Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Moore started V for Vendetta in 1981 as a young writer fresh from the dole queue trying to prove himself. He completed it in 1988 as a wealthy celebrity in a polyamorous relationship who was assembling a benefit comic by roping in his showbiz pals. The Alan Moore of the twenty-first century is an older man, one who has increasingly drawn the distinction between the comics medium, ‘a grand tradition rooted in its healthy scepticism with regard to rulers, gods or institutions; a genuine artform of the people, unrestricted by prevailing notions of acceptability’, and the comics mainstream, ‘a critically-accepted and occasionally lucrative component of the entertainment industry’. He’s an author who’s used his work to challenge the imposition of US corporate values on the world. A Hollywood movie is, by definition, incapable of dissent: it is a product of American cultural imperialism.

  A number of reviewers familiar with the source material picked up on the movie’s lack of depth:

  This movie simply doesn’t add much to the gallery of dystopian art – where Moore’s book already hangs quite prominently – aside from an embittered topicality that will look rather dusty in a decade or so. It’s capably acted – Stephen Rea sags expressively as the inspector on V’s trail; Portman carries off Evey’s arc from naïf to radical with aplomb. But the film shouts when it should sing. Bombastically insecure, it treats the audience like V treats Evey, preaching condescendingly and instructing us to watch the fireworks. But, as it has been translated and condensed for multiplex consumption, it really has no deeper meaning beyond the fireworks.

  The ‘political’ message of the movie version of V for Vendetta is equally undemanding: totalitarianism is bad, rounding people up and sending them to death camps is bad, government censorship of the media is bad; romantic individualism is good, self-determination is good. These are not provocative or challenging positions, and it’s not surprising that some of the movie’s most vocal supporters were right-wingers: supporters of libertarian Republican Senator Ron Paul, and the Tea Party, an offshoot of the Republican Party, saw the movie as championing their own political stance of small government and Ayn Rand-style selfishness.

  The movie of V for Vendetta has attracted a cult following among young political activists, and there were commentators who saw a story that focused on a terrorist opposing a right-wing government as ‘edgy’ in the George W. Bush years. But some of the material audiences responded to was purely from the movie, not Moore and Lloyd. The line ‘People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people’ is often quoted on social media, credited to Alan Moore. But it’s not in the original comic. First appearing on the movie’s teaser poster, issued over the Fourth of July weekend in 2005, it’s an adaptation of a well-known Thomas Jefferson quote – although fittingly, a fake one. And the long alliterative monologue that V uses to announce himself to Evey – also oft-quoted online – is entirely the work of the movie:

  Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, it is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what once they vilified. However, this valourous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

  It’s the story’s ending that changed the most in the film. At the end of the comic, the fascist regime is toppled, but nothing has emerged to replace it. V has anointed Evey as his successor, knowing he is too violent to be the architect of a peaceful future, but Evey’s first act is to destroy 10 Downing Street. While the comic opens up knowing ambiguities, however, the movie often appears simply incoherent. At its climax, the tyrant Sutler (disliking the name of the fascist leader in the comic, ‘Adam Susan’, the Wachowskis simply conflated ‘Susan’ and ‘Hitler’) is toppled, an occurrence that takes little more than the threat of a large public demonstration, but there’s no hint of what happens next. It might simply be the restoration of parliamentary democracy … in which case the destruction of the Houses of Parliament at the end is something of a mixed message. Evey delivers her last line in a voiceover: ‘No one will ever forget that night and what it meant to this country. But I will never forget the man and what he meant to me’, which suggests the makers intend it to mean we’re watching a happy ending.

  Giving V for Vendetta the ‘Hollywood treatment’ did the material a disservice. Moore had come to see Hollywood movies as inevitably compromised: ‘I’ve developed a theory that there’s an inverse relationship between money and imagination.’ He found some suggestions baffling: ‘We had one particularly dense Hollywood producer say, “You don’t even have to do the book, just stick your name on this idea and I’ll make the film and you’ll get a lot of money – it’s … The League Of Extraordinary Animals! It’ll be like Puss In Boots!” And I just said, “No, no, no. Never mention this to me again”.’ He did not feel ‘honoured’ that people wanted to adapt his comics for the cinema:

  The idea that there is something prestigious about having your work made into a film, that is something which infuriates me because it seems to be something that everybody else in the industry absolutely believes. Which to me sells out the entire reason why I worked all those years in comics, which was to advance the medium. All of the people that I was talking to during those years, they told me that that was what they wanted, too. It turned out, however, that at the first hint that their work could be made into a film, their attitude changed. It would seem that having a film made of your work is what validates it, that before that it was just a comic but now it’s a movie.

  It was clear by now that no movie would be given Alan Moore’s approval, but was it possible to create a film truly ‘faithful’ to one of his books? There was a further barrier. An ‘Alan Moore comic’ is nothing of the sort: it’s a collaboration. The first three major movies based on his work did little or nothing to emulate the art of the comic beyond restaging the occasional iconic panel. As he said of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

  If you continue to, say, ‘remain faithful to my story or my dialogue’ – I mean, that is so unlikely as to be absolutely impossible, but say that that was to happen. What about Kevin’s artwork? Kevin’s artwork is so integral to the whole feel of The League that it couldn’t be done with anyone other than Kevin … Kevin has always had an absurdist, grotesque British undercurrent to his work … In a film, it’s not a Kevin O’Neill drawing. I don’t care how much CGI there is in it. It’s not a Kevin O’Neill drawing. When I am thinking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it’s Kevin’s drawings that I want to see, Kevin’s storytelling, or the storytelling that is the combination of both of our efforts. These are the things that are important to me about The League.

  Ironically, though, Moore’s absence from the movies has pushed the artists into the spotlight. It’s they who appear on promotional materials, like DVD extras and video diaries on the movies’ websites, while Moore is barely mentioned. Eddie Campbell, Kevin O’Neill, David Lloyd and Dave Gibbons have all trodden a line where, while admitting to reservations with the finished result, they have been happy to go on set visits and to premieres, and to be quoted in press releases expressing delight at seeing their drawings brought to life. Kevin O’Neill got to share a whisky with Sean Connery while LXG was being filmed, and noted, laughingly: ‘People obviously ring up Alan all the time. They go to him first, but if they can’t get Alan, they end up talking to me … I did visit the movie set in Prague. They’ve spent a phenomenal amount of money, and there’s an incredible amount of craftsmanship going int
o it. All the cast members I met were fans of the book, and they all wanted to meet Alan, of course. Steve Norrington, the director, is a big fan of the book, and wants to do the best job possible.’

  In 2009, over twenty years after it was first optioned, the Watchmen movie was released. When asked about it, Moore told the Los Angeles Times that he would be ‘spitting venom all over it for months to come’. But although he was interviewed a number of times in the run-up to its release, he barely mentioned it unless prompted, in which case he would offer the same basic answer: he and Terry Gilliam had agreed it wasn’t filmable decades ago, he didn’t even have a copy of the comic in his house because he resented the way he had been treated by DC. Yet the Watchmen movie was, as The Atlantic put it, ‘as devout and frame-by-frame a reworking as could be imagined’. Director Zack Snyder had thrown out all the innovations of the previous drafts, preferring a reverent adaptation. The story was streamlined, which changed the ending, but in the post-Lord of the Rings era, blockbuster movies were now allowed to run far longer, and could be reissued in immense extended DVD versions (Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut, the DVD release, is just over three and a half hours long, and even finds room for an animated version of the Tales of the Black Freighter pirate story). The Los Angeles Times called Watchmen ‘nothing less than the boldest popcorn movie ever made. Snyder somehow managed to get a major studio to make a movie with no stars, no “name” superheroes and a hard R-rating.’

  The climate, though, was favourable for a ‘faithful’ Watchmen movie. Studio heads were now aware that superhero movies had the potential to earn back the hundreds of millions they often cost to make, and that ‘adult superhero’ was not a contradiction in terms. A new generation of filmmakers was emerging that consisted of proud comic fans. They had adopted Moore’s strategy of reinventing superheroes – and other fantasy properties with nostalgic appeal – along more grounded, cynical lines. Watchmen had been the obvious Ur-text for two big hits: the gloomy suspense movie Unbreakable (2000) and the colourful family film The Incredibles (2004). There had been a solid decade of mainstream superhero movies, so just as the comic was able to subvert the tropes of the genre, the movie had its own clichés to play with. Special effects technology had advanced to the point that Moore’s 1988 suggestion ‘for Dr Manhattan to be played by a computer graphic’ was now feasible. The graphic novel of Watchmen was on university reading lists, it could be found in any bookstore, and it’s noticeable that mainstream reviewers who hadn’t read the comic felt the need to justify their illiteracy. Fanboy culture was now utterly mainstream, comic book geeks could be seen swapping obscure references in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. When Moore visited the San Diego Comic-Con in 1985, he had found 5,000 fans gathered in one place an overwhelming number. By 2009 the same event hosted 126,000, and had mutated into a vast entertainment industry trade fair where studios sent their biggest stars to wow the early adopters.

  In the summer of 2008, Warner Pictures released The Dark Knight, the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, which pitted the caped crusader against the Joker. Unmistakably influenced by the late eighties take on the character, it made over $1 billion at the box office internationally. The film also saw the beginning of a year-long publicity drive for the Watchmen movie, with a lengthy preview trailer running before every screening. The stars had aligned … and the Watchmen movie flopped.

  Watchmen eventually eked out $107 million at the box office, less than the reported $130 million it cost to make. It proved to be a hard sell in foreign markets. With an R rating in the US (an 18 in the UK), it was never going to be as lucrative as The Dark Knight, but benchmarked against it, Watchmen was a disaster. Its $55 million opening weekend was a third of The Dark Knight’s total and it quickly fizzled out, making less in its fourth weekend than The Dark Knight did in its tenth.

  It’s possible to hold an inquest. The main problem is that no Watchmen movie was ever going to have the same relative status as the original. The trailer declared Watchmen to be ‘the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time’; the movie was never going to be equally acclaimed. The central conceit of the comic had been that it would be unusual to see ‘realistic’ superheroes, but for twenty years moviegoers had seen little else. The film also failed to sell the premise that the superheroes were past their prime by casting actors who were noticeably younger than the middle-aged characters they were playing – Matthew Goode (Ozymandias) and Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre) were both under thirty. Zack Snyder is much more interested in creating moments of visual impact, or recreating them from the comic, than in the psychology of people who’d want to be superheroes, so while Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) and Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) in particular are trying to get under the skin of their characters, the movie doesn’t leave them enough room.

  A number of reviewers took issue with the pace, noting that ‘Snyder unwinds every bone-splintering blow with copious slo-mo combined with concussive shifts in frame rate. Truth is, he leans too hard on that slo-mo button’ and ‘we’re left with a movie that feels overlong and incomplete at the same time, a frustrating combination’. Terry Gilliam, who must have put more thought into how to make a Watchmen movie than just about anyone else, came to the same verdict:

  There are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way … in the comic book, or graphic novel … It’s like the Comedian’s coffin is going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book it’s three panels: boom, boom and boom. On film hhhhhhhhhhmmmmm … The pace is wrong. I think Watchmen really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn’t have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr Manhattan was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought ‘Oh, come on!’ They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do!

  Alan Moore sees the pacing issue as one that affects cinema in general: ‘You are trapped in the running time of a film – you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there.’

  J. Michael Stracynski is the creator of early nineties science fiction soap opera Babylon 5, and was nominated for an Oscar and BAFTA for his screenplay of The Changeling. He’s written comics including Superman: Earth One and The Twelve. He also wrote a number of the Before Watchmen prequel comics published by DC in 2012, and declares himself to be a fan of Moore’s work; he once said, ‘Alan is the best of us. I’ve said repeatedly, online and at conventions, that on a scale from one to ten, Alan is a full-blown ten. I’ve not only said it, more importantly, I’ve always believed it.’ When asked why the Watchmen movie failed at the US box office, he answered:

  On an emotional level the Watchmen book is fairly cool to the touch; it’s thoughtful, intellectual, with great characters, but nonetheless on the cool side. Film and television are hot mediums, in that they rely on passion and extreme emotions to reach across the darkness of a theatre to affect the audience. Granted that there are some of those moments in the book, they are not what makes for a successful film, and in being so literal in the director’s transferral of the story from print to screen, that coolness was preserved, and the film became emotionally distant.

  Moore himself had dismissed the idea that Watchmen was cinematic: ‘It’s almost the exact opposite of cinematic … I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but, in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn’t.’ He now has an absolutist line on the concept of adaptation:

  I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circums
tances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they’d be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realise it on ‘multiple platforms’, as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I’m concerned.

  But Moore may have diagnosed the real problem with the Watchmen movie before the comic had even been published. In 1985, in his essay On Writing for Comics, he discussed the ‘cinematic’ techniques of comics: ‘Cinema in comics means Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and maybe a couple of others, all of whom did their best work thirty years ago. Why is there no attempt to understand and adapt the work of contemporary pioneers like Nick Roeg or Altman or Coppola, if a true cinematic approach is what we are aiming for?’ He goes on to discuss Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, and how it’s been designed to be seen several times. Stephen Bissette saw the influence straight away:

  I’m a huge fan of Nicholas Roeg, the director who did Performance, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell To Earth. Brilliant seventies filmmaker. And Alan loved his work too. Alan’s first script that I drew was Swamp Thing #21, The Anatomy Lesson, and it was structured like a Roeg film. And I recognised it, and I immediately wrote to Alan, ‘This is fucking brilliant. I love this stuff where you tell a story from the middle out, and by fragmenting it, you reveal more about the narrative than you would have if you had presented it in a straightforward, linear fashion’.