Alan Moore on V For Vendetta and the Rise of Anonymous 286
First time accepted submitter tmcb writes in with a piece by Alan Moore about the influence his comic has had on the hacker group Anonymous. "On Saturday protests are planned across the world against Acta — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The treaty has become the focus of activists associated with the Anonymous hacking network because of concerns that it could undermine internet privacy and aid censorship.
First published in 1982, the comic series V for Vendetta charted a masked vigilante's attempt to bring down a fascist British government and its complicit media. Many of the demonstrators are expected to wear masks based on the book's central character.
Ahead of the protests, the BBC asked V for Vendetta's writer, Alan Moore, for his thoughts on how his creation had become an inspiration and identity to Anonymous."
Re:Are they sure the writer is the real Alan Moore (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree_hoax
Re:Are they sure the writer is the real Alan Moore (Score:3, Informative)
I've spotted him laughing along at a couple of comedy gigs in Northampton of late. And showing a great deal of bonhomie with the acts too.
Guess what, we're all human.
Re:masked based on book? (Score:3, Informative)
Moore didn't draw it. David Lloyd did.
Re:masked based on book? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but the masks used by protestors are very much based on the version drawn by Alan Moore (and which the movie intentionally used, being a cinematic version of Moore's work). Had they been directly drawn from the original source, they would have looked more different.
...and not subject to royalties. [nytimes.com]
Anonymous, thanks for inflating the profits of one of the big media companies you are protesting against.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Moore agrees with you. The film was different from the graphic novel:
I've read the screenplay, so I know exactly what they're doing with it, and I'm not going to be going to see it. When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.
Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures â" not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys â" and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives â" which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?
(Emphasis mine)
http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/ [mtv.com]
Re:That's Because He's Getting Paid (Score:5, Informative)
For every cut Warner gets, Moore gets a cut.
Nope. He had his name taken off the film and directed that all profits he might be due from the film be given to Lloyd instead.
Re:England & the UK don't know how good they h (Score:3, Informative)
There are so many police officers in this country that of COURSE you're gonna get some racists, nutjobs, or power-trippers, just like any other large enough group of people. Getting up in arms over police abuses isn't the right fight, as those cops are degenerate assholes anyway and would be committing crimes if they were cops or not (the position of authority does make many crimes more egregious though). The right fight is going after the stupid laws and lawmakers that allow these behaviors to continue without removing these officers.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pretentious pointless movie (Score:4, Informative)
What ticks me off about it is the abuse of history. Fawkes (and others; Fawkes was largely the fall guy) was attempting to kill the Protestant King James I so they could install a Catholic on the throne. And an underaged Catholic at that; they would make themselves the regent, tied to the king of Spain.
Moore knows the history perfectly well. The book isn't about Guy Fawkes, it's about an anarchist who uses powerful symbols associated with Fawkes in a dystopia set centuries later, which owes much more to the politics of Britain under Margaret Thatcher than it does to historical plots against James I. By the time Moore was growing up, Guy Fawkes had become an ambiguous figure in the popular imagination; still burnt in effigy, but somehow 'remembered' with a degree of respect or even affection (especially if you weren't a fan of the government of the day). FTA:
"Jump forward 300 years, though, to the battered post-war England of the 1950s, and the saturnine insurrectionary had taken on more ambiguous connotations...When parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton...While that era's children perhaps didn't see Fawkes as a hero, they certainly didn't see him as the villainous scapegoat he'd originally been intended as."