Alan Moore has a better understanding of fascist psychology than most modern pop left personalities and fascists themselves. I sound like a fuckboy when I say that but it’s okay because I’m 100% correct.
I wish he’d leave the rapey stuff out of his books but I have no choice but to appreciate Moore’s craft.
Can you explain a little, what his understanding of fascist psychology is, and how it differs?
oh boy you’ve unleashed a dark spell. a dark spell of ‘yell about comic book.’ comrade i am sorry!!!!! back on my bullshit, but by request!!!!!! sorry this is late!!!!
REAL ANARKIDDIE HOURS!!!!!!!!!
so the movie was about:
the united states and the invasion of iraq, and how it is bad
bush and fox news
the power of the media and ideas to effect change
neoconservatives
romance between v and evey
good versus evil, and how evil needs to use trickery to succeed
be gay do liberalism
the book was about:
anarchy versus fascism
romance between the human soul and freedom
people don’t need to be tricked into supporting fascists. bad things just need to happen for people to support fascists.
thatcherism bad and whatever comes after it even worse
fascists will prey on the most vulnerable people
nuclear war bad
anybody can effect change
maybe go do lsd at a concentration camp, experience ego death when you realize you’re complicit, and you won’t be such a bootlicker
be trans do crime
in v for vendetta the comic, the story starts after there’s been a horrific nuclear war between, iirc, the soviets and the us. britain, who has just disarmed itself, has been spared. however, in the bleak aftermath of most of the world being dead, a new party rises. that’s norsefire. but wait! that’s not where the story starts! the story starts after norsefire has been in power for at least liiiiike, i want to say a decade?
so!! here’s why i think v for vendetta is good at fascists. one very specific sequence. in it, the leader of norsefire, adam susan, has a monologue.
so here we see two people talking to inanimate objects and being theatrically horny at them. the fascist leads a life of asceticism and cruelty, saving his love for a computer called fate (predicting the ‘dark enlightenment’ and ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’). at once weirdly explicit but totally sexless. male fantasies, volume 1, comic book version!! a fascist is a slave to aesthetic and symbols. a fascist likes the idea of humanity but not humans. the anarchist will love a symbol until it no longer suits their needs, at which point the symbol must be exploded. here’s where i remind you that v is not good. v is busy talking to a statue and then blowing it up, in the end not really changing anything or interacting with real people. it’s like the reason some contrarian leftists will roll their eyes when they see protestors so dedicated to toppling confederate monuments in the states. “like, yeah, okay, say goodbye to general h. h. incester iii or whatever, but how will this destroy the police or end racism?” which is a dogshit take, but there’s kind of a grain of truth to it. v follows it up by saving a life, but still.
see, fascists drive society like this:
whereas anarchists explode society like this:
at the end of the book (SPOILERS) susan is murdered by a sympathetic character we barely see. v and evey are off blowing stuff up, and this lady comes in, shoots susan, gets tortured, and dies. evey is an underage sex worker who dates a mob boss. v is very likely a trans woman. they manage to change the world, but their identities are not important. at the end of the book, evey is given a chance to remove v’s mask, but she chooses not to. the message is clear: fascism is going to hurt the most vulnerable among us, but anybody can be the ones to burn it down. even after we burn it down, the future is not guaranteed (the ending is ambiguous). it’s up to us to make a new and better world. we need everyone– the destructive v, the creative evey, and everyone in between– to dunk on the fash. v could be anybody, anybody could be v.
‘fascist superhero’ is redundant as a concept. a person empowered uniquely, either through innate gifts or a magical trinket or lots of money, upholding normative morality (even if they’re a snarling antihero– would the punisher torture a person he knows is innocent?). even superheroes who are stated leftists are BY THEIR NATURE– even if they’re poor or black or jewish or asian or fat or gay or trans or hispanic or muslim or arabs or communists or anarchists or social democrats or liberals– fascistic. they have wagnerian power. teams of superheros– strongmen, all unique, but acting as one. umberto eco gets overcited in this kind of stuff but it really do be like ‘popular elitism’ when watching marvel movies sometimes. they’re the might that makes right. in the heroic there’s always a whiff of the fascistic. there is a normal human and then there is a superhuman, or a superhero. v is not a hero, or an antihero. v has hormonal differences that let them survive the concentration camp, and v can do parkour or whatever, but that’s not the point. if you try hard enough and believe in yourself, you too can make a bomb out of fertilizer and then go kill fascists in poetically just ways. evey is the closest thing to a hero the book has, but she’s not one. she’s just an average woman who happened to get very angry.
i’m not saying that if you like marvel movies or whatever you’re a cryptofascist. that would be stupid. i’m just interested in answering the question of whether it’s possible to have a superhero who does not lean into fascist concepts of self.
alan moore tried to write a morally complex book. he did not want you to become an anarchist, which is either liberal or the most anarchist depending on how you look at it. he wanted you to think (which, i believe, is why he chose guy fawkes as v’s mask, even though fawkes was reactionary– the act of rebellion, no matter its valence, is good and cool)(i don’t agree but it’s definitely A Viewpoint, and it’s v’s viewpoint, and v is a complex character).
fascist psychology is to me about aesthetic veneration and a cluttered (but cohesive), sincere (but glib), grim (but vigorous), life-worshipping (but death-seeking) essentially spiritual impulse to superhero larp. it happens after a national humiliation and economic downturn, also shifting modes of production. capitalism heat-sinking revolutionary impulse into something rhetorically revolutionary but in practice not so much. what palingenetic ultranationalism does to a mf.
so how does this compare to the movie?
in the movie, norsefire only comes into power because they did super secret sneaky squirrel biochemical warfare against the people of britain, who got desperate and flung themselves at the fascists, who anticipated just such an outcome. susan (called sutler because hurf blurf it is a hitler reference) dies at v’s hand through via one of sutler’s underlings. the hero must be the one to strike the killing blow, even if it’s through proxy. evey is a white collar worker. her mob boss boyfriend actually is gay jon stewart in this version, who really sticks it to the man by being slightly saucy about him in tv skits (portending the absolutely dire snl-as-commentary we got later, and unintentionally highlighting how damaging the daily show was to liberal brains at the time) and having a quran in his home.
one part of the movie was actually pretty good, and it was about the lesbians in the concentration camp. i thought that part was actually faithful to the comic and it was beautiful.
the movie has evey say that v “was all of us,” when asked of his identity (and v is very much a ‘he’ in the movie), but it’s not really. it’s not really convincing.
the movie is a middle class white liberal’s view of neoconservatives, reskinned as fascists, in 2005. we don’t see or hear overt racism (except in the small epistolary novel tv show in the background) except anybody but the irish. norsefire is explicitly white supremacist but in the movie, ‘strength through purity, purity through faith’ has been changed to ‘strength through unity, unity through faith.’ yes, purity-as-a-concept isn’t always explicitly racist (sometimes just implicitly), but come on, wachowski sisters. prothero, the radio personality and concentration camp leader, is now bill o’reilly-but-also-a-soldier-in-the-middle-east or whatever. evey and v are a star-crossed romance. the book fascists are VERY british– echoing paxton’s assertion that fascism adopts patriotic aesthetic of whatever ultranationalism it favors (although the book uses mosley and the buf as templates, and they failed in part because they didn’t lean heavily on being british enough). the movie’s ‘fascists’ are based on ONLY nazis and mainstream conservative personalities from 2005 america. it’s so stupid.
other things i liked about the comic:
corporatism– norsefire is literally organized like a body– the eyes, fingermen, etc. i’d like to think alan moore knew what he was doing, given fascists’ stated ideal economic model (CORPoratism, geddit???) and also their preoccupation with physical metaphors.
as is custom for alan moore and his obsessive attention to detail, a lot of the storytelling is done through panel arrangements/background clutter. also i love the epistolary novel stuff; storm saxon is white will before white will existed.
