Published in the Hour, by Stuart Trew.
The Wrong Vendetta
A certain amount of shock and awe followed the release of the Wachowski brothers' screen adaptation of the comic series V for Vendetta. After all, the film is at heart about collapsing a fascist, puritan state - with terrorism if necessary - and draws blatant parallels between Nazi Germany and "war on terror" England and America. Big fucking deal, as they say.
I would have eaten this shit up too if it hadn't reeked of the very puritanism the original creators of the comic book V attacked so viciously back in the early '80s. Writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd didn't shy away from the word "anarchy" like the Wachowskis did, either for its negative connotation (anarchy = chaos) or maybe its implicit moral ambiguity (anarchy is simply democracy taken seriously). Or maybe because it would have required leaving in all of Moore's crucial female characters.
Anarchy, for it to work, requires respect, which in turn produces equality (between genders and races). Whether they realized it or not, the Wachowski brothers (who also gave us the Matrix trilogy) ignored the equality part when they removed the original comic's obvious and foundational feminist elements. Yes, women's lib is practically the driving force behind the comic V for Vendetta. The film, by ignoring this, reinforces the institutional sexism of both our world and theirs.
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