You're going to hear a lot about the new movie "V for Vendetta" in the coming weeks. You're going to hear "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" ad nauseum, if you're not already sick to death of moral relativism. You're going to hear a lot about the "obvious" similarities between the totalitarian state the movie portrays and the Bush government. That may be the focus of the Liberal paranoid fantasy world in which the movie is set. But it's not quite the same as the graphic novel Alan Moore and David Lloyd created a quarter-century ago. The movie version of "V for Vendetta" is just M for More Of the Same Leftist Propaganda.
The lair of the main character -- a mysterious figure in a Guy Fawkes mask, known only as "V" -- is stocked with books, art and music banned by the fascist regime. In the original, that included Shakespeare, Dante, Billie Holiday and anything Motown. In the movie version, we are shown a banner showing a Nazi swastika superimposed over British and American flags, along with the label, "Coalition of the Willing." There is also a Qur'an in the collection, a banned book praised for its "beautiful imagery." The emblem of the evil fascist government is a double-barred "Lorraine" cross. In case you've dodged the sledgehammer subtlety so far, "V for Vendetta" is less about the future than the present, less about the politics of Alan Moore than Michael Moore.
The main piece of disinformation reviewers are already sowing is that the original "V for Vendetta" was about Alan Moore's fear of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. No one who says such a thing could possibly have read the story. In fact, the history of Moore's tale started with a predicted Conservative loss to the Socialist-leaning Labour party in the early 1980s. Luckily, the Conservatives won in real life, and Anglo-American cooperation against the Soviets continued.
When Moore and Lloyd began writing "V" in 1981, the Labour Party's new leader was Michael Foot. Foot was a militant socialist whose policies included unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalisation of industry, strong union power, and heavy progressive taxation. In Moore's story, the Labour Party took control of the British government, which deepened the recession and led to the withdrawal of American missiles from Europe. The Soviet Union continued its attempt to take over the world, staging a military invasion of Poland. The American "President Kennedy" tried to bluff the USSR into backing down with the threat of nukes, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this time nuclear war actually erupted. The war devastated the environment and left an isolated Great Britain to fend for itself.
The government fell apart, and an obviously Nazi regime called "Norsefire" took over by force. Moore and Lloyd made the all-too-common mistake of calling the Nazis "right-wingers," when the Nazis were actually Socialists. Like all Socialist dictatorships, the Nazi/Norsefire group banned all weapons, seized control of the means of production and distribution, made dissent a crime, began the systematic killing of "undesirables," reduced the population to poverty and created a secret police. That's the government that created V through Nazi-like medical experimentation, and that's the government against which V fought.
It's a mark of the Hollywood Left that they needed to change the government of Moore's nightmare, a twisted blend of 1984, North Korea and Nazi Germany, into extremist Conservative Christians when making the film. To Liberals, a Socialist totalitarian dictatorship doesn't seem very scary. Look at Hollywood's constant love song for Fidel Castro. Islamofascist terrorists just need to be understood. Christians, on the other hand...
The conflict and complexity of Moore's world was reflected in V's tortured psyche. The movie throws all of that aside to make the same boring Left-wing political statements as every other Hollywood film these days. When he saw yet another of his great stories get the "Hollywood treatment," Moore publicly disassociated himself from the film and cut off all ties to DC Comics.
Moore's V saw fascism (total government control) and anarchy (no government) as polar opposites with no middle ground, and chose anarchy. The movie V sees democracy as the natural opposite of fascism, and plots to restore democracy by overthrowing the government. The movie turned V into a hero he was never meant to be, and it falls flat. Deep down, Moore's V had no illusions about what he was: a psychotic killer who committed monstrous acts in order to destroy the government that created him. To him, there was no higher cause. In the movie, however, V never seems to doubt his own heroism.
The movie deliberately tries to blur the line between freedom fighters and terrorists. Hollywood recreated V as a democratic revolutionary hero who commits crimes in a noble cause, instead of simply carrying out his personal, well, vendetta. In reality, terrorists fight to destroy democracy and enslave others through fear. No amount of Leftist equivocation can eliminate our capacity to judge between the two.
UPDATE: "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."
- Alan Moore on the movie "V for Vendetta," 15 March 06
