So there I am, having a nice day in Winchester with Nana Connell, and I check Twitter and what do I find? Tony Harris, comic book artist of Starman and Ex Machina fame, has caused a furore on the Internet for this baffingly misogynistic post about female cosplayers:
I'm not replicating the full text, because both the content and the atrocious grammar make my head hurt, but you get the idea, right? Harris has appointed himself Guardian of the Nerds, and those harlots shan't get past him to poison the well. According to royal decree by His Harrisness, the vast majority of female cosplayers are all posers and whores who love getting to walk around convention halls half-naked and pray upon the weak frightened little virginal nerd, soaking up adulation like Babylonian storm-witches. But they're also unattractive, as they only have "Big Boobies", not "GREAT Boobies", so truly they are the deadliest kind of female, sirens to geeky sailors.
You know, shit like this is why it's so difficult being a part of nerd culture sometimes. The roots of nerddom stretch back to the high school rejects - the sci-fi fans, the horror aficionados, the computer whizzes, basically everyone who probably got stuffed in lockers, had their lunch money stolen and never went to prom. Rejection was the seed from which nerd culture sprung from. Nobody liked you in high school? Fear not, there was a whole sub-society you could go to, one that would accept you whoever you were.
Except that's not quite true, is it? From my experience, nerd culture has proven just as insular and unwelcoming as any high school jock or cheerleader; probably more so, actually, because at my old school, I got along with the "popular" crowd pretty well. (It's worth noting the speech marks as they never actually saw themselves as the "popular" crowd.) I've lost count of the amount of times I've been told my opinion is worthless because I haven't watched 20+ episodes of a show beforehand, or I wasn't familiar with the collected filmography of Guy Maddin or whoever. I'm aware that people don't often act on the Internet how they do in real life, and it may be some kind of defence mechanism like a puffer fish inflating its body, but it doesn't help our reputation as a bunch of self-indulgent misanthropic pack of jackals.
John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory from Penny Arcade. Pay close attention, class.
To be fair to Harris, and to the scores of followers trying to keep the "barbarians" at the gate, I get where they're coming from. Nerddom is very much their little niche, and they don't want to see it dissolved away to nothing. That's a sentiment I share; I'm really annoyed by The Big Bang Theory and how it's considered something freaks and geeks. Here's the thing, though - the nerds have won. San Diego Comic-Con has become a major event the world pays attention to. David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor made geeks acceptable, even fashionable. People buy DVD boxsets and eagerly discuss Game of Thrones in public. Good Lord, a movie about the Avengers is one of the highest grossing films of all time! These are glorious days!
And you know what? As a culture of rejects, freaks and losers, we have no right to behave like we're still in high school, and excluding people from entering the clubhouse. Nerddom is not some sort of ivory tower we need to keep the proles out of - a guy from my school, a rugby player no less, is getting into mainstream comics because he loves The Dark Knight. This is a good thing. Christ, sports fans are pretty much the biggest examples of nerds there are. This is no longer exclusively our domain, and that's okay. We are not misers, jealously hoarding our secrets. If someone wants to dress up as a superhero and stomp about the convention centre, why not? Cosplay is just one gateway to geekery, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone that for the world. So is The Big Bang Theory, The Avengers, Game of Thrones, whatever it is you're interested in, please come in and don't be shy.
If you're passionate about fiction, about dressing up like fiction, discussing it and proud of it, then you're my brother and my friend, and I love you. Wave that geek banner high.
Part of my November 5th tradition is to re-read V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's seminal work on the clash between totalitarianism and anarchy. Others have their bonfires and fireworks, and those are lovely sights, but I don't have much in the way of winter clothing at the time of writing, so give me a warm room to curl up in and read the delightful tale of a masked psychopath declaring war on Britain. This marked the start of Moore's dense writing style, with plots and themes and allusions and wheels within wheels. What makes it so definitive is how human it is. The politics and intricate narrative are a backdrop to a smaller story. It has a sprawling cast of characters, but everyone involved in V's plots has an arc: Evey Hammond, Adam Susan, harangued police inspector Eric Finch, the widowed Rose Almond. Just from a storytelling perspective, it's one of Moore's definitive works.
The comic's profile has been significantly raised, for better or worse, by the 2006 film, directed by James McTeigue and written by the Wachowskis (of The Matrix and Speed Racer fame), and since then, the main character has become the face of the protester, and the unofficial Bible of the Occupy movement. Unlike some fans of the comic, I really like the V for Vendetta film, and I think it's a decent adaptation. That said, however, there are problems I'd like to address.
For the uninitiated, the film takes place in the near future in a dystopian vision of London that's about one-part Orwell to two-parts Nazi Germany. Security cameras are everywhere, the streets are prowled by the government's secret police, and the vox populi is forced to swallow the jingoistic bullshit of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the Daily Mail-tastic "Voice of London". Into this picture comes V (Hugo Weaving/James Purefoy in some shots), a masked terrorist who wears the cloak, stovepipe hat and face of Guy Fawkes, and blows up the Old Bailey on November 5th, a day the country forgot. He declares war on the government, and announces he will attack the Houses of Parliament one year from now; in the midst of this, he rescues and recruits Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young woman who starts to wonder whether her masked saviour is vindicator or villain...
In recent years, V for Vendetta has become the number one favourite film for anarchists and libertarians, and V the poster child for the hacktivist organisation Anonymous - how many protesters have you seen wearing that Guy Fawkes mask on top of ordinary clothes? This is as much a reincarnation of Guy Fawkes as a symbol of freedom from repression, and here's the first problem I have with the film. In the comic, Moore and Lloyd devised the story as a battle between the two diametrically-opposing forces of anarchy and fascism, and made clear there was no right side to choose - V was depicted as being insane and ruthless, almost psychopathic, torturing his apprentice for weeks with the intent of making her his successor ("because I love you, and because I want to set you free" is never a good excuse, fellas), and not caring one jot for any innocent lives that got in the way. He pretended to have emotions but he was as hollow as the Guy's painted grin - broken by the government's experiments until he was both more and less than human.
The leader of the Norsefire party, Adam Susan (this is a question I wondered about in both the comic and the film - what sane person would elect a party calling themselves "Norsefire"? At best it conjures up image of men in their late-thirties casting +2 Magic at each other. I also wonder how they managed to get voted in since their election rallies are so obviously Nazi-themed it's not even funny), was also shown to have a sympathetic, more pitiful side - he installed a fascist government because he honestly believed that was the best for his people, even denying himself the usual comforts they themselves would be denied, and at the end genuinely wants to reconnect with the public.
"Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste."
So the film's decision to cast it as a basic good vs. evil story rings a bit false. It's all simplified, no real moral ambiguity to speak of - Adam Susan is now renamed Adam Sutler after the most direct of war profiteers (former Winston Smith John Hurt now playing Big Brother), and is a tyrannical despot with Hitler's hairdo, barking orders from behind a screen and importing comforts by train at the expense of the public. The more direct antagonist is Peter Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith), head of the secret police and "an ice-cold sociopath, for whom the ends justify the means", just to highlight how eeeeevil the government is. Likewise, V is a more romantic ideal of a freedom fighter - cultured, intelligent, excellent swordsman, and made more human (he makes Evey breakfast, he has a mock swordfight with a suit of armour and acts embarrassed when Evey sees him, he appears to be romantically attracted to Evey in an utterly pointless romantic subplot). He more resembles Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, an intentional comparison, having V's favourite film be the 1934 version with Robert Donat. We're given a clear protagonist and antagonist, and not to say Norsefire wasn't harsh in the comics, but that moral ambiguity between the two figureheads of fascism and anarchy has been virtually swept away.
This makes the decision to keep Evey's torture at the hands of V all the more questionable. Don't get me wrong, I actually like that this scene made it intact. It's a real gut-punch viscerally and emotionally, both the punishment Evey goes through, and the sad story of Valerie Page (Imogen Poots). The reveal still hits like a slap to the face, but it rings a bit false. Prior to this, Film!V has not exactly come out smelling of roses, disguising innocent people as himself and using them as decoys, but he's still somewhat honourable and noble. So seeing Film!V do something this monstrous is a contrast to what we've seen before, and raises the question of why Evey continues to associate herself with a man who tortured her physically and psychologically - at least in the comic we had the possibility of V being psychotic and Evey having her will broken, and Evey as a naïve ingénue. Film!Evey is a smart, opinionated young woman essentially having her personality being rewritten by a masked madman.
This also links to the problem of self-professed freedom fighters and anarchists using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of fighting oppression. It's true that Guy Fawkes was the last man to walk into Parliament with honest intentions, but not many people know what those intentions were. Fawkes wasn't trying to overthrow a totalitarian theocracy; on the contrary, he wanted to introduce another one. A devout Catholic who believed that England was under threat from Protestant occupation, Fawkes and twelve others sought to destroy the House of Lords and with it restore Catholic domination of the country. It was David Lloyd who decided on V wearing the Fawkes mask, both for visual impact and for the moral grey-area this created - he and Moore are clever men, and would have known about this. The film? Less so.
The other albatross around the film's neck is the 9/11 parallels. The comic operated under the politically naïve assumption that a near-miss from a nuclear weapon would be enough to drive Britain to the arms of fascists, or at least the far right. Can't you tell this was written during the Thatcher years? It doesn't show a great grasp of politics or the public by the authors' own admission, but it's preferable to this. To elaborate: Inspector Eric Finch (Stephen Rea) is summoned by V, who claims to be a whistleblower under the name William Rookwood (Rookwood being another Fawkes collaborator. You'd think an experienced detective would pick up on this, but whatever). What follows is a massive exposition dump where V helps to outline the real reason behind the St Mary's Disaster - Sutler, then Undersecretary for Justice, and Creedy ordered experimentation on political prisoners, including V, secretly to develop a virus potent enough to kill thousands. They dropped the virus at St Mary's Primary School, whereupon it spread across the country, killing 80,000 people. In order to seize power, Norsefire then blamed this on supposed Muslim terrorists, and those of you who've had to deal with the Truther movement can probably see the metaphor here.
SO HAVE I MENTIONED YET THESE GUYS ARE EVIL BECAUSE THEY TOTES ARE
Ignoring the fact that this is a massive stinking expodump, it's very easy to draw parallels between this and the long-standing conspiracy theory of 9/11 being a false-flag operation, and it sticks in my craw. I get that the Norsefire party are meant to be Nazis by any other name, but seriously? Are they all a bunch of moustache-twirlers who get their jollies by forcing tramps to fight to the death in secret thunderdomes? Yes, Creedy spearheaded the operation, but there's bound to be many people in Norsefire who would raise their hands and go "Um, isn't this a bit...evil?" Humans are fallible; if Norsefire consisted entirely of emotionless robots, maybe I'd believe it, but humans do have morals. Someone would object to this. No, not some"one"; most of the party would probably object to the slaughter of innocents, much less an entire school of children, and they most definitely wouldn't keep shtum about it. It's not like Norsefire could keep it hushed up with their iron fist over the media, this was before they came to power.
A character mentions the Milgram experiment as the ultimate proof that humans are bastards, and that's apparently proof enough that politicians will be on-board with their children being subjected to agonising deaths, disregarding the fact that it can't be applied to everything, including - what started the experiment to begin with - the Holocaust. Professor James Waller, who holds the depressing title of Chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, points out how Milgram's parameters clash with those running the concentration camps. For example, test subjects were told there would be no permanent damage to the shock victims, while the Holocaust perpetrators knew they were killing people. The subjects didn't know anything about the victims, and weren't motivated by xenophobia. More importantly, the subjects had no clear goals, no aims other than "do the thing", and even then, some of them still objected to what they had to do. Even those who persisted felt stressed or nauseous afterwards, while the architects of the Final Solution were very aware what they were doing, and what they hoped to accomplish, and had years to reflect on what they did, rather than the hour the subjects were permitted. If anything, Milgram proved that humans wouldn't willingly torture a human subject; they'd have to be cajoled into it. V for Vendetta creates visual and thematic parallels to the Holocaust: mounds of bodies are seen outside the "resettlement camps", the subjects are all minorities and political prisoners, and, well, Norsefire itself. This "people will do whatever authority tells them to do" belief that the film is clearly shooting for is a bunch of Nihilism Lite bullshit I'd expect from the high school notebook of an angry Marilyn Manson fan. For all the many faults of the Matrix sequels, Reloaded at least got the audience to think about how unreliable belief systems can be. Even if everyone involved with the plan had no moral quandaries whatsoever, we're still left with a bunch of cartoon villains right out of fucking Captain Planet. The Wachowskis make a habit of uncomplicated Manichean conflicts in their work, with brave rebels standing up to The System. Speed Racer had its lead fighting against a decades-long system of corporate race fixing. Cloud Atlas had several of these stories: Sonmi~451 in Neo-Seoul, Timothy Cavendish in Aurora House, Adam Ewing and his wife in pre-Civil War America (his father-in-law opposes their decision to become abolitionists, saying "there's an order to things"). The Matrix movies even had it in its most literal form with the System being actual machines trapping humanity in a neverending saga. This has its place in those films, but V for Vendetta is more complicated a source material than that, so the clear-cut moral dichotomy just seems naïve and, worse, reductive.
What Creedy does in his spare time. He also drinks wine made from the blood of puppies. ADORABLE PUPPIES.
Despite my frustrations and these glaring flaws I've raised, don't think that the V for Vendetta film isn't worth your time. It's well-shot, there's clearly a lot of love for the comic there (jingoistic TV show Storm Saxon makes a background appearance), and the set design looks great - all throwbacks to 1950's England with posters for both Prothero's Voice of London program and Gordon Dietrich's (Stephen Fry) vaudeville comedy in that art deco-ish look. Even the font of the slogans and underneath the cameras seems authentic - probably because if you live around London, you've undoubtedly seen these about, on buses, trains, the Underground, and on government adverts. Portman's English accent ranges from South London to South Africa, mostly settling on RP, but she's still sympathetic and likeable as V's erstwhile protegé; and while the villains are evil stereotypes, they're well-acted stereotypes, Hurt giving the right mix of bluster and righteous thunder as Sutler, and Pigott-Smith cutting a sinister figure throughout. Roger Allam in particular should be singled out for how utterly smug and detestable he makes Prothero, despite having little screen time and being depicted mostly as a talking head. I wish Stephen Rea had more to do as Inspector Finch; he's Javert to V's Valjean, who works within a corrupt system to do all he can to help, but take him out of the film and you wouldn't even notice he's there, other than as someone for V to blab out the plot to.
V himself is suitably theatrical, blowing up the Old Bailey to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, quoting Macbeth as he enacts his vendetta, and of course the V speech. On paper, this comes across as pretentious and smug, like the Wachowskis were showing off their vocabulary. Combined with Weaving's charismatic baritone, however, it has its own pleasing rhythm when spoken. The film captures his look so perfectly as to be instantly iconic - a devil in black raiment with a ghoulish porcelain smile and silver daggers at his side, introduced standing in the middle of a stone archway. Director James McTiegue states in the commentary he chose this because it made for a startling introduction, framing him clearly for the viewer, while also throwing him in shadow, indicating he's a darker saviour than Evey accounted for. This trait is fumbled about in the film, but it's a hell of an introduction, and one that has cemented V as something of a modern cultural cornerstone.
(Yes, this is incredibly ostentatious. It is also really really cool.)
The human element, above all, endures. Dietrich, while so completely different to how he was in the comic (a closeted gay television presenter as opposed to a low-time criminal) that it's another case of Stephen Fry playing Stephen Fry, talks about how the government has forced him to hide his true self, and how he has "become the mask". It's quiet, it's understated, but there's weight to his words, and to his conflict, and speaks to the larger theme of becoming subsumed by another identity. To say nothing of how heart-rending Valerie's story is; despite her being virtually unknown until then, her suffering is made clear, and her refusal to surrender her dignity, "the very last inch of me", really does hit as hard as it did in the comic. I am so, so glad this scene made it in.
Above all else, however, I recommend this film on the grounds that it was the first real Alan Moore work to be adapted for the screen with a considerable degree of success. Moore's works are notoriously difficult to film (the author even considering Watchmen, his magnum opus, unfilmable), being very dense and layered in such a way that requires re-reading. His comics are designed to show off what the comic medium can produce that no others can, so to capture the spirit of his work in film is a tremendous feat in and of itself. From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were so far-removed from the source material they might as well have been different films altogether, but V for Vendetta maintains some of Moore's DNA. It's a film that still raises questions in the audience's mind, that forces them to ask: "What price, freedom?" It's the rare kind of action blockbuster that dares to challenge the viewer to think, to ponder, to stimulate new thought; and if nothing else, that's most definitely worth a watch.
