How Does V For Vendetta Change

To achieve a new world, revolution must always precede it. This can be true for any fiction that involves a tyrannical or authoritarian government, and people who wish to displace these governments. Historically, revolution have always heralded change. In V for Vendetta, this is exactly the means that V uses to overthrow the fascism government that presides over England, and thoroughly believes that “violence can be used for good” (V for Vendetta, 38:37). However, in the film Pumzi, Asha makes a discovery that can change the world she lives in for the better, but rather than attempting to achieve this better world through violence, she proves that peaceful methods can be much more effective.
In the film V for Vendetta, we understand through
the title that this film will follow the course of someone’s revenge, and through the persistent color red that is associated with the film we may also understand the chaos and blood that will ensue. V’s quest for revolution begins, not by rescuing Evey, but by blowing up the Old Bailey. To both V and Chancellor Sutler, The Old Bailey represents the past, or, as The Chancellor said: “a decadent past” (11:45), and by blowing it up, the audience can understand that V ‘blew up the past’. It is also logical to conclude that without a past, there is no future, and without a future, there is no past. For V, this represents the destruction of the current fascist government’s future. However, not only can it be the end of the fascist government, but it can also represent the end of the future itself.
In Pumzi, Asha’s journey is completely contrary to V.
The people in this society know of their past and how the Water War is what put them in the situation they are in. With this community knowing of their past and how they got there, it takes away the possibility of erasing their history, and therefore, erasing their past. After Asha had received a soil sample that was meant to be ‘impossible’ due to the council insisting that “the outside [was] dead” (07:51), she plants a seed known as the “Maitu (mother) Seed” as shown at the beginning of the film (00:47), which means “our truth” in the Kikuyu language. The name of the seed that we are shown at the beginning is not only telling us that the seed will be of great importance in the film, but it also foreshadows Asha’s role of being a ‘mother’ to the tree that will forever change the world she lives in. While V’s quest begins and ends with destruction and leaves us with a sense of dread about what might happen after the events of the film, Asha’s quest begins with a dream of the three and, consequently, of life, and ends with the rebirth of the soil’s liveliness. Though by the end of Pumzi, we still remain unsure of what might happen, we are given this sense that things might turn out for the
better.
Both V’s and Asha’s stories are both quite similar: they both follow a cause and die for it; in other words, they are both martyrs. However, there are quite a few differences between how they end up as such. V took his time to plan everything, to which detective took note of as he spoke of the feeling he’d had after he visited Larkhill: “I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It was like I could see the whole thing: one long chain of events that stretched back before Larkhill. I felt like I could see everything that had happened, and everything that was going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me, and I realized that we were all part of it. And all trapped by it.” (1:41:26-1:42:33). A pattern that was laid out before the detective, by the only man that had the time and the intellect to lay out lay out for him. Before this line, the detective says “he knows us better than we know ourselves”, which is why he knew how they would react to the things that he did even in the beginning stages. With all that time to plan, he had the very same amount of time to choose a different route. To take the route that Asha did where she used non-violent means to achieve success, and to truly make the world a better place after his death. Because with all that chaos that was roused from the citizens, and the violent destruction of Chancellor Sutler’s reign, it would only be safe to assume that this violence will persist after the events of November the 5th. However, Asha did not have the time to plan out her quest. In fact, her time out in the desert as she tries to find the living soil that matches with the one she received in the unmarked box lasted only a day, which can be known to the audience as desert temperatures drop during nighttime, and the sun does not descend throughout this short film. Though while at the community, she could have decided to rally the people to rise up against their leaders, Asha instead seeks to do it on her own and in non-violent ways. She also ends by dying for her cause, but rather than destroying the future, Asha gives life back to a land that has been vacant of it for so long.
In conclusion, while both films explore the concept of rebirth and to create a new world, the protagonists of these stories take two very different directions towards two very similar endings. Asha shows the audience that although it can be true that violence can be used for good in V’s mind, to obtain the best result is to go the route that amounts in the least amount of deaths. While V does destroy the old fascist regime, all the death and destruction are likely to keep being perpetrated after the government is abolished, and with no history, as V symbolically destroyed the Old Bailey to mark an end to the past, there is nothing that can hold the country together. However, while no one will ever remember what Asha did for her community, her non-violent ways and the fact that her life was given up so another thing could live lets the audience know that better things will come out of her death. Though violence can be used for good, it cannot be said that it is better than not using it at all.