The Weird Turn Pro

V For Vendetta
Directed by James McTeigue
Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski
Based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore

Dear Mr. Alan Moore, 

If you’re reading this, I’m sorry.  Don’t fret, as I’d never suggest you had anything to do with the creation of this film.  I am simply waxing nostalgic on my childhood.  Come to think of it, I have a bone to pick with you.  To imagine, I almost had a happy childhood reading Indiana Jones and Spider-Man comics.  Then I had to go and pick up Watchmen and my innocence was over.  Twelve!  I was twelve when I read those crazy comics, you enigmatic nutbar!  Suddenly and irrevocably, my taste in comics changed.  I never realized that superheroes could be disturbing.  That was all you.  A few years later, my thirst for even more of your stories had me picking up a horrific little series called V For Vendetta as soon as it was available for purchase within the United States.

You have to understand, though I had reached an age where I certainly had the opportunity to read books like Animal Farm and 1984, I simply hadn’t.  So it was your comics that provided the first dystopian nightmares I had ever read about.  They were pure genius, of course, but neither you nor anyone else needs me to say that.  It’s all been said before, hasn’t it?  The stories are legendary.  You know what else is legendary?  Your famous disdain for the entire movie industry.  Let me tell you, it was quite an experience to have read those comics in my formative years, enjoy a motion picture about it in my thirties, and then have to endure your comments on it.  To quote: “It’s a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives.”  Ouch.

In many ways you remind me of Terry Gilliam.  There’s another colorful character with artistic genius and a singularly original style.  Perhaps he’s even more of an enigma because he shares your hatred of Hollywood while remaining a director of it’s movies.  Perhaps that’s why he seems so bitter.  Well, if only he had been fortunate enough to be a comic book writer with all the opportunities you had!  Then I’m sure we’d have all been blessed with so many more great Gilliam works—true to his vision and unmolested by Californian demons.  Then again, maybe we wouldn’t.  After all, he’s a director of films, you’re a writer of comics, and these are two different things.  Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to tell us all these years?  You’d think we’d know that by now.  But no, it seems we’ll always hound you for your input on films, even though it’s your sincerest wish that they never existed.

I get why you hated the V For Vendetta film.  What you don’t get is that we’re not looking for perfect movie adaptions of your wonderful comics.  We just want wonderful movies, and your comics are as good a place as any to help achieve this.  Yes I know, you wrote V For Vendetta to make a point about the possibility of a fascist England and romanticize an anarchist response.  Yes, the movie obliterated that point.  Fine.  If we want that, we’ll read the graphic novel.  So what’s the point of adapting your story if the point has been entirely lost?  There is no point.  You’re right.  You win.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I sat in a theater for a little over two hours and enjoyed myself.  And there were so many times when I just didn’t.  So please, have a little mercy.

Sincerely,
Master Jimmy