Books
· 17TH OF MARCH, THE YEAR 2006V FOR VENDETTA, BY ALAN MOORE AND DAVID LLOYD
Never got around to reading this, so I figured I would before the movie comes out. Pretty much your standard dystopia plus a vigilante, but fairly satisfying so far.
Done
Actually, that was much more satisfying than I might have imagined. Alan Moore is a good writer. Not perfect, but very good, especially considering when this book came out. This book is pretty wordy, though. Text is seriously competing with the images. David Lloyd’s pencils are decent, but the inking does it wonders.
Honestly, what really sold the book on me was seeing how far it exceeded the movie. The movie, while entertaining, is very Hollywood. Dramatic music pervades every scene, everything gleams with spit and polish, and harsher edges of the original text are shorn to fit a bunch of standard cinematic tropes. Their decision to humanize V was interesting. In the comic his motives are ambiguous, and seemingly impersonal, if not amoral. He feels no regret for locking up Evey, for toying with her at every step. In the movie, he laughs, tells jokes, and gives a near teary lament for the cruel necessity of locking up his one true love.
On the one hand, the whole arc thing is sort of comforting, makes believers of the audience, but convention isn’t the story’s real strength. The compelling and relevant aspects of V for Vendetta are the meaning and motives of terrorism, and where terrorism and our response to it are leading us. An amoral V would have been more to chew on, forcing the audience to perform at least some basal assessment as to his ultimate palatability. And the dictator should have been way less Hitlery. Like, why do we still have obviously bad bad guys in 2006? Fucking Darth Vader wasn’t even obviously bad!
ONE COMMENT
I think this is a very good assessment of V especially with regard to making him more amoral in the movie. In the graphic novel his torturing and perturbing behaviour towards Evey almost becomes too much. Women in the novel were depicted much as Picasso has described women, as “suffering machines.”
In the book “From Script to Film, the Making of V for Vendetta,” James McTeigue describes making two renditions of the Jordan Tower takeover scene; one with the guard “Fred” fainting after V’s escape from the officers and one without Fred fainting. He noted that without Fred fainting, the scene played with very little sympathy for V and made V unlikeable. He also said that there was much discussion on whether the officers should be killed or not because they were basically innocent government employees and not inherently evil.
I agree that making V more amoral would have been much more intriguing. He was already dressed for the part. I remember when I first saw the movie, at the beginning, I thought it was going to be bad. It looked like a Michael Jackson/Phantom of the Opera cornball operation. After the first time I saw it I did not think much of it and in fact dozed through some of it. I thought it was odd that I slipped off in it though because I never fall asleep in movies or public places.
The second time I saw it and I don’t even know why I did (I can only vaguely recall that perhaps the next movie I went to was bad and to kill time until the rest of my party’s movies were over I went back into V) I really became hooked on his voice, mannerisms, ambisexuality and fearful romantic overtures. If you remember, in the Matrix the love interest virtually never comes to fruition until the very end of the movie. Perhaps the Wachowski Brothers are afraid or disappointed by romance. I’ve noted on various websites that many people were disappointed by things not going further between V and Evey with one man saying a raw highly charged sex scene would have greatly added to the movie.
I think subtlety is always good in sex scenes and less is more but in V’s case something would have been better than nothing, as it was.
I think besides being more amoral, if V would have seduced or somewhat attacked Evey sexually, it would have added to the movie as well. Even a failed attempt would have helped explain his suicide by police at the end. Without it, he was way too valuable at getting rid of bad guys to contemplate destroying himself in the process.
I’m going on too long. Best wishes.