Controversy...

As I said last time, today we're going to cross a line.  The line of acceptable behaviour and common decency.  This decision will alienate many of my readers, but I can no longer sit back and live a lie.  Therefore, there's something I have to say.

I really like the film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

There, it's said now.  I can't take it back and I won't, do you hear me?

But "comedy" aside, I'd like to examine my reasoning.  Firstly, let me get something out of the way; I'm very much aware that the vast majority of human beings (a) have never seen the film (b) have never read the books (c) have rather more pressing concerns, like staying alive till tea time and (d) don't read this blog anyway, so fuck it.  Regardless,  Alan Moore has a massive and vocal fanbase and they REALLY don't like this film, it seems.

I like Alan Moore's work.  At this point, under British law, I'm required to talk about V For Vendetta and Watchmen, because apparently, these are the most important comics of all time.  They aren't, by the way.  They're good, they're compelling, they raise powerful arguments about human society/behaviour and they are both so much a product of the 1980s that the film versions should have been directed by John Hughes.

I get awfully bored with people in the media raising these two comics as the highest form of art known to civilisation.  A lot of this seems to be down to the fact that they explore a contained narrative, i.e. they follow the conventional format of the novel and therefore allow a critic to apply the same standards as they would to  PROPER book.  Also, they make the point that super-hero costumes are stupid and unrealistic, which means you can relax and enjoy the fight scenes in a semi ironic way.

It's a bit frustrating that even my critique of these sacred texts is horribly dated; people were saying this stuff in the 1990s.  In all fairness, so was Alan Moore, who's never quite understood why everyone goes on about Watchmen all the time.  I always get the impression it was just another comics gig for him (as many of you probably know, it was intended to feature existing DC comics characters, rather than new ones of Moore's creation).  So we had dark themes and political satire and extreme violence and the deconstruction of the super-hero.  Neat ideas!  And then everyone wrote the same comic for the next thirty years.

Most super-hero comics are set in Manchester

Not everyone, mind, but it's wearying that we're still having dark, rainy, cynical superhero comics churned out right up until 2014.  Marvel, for their sins, spotted this after five bloody years of dark and "mature" storylines and are currently trying to raise the fun levels, finally noticing that a character called Daredevil might need to be a bit swashbuckling and fun in order to really live up to the title of the book.

There's always exceptions and I'm not going to go on and on (LIAR) about them, but James Robinson's Starman told a genuinely mature story (as opposed to adolescent expressions of crude sexuality, violence and ill-thought out politics) over many years.  Along the way, beautiful characterisation took realistic, likeable characters through dementedly unrealistic situations, with a fair few Bowie references in there for good measure.  Or try Grant Morrison's work; it's sometimes inaccessible, but if you relax and allow comics like Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles or his later work on New X-Men or Batman to sweep you along, you won't regret it.  All these examples toy with the "dark" aspects of comics, but in a way that allows celebration and joy to express itself; what a lot of writers forgot was that, in order to appreciate the darkness, sometimes we have to emerge smiling into the light.

(INTERLUDE: there's a rather a lot of other comics in the world, some of which were written after the year 2000 and aren't about super-heroes.  I could also spend happily spend the rest of this article listing comics you should read that aren't by white men and I genuinely apologise for the fact that I haven't. However I need to get back to that damn film at the top of the page.  Send me angry suggestions about who I should have recommended.) 




Trigger warning: the following section involves some brief comment on representations of sexual violence.  Given the tone so far, I feel it only right to make this clear from the start; it's unavoidable in a discussion of the source material. 






So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  Problematic, in a word.  Problematic.

I own all the collections.  I've re-read them a lot.  My favourite is the one that gets the worst press, Black Dossier, largely because it doesn't really feel the need to pretend to be anything other than a massive "spot the famous literary/pop culture icon" game.  I like the artwork and the sense of style and the dialogue, even though it often becomes just a string of postmodern jokes.

The thing is, the books also make me uneasy.

League runs for four volumes, all of which explicitly depict acts of extreme sexual or sexualised violence against women.  The books feature two central ongoing female protagonists (and one character who regularly shifts between bodies/genders, Teirisias style) both of whom are subject to sexual assaults in every storyline they feature in.  There's an argument that Moore is reflecting the role of women in the literature he is using to build his world; an excellent point about representation, true, but I just don't feel comfortable with the need for Voldemort to be portrayed as a rapist.  It doesn't advance the plot especially, except in a fairly minor way; by the time I reached this part, my reaction was one of weary despair that Moore was using this routine yet again.  Likewise, I understand the allusion to Pirate Jenny in Century: 1910 but I found the scenes based on this as far too horrifying and exploitative to sit comfortably with the explosions and jokes, especially in a comic that uses Jack the Ripper as a central character.

I think there's a real danger that Moore is using rape as a lazy character development technique; worse yet, it seems to be the only technique he makes use of with his female characters, who seem to fall into victim status with grim regularity.  I'm not certain if he's referencing the melodramatic "perils of Penelope" motif with Mina, but if he is, he's not referencing anything else at all.  Re-reading the first volume, specifically some of the Invisible Man sequences, is an uncomfortable experience to put it far too mildly.  I'm not even going to reference the depiction of that character's death, which has clearly been set up as a just punishment for his earlier outrages, but simply seems to compound the horrors.  Suffice to say that Moore seems to have a rather unsettling obsession with this kind of material; for me, the mix of high adventure and misogyny is far, far too representative of the worst elements of pulp culture.

I'm very much aware that this is not nearly enough or enough of a serious treatment of a huge and complex issue.  There is, clearly, a much wider discussion to be had in a more appropriate format.





Sensitive subject matter ends here

And, if you'll forgive a shift in my own tone away from the serious issues, he has clearly never properly read a Harry Potter novel.

Which brings me to the film.  The above mentioned James Robinson is credited with a large proportion of the script.  I feel a bit sorry for him.  He gets his first major Hollywood deal, is handed a legendary comic project and then gets told that they've just lost the rights to one of the main characters (Fu Manchu turned out to be in copyright still.  And racist).  Then the poor bugger reads the comic again and notes how a lot of it appears to be about an emaciated opium addict going through withdrawal.  And how the plot hinges around at least three sequences of extreme sexual violence.  And that a lot of the characters just stand around saying things until the reader notices which nineteenth century novel they're from.

Given all this, Robinson took the best possible course of action; which is clearly to think sod it, I'm writing my own version.  Actually, I may be doing him a disservice here.  What he does is create something rather interesting, possibly intentionally, probably not.  He creates the cinematic equivalent of the comic.  Just as the comic draws upon a written body of work, Robinson's script draws upon a visual body.  This isn't an adaptation of a book, it's using the same techniques in and on a different medium.

From here on in, I'm going to assume you've a degree of familiarity with the film.

SPOILERS: If not: Allan Quartermain (minus the opium), Mina Harker (with vampire super-powers), Captain Nemo (of roughly the same ethnicity that Jules Verne describes), AN Invisible Man (THE Invisible Man is in copyright still), Dorian Gray (portrayed as a camp version of Wolverine), Tom Sawyer (the Alan Moore fans went ballistic about this addition) and Jekyll/Hyde (the Hulk, but not green) get together on the Nautilus and try and stop someone who really isn't the Phantom of the Opera teaming up with Professor Moriarty to start a war or something.  They have a big battle in Venice and in the Arctic circle.  Lots of things explode.  Venice, incidentally, was built by Leonardo and is about sixty times the size it is in real life.  Everyone there wears those pointy carnival masks all the time and the canals can fit the Nautilus in.  There's a steampunk sports car and a white tiger.

It's bloody brilliant.

This is awesome

Seriously, I'm not being all hipster ironic.  I last watched this movie a week ago and writing this much makes me want to watch it again RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND.

This is also awesome

Back to my earlier point; this is a collage, a cut-up job.  As I said, possibly an unintentional one, but it doesn't matter.  What LXG (to use its Moore-baiting abbreviation) does is take the best bits of Hollywood action films and fuse them into a ridiculous, manic patchwork.  A patchwork made of explosions and submarines.  Best kind.

Awesomer.  

Let me clarify by "the best bits of Hollywood action", I don't mean Die Hard, great as that movie is.  What I'm talking about is a very specific thread of work.  I mean the kind of dated, slightly forgotten about, Sunday afternoon, Christmas holidays, rainy Monday matinee movies.  Quartermain, for example; played by Sean Connery, for starters.  The character as represented here is more like a survivor of the Hammer action classics, like She and Vengeance of She.  Neither of which featured Quartermain, but who cares?

Hell yeah

This is the Bank Holiday afternoon Victorian Disney action hero.  Of course Venice is massive!  It looks exactly like it does in that picture you drew when you were nine!  And as for Mina; what's the point in being Mina bloody Harker if you can't turn into loads of bats?  She positively relishes her power and bloodlust; she's a fantastic, fun character.  It's just a shame that she's the only woman in the whole sodding film, but I never said it was perfect.  She does, however, get this great exchange:


Quartermain: Mrs Harker, I doubt you measure danger in quite the way that I do.
Mina: And I imagine you with quite the library, Mr Quartermain.  All those books you must have read, merely by looking at their covers.


See?

This is just plain brilliant.  It's like dressing up as a pirate.  It's like drawing your own version of the Nautilus and making it the size of an aircraft carrier.  No, it's not great art, but then neither is At the Earth's Core or The Land That Time Forgot or Warlords of Atlantis or The Phantom or your own favourite.  It's a big daft laugh of a film and anyone who expected a straightforward adaptation of the comic needs to seriously consider their grasp of what makes cinema work.  This is referencing all those 1930s adventure serials in a more honest way than Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark did, because it's disposable.  One expects Rod Taylor or Doug McClure to arrive.  George Pal must have been watching over this movie; check out Doc Savage if you don't believe me.

Why how kind of you to notice.  I am indeed fucking fabulous.

I bet a lot of people read the comic and worked out which characters came from books that they'd read or heard of before.

I bet that at least someone, somewhere, watched the film and heard about these characters for the first time.  And then went and read The Invisible Man or 20000 Leagues Under the Sea for the very first time too.  If that happened only once, it was more than worth it.