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i do highly recommend the magus. it's long, but worth it. and compelling. and infuriating.

but i don't think that's how it ends with her. she makes a series of choices, and outside of granting his final wish (i.e. to get blown the fuck up) he's really set her free to make whatever is going to be made of the world post-fascism. (or whatever happens next)

it's fairly free of mercy in many respects, but it's certainly life-altering.

I think of V's actions as generally good, but not human. I used to think of his actions as merely not sane, but there's very little (if anything) that V does that does not lead to a intelligible, rational goal. It's that his methods aren't merely strange, they're impossible for human beings to employ, particularly the vast web of manipulation he engages in.

Consider the assassination of the Leader in the comic. While it looks like that poor woman is just screwed over by events and gets pushed past the breaking point, the two events that push her out of the upper-crust are V's doing - and he acts entirely as if he expects the shooting in the end. That's not even remotely plausible for a human being to arrange, but for some being that understands human motivations like a dog-trainer understands dogs, it's rather more so. It's also strikes me as in the realm of things that many people are willing to do with dogs, even if they genuinely mean well for them.

Of course, this isn't exact. V appears to think that he is monstrous or evil for some portion of what he's done. Not for what he does to Evey, but some of what he's done appears to step over some unclear boundaries. But then, even the death he arranges for himself at Finch's hand furthers his goals...

The movie... The major thing the movie did was to humanize V. In the movie, V once or twice shows uncertainty, is occasionally startled or surprised, and even stumbles over one of his speeches. His escape isn't nearly as destructive or flawless as in the comic, and it leaves him horribly burned. V's manipulation of people is much less impossibly precise. He's even somewhat conciliatory towards Evey after the faux-prison experience, and afterwards, she leaves on her own initiative, unable to entirely forgive him, even though she does has the same revelation as in the comic.

Also, Fascist Britain is just not remotely as miserable as in the comic. The extermination of non-whites is only scantily and uncertainly implied, not common knowledge people avoid talking about. Evey isn't a munitions worker resorting to prostitution to make ends meet, she's a decently-off young woman who gets caught out past curfew on the way to a date (though I don't remember why she risks traveling late with a summary-execution curfew in effect). Nobody appears to be hungry or desperate or even particularly poor, and people seem in enough denial about the awfulness of their government through the first half of the movie that while people are shocked at the head-of-state being mocked on TV by a famous entertainer, even he (mistakenly) thinks he can get away with it.

god bless our first senile president!

ahem.

that's a neat way to put it.

regarding the film, do you feel their changes were positive or negative? was it more in trying to make that kind of fascist britain more palatable to americans who feel they're living under a fascist bush regime, or just trying to make it more acceptable to general audiences for whom the an anarchist ubermensch character doesn't really click?

. . . And she took back the Faulklands (wasn't that one of Waters's beefs?).

Some day I am really going to have to buttonhole a few Brits of my age or older and ask them what the big deal was about the Falklands. I've read a bit about the war, and I cannot see what the big fuss was about, other than that which surrounds all wars. A British protectorate, the residents of whom considered themselves Commonwealth citizens, was invaded by a military dictatorship, for Christ's sake. Should there even have been any question about whether military force should have been used to eject the Argentians? And it's not like the RAF was carpet-bombing Argentinian cities or anything. Either there's more to the story that I haven't gotten, or British society really does/did contain a large segment of bedwetting defeat-lovers.

Eric - I like your analysis about the implausibility of the level of manipulation of human behavior shown in the comic book.

I agree with Timothy that Evey's torture, while it may have turned out good (I guess?) wasn't a voluntary undertaking.

I guess what I'm not seeing in the comic is the supposed moral ambiguity. To me, Moore seems to have framed that everything that V did was for a moral good: freedom, and the ends justified the means. That's an arguable premise, to be sure, but taking it to the logical conclusion and synthesizing all the normal actions revolutionaries would take and presenting them as one Romantic character is genius.

Also, I haven't seen the film, but if Eric's description of what the society looks like is true, then I wouldn't find the need for revolution so compelling. And the meta thing about all that is, is that Leader and his merry-band set the stage for V's actions and, in a way, justified them. If Leader and the State aren't as bleedingly evil as they are in the comic, doesn't that present more moral ambiguity rather than less?

Eric, that mini-series thing might have been good, but I saw how it turned out with The Stand and I was not pleased at all.

I probably should have read that statement before I typed the proceeding, but I think that if the movie makers had set up Fascist Britain the way the comic book did, then the rage from the audience would have triggered an acceptance of an impossible character.

oof...V needs Fascist Britain and the people of Fascist Britain need V. That makes my head hurt.

God that was awful. I hate how the misguided teenage male in Stephen King stories always seems to become the self-absorbed adult in King movies. It strips so much wherever they do it.

Late to the discussion. I see zero ambiguity here. Torturing someone against their will is always wrong. It's of no mitigating value that good ends are achieved by it. Evil means are always evil. V's treatment of Evie reminds me of how the Emperor assembled the Sardaukar.

How did I miss this discussion? Is this a continuation from a previous thread? Where?