Okay, let me make myself perfectly clear. Then, I’m dropping it.
Those words, “fascism” and “anarchy,” occur nowhere in the film. It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you’ve got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they’re bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It’s a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what “V for Vendetta” was about.* It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn’t it have been more direct to do what I’d done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?
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* emphasis mine
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V for Vendetta is a well-made movie that betrays its source material with a theme that is in direct opposition to that very same source material. That theme is this:
Anarchy is freedom.
Democracy is just another form of tyranny.
Agree with the theme, disagree with the theme. Whatever. The fact remains: the Wachowskis changed what the book was about. They played bait and switch with the message. And in doing so actually created a piece of propaganda that V would have a lot of fun blowing to bits.