Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  On 17 September 2002, Top Shelf, publisher of the US editions of From Hell, The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, announced a slate of new and reprinted work by Alan Moore. They would be publishing Lost Girls in 2004 (in the event, it took two years longer than anticipated), and were also to publish new editions of Voice of the Fire and The Mirror of Love. With the Cobweb story that Paul Levitz had blocked being included in an anthology, Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions, Moore had found a publisher happy to work with him, one who would put out even his most difficult material.

  Even before the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had been completed (the final issue was published in November 2003), it was known that Moore and O’Neill planned a third six-issue miniseries, with each issue focusing on a different League prior to the 1898 version. Moore wanted a break before starting work on Book Three, but was aware that Kevin O’Neill was keen to continue. So they devised a stopgap, a sourcebook which a Wildstorm press release on 28 December 2004 said was ‘due in late 2005’ and was to be called The Dark Dossier – though this was news to Moore, who notes that ‘right from the first outline it was called The Black Dossier. Me and Kevin were a bit surprised when DC kept referring to it as The Dark Dossier. We didn’t know whether they were having one of their periodic anxiety attacks about the use of the word “black”. We put them right.’

  Moore grew more and more enthusiastic about the project, describing it in May 2005 as ‘not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin. The human brain? Yes and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the Big Bang. It’s quite good … It will be nothing anyone expects, but everything everyone secretly wanted.’ The book showed all the signs of Moore enjoying himself, getting a little carried away and ultimately more than a little self-indulgent – as well as a 3D section, sections on different paper stocks and a mini comic, he also recorded two songs to appear on a vinyl record that came with the book. What had begun as a straightforward, rather dry guide to the history of the League became a massive exercise in literary mash-up. Among many other things, Jeeves faced off against Cthulhu, there was a porno comic written in George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ and a pastiche Shakespeare play which saw Prospero form the original League. As the book became more ambitious, it also became clear it would take a little longer to produce.

  The Black Dossier did not appear in 2006, but the movie of V for Vendetta did. It’s fair to say fans of Moore’s work had low expectations. A press release stating that Evey ‘begins to develop feelings for V’ and a trailer that emphasised slow-motion knife fights, explosions and the fact that the film was from the makers of The Matrix did little to change that. By now it was widely reported that Moore wanted nothing to do with cinema adaptations of his work and had asked for his name to be removed from any future projects. When the movie was finally released, though, a number of critics wondered if he had been too hasty. Joe Lozito wasn’t the only reviewer who felt: ‘it’s no wonder Mr Moore would be a bit wary. But he needn’t have removed his name from director James McTeigue’s refreshingly faithful but maddeningly uneven adaptation. While it contains none of the brilliance or immediacy of the source material, for any fan of Mr Moore’s original, there are moments of pure bliss.’

  Moore reports that Karen Berger had said something similar to him, that ‘maybe I’d want to reconsider taking my name off this, because actually it was very faithful to the book’. But he was highly sceptical and made it clear he would not reverse his position. When Lana Wachowski, one half of the writer/producer team, telephoned him, he reiterated his standard line: he wasn’t interested in being involved, but that didn’t mean he wished the producers ill.

  However, at a press conference on 4 March 2005 – transcribed in a press release the same day – producer Joel Silver was asked about Moore’s involvement and stated that Moore was ‘very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we’re in the UK [to start filming]. We’d just like him to know what we’re doing and to be involved in what we’re trying to do together.’ Exactly why Silver said this is unclear. The pair had met back when V for Vendetta was first optioned, and Moore had been excited at the time – but nearly twenty years had passed.

  It’s been suggested that Silver heard an account of the phone conversation with Wachowski that was a little more optimistic than was warranted. The fact that director James McTeigue could tell an interviewer, ‘I don’t know whether [Moore] really doesn’t want it made. I mean, obviously, the rights are out there for the film to be made so at some point he wants the film to be made,’ might suggest that some of the key people making the movie hadn’t been made entirely au fait with the situation. Whatever the case, when Moore found out about the press release, he was furious. He called Scott Dunbier and informed him that unless a retraction was issued, he would pull all future League of Extraordinary Gentlemen projects from DC. To avoid loss of face, Moore would be happy for the retraction to blame ‘a misunderstanding’, although he considered it to be ‘a flat, knowing lie’. After five or six weeks, when no such retraction had appeared, Moore made public his antipathy towards the film. In a May 2005 interview for the online comics gossip column Lying in the Gutters, he revealed he had seen the shooting script:

  It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn’t have got away with in Whizzer and Chips in the nineteen sixties. Plot holes no one had noticed … They don’t know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn’t be bothered. ‘Eggy in a basket’ apparently. Now the US have ‘eggs in a basket’, which is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought ‘eggy in a basket’ was a quaint and Olde Worlde version. And they decided that the British postal service is called FedCo. They’ll have thought something like, ‘well, what’s a British version of FedEx … how about FedCo?’ A friend of mine had to point out to them that the Fed, in FedEx comes from ‘Federal Express.’ America is a federal republic, Britain is not.

  While Alan Moore takes great pride in building up his fictional worlds from meticulously thought-through telling details, and so any carelessness in that area must have irked him, getting angry at ‘FedCo’ does seem like an overreaction – for the record, the final version of the film replaced the name with the British Freight Company (and it is never spoken, it only appears on some prop boxes). Moore’s confession, in a later interview, that around the same time he had dumped his entire consignment of contributor’s copies of a new edition of V for Vendetta in a skip because he had spotted a spelling error on the back cover added to the impression that he was spoiling for a fight but was struggling a little to find ammunition.

  In fact, the movie version is recognisably V for Vendetta, one touchstone being that the Valerie sequence, in which Evey reads a letter from a lesbian inmate of Larkhill concentration camp, is retained almost word for word. (So faithfully, in fact, that we’re told Valerie sat the Eleven Plus exam – fine in the comic, where she was born in 1957, but in the movie she was born in 1985, long after the exam had been abolished.) Originally appearing in Warrior #24, Book Two, Chapter Eleven of V for Vendetta remains a highlight of Moore’s writing, as well as a tour de force from David Lloyd, who’s said: ‘I’m often in this position where I’m defending the movie. I do support the movie, very strongly, despite some flaws. But the Wachowskis were big fans. They thought they needed to add their own creative input, that’s just one of those things. They were fans of it, there was no question of them losing [the Valerie material]. They were committed to it. I don’t think there was any question that was the core of it.’

  When Moore says, ‘If that book had ever been understood by the people publishing it in the first place, then they would not have told me that the scripts for the movie were true to my book. It wasn’t. It hadn’t got anything to do with my book,’ he’s not talking about FedCo, or disputing that the movie
retains important material like the Valerie sequence. So what is Moore’s real objection?

  Despite the teaser poster’s tagline that it’s ‘an uncompromised vision of the future’, V for Vendetta is unmistakably a product of the Hollywood studio system and has been reshaped by that. The London setting is retained – although the movie was mostly shot in Berlin – and the supporting cast are almost all from the UK, but concessions, large and small, have been made to an American audience. To explain what a ‘Guy Fawkes mask’ is, the movie opens with a flashback to Fawkes’ capture and execution. As with Sean Connery’s presence in LXG, the casting of Natalie Portman as Evey has clearly led to rewrites. While the screenplay’s first draft retained a sixteen year old so desperate she plans to prostitute herself, Evey in the finished movie is a runner at a television company who wants a promotion and faces the hardship of going to dinner with Stephen Fry.

  The movie was being made because the studio wanted the Wachowskis’ next project, and the Wachowskis wanted to make V for Vendetta. Even though they weren’t directing, the posters and captions of the trailers made it clear this was a film ‘by the creators of The Matrix trilogy’. Those films had been notable for their ‘bullet time’ slow-motion effects, and there are similar sequences in V for Vendetta involving V’s knives. V throws multiple knives at once and they fly through the air to their targets in slow motion, trailing CG swirls of air, while we see their victims’ faces reflected in the blades. In the comic, too, V has knives: we see him with at least three on his belt in the very first reveal of his costume in Book One, Chapter One – although he doesn’t use them that night, when he rescues Evey. It’s Book Two, Chapter Three, before we see one in V’s hand, and the second and final time he uses one is when he stabs Finch’s shoulder in Book Three, Chapter Seven. In the official script book, a comment by director James McTeigue encapsulates how the movie foregrounds and fetishises the weapons: ‘The knives around his belt are like glistening teeth, roundabout where a cowboy’s guns would be’. In the movie, violence is cool.

  There’s more going on, though, than adding a little Hollywood gloss to the original material. The political message of the book has also been Americanised, and it’s this that’s at the root of Moore’s objection. Put simply, V for Vendetta was an early example of Moore’s personal, political work, and the makers of the movie changed the politics.

  The comic V for Vendetta is a political work in two distinct, even contradictory, senses. First, it is a product of its times. Moore has said, ‘When I wrote V, politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We’d had Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we’d had anti-Thatcher riots, we’d got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances.’ Some critics, particularly Americans, see the book in broader strokes. James R. Keller, in V for Vendetta as Cultural Pastiche: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel and Film – which despite its subtitle is mainly concerned with the movie – asserts that the AIDS panics of the eighties ‘serve as the backstory of Moore and Lloyd’s graphic novel’ and Chapter Nine of his book, ‘“V for Virus: The Spectacle of the AIDS Avenger and the Biomedical Military Trope”, examines VfV’s not so subtle allusions to the AIDS panic of the 1980s, the period in which Moore and Lloyd conceived and composed their viral avenger’. In fact, V for Vendetta began publication in 1982, before the term AIDS had been coined, when the condition was barely known outside medical journals (there had only been seven reported cases in the UK by the end of the year). That was to change rapidly – by 1983 the British tabloids and US right-wing Christians were talking about ‘the gay plague’, by 1987 the UK government had launched massive public health campaigns and there were 1,200 cases in the UK, and by 1988, when Moore finished the series, the Conservative government was eliding medical and moral health as a pretext to introduce Clause 28. Many existing elements of the story had clear resonance with the real-life demonisation of homosexuals, and the AIDS crisis certainly came to inform Moore’s work, but V for Vendetta simply couldn’t have initially been conceived ‘as a response’ to something that hadn’t yet happened.

  V for Vendetta is a ‘response to Thatcherism’, but Thatcherism changed radically between 1981 and 1988. When Moore started writing the strip, Margaret Thatcher was leader of a divided government that was singularly failing to end a deep recession. The backstory Moore developed was premised on the idea that the Conservatives would lose the next election … in real life, they won by a landslide. The political left fractured, the Falklands War had been won, the recession had ended. Thatcher had steered the country to the right, and she hadn’t needed anything as outré as nuclear war – she had done it by selling off council houses, thereby transforming council tenants into homeowners who were suddenly very concerned with mortgage rates and property prices.

  When he was writing V for Vendetta, Moore was not assessing this situation twenty years on, from a different country. He had grown up in council houses. Having entered exactly the type of ‘unconventional lifestyle’ that was under attack, he was directly affected by gay rights issues. As he finished V for Vendetta, he was also assembling the anti-Clause 28 benefit comic AARGH!. In many ways, V for Vendetta is a parochial story, or at least is a nuanced, personal response to a specific period of British political life. When an academic watches the movie and describes V as ‘the artistic embodiment of the AIDS avenger’ or the director sums up Clause 28 as ‘a law that banned any homosexual expression – art, music, anything that was deemed homosexual’, it oversimplifies the British political landscape to the point of being an active misrepresentation.

  Of course, any retelling of the tale twenty years on would seek to recontextualise it, to address modern concerns. The V for Vendetta movie tries, but loses a lot in translation. As Moore says: ‘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.’

  The movie’s account of the rise of the right-wing regime boils down to a slight rebranding of the ‘Truther’ conspiracy theory that accuses President Bush’s government of instigating the 9/11 attacks as part of a grand plan to increase the power of the state, at home and abroad, under the pretext of protecting its citizens from future terrorist attacks. Moore is fond of grand narratives, and not fond of American right-wingers. So, does that mean he buys into ‘Trutherism’? As a reader of Fortean Times, Moore is familiar with countless conspiracy theories: From Hell is based around one; Brought to Light dramatised countless CIA plots and cover-ups, drawing attention to the people and organisations connecting them; Watchmen revolves around a plot to fake an attack on New York that will cause mass slaughter. Moore’s conclusion: ‘The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.’ Moore has been asked specifically about 9/11 and has written two pieces on the subject for benefit comic books. He has consistently stressed that he sees 9/11 as tragic but unexceptional:

  The thing is that the public, in the rest of the world, we have kind of got the idea by now. Ever since Guernica, probably almost everywhere else in the world, apart from America, have been relatively used to being bombed. And yes it is upsetting. Of course it is. But at the end of the day, without wishing to appear brutal, on September the eleventh 2001 you lost a couple of buildings and a few thousand people. The
re’s other people who’ve had it far worse, and sometimes at the hands of America.

  For Moore, the Truther analogy doesn’t work because it’s not unthinkable that such atrocities might occur.

  As he laid out his objections to the movie, Moore even managed to slip in a sly reference to its very first draft, from the late eighties: ‘It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country … perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski Brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere.’

  V for Vendetta, though, had never simply been Moore’s projection of where British politics might head after 1982. The second sense in which it is ‘political’ is that, for him, it explores a more universal struggle: ‘V for Vendetta was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy … Those words, “fascism” and “anarchy”, occur nowhere in the film.’ The comic was about his personal politics, far more than he had planned when he began creating it with David Lloyd. Moore has long believed we face a relatively simple binary choice, as individuals, to be either self-determining or controlled by others. V for Vendetta dramatises this, but it also problematises it. At heart, there’s quite a simple scheme to the comic: the character we’re meant to identify as the ‘hero’ (the one who espouses what we know to be Moore’s personal politics, and who is the apparent protagonist of the story) is a masked killer who is at the very least traumatised, and possibly insane; his opponents are fascists, but they are also ordinary people with jobs and families – they’re policemen, broadcasters, civil servants. V is fighting fascists, but Moore never lets us forget that he’s also leaving a trail of widows and orphans. The film all but ignores this, with McTeigue saying V has a ‘bipolar nature, he has this great idea for altruistic social change, but on the other hand, he’s murdering the people he thinks have done wrong by him’. While Alan Moore called the first chapter of the comic ‘The Villain’, McTeigue was happy to refer to V as ‘a superhero’.