For years I watched “V for Vandetta” and would tell my father V is the woman who wrote the letter Evey reads when V is torturing her. V is Valerie. I said this before I knew that the Wachowskis were trans, I said this before I came out as trans myself. But today it seems like one of those moments where I began to understand how I might perceive identity. But let us break down how I knew V is Valerie first, and circle back.
There’s no way that letter could have survived unless V either knew its contents or somehow held onto it during the the destruction of the facility V was in. How did V know who Valerie was? Was V that clever? How would they pass notes between cells. It seems unlikely that cells would just have large cracks in them to allow for notes to be passed. V made eggs for Evey as did her boss Dietrich who worked in the entertainment industry. It seems likely Valerie would have crossed paths with him while perhaps they were both keeping up appearances. There are so many factors that to me explained why they focus so much on this woman and leave V’s “forgotten past” so forgotten. I told my dad and my mom, and they thought it silly. But if you watch the ending, there are a lot of dead people in that crowd. There’s a lot to say “you can but you can’t trust what you’re seeing.” That you have to see through what’s being presented before you to understand the larger point being made.
I propose that Valerie was forgetting her self, her sense of being, and logged it on toilet paper. That last part is something I just thought up recently, but what I see in “V for Vendetta” is an allegory for how masculinity, and the masks we wear out of fear of it, torture us. There are also some instances of transness that I think the movie draws out without any seeming necessity. Evey is literally transformed by the torture V puts her through, and she describes an instance in which she encounters a friend who longer recognizes her. It sounds to me like somebody “passing” as people call it.
It sounds to me like the freedom a trans woman can feel once she is no longer feeling trapped by the shadow of something people strongly associate with her. The detectives constantly question who she is and try to understand her involvement with V. The metaphor unfurls further and you could see V as the shadow of something she never was. She never was actively trying to work against the system, but she became intertwined in this struggle by the nature of how she grew up.
I have to admit though, there are definitely a lot of different ways to interpret who V forgot whom V was. But I remember as a young adolescent interpreting this story this way, and today I can explore that concept further with much deeper personal understanding and with the benefit of context. And considering this was made by trans women, so of course this is what I’d see! Today I find it to be so utterly sublime that this story passed from their artistic vision through my own personal filter as a teen and I arrived at this conclusion. Ideas are bulletproof indeed.