The Cult of Personality

Creedy: Die! Die! Why won't you die?... Why won't you die?
V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.
For Benjamin, the film actor’s performance is split into the aura, or the intrinsic uniqueness of a piece of art, and the reproducible. The aura is only really experienced on the movie set, in the moment. The reproducible, (the dvd for example) is the image of this uniqueness. The reproducible leads to the cult of personality which is the commoditized personality. The personality which is the result of the illusion rather than the aura. The fact that the audience’s experience of a performer is controlled and airbrushed and edited in a certain way, leads to the desire for the audience, too to become reproducible. This is the modern phenomena of being famous for being famous. The allure of celebrity is the thrill within the illusion of being reproducible. We hear in pop songs the desire for “everyone to know my name” or to have “my face on every billboard.”
“With the increasing extension of the press… an increasing number of readers became writers.” This same phenomena of popularizing a medium by reducing technological barriers has been taking place in film for the past decade, only in film. Obviously, a quick glance at youtube will show you a mix of good and bad “amateur” video. It’s true that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.” Youtube has fully satisfied the need to be reproducible, and is starting to make people realize, I think, that the uniqueness of a piece may be an area to work on – so you can get more hits, of course.
I think V for Vendetta shows Benjamins’ distinction between the unique and the reproducible. You can kill V, the copy, the man, but you cannot kill the idea, the aura. When we view films, we can view the copy, but we cannot view the unique performance, which was creating by putting together hundreds of splices of movement. The unique performance is bulletproof, protected from our penetrating gaze.