still some incredibly strong themes here. People should not be afraid of their governments. Government should be afraid of their people. This is the power of great works of fiction. Art often holds a mirror to society, and we should especially pay attention when we don't like what we see. Now, V for Vendetta wasn't perfectly prophetic. It's a comic book movie after all. But like most films of its genre, it did get some things right. In the years since it was made, I think it's fair to say that the wars on terror and drugs have created a number of lasting problems, not least of which being people's general desensitization to the idea of perpetual conflict and the language of warfare. We've gotten used to the idea of a state that has nearly unlimited power to spy on citizens, violate people's privacy without any form of due process, and arrest people or take their property without a warrant or even legitimate cause. We've grown oblivious to the militarization of police and the shift away from the idea that they are here to protect and serve towards the idea that cops exist to enforce even the pettiest of laws with brutality. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, the war on terror has invited a lot of the same kinds of social mistrust we see in the movie. We've been increasingly conditioned to see our neighbors and fellow citizens as potential threats and told to turn them into the authorities if they do anything we don't like. Over the last 20 years, we seem to have abandoned the live and let live. It's a free country ethos of America and replaced it with a culture of busy bodies. You know who I'm talking about. Barbecue Becky, permit Patty, dog park Debbie, corner store Caroline, a veritable army of Karens. These are people who are constantly on high alert, looking to report any misdeed they can find. Even if they're made up. From suspicious UPS drivers to dangerous six-year-old girls, there's an endless stream of examples where obnoxious people call the police over nothing. But this isn't Mayberry and modern police aren't Andy Griffith. Today's officers are outfitted with body armor, tanks, and automatic weapons they got from the US military. Only they didn't get the army's rules of engagement or the Marines combat training. Instead, they got powerful public sector unions shielding them from the consequences of misconduct and qualified immunity, a legal concept that absolves government officials from personal liability, even when their actions harm citizens and violate their civil rights. The idea originated with a 1967 Supreme Court case, Pearson versus Ray, which was about a group of racially integrated clergy members who were arrested in Mississippi for using a segregated bus terminal. While segregation and the arrest itself were ultimately ruled unconstitutional, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that police officers and judges could be held individually responsible as long as they weren't intentionally violating the law or being unreasonable. Of course, what's reasonable is open to interpretation. Qualified immunity was revisited by the Supreme Court again in the 80s and in the 2000s. Each time, the court has held that officers cannot be personally sued for violating people's rights. The result has been an ever-growing number of cases where police officers have abused their power and used excessive force against citizens with essentially zero repercussions. Meanwhile, the radical expansion of criminal laws and tough-on-crime policies around the country has created incentives for officers to treat everyone as an enemy combatant. So calling the police to shut down a kid's lemonade stand or arbitrate a neighborhood dispute isn't just a cowardly way of outsourcing adult confrontation to authority figures, it's also potentially deadly. And while it's tempting to frame the problem entirely in terms of racism, it's a lot bigger than that. Fear does really weird things to people. I was in high school when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 12 of their classmates in Columbine, Colorado. A few days later, I was in the school library with a friend looking at a book about medieval siege weapons and debating the merits of the trebuchet. Then, in an unmistakably accusatory tone coming from the other side of the stacks, our librarian demanded to know what we were planning. We weren't planning anything. We were just nerds living in small town Nebraska. A couple years later, 9-11 brought with it a new kind of fear that people in the U.S. had never really experienced before. Terrorism. I already talked about the Patriot Act in my episode on the Winter Soldier, but what I didn't really talk about was the way that civil society changed. Just like that librarian, people started seeing anyone as a potential threat. And if you happen to be a Sikh or a Muslim, everything you did could be subject to the suspicious, watchful eyes of busy bodies who assumed anyone of Middle Eastern descent was an Islamic radical. Every time we find something new to be afraid of and let that fear guide our behavior, our society breaks down a little more. I'm worried that we're going to see this creeping social distrust fester and expand in ways that few of us probably want. Meanwhile, the disturbing precedent set by states asserting total control over their economies and human behavior during this crisis is going to be with us for a long, long time. Tonight, I will speak directly to these people and make the situation perfectly clear to them. The security of this nation depends on complete and total compliance. While there's little evidence that the last several months of lockdowns actually saved many lives, there's a lot of evidence that they caused significant damage to our society and economy, to people's mental health, and to our civil rights. Much like what happened with the Patriot Act, the new stimulus bills quietly expanded the government's power of surveillance, as if that wasn't a big enough problem already. At the same time, the Trump administration just created a new watch list that includes people merely suspected of a broader range of crimes than ever before, including money laundering, wildlife trafficking, and healthcare fraud. Any one of these new laws can become a pretext for politicians and police to abuse their power. And now, we have riots. V for Vendetta depicts a society that devolves into a police state when its people give in to fear and trade freedom for security in response to a virus. I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but it's hard for me not to see shades of that future in our present reality. And the question I want to ask you is simple. Is this the world you want? Are you okay with constantly looking over your shoulder for police, regardless of whether or not you've done anything wrong? Are you okay with SWAT teams breaking down your door and shooting at you without announcing who they are? Are you okay with knowing that your financial and medical records can be searched at any time or that the government could read your email, search, and cell phone history without a warrant? Would you be willing to start a business, knowing that your state could declare it non-essential and shut it down for months at a time? How do you feel about having a government that decides protests and criticism are no longer allowed in an emergency? And it's not just government. Are you okay with a world where your neighbors call the authorities when they don't like something you do instead of just talking to you face-to-face? Do you think that raising kids in this kind of world will create stronger, braver, and more ethical adults in the future? I don't. Fear of coronavirus led a lot of people to quietly accept deeply authoritarian policies without objection. Doing so made them feel safe, but we are only just now starting to see the magnitude of this decision. Our policy response to COVID-19 created a powder keg of civil unrest that just exploded. It even contributed to the spark that set it off. George Floyd, whose death at the hands of the Minneapolis police has resulted in both peaceful protest and destructive riots across the country, spent the last few months of his life unemployed when his job was deemed non-essential. But the idea that we can trade freedom for security has always been a false choice. What we're actually doing when we give up our rights is concentrating power in the hands of people who don't know or care about us. In the history of the world, no one living under totalitarian regimes has ever been safe. But I would take it even a step farther and argue that there's actually no point to living in a safe society without freedom. Revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having. Everything anyone has ever done that's worthwhile, from sailing the oceans to exploring outer space, starting a business or pursuing their dreams, involves taking significant risks. And some of the most beautiful and meaningful parts of life are the very things someone else would call non-essential. What is the value of life if you're never really allowed to live? dystopian fiction reminds us that our future will be shaped by the choices we make and the values we accept in the present. If we allow fear and complacency to drive our decisions, we will end up with the kind of society that stories like V for Vendetta warn us about. If we want a tolerant, free, and prosperous world, then we must all join together as people and courageously reject both tyrannical abuses of power from politicians and police and the senseless destruction of lives and property caused by violent opportunistic mobs. So if you feel what I feel and you see what I see, I challenge you to peacefully stand up for your rights, not in a year or even later in November, but right now. Our future depends on it. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. I know a lot of people are frustrated and hurting right now and a lot of what's going on is hard to deal with. One of the great things about YouTube is that we can all talk it out in the comments together. This channel is not a safe space or an echo chamber and I'm not going to go through and block people who say mean things to each other. But I do want to say that what happens here is a microcosm of what happens out in the real world. As we interact with people online, we all have a choice to treat people with respect and use those opportunities to learn something new about someone else's perspective or not. We can always find reasons to hate other people's opinions and blast them with an angry insult instead of trying to understand them. But in the past week, we've seen the worst of humanity and the best. To quote Ayn Rand, it is man's irrational emotions that bring him down to the mud. It is man's reason that lifts him to the stars. Let's use the comments here to lift each other up. I'd also like to give a shout out to our new patrons. We just launched our Patreon account last month and it's already starting to gain some traction. I'm super grateful to everyone who has already supported us and I'm looking forward to seeing how that will grow over time. Check it out. An extra special thank you goes to Matthew Tabor of The Create Unknown for being our first associate producer on Patreon and for being a good friend of the show and a huge part of its success for the last couple years. Thanks Matt. Don't forget to like this video and subscribe to the channel. 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