The Great Unmasking: Adaptation and the Problem of Identity in V for Vendetta

Referring to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta (1982-89) and James McTeigue's film adaptation of the same text (2005), this paper explores the metaphysical and narratological ramifications of adapting comics to film. In so doing, this paper holds that adaptation can be viewed as a simultaneously creative and violent act. The violence of McTeigue's adaptation is primarily expressed through a "great unmasking." This phrase refers to the idea that in the film adaptation, one of the text's most significant and interesting problems is simultaneously solved and destroyed– namely, the problem of identity. This paper argues that in switching from comics to film, the problem of identity (that is, the multifaceted mystery of the true identity and history of "codename V") is "solved" because the viewer knows that there is a man beneath the mask, that there is an actor named Hugo Weaving with a comprehensive and authoritative identity, replete with a verifiable history, whose presence, form and voice act as a center that eradicates the text's vast play of intertextuality and identarian uncertainty. Moreover, such presence, indirect as it may be, superimposed on the lack of origin in the text, corrodes and ultimately eliminates the thematic, aesthetic, narrative, and philosophical nuances such indeterminacy creates and sustains. Here, the film creates an authoritative identity that violently centralizes the fractured narrative of the text by destroying the anarchic telos of the text. In brief, the lack of a State-determined identity results in a problematization of the repressive and ideological State apparatuses necessary for its autocracy. It is in this way that the attritional violence of the verifiable identity of the film's protagonist, even when masked, serves to destroy all the radical indeterminacy of the concept of identity facilitated and encouraged by the text. With a view to exploring the violence of intermedial adaptation, this paper explores the metaphysical and narratalogical ramifications of adapting V for Vendetta from comic book to film, particularly how adaptation effects one of the central aspects of the text, namely the problem of identity.