The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Jul. 3rd, 2005 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyCourtesy of a friend, I have now read vols. 1 & 2, and am even more croggled and annoyed by the movie than I was to begin with. And I was pretty damn annoyed.
What really hurts is the movie-makers' insistence on associating themselves with the graphic novel, when they didn't understand and weren't interested in any of the things the graphic novel was doing. If they wanted to make a Victorian pulp adventure movie, even with the intertextuality, they could have done so without invoking Moore's work at all. Which would have been more honest, and would have meant that somebody else could have tried, in much better faith, to translate The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the screen, either big or small. If you want to play any of these characters straight, Moore is not the man for your project, and it's just stupid to pretend that he is.
1. Moore's Quatermain isn't a terribly interesting character, but he's far more interesting than the movie's--and I say this having sincerely enjoyed Connery's performance. The subversiveness of making Quatermain an opium addict ... well, I could go on and on about what that does to myths of British imperialism and masculinity, but let's just say it's a brilliant and inspired idea and it signposts so much about what Moore's going to do.
2. Psychopaths. Jekyll/Hyde and Griffin are psychopaths. (Dorian Gray should be one, too, frankly.) Moore's very clear on the fact that they aren't redeemable--and Griffin's an asshole, as well. I think Moore's making a comment about the heroes of a certain kind of Victorian literature, and Wells and Stevenson would not have disagreed with him. Jekyll/Hyde and Griffin aren't supposed to be sympathetic characters, just as Quatermain's weak and Mina is intolerant and Nemo will never unbend enough to be human. The fact that Moore works the reader around to the point that we find ourselves liking Hyde even though he's a completely unapologetic and unsalvageable monster is a feat of perverse and subtle storytelling, and you only get the payoff if you're willing to do the work.
3. Mina.
4. Mina.
5. Mina.
6. Mina.
I almost hate the movie-makers for what they did to this character. (I would hate them if it were worth the energy.) They unsubverted Moore's extremely subversive reading, taking everything back to where it's simple and patriarchal and Quatermain's the hero, just like he's supposed to be. And once you do that, well, no, boys, there's nothing left for Mina to do. Gosh, I wonder why? And so you make her a vampire, because you don't know what else to do now that you've fucked the story over, and it's stupid. Stupid and pointless and wrong.
Mina is the protagonist of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She's not a vampire. She's a strong-minded, independent, intelligent woman who has, through no fault of her own, been forced to become a hero. (Not a heroine--not in Victorian literature.) She's the only one of them who has as much common sense as intelligence, the only one (except possibly for Nemo, depending on how you want to read him) without such yawning abyssal character flaws so as not to be able to cope with the world as it is. She understands the world she's trapped in, and she hates it, and yet she's still trying to do the right thing, insofar as it's ever possible to know what "the right thing" is. There's a reason she's the liaison with Bond, and there's a reason she's the only one Hyde can connect with on a level other than enlightened self-interest and destruction of property. They're not the same reason, but both are signals--great screaming banner-waving signals--that Mina is the character around whom the story revolves. Moore couldn't explicate the project of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen more clearly without actually hiring a brass band and a boat on the Thames.
And the movie-makers missed it. Absolutely missed it Or willfully chose to ignore it, which brings me back around to the question I started with: why claim to be making a movie of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when you clearly don't like it or respect it or want to have anything to do with it?
What really hurts is the movie-makers' insistence on associating themselves with the graphic novel, when they didn't understand and weren't interested in any of the things the graphic novel was doing. If they wanted to make a Victorian pulp adventure movie, even with the intertextuality, they could have done so without invoking Moore's work at all. Which would have been more honest, and would have meant that somebody else could have tried, in much better faith, to translate The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the screen, either big or small. If you want to play any of these characters straight, Moore is not the man for your project, and it's just stupid to pretend that he is.
1. Moore's Quatermain isn't a terribly interesting character, but he's far more interesting than the movie's--and I say this having sincerely enjoyed Connery's performance. The subversiveness of making Quatermain an opium addict ... well, I could go on and on about what that does to myths of British imperialism and masculinity, but let's just say it's a brilliant and inspired idea and it signposts so much about what Moore's going to do.
2. Psychopaths. Jekyll/Hyde and Griffin are psychopaths. (Dorian Gray should be one, too, frankly.) Moore's very clear on the fact that they aren't redeemable--and Griffin's an asshole, as well. I think Moore's making a comment about the heroes of a certain kind of Victorian literature, and Wells and Stevenson would not have disagreed with him. Jekyll/Hyde and Griffin aren't supposed to be sympathetic characters, just as Quatermain's weak and Mina is intolerant and Nemo will never unbend enough to be human. The fact that Moore works the reader around to the point that we find ourselves liking Hyde even though he's a completely unapologetic and unsalvageable monster is a feat of perverse and subtle storytelling, and you only get the payoff if you're willing to do the work.
3. Mina.
4. Mina.
5. Mina.
6. Mina.
I almost hate the movie-makers for what they did to this character. (I would hate them if it were worth the energy.) They unsubverted Moore's extremely subversive reading, taking everything back to where it's simple and patriarchal and Quatermain's the hero, just like he's supposed to be. And once you do that, well, no, boys, there's nothing left for Mina to do. Gosh, I wonder why? And so you make her a vampire, because you don't know what else to do now that you've fucked the story over, and it's stupid. Stupid and pointless and wrong.
Mina is the protagonist of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She's not a vampire. She's a strong-minded, independent, intelligent woman who has, through no fault of her own, been forced to become a hero. (Not a heroine--not in Victorian literature.) She's the only one of them who has as much common sense as intelligence, the only one (except possibly for Nemo, depending on how you want to read him) without such yawning abyssal character flaws so as not to be able to cope with the world as it is. She understands the world she's trapped in, and she hates it, and yet she's still trying to do the right thing, insofar as it's ever possible to know what "the right thing" is. There's a reason she's the liaison with Bond, and there's a reason she's the only one Hyde can connect with on a level other than enlightened self-interest and destruction of property. They're not the same reason, but both are signals--great screaming banner-waving signals--that Mina is the character around whom the story revolves. Moore couldn't explicate the project of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen more clearly without actually hiring a brass band and a boat on the Thames.
And the movie-makers missed it. Absolutely missed it Or willfully chose to ignore it, which brings me back around to the question I started with: why claim to be making a movie of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when you clearly don't like it or respect it or want to have anything to do with it?
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 07:28 pm (UTC)I don't know why movies do that, but they do it so friggin' much that I'm much better off not allowing myself to get annoyed about it.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 08:55 pm (UTC)I think she makes a not-very-good decision about her love life, but I found it in character and believable, and Mina herself doesn't seem to think it was a very good decision, either. It's actually one of the things I like about her as a character as about League as a whole: that nobody's perfect, and even the people who are closest to being heroes do stupid things sometimes.
And I liked vol. 2 for absolutely refusing to compromise on Hyde's monstrosity.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 09:16 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 10:59 pm (UTC)I've only now read the first volume, and was fascinated, but the gore being depicted artistically disturbs me a lot more viscerally (sorry!) than descriptions of gore in books. Plus, while well-written psycopaths that you end up understanding are certainly fascinating, it wears on me to not have somebody I can either root for or identify with. (It's the same reason I can't read most of the Hellblazer comics.) But League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was certainly a brilliant piece of art - it's just one that I'd have to reread only when in a particularly toughminded mood.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 05:45 pm (UTC)HOLLYWOOD
Date: 2005-07-07 09:29 am (UTC)