I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Continuing in my obsession with V for Vendetta this week, here is the first part of a recent interview with Alan Moore that deals with his thoughts on the new film.

If you are not familiar with Alan Moore, it's important to realize that, though he is an extremely intelligent and (according to people who know him well) gracious person, he often comes across in interviews as a bitter old man, especially when he is discussing politics, Hollywood, and American culture. In recent years he has become particularly negative about any attempt to adapt his work to film, largely because of the disaster that was the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. The V for Vendetta movie was made without his blessing (the rights were sold to Warner Brothers nearly twenty years ago), and he has made it very clear that he does not want to be associated with it.

With that in mind, it's interesting to find out exactly what he thinks of the screenplay the Wachowski brothers wrote based on his graphic novel. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has some problems with it:

As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged.

I also can't resist pointing out that, in discussing his original work, Moore confirms what I assumed as far as his agenda in writing a story with a terrorist for the main character:

I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites...I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

From there Moore launches into a general rant about his gripes with DC Comics, including how he feels he was deceived out of the rights to his works, although he doesn't explain how. Just for clarification, Moore signed a contract with DC that said they would have the rights to publish Watchmen and V for Vendetta, with the provision that as soon as those works went out of print, the rights would be returned to Moore and the artists (Dave Gibbons and David Lloyd, respectively). DC has never allowed the books to go out of print, thus maintaining perpetual rights to Moore's works. As Moore tells, that was just the beginning of an escalating feud with DC.

And as an antidote, or perhaps an afterthought, to Moore's very negative comments about the film, here is a review from The Onion AV Club. Their reviewers are very discriminating in their taste, so I take this evaluation as very high praise. Despite Moore's own views, I'm still very interested to see the film for myself.