V is a masterwork of science fiction allegory that can inspire us on how to resist the Trump regime.
A government aggressively undermining trust in scientists, journalists, and academics. Propaganda that pushes state-approved ideology with figureheads who spout the party line. Masked men marching in the streets, abducting and shooting people at will.
This is the world of the superb 1983 miniseries V. It is also America under Donald Trump in 2026.
Yes, it’s fascism. Masked federal agents are shooting unarmed American citizens in the streets. That’s about as fascist as it gets. No, we are not helpless against it, and we certainly haven’t fallen as far as the people of Earth have in V.
I’ve thought of V frequently over the past year. My parents saw the miniseries when it came out, and showed it to me later when it was released on DVD. I was in middle school, at a ripe, impressionable age when I was starting to reckon with adult storytelling. V made a deep impression on me, not just for its exciting sci-fi action and the impressive scope of its narrative, but for its message, embodied in the opening dedication:
To the heroism of the Resistance Fighters – past, present, and future – this work is respectfully dedicated
Originally envisioned by writer/director Kenneth Johnson as an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here, V follows in the best sci-fi tradition of telling an urgent political and social allegory cloaked in genre trappings. Laser guns, aliens, and spaceships are the window dressing for timeless themes of tyranny and resistance. In fact, the sci-fi angle probably helped the story travel farther and reach a wider audience than a straightforward adaptation would have.
During both of Donald Trump’s terms, V and George Orwell’s 1984 prepared me well for the warning signs of fascism: the “alternative facts,” the cultlike worship of the Great Leader, the constant gaslighting to force you to, as Orwell put it, “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” (The Trump regime’s attempt to recast the January 6th insurrection as a peaceable assembly may be the most notorious example.) Aside from a few bad matte shots, V holds up brilliantly. Its storytelling is as gripping and powerful as ever. What can it teach us today about how to recognize and fight back against Trump and MAGA?
We open in El Salvador, as freelance journalist Mike Donovan and his assistant Tony document a civil war. Explosions boom, gunshots ping, and helicopters zoom overhead as a revolutionary insists that he’ll keep on fighting until his country is free. There’s the theme, right there in the opening seconds: resistance against tyranny. Donovan films the freedom fighter bravely planting his feet and facing off against a strafing helicopter armed with nothing but a pistol. Remember this image: we’ll come back to it in Part Two.
After Donovan and Tony escape from the war zone, Donovan turns to see – whoa! An alien spacecraft covering half the sky, the first of many strikingly cinematic moments throughout the two-part miniseries.
The next half-hour is a masterclass in tight, efficient storytelling, as we’re introduced to more than 20 named characters, while still following the single narrative thread of the mysterious alien Visitors. After parking their flying saucers over most major cities on Earth, the Visitors make peaceful contact with humanity. They look just like us, with only their electronically modulated voices signaling their extraterrestrial origins. They insist that they’re here just so humanity can help them manufacture certain chemicals they need to run their society. In return, they’ll vastly accelerate our technological development.
The deal is too good to be true, as brilliantly suggested by subtle cues. At a digsite where paleontologists uncover remains of ancient hominins, the scientists watch in wonder as a Visitor spacecraft flies overhead. An ominous shot juxtaposes an ancient skull with the alien vessel, suggesting that these newcomers mean death.
The action generally follows two protagonists: Donovan, as his attempts to investigate the aliens get him branded as a fugitive, and biochemist Julie Parrish, who gradually begins to organize a resistance movement to oppose the Visitor regime. But the brilliance of V is how effectively our sympathies are spread among many characters, established with quick, concise, human moments. The plot defies easy summary. We follow Donovan and Julie, but also several interconnected households of ordinary people in Los Angeles, who show us a spectrum of varied reactions to the onset of fascism:
- Donovan’s mother Eleanor immediately insists that her husband lobby for the Visitors to use his chemical plant. We later see her shamelessly flirt with a Visitor officer. For the scheming Eleanor, ideology doesn’t matter, only proximity to power.
Her mercenary zeal for cozying up to the regime is reminiscent of America’s tech elite: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others who obsequiously crowd in the background for group photos of themselves with the Great Leader, in hopes of currying favor for themselves and their companies. - Donovan’s newscaster colleague and old flame Christine Walsh is recruited by the Visitors to serve as their official spokesperson. (One could also say seduced – a scene between Christine and Visitor leader Diana has strong sexual undertones.) She’s enthusiastic about the job as an “excellent career move,” and when Donovan warns that she may be compromising her objectivity, she brushes off his concerns: “It’s the perfect opportunity to get really inside stuff, exclusive stuff… I’m sure to get a book out of it at the very least.”
Why work for a fascist president? Perhaps because you believe you can control him, use the position as a career stepping-stone, and escape with your objectivity intact, and maybe a book deal to boot. Scores of former Trump staffers such as John Bolton, Cassidy Hutchinson, Kellyanne Conway, Mark Meadows, and more did indeed get their book deals… and the books flopped. - Daniel Bernstein, a troubled teen boy with a drinking problem who can’t hold down a job, finds meaning by joining the Friends of the Visitors, a youth auxiliary movement with clear parallels to the Hitler Youth. His journey towards becoming a full fascist foot soldier is reminiscent of the ways that young men today are drawn toward the manosphere and vile figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. A movement that promises meaning and direction and whispers in your ear that you have the natural right to dominate others: it’s catnip to insecure and resentful young men.
- Daniel’s grandfather Abraham is a Holocaust survivor who, with every step the Visitors take toward total control, sees more clearly the beginnings of tyranny. Leonardo Cimino is perfectly cast, conveying Abraham’s entire thought process with subtle, wordless shifts of expression. Every time the film cuts to Abraham reacting to another Visitor announcement, you can see that this man knows exactly what’s going on.
The first signs of trouble arrive when the Visitors begin secretly abducting and murdering scientists. In public announcements, they allege the discovery of a “scientist conspiracy,” primarily of anthropologists and biochemists, whose members allegedly sought to seize Visitor motherships. The first step for any fascist regime is to attack sources of independent knowledge production: scientists, journalists, academics, so that the only acceptable truth is the one produced by the state or the Leader. Hence Trump’s relentless attacks for over a decade now on the media, which he has dubbed “the enemy of the people.” In his second term, Trump has also accelerated his assault on research institutions like the Ivy League schools and the University of California, threatening to withhold funds unless they cave to his ideological demands.
The main reason the Visitors target scientists, of course, is that they’re the ones capable of figuring out the truth. The truth that Donovan uncovers while snooping around on a mothership…
They’re lizard people!!
The reveal of Diana and her associate Steven eating guinea pigs and mice is memorably creepy, and the scene where Donovan literally rips the mask off a Visitor to reveal a lizard face still gives me a jolt. It’s thematically appropriate: rip the proverbial mask off a fascist and you’ll find the ugliness inside. But also, it’s just plain cool: a visceral creature-feature shock.
By now, the telltale signs of tyranny are accelerating. The propaganda posters go up. Mass resentment of scientists begins to fester. Fascism requires an “Other” to rally against: a class of people deemed depraved, dirty, evil, even subhuman. Not “one of us.” In V, scientists become the Other, as we see a gang of thugs throw rocks through the window of a paleontologist’s house. In Trump’s regime, immigrants are the Other, as we see J.D. Vance and other Christian Nationalists create new categories of people such as “Heritage Americans” for the purpose of identifying who “we” are and who we are permitted to discriminate against.
And then the armed, masked men start patrolling the streets. Do I even need to spell out the modern-day parallels here?
Though this alien invasion provides the setup, and the film includes many playful references to sci-fi pop culture (a marching band plays the Star Wars theme, two characters play Space Invaders on Atari), for most of Part One, the sci-fi elements fade into the background and we mostly focus on ordinary people in scenes that could refer to any real-life authoritarian regime. Daniel’s parents begin to walk on eggshells around him, no longer certain that he wouldn’t inform on them. Julie, as she sees her scientist colleagues disappear one by one, organizes a resistance meeting. Though it was easier to get off the grid in 1983, the same principle applies today: resistance begins locally, with groups of people building support networks for their own communities. We’ve seen this demonstrated in Minneapolis and Chicago, where local citizens band together to obstruct ICE and warn neighbors of raids.
Part One ends with two gripping dramatic moments. Abraham agrees to shelter a paleontologist, his wife, and three kids in his backyard poolhouse. When his son expresses reservations, Abraham responds with a powerful speech, revealing that “your mother didn’t have a heart attack in the boxcar;” she died in the Nazi gas chambers.
“Perhaps if somebody had given us a place to hide… Don’t you see, Stanley, they have to stay, or else we haven’t learned a thing.”
On the nose? Yes, but it should be. Abraham reminds us of the consequences of demonizing the Other, and the failure to help those in need.
The second moment follows the first resistance action of Julie’s cell. During a raid for medical equipment, Julie’s colleague Ben is mortally wounded by Visitor gunfire. She drives Ben, who’s fading fast, to see his brother Elias one last time. We’ve already seen the strained relationship between the brothers: Ben, the golden boy, the doctor (Elias calls him an “Uncle Tom”), and Elias, the common thief, the street hustler (Ben tells him to “drop the Richard Pryor act”).
As Ben quietly slips away, Michael Wright delivers a heart-wrenching performance. He’s in denial, talking and pacing around frantically, anything to fill the air, anything to distract himself from the awful truth of his dead brother before him. A boombox incongruously pumps out cheerful funk music. But eventually, the truth can’t be denied and Elias breaks right before our eyes. “The doctor cannot die. The other one can die, but…” It’s an acting tour de force that should’ve won an award. And it demonstrates to us another awful truth: Elias thought he could carry on with his life, making money in his side hustles. But under a tyrannical regime, death and sorrow come to you.
Part One of V is mostly about the rise of fascism. But in Part Two, we’ll explore the next step: resistance to fascism. The final scene of Part One points the way forward. Abraham catches a group of kids spray-painting some Visitor propaganda posters. He shows them a new emblem to paint: the letter V, for Victory. It’s right there in the title. In the long run, tyranny always loses. As long as we resist, we will have victory.
