Polite Dissent

My wife and I went to see V for Vendetta this afternoon. It’s not a bad movie, but I prefer the original comic version much more. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that the movie makers had the need to “cross every t and dot every i”. They apparently felt that every little detail had to be explained and that all the pieces had to fit perfectly.

It’s not just V for Vendetta. I see this a great deal in the more mainstream media. Every idea is spoonfed to the audience and reinforced again and again so that no mysteries remain. I suspect this is why shows that eschew this concept, like Lost, seem so fresh and innovative.

Good stories don’t need every little thing explained and it can be a good thing when the occasional mysteries persist. In the V for Vendetta movie, the writers felt the need to explain in detail about Larkhill, the precise experiments that were done there, and V’s resulting super-powers. The rise of the totalitarian state was also explained in lengthy detail. Subtlety was never an option. For example, the film hits you over the head with the idea that V’s emergence from the flaming prison corresponds to Evey’s exultation in the rain. How many times did they juxtapose the images in that scene? Two? Three? More?

Not every mystery is revealed…entirely. Like the comic, V’s identity is never revealed…though unlike the comic, the mystery is narrowed down. Let’s just say that Dorian was right all along.

I like my stories more complex and the answers slowly given out. I suspect this has a great deal to do with the science fiction and comic books I grew up reading. The stories that remain my favorite were the ones where the reader had to work to put the pieces together on their own, so that when the reveal came — if it did — you felt as if you had earned it.

Again, it’s not a bad movie. It just ended up being the watered-down, for-mass-consumption version I always suspected it would.

Tangent: The biggest puzzle to me is why the rose in question was identified in the movie as a “Scarlet Carson” instead of the “Violet Carson” it was in the book. The producers loved all their V allusions, so why discard this one?