In high school, my new friends called me V.

My old friends mostly still called me "Alec" and the teachers were kind of all over the place, but I didn't care what they called me so long as they accepted a letter in the place of my name on algebra tests.

As with any good nickname, this was not my idea. And it wasn't, as at least one teacher assumed, because I had particular interest in the destruction of government buildings. Instead, it's because I needed a monologue for my first year at the local summer theatre camp and chose something particularly vivid and vivacious from a movie I had seen just a few months prior:

Viola! In view, a humble, vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi now vacant — vanished. [Etc.]

I'm gonna be honest. I don't know what all of the words mean. But nearly twenty years later, I still know what they are. They’re probably the last words I’ll remember.

But I haven’t watched V for Vendetta in years, if Letterboxd is to be believed: a movie “Watched” but not “Logged” means I haven’t seen it since at least 2019. But last night, it was proposed that we ring in the new year with the destruction of parliament — that I pull out the blu-ray and Kagi “When do you have to start V for Vendetta so that the bombs go off at midnight.” The answers are all about ringing in the 5th of November rather than 1st of January, but the answer was “9:57 PM” nonetheless. And the answer was correct. I didn’t check to the second, but when I watched Evey Hammond pull the train’s lever sending the armed train off it was 11:59, and when the “percussion” kicked it in was 2026.

And when the credits rolled minutes later and I turned off the TV, fireworks thundered in the distance. If only they were so motivated.

In most respects, V for Vendetta holds up pretty dang well. Coming after Spider-Man 2 but before Iron Man, it reflects a very different age of comic book movies. You can feel the comic aesthetics most clearly in the action sequences, though there are just so many shots that feel ripped from pages that I haven’t read recently enough to know if they were ever there.

(I recall Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s series — which ran from 1982 to 1985 — being quite different from the film, but it’s been too long for me to remember anything more than that. Perhaps I’ll pull it off my childhood shelf next time I visit my parents.)

Its politics are also pretty dang solid. As you’d expect from a Wachowski script, it hates the right people for the right reasons. As you’d expect from a Wachowski script, it’s also needlessly convoluted and puts too fine a point on too many of its ideas. Immediately before that monologue:

Evey: Who are you?

V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.

Evey: Well, I can see that.

V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation, I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

Ha. But also ugh. It was definitely more poignant at 14 than it is at 34. (I’m now wondering if this was the first R-rated movie I ever saw in a theater?)

V for Vendetta is at its heart a film about the impact of symbols. The mask is obviously the most iconic, but so are the fascist markings and the enormous talking head of the High Chancellor (very fun to cast John Hurt — who starred in 1984’s Nineteen Eighty Four adaptation — as a modern take on Big Brother) and the explosions themselves and the buildings they’re exploding and on and on.

Which makes it extremely fitting to end 2025 with this movie, because goodness gracious was 2025 filled with symbols. The current administration is absolutely obsessed with them: from the symbol of billionaires lined up at the inauguration to the symbol of generated slop dehumanizing immigrants as they’re abused by a different type of masked men to the literal symbols on the bullets that killed Charlie Kirk.

Sarah Jeong’s excellent Verge article Killing in the Name of… Nothing (paywalled sometimes) delves into the latter symbols and those like it, because the most meaningful thing about those symbols is that they didn’t mean anything.

V would have hated that. He would have hated “Six Seven” even more.

I don’t know what 2026 holds. In New York, we can be excited by a new mayor basically my age who has unfortunately already moderated some of his stances since winning (extremely frustrating!) and will undoubtedly disappoint a lot of people — disillusioning some not-insignificant percentage of the 30,000 volunteers who knocked on 750,000 doors away from electoral politics entirely.

But I’m still excited to have Zohran Kwame Mamdani as my mayor. He’s working with mostly good people and will hopefully do some real good for this city. It’s nice to have a single ray of maybe-hope in the current hellscape.

Beyond the boroughs, America is cracking into pieces. Who knows where it goes other than that the answer is “Not where it should.” The mid-term elections may well bring a blue wave but the elected democrats will at best stop further damage and tbh I doubt they’d do that much.

Last year, Apple TV released the miniseries Manhunt about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and capture of John Wilkes Booth. It was a good series that seems to be largely based in fact, and it is now exactly what I believe happened and I expect I’ll never do any additional research to confirm/deny. But the thing it made me wish for was an alternate reality story where Lincoln had not been assassinated and Reconstruction had succeeded (two weeks ago, someone on Reddit asked for the same thing, which is fun). What would America be like — what would the world be like if the slave-holding states had been punished for what they did?

What could America be like if the masked men rounding up residents were tried like the Nazis?

Vaudeville performer Will Rogers said “It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute,” and a corollary is that it is oh-so-simple to destroy a symbol.

The current administration’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing is awful if you care about The White House as a symbol of American governance, of the presidency as an institution, etc. If you just think of it as “The place where the US president lives,” it’s mostly just funny. Because now everyone has to think that, because that’s what it is. It can be literally shaped in the image of its resident with no interest in what came before or after.

And I hope whoever comes next destroys the gaudy ballroom because gold is ugly and I think everything he ever touched should be burned… but it won’t make The White House mean anything again. The symbol broke.

In the end, V decides the lever to complete Guy Fawkes’s mission should not be pulled by him or anyone of his generation: that they are relics of the past and it is those who have to deal with the consequences who should decide what comes next. It's perhaps the most fanciful part of the entire film: I can't imagine anything less likely than a geriatric in a position of power willingly stepping aside (see: Biden’s whole fucking deal and also the way the Democratic establishment treated Mamdani).

But it's a nice sentiment, and it's true that eventually the geriatrics will lose power (by political will or the crushing force of time) and the generation will be gone. And those of us who are still around get to decide on their legacy. Which of their actions mattered and which of their symbols are worth keeping… if any at all.

And I'm thinking it's not gonna be many.

Happy New Year, folks! Here's to a better one for me and you and everyone you love and probably not for everyone you don't.

(I didn't edit this one, so there may be some errors. Sorry but that's just newsletters babyyyyyy)