Next week I’m going to pretend to be an academic and go talk to some college students about comics. One of the classes I’m sitting in on is going to focus on Alan Moore, so I reread V for Vendetta and Watchmen for the first time in a while. I hadn’t realized that they were written so close together: V in 1981, I think, and Watchmen in 1986. They have a lot in common: both are cold war parables and turn on a liberal superman causing chaos in everyone’s best interest.
Still, my reaction to the two of them is very different. I’m really, really ambivalent about V. There are certainly a lot of good things in it. Valerie’s letter, in particular, still makes me weepy — tragic struggle against overwhelming odds, love in the face of the apocalypse, a quiet testament to human dignity, all wrapped in direct and beautiful prose — it’s pretty hard to resist. Evie receives the letter in prison; a missive from the cell next door, and it’s a really powerful moment. But then we learn that Evie wasn’t really in prison: it’s all a test, or lesson, by the mysterious masked super-anarchist, teaching beautiful lessons while reading Shakespeare and listening to Martha and the Vandellas. It’s all just a bit too convenient, isn’t it? The cultured lefty icon; intelligent, unstoppable, meting out justice to the big bad fascists who deserve it. Throughout the book, V pulls all the strings; he seems to be responsible for everything that happens, single-handedly pulling down the fascist government and returning England to anarchy. The opposition is too easy, basically. I mean, if one drugged up homicidal hippie with a stupid mask can topple fascism while quoting the Velvet Underground, well, fascism can’t really be much of a threat can it? Maybe, in fact, fascism for Moore has little to do with the historical movement, and is in fact simply a liberal wet-dream, fabricated to justify self-satisfaction and dreams of predictable violence (Parliament blown up! Big Ben blown up!) Evie’s renunciation of violence seems pretty darn hollow when readers are encouraged to take pleasure in scene after scene of facile vengeance.
Rereading this really crystallized for me what I think is the biggest problem with Moore’s writing — his weakness (to paraphrase Borges) for appearing to be a genius. Moore’s an extremely smart writer and plotter, and he fancies himself a metaphysician and political seer. As a writer, he tends to have all the answers, and while that can look pretty amazing when enmeshed in the story, when you take a step back, the discordant cacophony of all the begged questions starts to get a little irritating. Evie occasionally yells at V and tells him he’s a pompous asshole who cares more about puzzles and quotations than about human beings. Of course, Evie always backs down and accepts that V only tortured her because he loves her…but it’s hard not to feel that Moore is loading the dice. It’s Moore, after all, who sits behind that mask; it’s him who’s rigged the game. He can’t afford for us to start judging V as a human being, because then the whole house of cards would come down. We’d be forced to ask whether violence in the name of freedom is really a whole lot different than violence in the name of order. V claims to do what he does to free Evie and England, but do you really free people by kicking the shit out of them and scaring them half to death? It seems to me that most freedom movements worth the name were about building connections between people, not about individually deciding the shape of the world you’d like and then imposing it on folks. Freedom is hard work, and involves lots of compromises, in other words. It’s more fun to think about just imposing it by fiat, of course — but if you’re imposing it by fiat, it’s not really freedom, is it?
As I said, on the surface Watchmen seems to start with many of the same preconceptions and come to many of the same conclusions. But it’s much more ambivalent about the future it imagines, and as a result it’s a whole lot more convincing. For maybe the only time in his oeuvre, Moore’s villain here isn’t the fascists or the right. Instead it’s the liberal one-worlder Adrien Veidt.
Turning the tables on his own political sympathies like this seems to have freed Moore up in a way he rarely managed before or since. In V, for example, all of Moore’s fascists are pretty much stock villains — they’re vicious thugs, mostly sexually perverted in extremely unpleasant ways. (Finch is sympathetic, of course — but he doesn’t really believe in the ideology.) In Watchmen, on the other hand, the fascist nut-jobs are some of the most sympathetic characters. Rorschach is probably the character who gets the most screen time, and he’s…well, lovable. He’s got tons of touching moments, from the grandiose (when he tries to rescue the kidnapped girl) to the small (when he tells Dan he’s been a good friend.) The Comedian’s hard to hate, too; he’s an amoral, violent jerk, but also vulnerable and insightful and, yeah, it’s just not hard to see why Sally fell for him.
Veidt’s sympathetic too, of course, but the point is that there are genuinely different perspectives in Watchmen, and as a result the sense of inevitability and moral certainty that can pervade and deaden Moore’s writing (from V all the way to Lost Girls) opens up. I mean, the idea of time and narrative as immutable is certainly in the book, but it’s tied specifically to Jon, and while he’s obviously cosmically powered diagetically, in the overall composition of the story he’s got much less motive force than V did. Jon can insist that people’s choices don’t really matter and everything is already determined, but the narrative ends on a question mark; Veidt, for all his smarts and planning, isn’t sure if things will work out, and neither are we.
I also appreciate how much effort Moore takes throughout the story to not let Veidt off the hook. V kills lots of anonymous folks, none of whom we ever care about. But Veidt doesn’t just kill half of New York; he murders actual player characters — people who we’ve come to know over the course of the series. The newstand vendor, Joey, the therapist, the detectives; their deaths have weight. They matter. The violence in V is costless; the violence in Watchmen isn’t.
There’s tons of other stuff to like in the series too: I especially noticed the deft handling of the Dan and Laurie relationship, this time — the dialogue is sexy and sweet and quick, a very nicely done romantic comedy within the larger story. And, of course, the way all the little details mesh (the travels of the sugar cubes or the comedian’s button) are lovely. But I think what really makes this perhaps Moore’s best is that it’s the one time where he was both willing to raise big questions and issues and willing not to answer them. For once, and despite the formal mastery, Moore doesn’t really present himself as a magician. It suits him.
*****
If you’d like to read more about Moore, my thoughts here were somewhat inspired by an essay by Bert Stabler which he wrote for the Gay Utopia symposium.
I don’t think you’re giving Moore enough credit – we ARE being forced to ask whether violence in the name of freedom is really a whole lot different than violence in the name of order.
Moore sets up the dichotomy between anarchy and fascism, not allowing a middle way.
That it’s couched in the traditional form of a masked adventurer, is a feint, he is actually asking the very questions you are worried aren’t being asked.
V is not a hero.
Agreed. Your essay comes across as if you’re (not not not saying you actually are) being willingly narrow in your view of the work in order to be able to draw the distinction you’d like to between the two works. While it is true that “V” is built on a much more classic-romantic foundation than Watchmen and thus has a bit more sweep and a bit less nuance, I don’t think it’s quite as didactic as you paint it to be.
It’s also not a terrible idea to look at the work in the context of the Britain in which it was created, where the Prime Minister was openly talking about putting AIDS patients in concentration camps and cameras were being installed on every street corner (where they still are, watching…)
Anyway, thought provoking as usual, Noah, thanks for sharing.
I think you’re supposed to be ambivalent about V. You’re supposed to be asking yourself if V’s actions were justified. He’s a morally ambivalent character.
Moore signals, through Finch’s dialog, that V allowed Finch to kill him. Effectively, V committed suicide using Finch as his weapon. I think this is because V realized that he was becoming as bad as the Fascist state he was fighting. Just like the a totalitarian police state, V kidnaps people, tortures, spies on everybody, controls everybody’s lives, kills the people who oppose his goals.
Therefore, once he’s sure the state’s coming down, he arranges to have himself killed, so as to remove the temptation to control England once it’s been freed.
I think Moore is trying to have it both ways, actually. He hedges by having V get himself killed, and he throws a sop to non-violence by having Evie give it lip-service.
But the key for me is that nobody — not Evie, not Finch, not anybody — is ever portrayed as being V’s equal in any way. Nobody gets to argue with him and win. Nobody gets to fool him. Nobody gets to outthink him or checkmate him, morally or otherwise. That isn’t the case for Adrien, who is shown as being quite fallible in various ways.
Intentionality is always tricky, but I don’t feel that anyone in the comic ever successfully voices the concerns I have with the book, and therefore I think it’s safe to say that Moore doesn’t share those concerns either.
For a contrast, look at Pygmalion. Shaw is pretty clearly identified or on the side of Henry Higgins, the eccentric bachelor genius. And yet, especially in their last dialogue, Eliza argues him to a standstill, effectively questions his morality, and powerfully makes the argument Evie really should make: viz., people aren’t toys, and you don’t get to use them, not even for their own good — and, incidentally, convention isn’t all bad, and calling yourself an eccentric is just another way of saying you’re an egocentric prick.
Moore could have made Evie a stronger, more articulate character, but he’s got a big old crush on V, so he doesn’t. As a result, V doesn’t think through the implications of vicious lefty paternalism the way that Watchmen does.
Noah,
It’s a pleasure to read a critic who sees through V for Vendetta. I completely agree with your comments. All I would add is that, for me, the book has always represented a chilling look into the cult mentality. Every cult leader believes that society programs people in pernicious ways, and that radical measures are required to break through that programming and liberate the true individual. Every cult uses and twists concepts like love and freedom. Their followers are not brainwashed, they are clear-thinking and radically liberated. The character Evey’s ordeal and ecstatic anarchist conversion is the centrepiece of the book, and the point at which I no longer found it possible to enjoy Alan Moore’s work. I’ve seen people defend it by claiming it as intentional ambiguity, but that’s wishful thinking. Even if her “awakening” weren’t obviously treated with a total lack of irony in the book, he’s made comments since that reveal exactly how he feels about it:
THE BEAT: Some of the things he does to Evey are dubious.
MOORE: Well…that was the bit where, I could get behind what he does to Evey – this is probably telling far too much about me – I could get behind that far more than I could get behind killing people. Because it seemed to me that even though, yes, he was actually torturing Evey, this was in his own mad way, an attempt to heal her. An attempt to push her to a point where she has to wake up to herself as an individual with its own will and own wants and destiny that is not just part of the carpeting of the world, but is a person, is a fully human being. And yes, he does use rather extreme methods. I suppose what I was doing was if I were to actually go-around and imprison all the people that I wanted to mentally and spiritually set free, and subject them to torture for a couple of months, I’d probably get locked up, wouldn’t I? Nobody would understand that one. Whereas, if I put it in a comic then I can to some degree take the reader vicariously through the same experiences and give them the same revelations without risking a jail sentence which is one of the delights of fiction.
That’s from an interview with Heidi MacDonald on The Beat… unfortunately it seems to have gotten timed out and dropped from the archives. I had to google a line I remembered and found it quoted on metafilter. It’s memorably disturbing.
Here he is on anarchy:
In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people—and educate them massively—towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group…
People requiring massive re-education… hmmm. This is interesting too, from the same interview:
And I think that if we actually look at nature without prejudice, we find that this is the state of affairs that usually pertains. I mean, previous naturalists have looked at groups of animals and have said: “ah yes this animal is the alpha male, so he is the leader of the group.” Whereas later research tends to suggest that this is simply the researcher projecting his own social visions onto a group of animals, and that if you observe them more closely you will find out that, yes there is this big tough male that seems to handle most of the fights, but that the most important member of the herd is probably this female at the back that everybody seems to gather around during any conflict. There are other animals within the herd that might have an importance in terms of finding new territory. In fact the herd does not actually structure itself in terms of hierarchies; every animal seems to have its own position within the herd.
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2007alan-moore-interview
Couldn’t you justify pretty much any kind of social arrangement – including a guru and followers – by saying “no, no, there’s no dominance here; every animal has its own position.”
It doesn’t surprise me that he’s spent the last few years essentially trying to start his own religion.
First, those two posts by “Marcy” above are actually me, having logged in on my wife’s account. Duh.
Second — thanks for your thoughts Craig. Those quotes are really interesting, too. I think you may be a touch too hard on Moore — as I said, I think he manages a subtler position in Watchmen, and in the quotes he does suggest fairly strongly that he thinks killing and reeducating people in real life is wrong. He’s not exactly starting his own religion either — he’s not L. Ron Hubbard or anything. He’s a pretty complicated writer, and moves about from project to project on what his positions are, I think. But you should definitely take a look at Bert’s article which I link to above; the first few paragraphs about V (the movie) are pretty great.
I think Moore lays out the difference between himself and a monster like Hubbard pretty clearly – that he’s not actually going to go out and do it, he just wants to give us the experience through his work. Hubbard also seemed to know he was running a con. Moore is influenced by Crowley, though, who also influenced Hubbard, and my general impression of each of those guys’ thinking, as well as a wide swathe of New Age thought, is that human beings are godlike in essence but imprisoned in a false, limiting “reality” generated by society, Dad, a sinister demiurge… We only become ourselves when we wake up. The problem with this, as V illustrates, is that it’s an arrogant and scary power fantasy to think that people can only become themselves through your intervention; that you’re not just another person with an agenda to impose, but that you possess the keys to liberation.
I think Watchmen was probably Moore’s most sophisticated work, done in a mature period that he’s since fallen from. Dramatic writing has a way of taking writers outside themselves. I don’t see any such complexity in V, though; it seems like a pretty direct power fantasy and statement of his beliefs, sans magic. It’d be brilliant if it really were an ironic exposition of the totalitarian revolutionary mindset, but…. naaah. The violence/revenge fantasy element seems to be a token part of the action/adventure genre, even if Moore’s rationalizing is historically risible: this round of violence was only a regrettably necessary purge to dispatch a violent regime, and from now on our movement will part ways with violence! Yes, that always works so well.
Craig: I think Watchmen was probably Moore’s most sophisticated work, done in a mature period that he’s since fallen from.
Yeah, unfortunately I pretty much agree with that. I think Big Numbers could have been even better than Watchmen, if it had been finished.
Personally, it’s one of my favorite comic books even though i can see its flaws, especially all that tedious power-jostling between the fascists at the end.
It’s worth noting that a lot of the extra sophistication or ‘maturity’ of Watchmen can be attributed to the fact it was put together over a much shorter period and the creators were much more focussed on what they were doing.
In contrast the first two serialised parts, (let alone the final part which followed years later) of V came out over in Warrior over a much longer period and you can see the authors learning as they went along; As you read it, you notice that what began as a cross between ‘The stars my destination’ and ‘1984’ blossomed in something completely different along the way. Lloyd’s art also changed radically over the course of the strip. While on the subject, I’d love to see the whole thing republished in black and white one day…
I think the most ‘mature’ thing, (not necesarily to be confused with ‘best’) Moore’s ever done is his brilliant 9/11 strip ‘This is information’, with his novel ‘Voice of the Fire’ close behind.
I’m sympathetic with the first two comments. V is at least partially problematized–nowhere near as much as one would like, no doubt, and certainly not to the extent that e.g. Tyler Durden is in (the film of) Fight Club. But the propagandising of V for Vendetta is at least a little more complicated and conflicted than that of…I don’t know, Steve Ditko’s Question or Mr. A.
Sure, it’s no great achievement to be less strident than Ditko. But it takes a rather selective reading to see V as (being presented as) a straightforward and unproblematic hero or authorial mouthpiece.
It’s pretty clear in V that there is some ambiguity, vis a vis, V’s position. The key is all the parallels drawn between V and the fascist leader (Adam Susan?). V himself voices these parallels, noting how he’s stolen Susan’s lover (the machine/computer thing?) and how he now basically occupies Susan’s position (as lover, as watcher…and therefore as “leader” of a sort). There’s little doubt that V removes himself (violent, similar to Susan) in favor of Evey, who’s meant to be seen as a “kinder, gentler V”–the V we can have once the stage is cleared, once people are awakened, and once violence is no longer necessary. This is why the whole thing wouldn’t make any sense if V ended up defeating Susan and occupying the seat of power. If he did so, we’d be in the same place we were before (see Shelley’s _The Cenci_ or any number of real-life political analogues). True, the whole thing is engineered by V and he is not “fallible” in the ways Veidt is…but even for his own schemes to work…he has to disappear. Clearly, Moore has sympathies with anarchy, but the ambivalences are certainly in V…and pointed out all of the various time that the parallels between V and Susan are foregrounded. I wouldn’t necessarily trust Moore’s extra-textual comments on these issues either. As Noah points out, Rorschach is a completely sympathetic character, but Moore has repeatedly talked about how he is not “meant” to be sympathetic. The text (both in Watchmen and V for Vendetta) are more complex and interesting than the interviews. Just to throw another text into the mix…Miracleman too is quite ambivalent on these issues. MM is clearly a kind of “charismatic” figure who eventually asserts a kind of fascist utopia…but the results of this are just as ambivalent as that achieved by Veidt in Watchmen. Things seem “better” than they were, but at the expense of personal freedom, making one’s own mistakes, etc. (Gaiman’s run foregrounds this even more…but Moore was consulting on these issues too). Watchmen is great, of course, but I do think it sells V short to suggest it is lacking in ambiguity and ambivalence. V is a violent terroristic nutter…and only one step away from Susan’s own position…the book foregrounds all this fairly clearly. IF I had the damn thing in front of me, I’d even give page numbers. If anything,
All the above is enjoyable and touches on many of the problems I have with Moore, but no one’s commenting on the more or less technical implication in the original post that, as a writer, Moore is something of a cheat. I’ve noticed his sleight of hand again and again – an attempt to bind you to a moral argument or force a perspective, neither of which really hold water upon examination. It’s a tribute to his talent that he so often succeeds, often with his readers unaware – and a tribute to my exhaustion (and distance – I haven’t read him in a few years out of exasperation) that I am unable to produce examples at the moment.
And by the way, speaking of his best work, hasn’t anyone read From Hell?
Positives
Eddie Campbell leaves the periods off the lettering sometimes, which really breathes life into the dialogue
Spooky first person evocations of a fraying sanity as we follow William Gull doing his business
All the horrific realistic detail of life in that time and place
Eddie Campbell
Negatives
Dependence on preposterous, melodramatic soap opera/conspiracy theory rationale for the murders
Lots of tedious connecting of historical dots as we watch this scenario stretched to fit the facts, especially in later chapters
Cop cliches. “I swore I’d never come back to this hellhole neighborhood again.” “this goes all the way to the top!” “this coverup stinks, and I let it happen!”
Can William Gull really be such an acutely drawn character when it’s easy to picture him tying women to train tracks?
Portentous, unconvincing, and borderline offensive attempts to tie the Jack the Ripper murders to everything that’s happened since then, like Nazis
Longwinded rants about magic given tissue-thin dramatic justification by insertion in the mouth of the bad guy. “Magic is an important and real force and architecture has been used in a conspiracy to suppress female power throughout the centuries under the harsh light of a male sun and by the way, I think that’s good.”
Too many shout-outs to his buddies in the footnotes.
OK, OK… he also gets you involved in the stories of the women who die. He makes you care, maybe more so than in Watchmen, which has a little bit of a “why are we still following these people?” sense before they get sacrificed.
Not just the lettering but also the art breathes. It has an ominous, affecting quality that I haven’t seen in another comic. You can really feel fate closing around the characters. Moore, as always, deserves some credit for the visual telling.
Although it is not a realistic novel, it achieves what realistic fiction can in that some of the details are scarier than anything standard to the horror genre. Which puts it above any other Ripper fiction I’ve read.
Like all of his stuff until Promethea, it is sometimes fun.
It is tempting to be too hard on Moore because so many critics, even Journal critics, still remain in this dazzled, worshipful position toward the literariness, the volume of ideas and references. It’s frustrating because I don’t think everyone who’s talking about this stuff is 18, even mentally. I think it’s a choice. There haven’t been that many novelistic achievements in comics and people don’t want to risk letting something he wrote come apart.
Eric: the parallels V draws between himself and Susan only seem intended to demonstrate Susan’s thorough humiliation at his hands. V has invaded his instrument of power, which Susan loves, and wrested it from him.
As Noah points out, Susan, along with the other fascist baddies, is laden with a weird sexual fetish, an attachment to the apparatus of control, that is treated derisively. (None of the friendliness to kink that we see in Lost Girls.) This is all part of Moore’s rather puerile insight that the powerful must be driven by a sexual compulsion for the exercise of power. (In Miracleman he has the elder Bush sitting in group therapy relating an erotic dream about making soldiers kill bunnies.)
Susan is laid psychologically naked and dies powerless. By contrast, V controls and anticipates virtually everything that happens, even his martyrdom. Yes, we are told that he can’t exist in the peaceful society to come… but he himself predicts that and eulogizes himself romantically (“farewell to our dashing bombers”), and is seen off in his glorious burial by his loving disciple. And we never see under his mask, in any sense. We never get a hint of what drives him. We see Susan’s kinks. Did V get into shaping the destiny of this attractive, vulnerable young girl? It’s not even clear that V is a sexual being in any sense. That’s not really fair, is it?
It is an enormously attractive fantasy to have some masked god come along and do all the things you think we need. In Moore’s case, that means bringing down and humiliating a fascist regime (and Moore clearly thinks all formal power structures have fascism in the grain) and “liberating” a soul in a blueprint for the baptismal awakening of humanity. It is enormously attractive to have this handy, useful figure perform all the ugly deeds necessary, sum up all the moral stickiness in his own person, evade accountability by never taking off his mask, and then leave.
If V is as seriously questioned, as ambivalently portrayed, as some people here and Moore himself seem to believe (he’s said there is no act of violence in the book that is not questioned), then why doesn’t the grieving widow of one of V’s victims come after V? Why, at the end of her downward spiral, does she go after Susan? It’s unrealistic; vengeful families tend not to take a big picture perspective. But the choice avoids an ugly scene. And the implication is that she recognizes the true author of her misfortune. Thus V gets off the hook, and engineers a nicer martyrdom from his pawn.
As Noah points out, Rorschach is a completely sympathetic character, but Moore has repeatedly talked about how he is not “meant” to be sympathetic.
Rorschach’s winding up sympathetic, in spite of Moore’s intentions, shows Moore’s inability to get out from under the conventions of the tough-guy genre more than it shows an unexpectedly complex character who got away from him. He’s a scary urban vigilante, one of a well-recognized type, and as such he gets the least embarrassing costume and is shown to be cool and powerful when he walks into underworld bars or turns the tables in prison. His uncompromising quality, supposedly part of his craziness, is never pushed to the point that it stops being emotionally satisfying- again, hard to avoid in that genre, which is full of hardasses who take it to the limit. Yeah, he makes a choice at the end that risks all life on earth, but he’s also standing up to a smug prick who’s spent the last chapter pushing the nice characters around and congratulating himself for mass murder. It doesn’t hurt that he’s awkward and unloved. His only traits that aren’t endearing seem to be a certain grossness and explicitly far-right political views (you never hear the Punisher making comments about gays). Those details seem to drop after the first chapter.
Miracleman seems to rest on the insight that Alan Moore’s idea of utopia can’t be imposed from outside, by a big strong man, and if it were we’d all be left kind of hollow. I see no hint of that insight in V. Instead it tells us quite sincerely that we are not to attempt to unmask V, with good reason: letting him be a person would turn it into that other kind of narrative. It employs a lot of dishonest strategies to suggest that Evey makes her own choices at every step of the way, and that V simply releases forces that in the future will guide themselves. However unconvincing, this is in line with Moore’s view that the revolution must come from within. It is a sincere statement, complicated only by its pulp genre dependence on violence, and that complication is dispensed with by the obnoxious rationalization that the masked man, who is not really a man although we love him, did it all and now he will go away.
The text (both in Watchmen and V for Vendetta) are more complex and interesting than the interviews.
If there is unexpected complexity in V, it only emerges in the sense that any look into the psychology of someone who believes these things will be scary. It is a horror story, but not an intentional one. It has always seemed clear to me from reading the book that V’s treatment of Evey is portrayed as an initially scary but ultimately positive thing. What to me looks like brainwashing is clearly portrayed as a spiritual awakening from which Evey emerges stronger, more independent, and, in a nauseating scene, thankful. I posted the clips from the interviews because I’ve seen a lot of people defend that by saying, “no, no, it’s intentional complexity” and, although a close and honest reading shows that’s not the case, Alan Moore’s freely given opinions are the fastest way to settle the issue.
I don’t think he’s a cult leader. I think the implications of his beliefs, which his work sometimes surpasses and sometimes not, are arrogant, foolish, and scary.
16 comments? f’reals? And Dreyer got what, one?
Diz-Pressing.
I think a crucial point in V for Vendetta that nobody seems to have remembered when mentioning how “inhuman” and “infaillible” he is is that he’s not supposed to be. V is clearly referred to as the embodiment of an idea. it’s the idea that transforms Evey, it’s the idea that brings down fascism. You can tell me that no idea ever put a bomb in the british parliament… I’ll tell you anonymous bodies blow up a lot of things almost everyday in the world in the name of some idea or other. When V dies at the end, it’s not the idea that dies, just his embodiment, the violent, anonymous bomber.
Also, someone bropught up the ambiguity in Miracleman. It’s sad that Miracleman is no longer in print as it’s really a companion piece to V, both comics being two sides of the same coin if you will (I actually read somewhere that Moore had originally planned to out V as a future Miracleman, undoing the fascist regime he himself brought). Reading both comics really brings out a lot of the political ambiguity that’s missing from V and Miracleman. Remember both comics originally ran together in Warrior and were meant to be experienced together. It’s not the same array of viewpoints that Watchmen offers, but you can see how the ideas in MM and V may have devellopped into Watchmen.
Also I don’t think it’s fair to call From Hell on the simplicity of Gull’s ideas… He’s Jack The Ripper. Do you think Jack The Ripper had an ambiguous view of gender politics ?
If there’s an over-simplification of politics in Moore’s work (and i believe there is) it really is in his more recent work (Promethea, Lost Girls & Black Dossier).
I don’t believe anyone on this thread has got the angle on V For Vendetta! And, guys, it’s really not that hard… So rather than try explain to people he doesn’t actually share a mindset with Charlie Manson, I’m going to home in on one of the closest shots.
Left Luggage said…
Moore sets up the dichotomy between anarchy and fascism, not allowing a middle way.
V doesn’t represent anarchism as a political philosophy. Kropotkin or Bakhunin didn’t run around in Guy Fawkes masks and capes. (Honest, I’ve seen pictures of them!) V represents a genre cliché, a dashing anarchist rebel/adventurer. Conditioned by genre reading, we first believe he’s going to be our hero, only to find him doing more and more extreme things that make us more and more uncomfortable. Noah, you don’t see the questioning of violence coming up because it’s embedded in the piece.
The dichotomy in V is nothing to do with anarchism vs fascism. It’s Valerie’s letter suggesting we always have it within us to resist tyranny vs. the Doctor’s assertion that we’d do pretty much anything if told to by someone in authority, so we “deserve to be culled.”
I am currently trying hard to believe that there’s been a decline in genre clichés in comics, which has led you lot to miss the point of V so spectacularly. It sure doesn’t look like that whenever I visit a comics shop though…
Hey Gavin. You still haven’t convinced me. Yes, V is a genre piece. But you can write about anarchism without including actual, real-life anarchists.
As a problem with your formulation, think about this: if Valerie is supposed to represent resistance to authority, what does it mean that her letter is used by V to solidify his hold over Evie? And is it really a rejection of violence to suggest that the revolutionary who uses violence can seamlessly take himself out of the picture, ushering in a peaceful era. Is that thoughtful critique? Or is it dangerous wish fulfillment?
Hey Gavin
Hey Noah!
You still haven’t convinced me. Yes, V is a genre piece. But you can write about anarchism without including actual, real-life anarchists.
V is a genre character! I don’t think he’s supposed to represent real-life anarchists or anarchism. In this way V is similar to Watchmen, in that it’s utilizing genre conventions in order to pinpoint them. It’s nothing like an actual anarchist comic like Breaking Free.
Admittedly, V rests on the affection us Brits have for gentleman rogue kind of characters. We have Guy Fawkes or Dick Turpin while you have Johnny Appleseed. This possibly means it doesn’t travel well.
…if Valerie is supposed to represent resistance to authority, what does it mean that her letter is used by V to solidify his hold over Evie?
I was about to upbraid you here, then noticed it was me who’d carelessly used the word ’resistance’! Valerie doesn’t really ‘resist’ power, beyond smuggling pencils around. Her point is more about the futility of power, that it’s never going to actually get what it wants. It can only trap your body etc.
And is it really a rejection of violence to suggest that the revolutionary who uses violence can seamlessly take himself out of the picture, ushering in a peaceful era?
I don’t think it is a rejection of violence, or in any other way lays things out for us. As I say it sets up two poles then asks us to orient ourselves around them.
But the key for me is that nobody — not Evie, not Finch, not anybody — is ever portrayed as being V’s equal in any way. Nobody gets to argue with him and win. Nobody gets to fool him. Nobody gets to outthink him or checkmate him, morally or otherwise.
Perhaps our differences come down to this comment. The triggers for how to respond to V are quite deliberately withheld. Leaving something out can be as creative as putting something in, quite often more so. You see a hole in the book where I see the point you’re supposed to project yourself. I know it’s not what you’re actually suggesting, but formally speaking your objection could be resolved by a bigger, real good guy happening by.
But one place I kind of agree with you is over the ending. It does feel a little pat to suggest taking this one character out of the picture will put the use of violence back into the bottle. Like Watchmen, V does at times get trapped inside the very genre conventions it’s trying to subvert – here the need for a neat resolution. I’m always surprised more people don’t comment on that.
Please swap italicisation over between second and third para there.
(Bugger!)
Interesting thread. I’ve always taken what V does to Evey as brainwashing, and the fact that she’s grateful for it as an indication that she’s been successfully brainwashed. Fascism and anarchism, in V for Vendetta, are two absolute principles (order and freedom) elevated to the status of ideologies, and although, through V the character, anarchism is presented as superficially more appealing, it employs torture, brainwashing, blackmail and murder to get its way just like fascism does.
The remarks Craig quotes do seem to suggest that this nuance perhaps isn’t what Moore intended, but it also seems to be inherent in the work. Either Moore’s subconscious had a better handling on the issues he was working through in V than his conscious mind (something I often find in my own work) or I’m rationalising away my problems with the book.