As Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture reaches a climax, blasting out of loudspeakers across London, a cloaked figure orchestrates an explosion. Each wave of his conductor’s baton signals another detonation in the Old Bailey, its baroque façade shattering into fragments. The man, known as V, watches from the roof, a smile permanently affixed onto his Guy Fawkes mask.
So begins the (first) 5 November of V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis’ film premiered 20 years ago next month (it was meant to be released on Bonfire Night, but delays saw it pushed to December). There is gunpowder and treason, yes; but far more incendiary is the movie’s plot. It follows V, an anarchist firebrand avenging a fascist government. He is the result of a grotesque medical experiment at Larkin Resettlement Camp. And, with the help of Evey, a vagabond he takes under his wing, he starts a revolution in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Britain.
The film became an instant cult classic and its visual identity galvanised a political movement; his vaudeville face covering has since been adopted by left-wing groups including Occupy and anarchic hacking collective Anonymous (Warner ironically continues to profit off the sales of the masks). But it wasn’t a new image, or story. The film was based on a lesser-remembered graphic novel of the same name written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, serialised from 1982-85 in Warrior and later published by DC Comics. The novel is far more radical than the film. Rereading it this year, its premonitions about authoritarianism and AI feel more prophetic than ever.
Moore mounted his own vendetta against the film, calling the screenplay “rubbish”, refusing to ever watch it and redirecting any royalties to Lloyd. “It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn’t have gotten away with in Whizzer and Chips in the 1960s,” he told Comic Book Resources in 2005. To entirely dismiss the movie, as Moore did, is unjust. It’s a strong retelling, a valiant effort that’s rightly admired by Lloyd and relatively faithful in its approach. But, at the risk of going all “the book is better than the film”, the book is, well, better.
V in the novel more richly represented as an Übermensch intent on revenge. He doesn’t apologise to Evey after imprisoning her to teach her the real meaning of “freedom” because he’s an unhinged vigilante, not the more two-dimensional “masked avenger who saves the world” (in other words, a big screen superhero) that the film’s producer, Josh Silver, envisaged. It’s true that Hugo Weaving plays V’s verboseness masterfully; but to turn V into a straight-up Good Guy is to piss on the bonfire.
The spectre of tech, too, looms larger. Adam Susan, the leader of the far-right government, ends up falling in love with the government supercomputer, Fate. This fetishisation of artificial intelligence is at the detriment of art. “They have eradicated culture […] all the books, all the films, all the music,” V says. It’s a striking prediction of the death of culture and the churn of AI slop.
Where the film ends with a similarly simplified resolution, the graphic novel sees beleaguered investigator Eric Finch trudge up the deserted M1 motorway towards “the north”, a haunting image that surely inspired 28 Days Later. It’s an imperfect cadence that feels an apt way to end the chaos.
Most vitally, Moore is unafraid to decry fascism (the f-word is, in the watered-down world of the Hollywood adaptation, used very sparingly). “It was all the fascist groups […] I remember when they marched into London. They had a flag with their symbol on it. Everyone was cheering,” recalls Evey in the graphic novel, before recounting the rise of xenophobia. “Then, they started taking people away. All the black people and the Pakistanis […] all the radicals and the homosexuals.”
With authoritarianism on the rise across Britain, and global far-right parties gaining ground, Moore’s nightmarish vision feels close to home. While the film does, to its credit, manage to uncannily introduce a pandemic, it falls short of the graphic novel’s oracular power. “It is the duty of every man in this country to seize the initiative and Make Britain Great Again,” reads an early panel of Moore’s text. Sound familiar? It’s not the only prophecy. There’s the paedophilic priest, the crackdowns on sex workers, the military conscription, the mass surveillance, the therapeutic use of hallucinogens…
But Moore’s clairvoyance is best captured by a 1988 essay written just after the series was completed. “Naiveté can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge England towards fascism,” he wrote. And then, the haunting coda, ringing truer than ever. “One can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean spirited and I don’t like it here anymore. Goodnight England.”
[Further reading: Anthony Hopkins remains an enigma]
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