Panel Vision - V for Vendetta, book vs film

So, it’s November 5^th, Guy Fawkes day, in which we Americans celebrate this holiday we’ve generally never heard of and don’t grasp the actual meaning behind by wearing a mask we saw in a movie adapted from a comic in 2006.  All of which is my very round about way of saying that I’m going to be talking about V for Vendetta today, specifically looking at the movie adaptation compared to the Alan Moore comic book that inspired it.  These two works loom large in popular and comic book culture as landmarks of the superhero genre and with good reason as they’re both very well made and enjoyable works.  

The graphic novel comes to us from comics’ legend Alan Moore as a sort of follow-up to the mass success he’d enjoyed with Watchmen a few years prior.  Meanwhile, the film adaptation comes to us from a screenplay by the excellent Wachowskis and starred Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving.  Both works are of excellent caliber even though their actual importance and deeper themes tend to be misinterpreted by their very large fan bases, a fact that’s actually quite impressive given how monumentally different both stories actually are.

From the outset both the film and graphic novel versions of V for Vendetta are pretty similar, they both revolve around a appropriation of the Guy Fawkes Night iconography for the purposes of opposing a fascist dictatorship by the main character V and the fractious relationship he forms with the woman Evey Hammond in the time leading up to his planned revolution.  To be clear I do mean “appropriation” as well, especially in terms of the 2006 film where the fascist government being taken down is overtly religious in nature as Guy Fawkes’ actual goal in his planned revolution was to bring down what he considered to be protestant oppressors in order to bring about a new age of catholic enlightenment.  

All things considered, the decision to construct the entire visual ethos of the narrative around Guy Fawkes is kind of an odd choice in terms of both film and book given that Guy Fawkes Night is an incredibly spiteful holiday based around the government NOT being blown up and the man who tried getting tortured into a confession.  That kind of odd, mismatched aesthetic is actually pretty key to the differences between film and book and is especially central to the style of the book’s creator Alan Moore. 

In case you’ve never heard of him before Alan Moore is one of the most important figures in modern comics, thanks mainly to an incredible run of work he put forth throughout the ‘80s.  He’s the author of Watchmen, From Hell, Marvelman, V for Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentleman among a plethora of other comics.  He’s also an incredibly strange man in real life who seems to believe himself to actually be a wizard.  That strange, unhinged nature of Moore has always found its way into his comic books in a curious instance I like to call “Mooreisms.”  

These are instance of surrealism and strangeness that tend to pop-up in otherwise serious work apropos of nothing.  Examples might be things like the multiple Dr. Manhattan’s sex scene in Watchmen or the slimy squid at the end of the story or even just having Dr. Manhattan spend most of the story buck-naked.  Those same slips of consciousness tend to populate V For Vendetta as well only to an infinitely greater degree.  In Moore’s vision of fascist Britain for instance all life is controlled by the F.A.T.E. computer system, which the villainous prime minister seems to be weirdly in love with a subplot that’s never really explained.  Additionally, government security is broken down into 5 senses, with branches like the eyes for surveillance and the nose for chemical analysis.  Some of this point did make into the film with the term “finger men” being applied to some of the government operatives and Roger Allam playing the voice.  Though they do leave out the most amazing and insane slip of consciousness from the book when Roger Allam’s character is reduced to a catatonic state when his doll collection is blown to pieces in front of him. 

All of these changes are more superficial than meaningful however and ditching Moore’s signature bizarre sensibilities is hardly that surprising for an adaptation.  Where things start to get a little more pronounced in difference is the back-story for the individual universes.  In Alan Moore’s original graphic novel the presumption was that a previous liberal government had disarmed Britain’s nuclear arsenal and, as such, they had managed to survive a nuclear war sometime in the previous decade.  However, the nuclear devastation and Britain’s survival served as the catalyst for the fascist party to manipulate the tragedy of nuclear war to their advantage and seize power.  In the film the justification for a fascist Britain is much darker and predicated more on conspiracy theory revisionism rather than pessimistic speculation. 

Moore had written V for Vendetta with the assumption that the events in the book could conceivably happen, specifically that Margaret Thatcher would lose the 1983 election and the liberal government would institute nuclear disarmament.  When V for Vendetta was crafted, right around 2005 when most of America was coming around to the cavalcade of problems the Iraq War was about the launch, the emphasis was on looking for meaning in the past.  As such, its fascist government was a dark party that utilized uncertainty and chaos to stage a false flag attack on their own nation so as to be granted special, emergency powers.  Both versions of events hold the government in abject contempt as a group that would happily exploit the deaths of untold millions for their own gain, the difference is that Moore’s vision of the government are more incompetent bumblers whose own stupidity opens the way for fascism while the Wachowskis idea of government is malicious and ingenious. 

This change also ties into the film’s other big shift; actually clarifying V’s identity for the audience as well as making it indisputably clear that V is a hero within the narrative.  In the comics V’s identity is kept forever obfuscated and the ambiguity afforded his character is a major theme in the book, one that goes hand-in-hand with Moore’s overall ideology about the moral ambiguity of anarchy itself, which V stands for.  The film, on the other hand, lays out specifically V’s identity as a government abductee/test subject who was transformed into a super soldier through government experiments and whose blood produced the deadly virus that fueled the false flag attack that allowed the fascist party to seize power.  This is where the film enters its own range of Moorisms, especially with how dated this whole sequence has become in hindsight.  The false flag/conspiracy stuff was fine for its time but after nearly 10 years V for Vendetta ’06 has become more and more of a relic from a previous and more pessimistic age, especially given how much its government was crafted to take shots at the Bush administration, especially vice president Cheney.  

What both of these differences stem from, essentially, is what informs the story that’s being told as well as the frame from which the story emerged.  For Moore, writing for V for Vendetta was a matter of speculative fiction, it was a story that might happen fueled by cold war paranoia and fear more than anything else.  Even with that fear Moore’s writing has always remained very distant and controlled, we rarely see real emotional outbursts in his work save for the Mooreisms I mentioned earlier or his more recent run of Lovecraftian erotica (I don’t recommend reading those by the way.)  Moore’s style has just always been very tightly controlled and V for Vendetta is one of the best examples of that given how much of it his Moore’s prediction of things to come.  He once published a list of all the previous works he wanted to integrate elements of into V for Vendetta and reads like a shopping list for his Frankensteined creation rather than a collection of influences, to the point you can actually pinpoint where exactly each aspect entered the narrative.  There’s a scene in Watchmen where Ozymandius, the smartest man in the world, stands in front of a wall of TVs and predicts the world’s future based on what he sees and it feels very much like Moore is doing that same activity with V for Vendetta. 

In the film V for Vendetta everything is past tense and everything is fueled by anger rather than fear or prognostication.  It’s a story born from anger over the recent Bush re-election and the worsening state of the world at that moment in time.  That’s why it, along with its spiritual follow up Children of Men, make so much reference to things like America’s collapse or the Avian flu pandemic, it’s all just topicality to give voice to the writer’s anger at the state of the world in the then, not the future.  That’s why V goes from ambivalent force of change to unambiguous hero and why the governments goes from bumblers to masterminds, because the book is a terrifying vision of the future while the movie is an angry fantasy for the present. 

None of this is to say either version’s approach to the story is objectively better than the other, they’re both very necessary stories for processing how we feel about the world, the future, politics, and the powers that control our lives while also coming off more than a little dated given how much their genesis originates in the era that spawned them.  I do think the film version holds up better and that’s mainly thanks to the major element of LGBT rights that takes up so much of the 2^nd act.  

This is still a subject of discussion in modern politics and the fact that Lana Wachowski was still a closeted transsexual during the time of writing for this film makes it clear how very personal those issues were, which is why they feel the most moving and genuine.  The fascism and superhero stuff in the film has real anger but its tempered by some distance with the fantasy of freedom fighters and conspiracies while the LGBT rights part of the story has a distinctly raw and personal affect that can’t be faked.  This section also brings things closer in line with Moore’s original vision for V for Vendetta, initially titled The Doll, which was to be about a transsexual terrorist fighting a fascist government. 


if you liked this article please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter