The World Doesn't Get Alan Moore

While I am well-aware of Alan Moore's significance as a modern cultural touchstone, I can't honestly say I've read any of his truly significant works. In fact, apart from an issue of Spawn and a couple of issues of WildC.A.Ts I can say I haven't read anything by him at all. As a longtime comic book fan I am embarrassed to say I haven't read Watchmen (at least I can claim having flipped through The Dark Knight Returns when it was on display at Power Books., though that was by Frank Miller, back when he was still credible).

Arguably, then, I don't have any business writing a blog post about Alan Moore's work, but the thing of it is, I have enjoyed at least two adaptations of his seminal comic books, V for Vendetta and Watchmen, the former a bit more than the latter and am sincerely disappointed that people don't seem to appreciate these works as much as I have. Rather than offer some snarky, elitist explanation as to why people don't "get" Alan Moore, though, I thought I'd try to posit a little theory I've been brewing since I found out that Watchmen conspicuously underperformed at the box office.

I know they're pretty much the world's easiest target, but first of all I blame Hollywood, and V for Vendetta, while it remains my favorite adaptation of a work by Moore, is a good example. There the filmmakers (Andy and Larry Wachowski of The Matrix fame) were able to preserve a lot of the key elements and aspects of the story but still managed to dull its edges by removing some of the more risque aspects of Moore's storytelling. There's a whole wikipedia entry on the changes, but I was struck by the removal of Finch's resorting to drug use to try to learn to think like V, and ultimately by the fact that unlike his cinematic counterpart, the comic-book version of V cared not a whit for democracy but was in fact an anarchist. There is such a thing as taking creative liberties, but there's also such a thing as hijacking somebody's body of work to make it a platform for one's own agenda, and though I had no problem with the film being the anti-Bush propaganda that critics accused it of being, I really wasn't fond of the fact that the story went from a bold vision of a world where all vestige of despotic order is destroyed and replaced with its antithesis to a feel-good, twisted version of an "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coca-Cola chorus. It became about "freedom" and "democracy," which, while virtues in and of themselves, were NOT part of the original story. So for the most part, Hollywood doesn't have the balls to envision Alan Moore's work as it should be done. One only need watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to see that.

How, then does one explain the underwhelming box-office performance of Watchmen, which a lot of fans have hailed as painstakingly faithful to the source material?

That brings me to the second culprit behind the lukewarm reception to adaptations of Alan Moore's works; Joe Public's perception of comic book movies.

Now, though it wasn't my favorite comic book movie of last year or of all time, I really have to concede that makers of The Dark Knight have probably made the boldest narrative effort by (spoiler alert, if one is needed) pitting Batman against a villain he cannot conclusively defeat without great personal cost. Thing is, there was a structure to it; a hero, a villain, and acts of good pitted against acts of evil.

Neither V for Vendetta nor Watchmen follows that paradigm, with the characters there often acting with as much villainy as heroism. And it is because of this, the absence of larger-than-life archetypes, that the general audience, who, I think, have pre-conceived notions of the kind of stories their comic-book based movies should tell based on over three decades of such movies starting with 1978's Superman, simply doesn't connect to Moore's characters, which is really a shame because they are wonderfully nuanced, even when watered down.

Another aspect I think comes into play is something Moore himself declared; his works are unfilmable, because they depict events and characters in a way that can only be done on the printed page. I don't know that I agree entirely with that and certainly the technological advances made since Watchmen's initial publication in 1986 have made that statement debatable, but it is still entirely possible that things may have gotten lost in translation. Some of the most damning indictments of the film have come from internet fans who watched the film, were underwhelmed, re-read the comic books to restore their faith in Moore, and came to the conclusion that the story "wasn't really that great to begin with," which is more the fault of the filmmaker than anyone else; I mean, I don't remember it ever happening that an adaptation has literally dragged down the source material along with it. Maybe Moore was right and the series should never have been filmed.

I think the problem in a nut shell is that the world is not ready for Alan Moore yet. Whether it's Hollywood producers with no balls, or audiences with too many preconceived notions, I don't think people are in the proper position to appreciate the subtext of Moore's works.