Alan Moore: V For Vendetta Sucks, And the Wachowski Bros. Are Gutless Pussies Too

I said no more on this, but when the author of the book the movie's based on pans it this badly, I have to quote him:

"V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?"

The "pussyboy" angle hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for that, Alan.

The "impotent American liberal fantasy" is what bothers me about this. It's just pure pandering to a certain sort of soft-headed, unhinged mass of partisans. It's not "brave" to pander to like-minded idiots.

And it's not smart or insightful, either.

I didn't like Moore's original book much at all, but at least he seemed to be trying to explore more than the notion that "Margaret Thostaer sucks." But that crude formulation is as complex as the film V for Vendetta gets (substituting "George Bush" in for Margaret Thostaer, of course).

Via Anarchangel, thanks to WesS.

posted by Ace at 01:37 AM

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