This post is the sexy pop culture final� to the stuffy political rant just below. In case you read this one first (or only) I ended the previous one with a remark about the new UK law that forbids "glorification of terrorism." And while I may have promised in that post a hot photo of Natalie Portman, this still seems much more appropriate to my question: Will V for Vendetta be banned in Britain?
Strangely, I haven't seen this addressed anywhere, even though the movie opens in a matter of weeks. From what I hear, this dystopian futuristic gloss on the Guy Fawkes legend is gonna be a great deal of fun, and is pretty explicitly pro-terrorism ��in the service of fighting a right-wing government that has stripped its country of civil liberties in the name of national security. The wingnuts are gonna go apeshit, mark my words. But, hey, that's their First Amendment right. The question is, will the British government apply its new standards to a Hollywood film? I seriously doubt it, of course, and that's just the problem with speech codes. When they attempt to be neutral � this one doesn't ban any specific ideology, just the concept of glorifying terrorism � in practice they are always applied with discrimination. We'll arrest Arabs who carry signs celebrating Islamic terrorism, but not Americans who make a movie celebrating intra-British terrorism. How can that be philosophically justified without admitting that it's really an idea � Islamism � that's being targetted? Hell, if an Islamic nation made this exact same movie but made the heroes Arabs and the time now instead of 30 years from now, I bet the movie would be banned.
