Critical Studies in Media Communication

Vol. 27, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 3954

The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta:

On Political Affect in Cinema
Brian L. Ott

This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the
2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that
focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes
viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic
struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic
rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.
This manuscript is included in a special issue titled, Space, Matter, Mediation, and
the Prospects of Democracy, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2010.

Keywords: Visceral; Political affect; Cinematic rhetoric; Embodied experience; V for

Vendetta

What is important in a text is not its meaning, what it is trying to say, but what it
does and causes to be done. What it does: the affective charge it contains and
communicates; what it causes to be done: the transformation of these potential
energies into something else . . . political actions. Jean-François Lyotard1
On March 17, 2006, the much hyped film, V for Vendetta, opened in theaters
worldwide. Although the film, which is based on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s
graphic novel of the same name, represented James McTeigue’s directorial debut, it
was far from a novice enterprise. The Wachowski Brothers*whose résumé included
writing and directing The Matrix (1999), which garnered academy awards for best
sound, film editing, sound effects editing, and visual effects*co-wrote the screenplay
for Vendetta and, along with Joel Silver of Die Hard (1988, 1990) and Lethal Weapon
(1987, 1989, 1992, 1998) fame, served as the film’s producers. With such an
impressive pedigree, and as the Wachowski Brothers’ first major undertaking since

Brian L. Ott is visiting Professor of Rhetorical and Media Studies at the University of Colorado Denver.
An earlier version of this manuscript was presented as the Keynote Address at the 2009 Undergraduate
Communication Research Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author thanks Greg Dickinson, Donovan
Conley, Bernard Armada, Carl Burgchardt, Robert Mack, Barbara Biesecker, and Ronald Greene for their helpful
conversations and comments on earlier drafts. Correspondence to: Department of Communication, University
of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA. Email: Brian.Ott@ucdenver.edu

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/15295030903554359
40 B. L. Ott
completing their epic Matrix trilogy in 2003, Vendetta was highly anticipated by
critics and the public alike. Despite its impressive showing at the box-office, however,
critical response to Vendetta was decidedly split.
On one side of the aisle were critics who praised the film as stirring, calling it ‘‘bold
and thought-provoking’’ (Puig, 2006, p. 6) and ‘‘compelling, rousing and at times
strangely moving’’ (Kenny, 2006, p. 1). On the other side of the aisle were critics who
panned it as shallow, labeling it ‘‘a piece of pulp claptrap’’ (Hunter, 2006, p. 4) and ‘‘a
dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction’’ (Denby, 2006,
p. 1). The intensely polarized response to the film was hardly surprising given its
explicit political themes and inspiration. Indeed, one critic accurately predicted such
a response in his own review of the film:
It’s quite likely that Vendetta will split the opinions in some parts of the country.
The unflinching message may be too much for some people to accept. Like it or
not, this is a film that will not leave you upon exiting the theater. It sticks with you
and makes you think. It brings up points that are worth thinking about. The best
political films are the ones that fuel debate afterwards and Vendetta should do that
in spades. (Otto, 2006, p. 11)
Although critics were intensely divided on the film’s merit, they were strikingly
unified in their interpretation of the film’s message. V for Vendetta, critics agreed, was
an allegory for life in George W. Bush’s America, and an unwavering critique of his
administration and its policies (both domestic and foreign) surrounding the war on
terror.2 This message was confirmed by James McTeigue, the film’s director, who
publically noted, ‘‘We felt the [graphic] novel was very prescient to how the political
climate is at the moment. It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by
government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people.’’3 But
merely identifying the film’s central message tells us little about how the film works
rhetorically.
My own interest in the film*following Lyotard’s lead in the opening epigraph*
lies less in what the film says or means, and more in what the film does and how it
does it. On that basis, I argue that V for Vendetta enlists and mobilizes viewers at a
visceral level to reject political apathy and to enact a democratic politics of resistance
and revolt against any state that would seek to silence dissent. In service of this
argument, the essay unfolds in three parts. The first section sketches an appropriate
framework for understanding how cinema marshals and moves viewers by engaging
them in a fully embodied experience.4 The second section offers a brief overview of
the film’s plot before turning to an analysis of its triptych narrative and affective
development. The third and final section considers the methodological, critical, and
theoretical implications suggested by the preceding analysis.

A Multi-Modal Approach to Cinematic Rhetoric

The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long
tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.5 Historically, the rhetorical
criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema,
 Visceral Politics 41

attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level.
But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006;
Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how
cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as
symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in
rhetorical studies,6 for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily ‘‘reflects a
merger of reason and emotion’’ (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007).
Rhetorical appeals are, of course, always enacted by means of particular commu-
nication media. Since it is the medium that makes rhetoric material, it is vital that
critics examine not just the symbolic and sensory aspects of messages, but the very
technologies of communication that underlie them. Thus, in this essay, I advocate a
multi-modal approach to the rhetorical study of cinema (see Figure 1), an approach
that attends to the complex relations among discourse, figure, and ground.
Before discussing each of these modes in greater depth, I wish to stress that I take
them up separately for purposes of conceptual clarity only; they are, in practice,
intensely interwoven and interdependent.

Discourse
Discourse and figure,7 the first two dimensions of a multi-modal approach to
cinematic rhetoric, are derived from Lyotard’s Discours, figure (1971), in which he
probes the stabilizing structures and destabilizing energies that animate art. In the
case of cinema, discourse describes those rule-governed movements or elements,
namely narrative and language (i.e., shot selection, sequencing, and editing), that
compose an orderly whole. ‘‘Cinematography,’’ observes Lyotard (1989a), ‘‘is . . .
conceived and practised as an incessant organizing of movements following the
rules of representation’’ (p. 170) in which any movements that do not make ‘‘sense’’
are excluded or cut. In psychoanalytic terms, cinematic discourse is a ‘‘secondary’’
process or activity because it presupposes an all-perceiving subject (already
constituted in/through language), the spectator, who is separate(d) from the
cinematic spectacle (Metz, 1986, p. 46).
In classical narrative cinema, or for Lyotard (1989a) any mainstream, realist
cinema, the spectator is always on the side of perceiving (subject), not the perceived

Mode Level Entails Enacted

signification & language &

Discourse representational
identification narrative

aesthetics &
Figure experiential sensation & affect
erotics

medium &
Ground environmental space & presence
technology

Figure 1. A multi-modal approach to cinematic rhetoric

42 B. L. Ott
(object), thus making signification and identification possible. It is the spectator who
constitutes the ‘‘imaginary signifier,’’ and creates the film, in effect, by organizing its
fragments into a coherent and unified narrative (Metz, 1986, p. 48).8 Moreover,
the spectator, motivated by narcissistic tendencies of the ego, seeks to identify with
the object(s)*characters and stories*on the screen (Mulvey, 2006, p. 346). Since the
spectator is absent from the screen, however, she identifies not with herself as an
object (as in Lacan’s mirror stage), but with the process of viewing itself (and the look
of the camera). Consequently, identification determines ‘‘the audience member’s
basic position vis-à-vis the text, a position . . . from which his or her emotional and
cognitive disposition toward the characters and the text develop’’ (Cohen, 2001,
p. 250). Discursive structures involving narrative and identification are but one mode
by which cinema moves audiences, however.

Figure
For Lyotard, discourse is always accompanied by figure*the unbounded energies and
forces expressed and experienced through the aesthetic and erotic dimensions of art
(Lash, 1990, p. 176; Rodowick, 2001, p. 18).9 Whereas discourse closes down or fixes
meaning, the figural explodes it, exceeding both rationality and representation.10
As Tomiche (1994) explains, ‘‘The figural is the name of an unspeakable other
necessarily at work within and against discourse’’ (p. 48). Although both are always
present (the figure infecting discourse and discourse colonizing the figure),11 the ratio
of discourse to figure varies according to art form and iteration. Because of its
hybridized mode of expression involving music, sound, speech, and moving images,
cinema is among the most figural and thus sensual of the arts (Lash, 1990, p. 186;
Rodowick, 2001, p. 82; Sobchack, 1994, p. 37). ‘‘Films,’’ elaborates MacDougall
(2006), ‘‘appeal in an even more direct way [than writing] to the human sensorium,
in part because of the senses they address and the fact that they address them
simultaneously’’ (p. 57). Unlike discourse, which entails distance and separation, the
figural involves immersion and immediacy, appealing directly to the senses.
Because the figural operates at the level of the unconscious, which Lyotard insists is
not (contrary to Lacan) structured like a language (Rodowick, 2001, p. 9; Tomiche,
1994, p. 48), it is a primary process and therefore does not signify.12 The responses it
evokes from audiences, then, are not easily quantifiable. Since the figural can only be
felt or experienced, rather than read or interpreted (like discourse), the rhetoricity of
cinematic figures is best approached on an affective register. Affect has variously been
defined as ‘‘the intensity that allows us to feel’’ (DeChaine, 2002, p. 86) and the
‘‘immediate modes of sensual responsiveness to the world characterized by an
accompanying imaginative dimension’’ (Altieri, 2003, p. 2). In keeping with these
definitions, I understand affect as direct sensory experiences (of color, light, sound,
movement, rhythm, and texture), along with the feelings, moods, emotions, and/or
passions they elicit. Together, discourse and figure allow the critic to approach film as
a ‘‘mind/body/machine meld’’ (Kennedy, 2000, p. 5) in which ‘‘[t]here is a continuous
 Visceral Politics 43

interplay among its varied forms of address*the aural with the visual, the sensory
with the verbal, the narrative with the pictorial’’ (MacDougall, 2006, p. 52).

Ground
Attending to cinema as a fully embodied experience necessitates looking not only at
discourse and figure, but also at ground.13 The term ground comes from the work of
Marshall McLuhan, who argued that media create the very contexts in and through
which people process their world (both cognitively and sensorily). McLuhan’s
recognition that media are environments was based his observation that different
media produce different kinds of space.14 In Laws of Media, for instance, McLuhan
(1988) distinguishes between the ‘‘visual space’’ of print media and the ‘‘acoustic
space’’ of electronic media. He, then, proceeds to demonstrate how visual space,
which is fixed, uniform, and sequential/linear, produces an experiential environment
that is detached, objective, analytic, and individualistic, while acoustic space, which is
dynamic, discontinuous, and simultaneous, creates an experience that is involving,
resonant, intuitive, and communal. For McLuhan, visual space favors a world of
observation and reflection, while acoustic space favors one of immersion and
sensation (Schafer, 2007, p. 84).
Though it may seem strange to suggest that cinema*a medium so obviously
visual*produces acoustic space, McLuhan is using the term ‘‘acoustic’’ in a very
particular way. For him, it designates an experiential environment that is
simultaneously penetrated by multiple senses: auditory, visual, and tactile (McLuhan,
1988, p. 33). The acoustic space fashioned by cinema is characterized first and
foremost by presence,15 which Lee (2004) defines as, ‘‘a psychological state in which
the virtuality of experience is unnoticed’’ (p. 32). Given the strong sense of presence
elicited by cinema, spectators lose sight of their physical surrounding (i.e., the
theater) and are transported into the world of the film (Green & Brock, 2002, p. 317).
Films, in other words, invite audiences to forget they are watching a film. This means
that one’s cognitive and sensory processes are responding to the world within the film
as though its objects and entities were immediate and unmediated (Lombard et al.,
2000, p. 77; see also Shaviro, 1993, p. 54). In addition to its obvious visual and
auditory aspects, cinema is a highly tactile medium in which the eyes, perceiving
haptically, function as organs of touch (Marks, 2002, pp. 2, 3, 9; see also MacDougall,
2006, pp. 22, 57). The (acoustic) space of cinema, then, requires that critics explore
how films ‘‘touch’’ as well as move us.
There is, unfortunately, no precise procedure, no proper proportion,16 for
analyzing the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground. The fact is*and it is a
fact too frequently forgotten or ignored*that rhetorical criticism is an art, not a
science. Criticism is, like the objects it studies, process and performance. At its worst,
it rather flatly describes that which it engages; at its best, it creatively (re)creates a
compelling sense of that which inspires it. So, discourse, figure, and ground are not so
much a method for uncovering some essential ‘‘textual truth,’’ as they are a set of
critical prompts for appreciating cinematic rhetoric as embodied experience. In the
44 B. L. Ott
following section, I draw upon them in an effort to (re)produce a general ‘‘sense’’ of V
for Vendetta.

A Film in Three A(ffe)cts

Set in Britain in the not-too-distant future, V for Vendetta tells the story of a masked
vigilante known as ‘‘V,’’ who seeks to inspire the country’s citizens to rebel against
their fascist government. Near the outset of the film, V (Hugo Weaving) rescues Evey
Hammond (Natalie Portman) from several Fingermen (secret police) intent on
raping her. Later that evening (with Evey by his side), V blows up the Old Bailey
courtrooms to commemorate Guy Fawkes Day17 and awaken the local citizenry from
their political stupor. Not wanting to appear vulnerable or lacking control, the
government attempts to spin V’s terrorist act as a planned demolition. But V
commandeers the BTN (London’s sole TV network), claims responsibility for the
bombing, and promises the city’s dispirited citizens that he will destroy the Houses of
Parliament in exactly one year. V then begins to systematically exact revenge against
various government officials who had tortured him or authorized his torture during
his imprisonment at the Larkhill Medical Research Institute years earlier. A somewhat
reluctant ally in these acts of retribution, Evey is captured and repeatedly tortured for
information about V. But she remains defiant even under the threat of death, at
which point V reveals himself as her captor and torturer, a role he assumed to help
her overcome her fears. The film concludes with the citizens marching defiantly
against the totalitarian government, and Evey carrying out V’s plan to destroy
Parliament.
V for Vendetta is more than just a story, however; it is a multi-modal composition
whose rhetoricity depends upon the distinctive interplay of its narrative content,18 its
formal structures, its aesthetic dimensions, and its underlying technological
apparatus. As with any analysis, this one will necessarily be selective and
reductionistic. Hence, my critical aim is not to account for every element and aspect
of the film, but to suggest how its basic tenor and temperature function rhetorically.
Toward that end, my analysis proceeds in three parts, organized sequentially around
what I take to be V for Vendetta’s key cognitive-emotive a(ffe)cts: repression and fear,
resistance and excitation, and rebellion and release.

Repression and Fear

The general affect evoked by V for Vendetta throughout the first half of the film is one
of repression and fear. This sense/sensation is expressed and stimulated through both
narrative and aesthetic means. At the level of story, audiences are invited to identify
principally with Evey, who serves as viewers’ proxy (DeFore, 2005, p. 6). Indeed, her
transformation over the course of the film from frightened victim to engaged and
emboldened citizen functions symbolically as our own. Early in the narrative, Evey is
attacked and nearly raped by government Fingermen for being out after curfew, itself
a signifier of government repression. In watching Evey terrorized, quite literally at the
 Visceral Politics 45

‘‘hands’’ of the government, the audience participates in her fear, a fear that is infused
with disgust and revulsion by close-up shots of one Fingerman’s black-stained teeth
and the unbuckling and dropping of his pants. The chilling character of the scene is
heightened by its location in a dark, shadowy, and confining London alleyway.
Importantly, audiences are not invited to identify with V, who dramatically rescues
her. Thus, the audience is as helpless as Evey to stop the attack, and indeed, her rescue
by V (who viewers are repeatedly reminded represents an idea) constitutes our rescue
as well. The audience is, like Evey, ultimately freed by this idea, an idea succinctly
stated by the film’s tagline, ‘‘People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.’’
But this freedom from fear does not come until much later in the narrative. At the
outset, Evey is reluctant to become involved, to stand up to the government, for she
has been disciplined by its repressive regime to suffer in silence and consequently to
conform. Aesthetically, Vendetta works to produce a similar experience in viewers.
Much of the film, for instance, takes place in V’s underground hideout and other
cramped subterranean spaces. Thus, through its consistent framing of tight spaces,
the film fosters a sense of confinement, restriction, and repression. As McTeigue
explained in an interview, ‘‘a lot of Vendetta was filmed to feel completely interior: to
give a sense of claustrophobia’’ (quoted in Lamm, 2006, p. 172). This aesthetic of
confinement is often combined with one of surveillance in the film. Shots of
Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt), for instance, typically show him on an over-sized
video screen from an extreme low angle; this has the dual effect/affect of associating
him with power and subjecting the audience to his panoptic gaze. As Barry (1997)
explains, ‘‘The language of camera angles is . . . highly manipulative emotionally . . . .
If the angle is extreme, the attitude becomes emphatic. Low angles (shot from
beneath with the camera looking up at a subject) give the subject a sense of
importance, power’’ (p. 134). The low-angle shots of the Chancellor are also shot in
extreme close-up, making his worn, wrinkled face unnervingly immediate. ‘‘In
exaggerating proximity,’’ MacDougall (2006) observes, ‘‘the close-up brings to cinema
a quasi-tactility absent in ordinary human relations. When we meet others in day-
today exchanges we do not explore their faces with our fingertips, but in the cinema
we come close to doing this’’ (p. 22). Because of Sutler’s visual framing, which is
made possible by a uniquely cinematic ground, the audience can virtually touch the
sweat oozing from his pores, which reinforces viewers’ earlier disgust at the teeth of
the Fingerman and hence the government.

Resistance and Excitation

The most explicit sense of confinement, repression, and fear created by the film
comes, of course, with Evey’s abduction and gruesome torture, which is visually told
through alternating point-of-view and objectivist shots that suture the viewer into the
narrative at a discursive level. But at the very moment in the film when Evey’s (and
therefore the audience’s) distress is at its highest and most unbearable point, the
viewer experiences (enjoys) several liberating acts of resistance. Since the audience’s
46 B. L. Ott
loyalties lie with Evey rather than V, his violent and vengeful acts earlier in the film
contribute to, rather than offer symbolic relief from, the film’s mounting tension and
‘‘sense of growing dread’’ (Puig, 2006, p. 7). During her incarceration, Evey defiantly
refuses to disclose any information about V, for which she endures even more abuse.
Her resolve is sustained by an emotional bond she forms with the prisoner in the
adjacent cell who passes her letters through a tiny crack in the prison’s thick concrete
walls. In reading the letters, Evey learns the life story of a woman named Valerie
(Natasha Wightman), a story that is told to the audience through voiceover and
visual flashback. Not only do the flashbacks disrupt the temporality of the film,
offering temporary affective reprieves from the graphic images of torture, they also
convey a sense of hope and excitement. The scenes of Valerie’s life are the most
brightly lit in the film, and they are framed to emphasize spaciousness. In one
flashback, Valerie is on a film set surrounded by rolling green hills, stunningly draped
by hundreds of billowing orange linens. To fully appreciate the emotional valence of
this scene, it is important to consider the more figural dimension of color in the film.
The most prominent color in Vendetta is a dark olive, but it is repeatedly
contrasted with a brilliant orange. In addition to recurring throughout the film, these
two colors are featured in the original graphic novel and promotional posters for the
film. The ability of color to impact mood is well established in psychological
(Hemphill, 1996; Jacobs & Suess, 1975) and media scholarship (Detenber, Simons, &
Reiss, 2000; Lichtlé, 2007; Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). In fact, as Kennedy (2000)
notes, ‘‘Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation’’ (p. 115). This is
because ‘‘color tends to be a subconscious element in film. It’s strongly emotional in
its appeal, expressive, and atmospheric rather than conspicuous or intellectual’’
(Giannetti, 1987, p. 21). The dark shades of olive and blaze oranges in Vendetta work
not against one another, but in concert. As the olive undertones foster feelings of
dismay and hopelessness, the bursts of orange stimulate and arouse excitement. Thus,
in an atmosphere colored by fear, anxiety, and distress, the film also manages to
incite, provoke, and call to action. Indeed, to the extent that Evey stands in for the
audience, her bright orange prison garb invites strong affective identification; viewers
internalize the color, its emotional texture and feel, and consequently the
revolutionary politics embodied in Evey’s transformation from conformist citizen
to social dissident.

Rebellion and Release

After weeks of torture, Evey’s captor informs her that she has been convicted by a
special tribunal and that she will be executed unless she cooperates. Evey refuses and
is sentenced to death by firing squad. As she is about to be escorted to her certain
death, she is pressed a final time to supply just ‘‘one little piece of information . . .
anything’’ about V. When she calmly replies that she would ‘‘rather die,’’ she is
immediately set free. As she makes her way through the prison hallway and into V’s
Shadow Gallery, Evey begins to realize that V was her captor. Stunned by this
revelation, she stumbles, barely able to breathe. So, V accompanies her to the
 Visceral Politics 47

building’s rooftop for fresh air; standing there in the cool, driving rain, Evey is
reborn, her baptism by water intercut with V’s baptism by fire years earlier. In that
moment, she realizes that*for the first time in her life*she is truly free because she
no longer fears her government. The scene is wrenching for viewers, who learn, along
with Evey, that willingly sacrificing one’s freedoms in the name of nationalism is its
own kind of imprisonment. The rebellious energy that has been stirred up in Evey
and, by extension, the audience must be released. To fully appreciate this desire for
release, I turn finally to the film’s aural experience: its sonic affect(s).
One of Vendetta’s most compelling figural dimensions is its use of sound, for sound
is particularly influential in creating an absorptive ‘‘acoustic space.’’ A film’s musical
score, argues Donnelly (2005), ‘‘envelopes the audience, bathing it in affect’’ (p. 13).
It carnally cues viewers how to feel about particular characters and narrative events.
In the lead up to Vendetta’s final climactic scene,19 Tchaikowsky’s inspirational 1812
Overture*‘‘a reminder of America’s own national origin in terrorism against the
British crown’’ and ‘‘a traditional piece of music in the celebration of our national
independence on the 4th of July’’ (Keller, 2008, p. 43)*blares over the city’s public
broadcast system, its roaring canons rousing citizens to descend on Parliament in
spite of the curfew and inviting viewers to cheer their defiance. By the time the throng
of people, each donning their Fawkesian masks, has marched down Whitehall to
Parliament, the audience stands (emotionally) with them eagerly awaiting its
destruction. It is not music alone, however, that has brought us to the brink.
The aural aesthetic of Vendetta is perhaps best captured by V’s voice, the very
tempo, texture, and rhythm of which calls the audience to action (as much as his
words). The oral dimension of speech*what Barthes (1977) would call ‘‘the grain of
the voice’’ (p. 181)*‘‘is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response’’
(Lunceford, 2007, p. 83). As Puig (2006) observed in USA Today, V*despite being
hidden behind an immobile mask*is ‘‘able to convey volumes [of emotion] with
subtle, fluid gestures and expressive vocal cadences’’ (p. 8). The rhythmic grain of V’s
voice, always building in intensity, always swelling in exigency, generates the desire for
ecstatic release precisely because its escapes and exceeds all (rational) meaning. The
sound of V’s voice does not represent anything; it simply offers the promises of
explosion, of jouissance, of the coming undone of the subject and its subjugation.
Vendetta propels the audience ineluctably toward this moment of total expenditure
and abandon with panoramic shots of London, and, finally, the film’s visual and aural
climax*the stunning and booming explosion of Parliament.

Emotional Currents: The Implications of V for Vendetta

In the preceding analysis, I have attempted to (re)create a general sense of how V for
Vendetta moves audiences. Adopting a multi-modal approach to cinematic rhetoric
that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I specifically argued
that Vendetta*through an array of visceral resonances, pulsations, intensities, and
sensations*invites viewers to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of
democratic struggle. As with any film, not all viewers will respond to Vendetta’s
48 B. L. Ott
rhetoric*its invitations to action*in the same way. Audience responses to rhetorical
experiences20 are as complex as those experiences themselves and are, at a minimum,
influenced, constrained, and enabled by audiences’ personal politics, background,
and previous (rhetorical) experiences. As reviews of the film cited in the introduction
to this essay indicate, audiences did, in fact, respond variously to V for Vendetta.
What, then, can be learned from an analysis of the sort I have undertaken? In the
remainder of this essay, I probe what I see as the three primary implications of this
study.
The first implication is on the order of method. That audiences can and do
respond differently to particular rhetorical experiences such as a film does not in any
way obviate the fact that a given rhetorical experience functions in a particular way.
I can, for instance, urge readers to accept the claim made in the previous sentence
(which I have already done through argument), but I cannot force them to. That
some readers will choose not to accept the claim does not alter what the claim urges
or how it urges it. Consequently, the task of the rhetorical critic is to show how a
particular rhetorical experience works, and that requires developing and implement-
ing critical tools appropriate to the experience under investigation. In this essay,
I have proposed that to more fully understand the rhetorical experience of a film,
critics should attend to cinema in all its complexity by adopting a multi-modal
approach involving discourse, figure, and ground.
A second implication has to do with the relation between politics and mass or ‘‘pop’’
art. An analysis of V for Vendetta suggests that mainstream mass art can be politically
progressive and counter-hegemonic. Since the Frankfurt scholars first began
theorizing the ‘‘culture industry’’ (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2001), critics have tended
to regard mass culture as an instrument of ideological reproduction and hegemonic
domination, locating resistance mostly in elite or avant-garde art, what Lyotard
(1989a), in the case of film, has called ‘‘acinema.’’ In those instances in which popular
cultural products have been heralded as transgressive, the emphasis has typically been
on either the individual, fleeting, and tactical character of the resistance (in the
tradition of de Certeau [1984]) or its relation to a specific subculture (in the tradition
of Hebdige [1979]). Commenting on Vendetta’s politics though, Keller (2008) notes:
Seldom do films make as heavy-handed an effort to intervene in complicated social
process that have the capacity to impact the disposition, direction, and duration of
political policy as does V for Vendetta, which warns its audience that a population
should never trust its government to restore freedoms once they have been
undermined in the interests of national security. (pp. 5859)
It’s easy, even fashionable, today to retrospectively critique the Bush administration
for its unilateral efforts to expand executive powers, for its use of torture (Abu
Ghraib), for its program of domestic eavesdropping and surveillance (FBI and NSA
wire tapping), for its infringement on personal privacy by conducting unwarranted
searches and seizures, and for its trampling of basic civil liberties by denying due
process and habeas corpus at detention camps (Guantánamo Bay) and secret CIA
black sites. But V for Vendetta rendered these same critiques in early 2006 while the
 Visceral Politics 49

vast majority of Americans held their tongues. As political rhetoric, V for Vendetta
urged viewers not to passively sit by as their rights and liberties were being curtailed,
and empowered viewers to question and speak out against their government.
A third, and perhaps the most important, implication of this study concerns the
affective dimensions of politics, how bodies are mobilized (called to action) at a
material level. Reflecting on this point in relation to cinema, Shaviro (1993) writes:
Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal
reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame. . . .[S]uch
affective experiences directly and urgently involve a politics. Power works in the
depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the disembodied realm of
‘representation’ or of ‘discourse’. (p. vii)
Based on an analysis V for Vendetta, Shaviro’s point can be extended and refined in
two important ways. One way involves how we think about the relation of affect to
bodies. That Vendetta evoked strong affective responses from viewers is certain (as even
those who disliked it, disliked it intensely), but different bodies had different affective
responses. Why? I want to suggest it is because of what those bodies brought to the film.
Affects involve a corporeal continuum, which ranges, on one end, from the
experiencing body (i.e., immediate sensations of movement, color, and sound, for
instance) to, on the other end, our body of experience (i.e., our body’s memory of
previous sensations). Upon entering a room, one can immediately sense the mood or
atmosphere because one’s body is responding directly to the sensory stimuli in that
environment (the experiencing body) and to previous environments that felt similar
(our body of experience). Films function much like rooms do in this example. In
experiencing a film, one’s body both (1) responds to the discursive and figural
elements of the film and (2) recalls previous cinematic and non-cinematic
experiences, which in combination evoke affective responses.
For those who came to the film with memories of repression already inscribed on
their bodies by life in George W. Bush’s America, their body of experience resonated
strongly with their experiencing body in the theater. In other words, since how
‘‘feelings feel in the first place may be tied to a past history of readings, in the sense
that the process of recognition (of this feeling, or that feeling) is bound up with what
we already know’’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 25), for some the social climate of the U.S. and
the general mood of Vendetta could be said to participate in an affective embrace.21
It would be naı̈ve, however, to think that everyone’s experience of Bush’s America was
repressive. For many, Bush’s politics and policies made them feel safer and more
comfortable, in which case there was a vast gulf between their existing body of
experience and their experiencing body in the theater. In this scenario, the result
would likely be more akin to an affective repulsion than embrace.
Another way to refine Shaviro’s point is to reflect on how affect operates politically.
The great twentieth-century theorist of symbolic action, Kenneth Burke (1969),
maintains that an ‘‘attitude’’ is often an incipient action, an orientation or
predisposition toward the world and thus ‘‘the first step towards an act’’ (p. 236).
And attitudes, as this study has demonstrated, entail fully embodied experiences.
50 B. L. Ott
Affect, as well as (and in combination with) reason, inclines us to form and adopt
some attitudes and not others. ‘‘Affect,’’ explains Tomkins (1981), ‘‘can determine
cognition’’ (p. 324), for ‘‘motivation itself . . . is the business of the affect system’’
(Sedgwick, 2003, p. 20). Thus, we might begin to think of affects, and in particular
the affective dimensions of embodied experience, as incipient attitudes, as energies,
intensities, and sensations that function as the first step towards an evolving attitude.
Indeed, it is through the intersection of affect, attitude, and action that Vendetta
moves viewers at a material, bodily level to enact a politics of resistance and revolt*a
politics that is, in a word, visceral.

Notes
[1] Quoted in Seidler, 2001, p. 133. A different, though equally instructive translation of this
passage appears in Driftworks: ‘‘What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it
does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and transmits. What it
incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy into other things*other texts, but
also . . . political actions’’ (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 910).
[2] V for Vendetta, explains Keller (2008), ‘‘signifies outside of its own context, serving as a
caution to the actual governments of post-9/11 America and Britain that . . . [t]he surrender
of civil liberties in the interests of national security is an ill-founded enterprise’’ (p. 34). See
also Burr (2006), Chocano (2006), Corliss (2006), Holleran (2006), Smith (2006), and
Vonder Haar (2006).
[3] ‘‘About the Story,’’ V for Vendetta at WarnerBrothers.com, http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.
com/cmp/prod_notes_ch_02.html (accessed May 11, 2009).
[4] ‘‘[E]mbodiment,’’ explains Sobchack (2004), ‘‘is a radically material condition of human
being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in
an irreducible ensemble. Thus we matter and mean through processes and logics of sense-
making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought’’ (p. 4).
[5] For an overview of this scholarship, see Blakesley (2003).
[6] As Gunn and Rice (2009) note, the ‘‘the ‘affective turn’ in communication studies is more
properly described as (an) ‘about face’’’ (p. 215).
[7] Discourse and figure closely parallel Kristeva’s (2001) distinction between ‘‘the symbolic,’’
which entails signification, and ‘‘the semiotic,’’ which entails bodily drives and desires
(pp. 3637).
[8] See also Eleftheriotis, 1995, p. 104, and MacDougal, 2006, pp. 2425.
[9] ‘‘Aesthetic rhetoric,’’ clarify Whitson and Poulakos (1993), ‘‘focuses on the human body as an
excitable entity . . . it forgoes the attempt to communicate a particular message exactly, and
strives to convey an impulse’’ (p. 141). Elsewhere, they (Poulakos & Whitson, 1995) add,
‘‘An aesthetic rhetoric counts on, attends to, and takes into account the body and its senses’’
(p. 382).
[10] On this point, see Readings, 1991, p. 4, and Slaughter, 2004, p. 236.
[11] According to Lyotard (1989b), ‘‘the figure dwells in discourse like a phantasm while discourse
dwells in the figure like a dream’’ (p. 33). As Rodowick (2001) elaborates, ‘‘figure and
discourse cannot be opposed. . . . in Lyotard’s view, figure and discourse are divided not by a
bar but rather by only the slightest of commas. . . . Lyotard finds that the figural resides in
discourse as the intractable opacity of the visible’’ (pp. 5, 6). For further elaboration on this
point, see Lydon, 2001, p. 24; Slaughter, 2004, p. 233; Trahair, 2005, p. 177.
[12] ‘‘Lyotard’s ‘discursive’ is the Freudian secondary process, the ego operating in terms of the
reality principle. The figural, by contrast, is the primary process of the unconscious which
 Visceral Politics 51

operates according to the pleasure principle (Lyotard, 1971, 1984). Lyotard’s notion of the
figural is formulated partly as a critique of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured
like a language’’ (Lash, 1990, p. 177). See also Featherstone, 2007, p. 38.
[13] It is worth noting that figure and ground as I (along with Lyotard and McLuhan) am using
them differs markedly from Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) use of them. For Lakoff and
Johnson, figure/ground concerns an observer’s cognitive perception of the spatial relation-
ship among objects in visual schemas (i.e., which one is perceived to be in front of the other).
[14] Space, according to Hall (1959), ‘‘not only communicates in the most basic sense, but . . .
also organizes virtually everything in life’’ (p. viii).
[15] Presence has long been recognized as an important dimension of rhetoric because it ‘‘acts
directly on our sensibility’’ (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 116).
[16] I am attempting to resist the crystallization of discourse, figure, and ground into a rigid
method, for as Barthes (1977) so eloquently notes, ‘‘The invariable fact is that a piece of work
which ceaselessly proclaims its determination for method is ultimately sterile: everything has
been put into the method, nothing is left for writing . . . No surer way to kill a piece of
research and send it to join the great waste of abandoned projects than Method’’ (p. 201).
[17] Guy Fawkes was a Catholic fanatic, who along with cabal of co-conspirators, tried to blow up
the Houses of Parliament in 1605 by placing 36 barrels of explosive beneath the building.
Although the plot, known today as the ‘‘Gunpowder Plot,’’ was thwarted by the British
government, the event is ‘‘commemorated’’ every November 5 in the U.K. with firework
displays. The film’s first spoken line is: ‘‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the
Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever
be forgot.’’
[18] The film’s intertextual gestures alone, which range from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Rowland Lee’s 1934 film
adaption of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, have already been the subject of a
book-length study (Keller, 2008).
[19] As Travers (2006) observed in Rolling Stone, ‘‘Setting indelible images to a deft score by Dario
Marianelli . . . speeds us along to a thunderous climax at Parliament’’ (p. 10).
[20] I am strategically avoiding the word ‘‘text’’ here, as it brings with it the metaphorical baggage
of reading and interpretation. A film is not a text; it is an embodied, cognitive-emotive
experience arising from the unique interplay of discourse, figure, and ground at/in a
particular space and time.
[21] I am specifically thinking here of the sensation Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call ‘‘the clinch,’’
which occurs ‘‘when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so tightly
in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’’’ (p. 168). What I am calling an ‘‘affective
embrace’’ might also be thought in Burkean terms. Kimberling’s (1982) reading of Burkean
form is instructive in this regard:
If form is a set of analogs to inner states of being (Burke mentions both the
‘‘concrete’’ functions such as the rhythm of the human heartbeat and the
‘‘ineffable’’ ones such as love, guilt, sorrow, etc.), then the task of the critical
theorist must be to demonstrate how these analogs actually are developed in
works of art involving different media of communication. (p. 45)

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