V for Vendetta

“All works of art,” the writer and film director Nicholas Meyer has said, “are inevitably – and ineluctably – products of the time and circumstances during which they were created." This simple fact has always posed a dilemma for filmmakers who are adapting works of literature to the screen. How, for example, do you take a tale written in the 1980s, and “update” it so that it will be meaningful to an audience of the 2000s – without losing the essence of the story? Such was the predicament faced by the makers of the film adaptation of V for Vendetta. The original comic strip, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, was intended as a comment on Margaret Thatcher’s England, but by 2006 the political context that had once made V for Vendetta so bracing must have seemed faintly quaint. Therefore, it fell to screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski and director John McTeigue to make the story speak to a new time and place. But in updating the politics of V for Vendetta, the filmmakers perhaps also felt compelled to transform the story to suit the tastes of a new, action oriented audience. These changes may have helped the film commercially, but they may also have robbed V for Vendetta of much of the complexity that made it so interesting in the first place.

The broad outlines of both stories are essentially the same. It is the not-too-distant future (in the original strip, 1997; in the film, an unnamed date post-9/11), and England has become a fascistic police state. Homosexuals, blacks, immigrants, and all other “undesirables” have been gotten rid of, tossed out along with culture, music and art; the prevailing attitude of the government is summarized by propaganda posters which read “Strength Through Purity; Purity Through Faith”. Enter V, a self proclaimed anarchist who dons the disguise of a Guy Fawkes mask; he wages war on the government, aided (and sometimes questioned) by a young woman named Evie.

This is hardly a routine tale of superheroes and dastardly villains – and indeed, V for Vendetta was intended not just as a science fiction/action romp, but as social commentary. When Alan Moore wrote the original comic strip, it was in reaction to the prevailing trends of Margaret Thatcher’s administration in England – her hard headed conservative attitudes, her aggressive nuclear policies, her restrictive views towards homosexuals and immigrants. The villainous conservatives of Moore and Lloyd’s story – dubbed “Norsefire” – were simply outgrowths of “Thatcherism”, pushed to downright fascistic extremes; it was a science fiction landscape of jackbooted cops and government surveillance.

All of this made V for Vendetta revolutionary in the 1980s – it was bold and politically aware in a way that most comics, still concerned with men in tights and goofy super villains, were not. But by the time the film was made in 2006, the story had, at least in the most superficial sense, become hopelessly dated; the political context of the 1980s, when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear destruction, seemed downright quaint.

The solution of the Wachowskis and McTeigue was to take the Cold War politics and update them, so that the film could become a comment on the American political landscape following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. While the original story had postulated nuclear warfare as the impetus for a global turn to fascism, the film’s transformation occurs in the wake of the War on Terror (“the American war”, as it’s referred to in the film).

The film cheerfully mixes elements of the post-9/11 landscape to create its starkly imagined future world. It is revealed late in the film that Norsefire actually manufactured a disease in order to produce public panic – a plot development that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the anthrax scare of 2001. The character of Lewis Prothero was in the original story a radio commentator who served as the “Voice of Fate”, his soothing tones broadcast over England’s radio channels; in the film, he is re-imagined as a fire and brimstone demagogue who spews stereotypically right wing hate on a nightly television show. (“I’m a god fearing Englishman and I’m goddamn proud of it!”) As played by Roger Allam, the film’s Prothero brings to mind right wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, who seem to be trying to make up for in sheer noise and fury what they lack in cogency.

In updating the strip's political context, the Wachowskis and McTeigue perhaps felt that other storytelling concessions had to be made. On the page, V for Vendetta was surprisingly complex; one of the most interesting aspects of the piece was the depth and complexity of all of its characters. Moore has admitted that, in writing the original strip, he found that “I’d look at a character who I’d previously seen as a one-dimensional Nazi baddy and suddenly realize that he or she would have thoughts and opinions the same as everyone else." One of the great ironies of V for Vendetta was that, while the original images were in stark black and white, the morality was painted entirely in shades of gray; to quote V himself, every one of the characters “is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain…Everybody has their story to tell.”

That complexity made V for Vendetta less an action tale than a character study – but it holds less true for the film version, where each character is essentially a hero or a fool or a villain. The Wachowskis and McTeigue were making a film for an audience who, in 2006, expected action rather than introspection, an audience more accustomed to violence than ideas, more interested in effects than in characters. In the film version, Moore’s grayer morality is simplified back down to “black hats” and “white hats” – a kick ass action tale of a hero who uses cool kung fu posturing to best a bunch of one dimensional proto-Nazi thugs.

This change can be clearly seen in the translation of the character of the Norsefire party leader, named Adam Susan in the comics and Adam Suttler in the film. In the original strip, Susan is a vindictive and unjust man, yes, but he is also a man who honestly believes that, “The only freedom left to my people is the freedom…to live in a world of chaos. Should I allow them that freedom? I think not.” He himself has made personal sacrifices in the service of his larger political goals. Indeed, politics have taken the place of love for him, for while he admits that he has “never known the peace that lies between the thighs of a woman”, he also professes his love of “Fate”, which exists for him in the form of a computer database to which only he has unlimited access; the story’s most perverse moment may come when Susan orgasms while watching a cascade of images of death play across Fate’s cold, smooth screens.

None of this complexity is present in the Leader as presented on screen. Adam Suttler (the name was perhaps changed to sound more like Hitler) is less a character than a symbol – a monolithic, Orwellian talking head seen almost entirely on a giant television screen. In contrast to Susan, who has himself sacrificed liberty and happiness, Suttler receives private shipments of butter while the rest of the country starves. (V himself steals some, and uses it to make toast for Evie.) There is no shading or complexity to Suttler; he is as cold as the television screen that acts as his platform.

Similar changes greet our “hero”. In the strip, V was an enigma, his face hidden behind a Guy Fawkes mask, his dialogue consisting almost entirely of literary quotes. The book keeps V morally ambiguous; he’s certainly in the right to fight the fascistic government, but his tactics and methods are often subject to question. How many stories can one think of where one hero tortures the other, simply to prove a point? (“I didn’t put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.”) The film makes V’s morality much tidier; he is the Count of Monte Cristo (which he names as his favorite film), a wronged man fighting against an unjust system. In the book, V was a shadowy figure; only once does he display real emotion, by himself in a screening room in the Shadow Gallery, where he seems to bow his head and weep. One could almost imagine there not being anybody behind V’s mask – just an idea, an invention of the mind. The film makes it much more obvious that V is a man – he is hurt, he expresses doubts, he weeps bitterly when Evie leaves him. To be fair, a certain amount of this emotionality may be a necessary consequence of the transition to film; while V can be silent and still on the page, a film adds body language and vocal delivery, immediately making him a more emotional character.

The character of Evie is also transformed. In the strip, she is first seen as a sixteen year old girl, clumsily trying her hand at prostitution; she is not yet a woman, naïve, and therefore when V rescues her and takes her in, she becomes a kind of blank canvas onto which V can paint his political manifesto. In the film, Evie appears to be much older (Natalie Portman may be many things, but she is not 16), and is not so much naïve as resigned to the way things are. The entire trajectory and growth of the character has therefore been changed; in the film she becomes a woman who journeys not from innocence to knowledge, but from a resigned state to one of idealism, to a feeling that she can change her world for the better.

The film's most obvious change is the development of a love story between Evie and V. In the strip, their relationship was entirely platonic; V responds with silence when Evie asks if he wants to sleep with her, and indeed in the book V doesn’t seem to have any kind of amorous intentions, stating that his only mistress is anarchy itself. (There’s an interesting parallel in that both V and his opposite number, Adam Susan, are men who have essentially subsumed their sexual desires into their political positions; they are men for whom the pleasures of the flesh cannot possibly measure up to the pleasures of rhetoric and ideas.) The film, by contrast, works overtime to bring an element of Beauty and the Beast or The Phantom of the Opera to the relationship; in essence, the relationship of the pupil to the tutor has been reduced to a more overtly sensual attraction. (To be fair, it’s a change that V himself, a lover of theatricality and melodrama, might approve of.)

If the major characters of the strip have been simplified, the supporting characters have been virtually immolated. The original V for Vendetta was published almost over the course of a decade, and as such could take its time with its story, stopping to catch up with the destitute widow Rosemary Almond or to see what was happening with the manipulative socialite Helen Heyer, among others. But a two hour film cannot be so lackadaisical in its storytelling, and in the interests of thematically clearing the decks, the Wachowskis removed much of the book’s supporting cast. Characters like Almond and Heyer were cut altogether, and even those who did remain found their parts significantly reduced. Broadcaster Roger Dascombe is just barely a walk on in the film, and Peter Creedy is simplified into an obvious villain, so much the better that he and V can have a dramatic final standoff. The only supporting character to survive the process with some complexity intact is Inspector Eric Finch; in both the film and the strip he is the story’s “conscience”, a basically decent man working within a system he knows is wrong.

The majority of these changes tend to “dumb down” the complexity of Moore’s work, to make it more palatable to an audience looking for a rousing action picture. But even beyond story and character simplifications – which are common to many film adaptations of literary works – lay more central issues of form. Like Moore’s later masterpiece "Watchmen", V for Vendetta itself plays with the comic format, and with storytelling in general. Moore and Gibbons seem to delight in using symmetry in their work (the repeated images of Evie’s protector figures being taken away), in juxtaposing words and images in unexpected ways, in taking key ideas and concepts and having them echo throughout the story, bounce off one another, create new associations. This works wonderfully in the print format; the reader can always flip back a page or two to catch an additional bit of visual nuance, a previously unnoticed grace note. But a film does not have these luxuries; it must march steadily onward at 24 frames a second, with little room for the same kind of dramatic, literary and visual density. As a result, the film version of V for Vendetta simply jettisons many of the book’s subtler strains, or makes them so blunt and obvious that they lose much of their power.

To be quite honest, as a prospective screenwriter/director, V for Vendetta is exactly the kind of property that I would not want to adapt to the screen. Its strengths are the strengths of the literary medium. The sheer scope of its cast, the complex interweaving of its themes, the deliberateness of its pacing, the almost playful dance of word and image – these are qualities that the comic book form instantly provides, and they are qualities that are difficult to reproduce on celluloid. The film critic Roger Ebert has said in the past that film is not the ideal medium for ideas, but rather for emotions; because V for Vendetta was a comic strip about profound intellectual concepts, it is perhaps inevitable that the film version would lose much of the original story’s texture. Inevitable, but still regrettable. The original V for Vendetta was about ideas – it was about people; the film version, in contrast, is about explosions and action sequences. Norsefire itself might have approved of the way that V’s ideas had been simplified.