Precious

If you haven't watched V for Vendetta, then I advise you not to watch this clip, as it will ruin the movie for you. For those who have watched it, here tis.



Here are the lines from the screenplay. To offer context, Evey is a prisoner of a totalitarian government. She was caught aiding and abetting a freethinker and radical named V who is attempting to set free the people of the country (through hijacking the media, killing high-ranking officials, etc). She has been kept in a dungeon cell and repeatedly tortured:

Interrogator: Are you ready to cooperate?

Evey: No.

Interrogator: Very well. [He stands, completely bathed in shadow. He paces toward the cell door.] Escort Ms. Hammond back to her cell. Arrange a detail of six men and take her out behind the chemical shed and shoot her.

[Evey is wreathed in darkness. She has accepted her death, stared it in the face and calmly chosen it. Bells sound, a strange chime. A stranger enters. He too is wreathed in shadow.]

Executioner: It's time.

Evey: I'm ready.

Executioner: Look, all they want is one little piece of information. Just give them something, anything.

Evey: Thank you. But I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds.

Executioner: Then you have no fear anymore. You're completely free. [He turns and walks out of the cell, leaving Evey utterly bewildered. She does not understand.]

Evey: (to herself) What?

[She listens as his footsteps fade down the hall, the door hanging weirdly open.

Evey takes a few tentative steps toward the door and sticks her head out into the empty hall, peering down both ways.

Slowly, she emerges from her cell, retracing her path down the hall that she has never seen before.

Quietly inching along the wall, Evey peeks around a corner, gasping at the rigid guard standing off to the side. There is something about the man's frozen stare that keeps her from running.

Evey straightens and crosses to the guard.

It is a mannequin.

She touches him, the wheeled platform he is mounted on rolling back against the wall. She sees a door and pushes it open to find...]

V: Hello Evey.

Evey: [She cannot quite believe it. She is shocked.] You. [Pause, accusatory] It was you.

V: Yeah.

Evey: [pointing to her dungeon cell, the hallway just beyond the door] That wasn't real. Is Gordon-

V: I'm sorry, but Mr. Deitrich is dead. I thought they'd arrest him but when they found a Koran in his house, they had him executed.

Evey: [whispers] Oh, God.

V: Fortunately, I got to you before they did.

Evey: [angry] You got to me. You did this to me. You cut my hair...you tortured me....you tortured me! Why?

V: You said you wanted to live without fear. I wish there'd been an easier way, but there wasn't.

Evey: [begins to sob, hyperventilate] Oh, my God.

V: I know you may never forgive me. But nor will you ever understand how hard it was for me to do what I did. Every day I saw in myself everything you see in me now. Every day I wanted to end it. [intensely, passionately] But each time you refused to give in, I knew I couldn't.

Evey: [spits the words out with hatred] You're sick. You're evil!

V: You could have ended it, Evey. You could have given in, but you didn't. Why?

Evey: [full of venom, hatred, disgust] Leave me alone. I hate you.

V: [passionately] That's it! See, at first, I thought it was hate, too. Hate was all I knew; it put my world, taught me how to eat, how to drink, how to breathe. I thought I'd die with all that hate in my veins. But then something happened. It happened to me just as it happened to you.

Evey: [turning from him in disgust] Shut up! I don't want to hear your lies!

V: Your own father said that artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Evey: [shaking her head adamantly, tears coursing down her cheeks] No.

V: What was true in that cell is just as true now. What you felt in there has nothing to do with me.

Evey: [frustrated, shouting] I can't feel anything anymore!

V: Don't run from it, Evey. You've been running all your life. [she starts to hyperventilate, breathing very shallowly]

Evey: [she chokes out] I can't [breathing shallowly, fast] breathe...[falling to her knees] asthma...

V: [He cradles her in his arms, his arm behind her head. There is something very tender about the gesture] Listen to me, Evey. This may be the most important moment of your life. Commit to it. They took your parents from you. They took your brother from you. [she is rocking back and forth, sobbing, totally out of control- he holds her chin with his gloved hands] They put you in a cell; they took everything from you that they could take...except your life. And you believed that was all there was, didn't you. The only thing you had left was your life but it wasn't, was it?

Evey: [she is begging, crying] Please.

V: You found something else. In that cell, you found something that mattered more to you than your life. Because when they threatened to kill you unless you gave them what they wanted, you told them you'd rather die. You faced your death, Evey. You were calm. You were still. Try to feel now what you felt then. [she slows her crying, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself]

Evey: God...I felt...

V: Yes?

Evey: I'm dizzy. I need air. Please? I need to be outside.

V: There's a lift. It will take us to the roof.

[Evey exits onto a balcony. It is the first time she has been outside since the beginning of her imprisonment by V. He offers her a cloak, but she does not take it. She walks tentatively, unbelieving, into the thunderstorm outside. We see the separate, beautifully formed raindrops falling upon her. They purify her.]

Evey: [in a tone of wonder and realization] God is in the rain.

[She is reborn. The scene is interspliced with V's freedom through the fire. She raises her arms and embraces her new understanding of herself; V recalls his own freedom.]

~

To me, this scene symbolizes the state of human existence. We are tortured, cruelly tortured by a God who seems not to care for us. We are tried beyond endurance; there is a pain that racks the soul and kills us. We do not know why we have been tortured so and then we are set free. And we realize it was all a sham. We thought it was someone evil and cruel who was torturing us, whether that was our Evil Inclination or some other tool. In truth, it was God. But God did it in order to set us free, to enable us to learn things about ourselves we could never otherwise have known. And thus the idea that the Tzaddikim see the Evil Inclination as a mountain and the Reshaim see it as a hair makes sense. At the end of time, the wicked ones see that it was only a mannequin guarding their prison cell. They were free to leave at any time. The righteous ones, however, see the entire torture chamber, the soldier who was guarding them and cannot imagine how they overcame all that terror and darkness. And then they step forward to confront God, the one who formed the Evil Inclination, who created our prisons and troubles and sufferings. And God shows us how our prisons set us free.

In a line that was cut from the screenplay, V explains to Evey that he did this: "Because I love you, Evey. Because I wanted to set you free."

Since elementary school we are taught that God loves the righteous ones, the Tzadikim, and that is why He hurts them. It never made sense to me until I saw this film. Once I saw it, everything clicked. I realized our world and our trials, tribulations and sufferings are all a construct. This is the fictitious torture chamber, if you will. The one who tortures us is God, so that we may discover ourselves and the purity that reigns within us. It is not pleasant; it is not what we desire. But it is the only way. In the strongest form possible, those who die al kiddush Hashem are those who have chosen their principles over their body; they realize this is merely a construct. But in our smaller forms and our smaller sufferings, we are purified. It is a question of who and what we become during our time in the dungeon. Do we betray V? Or do we find the integrity, that one inch of ourselves that is "small and fragile and the only thing in the world worth having," that allows us to stand?

All that we feel, all that we undergo, all that we are is a gift given to us by God, in whose eyes we are most precious. The pain He inflicts is necessary so that we understood who and what we are, and what is so much more important, who we have the potential to be.