They Seem Like Nice Boys (Book Three, Part 58: V for Vendetta Book Three, Movie Development)
Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first post-Watchmen project saw him returning to the beginning of his career to finish V for Vendetta.
“In the end, I was glad they got the ideas out but very disappointed that they blew it so badly and distorted all the Gnostic transcendental aspects that made the first film so strong and potent. If they had any sense, they would have befriended me instead of pissing me off. They seem like nice boys.” – Grant Morrison, 2005 interview with Suicide Girls
Moore’s evolution over the seven years of the project is perhaps clearest, however, in the larger thematic issues. Moore had originally envisioned V for Vendetta as an exploration of anarchism vs fascism in which all sides were taken seriously—as early as 1984 Moore talked about how he originally “ intended it to be a pretty trite piece of propaganda. But it didn’t work like that – it came out superficial and hollow. I realized that the only way to treat it honestly was to take the fascist characters and get deeply involved in their mentality.” It was not, obviously, that Moore was without any moral investment in the debate between anarchism and fascism—a debate Moore has suggested is both the absolute heart of all political debate and one that is in fact “as much a matter of the emotions and spirit as they are matters of abstract intellect and politics. Maybe even more so.” Given this, and especially given his summary of the debate as “should we be ruled,” there is only ever one position that Alan Moore has ever taken at any point in his life. And the idea that V for Vendetta is particularly ambiguous in what it favors between fascism and anarchism is, charitably, strained.
All the same, there were moral ambiguities to resolve. Any ending was going to necessarily resolve some of the shades of gray, just based on what the plot beats were—who got to win, who got big hero moments on the way out, etc. And so Moore had decisions to make. He’s suggested that the bulk of these were already made, noting that “There were no major plot changes from the way I laid out the story when we were doing it for Warrior,” but in the same interview he noted that “the tone [of Book Three], I think, is subtly different.” Speaking about it some years later, asked in an interview about V’s tactics, Moore clarified that the use of violence “is something which I don’t sympathize with,” and that “in Book Three, it’s finally decided that no it isn’t; that killing people is always wrong; and at that point the initial hero V stands down and lets a non-violent person take over the role.”
It’s easy to read this transformation in light of Watchmen. It is not clear when, exactly, Moore embraced nonviolence. His earliest explicit endorsement of it comes in 1987, when he expressed a “deep aversion to all forms of violence and war,” but it’s a position one can imagine him taking at any point in his life.…
