So, he’s calling the current crop of comic films a white supremacist’s dream? Is that why people are calling him racist?
I mean, prior to Black Panther shows up, these films were relatively pale and male, were they not (I’m thinking specifically the MCU) - Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk… white dudes, all, yeah? We didn’t get a film lead by a woman until Captain Marvel. And it is pretty much a celebration of American militarism, which as anyone with a working knowledge of American history knows is a problem and has been driven by white supremacy.
So, perhaps he’s not entirely wrong there?
[ETA] And if there is OTHER things that show him being racist, that’s one thing. I don’t think this is an example of that.
I don’t think he’s racist. I just think his logic is poor and he’s pointing angry fingers in the wrong places. It’s a shame that someone who did so much for the genre has so much loathing for it and so much ignorance of what’s being created.
At Hollywood and the corporate owners of the major comic publishers? They are the ones making deals with the US military and arms dealers to cross promote American Imperialism and the American comics. If anything changed from when Moore was writing for DC, it’s the industry. He strikes me as the kind of guy who has been pretty consistent in the messages of his work and what he hopes to accomplish with it, while we can’t really say the same for hollywood or the big comic publishers
He got screwed over when it came to adaptations, among other things though. He hated them, and for good reason - none of the adaptations of his work even remotely got the point of what he was attempting to say. The closest was V for Vendetta, and that just went with a sort of milquetoast commentary of the war on terror instead of an endorsement or at least deeper exploration of anarchic theories that he was promoting in V (against the rise of fascism in Thatcher’s UK).
To be fair, he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with his adaptations, saying that he’d written them as comic books and that they didn’t belong on the screen, and basically giving the rights away for lack of giving a shit. He’s not wrong that some terrible movies have been made of his comics, but maybe if he hadn’t utterly removed himself from the process, they may have been better.
Sure, but did he have to? If he felt the work spoke for itself and wasn’t in need of reinterpretation, isn’t he allowed to make that choice? I know plenty of people are over the moon when hollywood comes calling, but not everyone is, and I think that’s fine, too.
Plus, he’s always struck me as relatively uncompromising when it comes to his own artistic vision. That’s fair enough, I think.
But as far as I had heard, he had no real say in adaptations (since they were under DC anyway who owned copy right on properties such as the League), and that was part of his refusal to participate.
Absolutely, I very much respect his decision to say “this work should exist in its original form and not be adapted for mass market Hollywood entertainment”. But if he knows he doesn’t have that choice (because of poor contracts, etc), and it’ll be adapted with or without his input, complaining about an adaptation that he refused to participate in seems sort of disingenuous to me. If he doesn’t want his artistic vision uncompromised, perhaps he should consider aiding that vision to make sure it’s consistent.
Why, if he doesn’t really have a say, though? If it’s not up to him, why should he be forced to participate in a process he does not agree with?
Or he could not write comics or books at all, I guess? Seems like we’d all be lesser for it though. And maybe “not becoming an artist” is always a choice an artist can make, but why do we look down on artists when they make choices regarding their artistic work? I agree at some point, stuff is in the public domain (not in the legal sense, but in the… viewing sense, if you get my meaning) and the artist kind of has to accept that (coughgeorgelucashanshotfirstcough) but at the same time, I think they should still get to talk about their view of the work.
At the end of the day, commercial production of art is always going to be a compromise to some degree, of course. I don’t think that should preclude artists having a say about the mass production aspect of their work. All of us have to make a living, after all, and all of us would like to think we do so under the terms that we dictate… most of us do not, Moore included. I think it puts us all in a weird moral gray area, in that we’re constantly both implicated and struggling against a system that is at its heart exploitative.
But (in the case of Moore) going back to the purest form of art (what would that be? Cave painting, I don’t know) isn’t really a productive answer, because art itself only really works when it’s in the public and part of a conversation about the world and the conditions in which we all find ourselves (which are, as Marx reminded us, shaped by us, but also to a large extent beyond our control).
I guess for me, I see it as him pushing for the best solution to the problem of being an artist in the modern world - that to make a go of it, you have to deal with the commercial world at some point, but at the very least you can make some decisions on what that will be and you can bring attention to the deficits of the system we all labor under. Seems to me that he made a stand as best he could on his own principles in a system that has already compromised him.
He likely assumed that working in comics was free of a lot of the bullshit of the non-artistic working world, given the ideology around the production of popular culture during the cold war. He then got successful and discovered that was not the case. It’s a disappointment that comes to us all, that we’re not going to be the one to singlehandedly avoid the worst of the system or to be the ones to change it. Like most everyone else, we’ll struggle with it and make our compromises with it and either be bitter about it or come to terms with it.
[ETA] Sorry. That was a little long. TLDR: I think he gets to make that choice and has a right to talk about the choices that were foisted onto him by a system of production he did not create.
