Keller - V for vendetta as cultural pastiche a critical study of the graphic novel and film

Also by JAMES R. KELLER
AND FROM MCFARLAND

Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study (2006)

Queer (Un)Friendly Film and Television (2002)

Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels (2000)

EDITED BY JAMES R. KELLER AND LESLIE STRATYNER

The New Queer Aesthetic on Television: Essays on Recent Programming (2006)

Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television (2004)

EDITED BY LESLIE STRATYNER AND JAMES R. KELLER

Fantasy Fiction into Film: Essays (2007)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-0497-8

2008 James R. Keller. All rights reserved

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On the cover: Guy Fawkes Mask, Brian Chan, paper origami, November 2006; background 2008 Shutterstock

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Shadow Texts, Superstrings, and Parallel Universes

Allow me to begin with a metaphorical digression, with a laymans description of a theoretical model from physics, one that attempts to account for all energy and matter within the universea Theory of Everything. In this way, I hope to elucidate the abstruse concepts surrounding intertextual theory, thus, ironically, illuminating the seemingly incomprehensible by explicating the merely esoteric. The latter, at least, has a provisional form that can help one to visualize the conceptual and linguistic subject matter pertinent to this study of the varied cultural productions surrounding V for Vendetta, originally a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and David Lloyd in the 1980s, but more pertinently the cinematic production (2005) by James McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers, of Matrix Trilogy fame. The very rudimentary model of M-Theory or String Theory will allow us to conceptualize the interrelations between multiple textual productions in the present, between those of the past and the present, and between those of the present, past, and future. Thus we will open up a portal on the interplay or interpenetration of language, concepts, and images within the various V for Vendetta texts and more broadly within artifacts of both high and low cultures.

For a time, efforts to create a Theory of Everything, to explain all of the observable phenomena of the universe with the known laws of physics, were hindered by a theoretical schism within the field, a breach between Einsteins law of Special Relativity, which explained the macrocosmic or the grand structures of the universe, and Quantum Dynamics, which addressed the microcosmic, the physics of the atomic and subatomic levels. These two very useful laws were functionally incompatible until the introduction of String Theory (Greene, Elegant 3, 13). The new model actually necessitated the existence of both Special Relativity and Quantum Dynamics in order to be coherent (Greene, Elegant 16). Yet it became mired for a time in wrangling over the exact number of additional dimensions that existed beyond the observable fourthree of direction (forward/backward, up/down, and right/left) and one of time. String Theory, based upon the image of trembling fibers (billions of times smaller than an atom), each of which vibrates at a separate frequency, for a time hypothesized ten requisite dimensions. However, there were five competing and viable theories attempting to explain these strings. The resolution to the impasse came with the introduction of an eleventh dimensiona postulate that resulted in the genesis of M-Theory, the brainchild of renowned physicist Edward Witten (Kaku 211214).

With the addition of an eleventh dimension, the competing elucidations of String Theory were reconciled, and a new and refined hypothesis of the structure of Everything evolvedM-Theory. While the M in M-Theory is the slipping signifier, suggesting Mother, Mystical, Magical, or Model, depending on the interpreter, it is the signifier Membrane that momentarily fits our purposes, and we might even consider adding Metaphorical to the burgeoning list of descriptive Ms. Via some inaccessible (to the layman) mathematical and theoretical acrobatics, M-Theorists have gleaned that the strings postulate the existence of parallel universes, in one visual model, dangling, bending, warping, and rippling side by side, not so much like strings as corresponding sheets or membranes, each of which constitutes an alternate universe (Greene, Fabric 391394). Within this framework, physicists have conceptualized Black Holes as portals or wormholes linking the corresponding membranes or even as the points of inception for newly created universes (Greene, Elegant 264265, 369). The Big Bang (which created all matter and energy in our known universe, a process which continues even now, the structure continually flying apart in every direction) is thus conceived as the simultaneously creative and cataclysmic result of the membranes smashing into each other (Kaku 222). In the inflationary model of the cosmic expansion, the black hole is conceived as a puncture in the fabric of space/time that initiates the big bang and rapid inflation of a new universe in an alternate dimension, each branching from another like interlocking and interdependent balloons. These newborn universes may explain what has been termed dark matter, which attempts to account for the missing 70 percent of the matter in our own cosmological vista (Kaku 221). The parallel membranes also account for the weakness of gravity within our universean idea postulated by Harvard physicist Lisa Randallwhich holds that gravity is not native to or does not originate within, so much as permeate, our universe; it is a particlea gravitonthat penetrates all of the dimensions, and, therefore, is diluted. It may be a residual effect emanating from outside our observable dimensions. In other words, we experience only the remainder or the filtrate of the full gravitational force (Kaku 216221).

By now the reader has probably begun to wonder, What possible application could such a subject have to the study of film, literature, and intertextual theory? And the answer is Much, but all metaphorical. While there are indisputably more problems with and omissions in the above description of string theory than can be briefly listed in twice as much space, that need not concern us since the purpose of this discussion is to construct metaphors for esoteric literary theoryto track the intertextual footprints crisscrossing the porous and constantly interpenetrated terrain of James McTeigues and the Wachowski Brothers film V for Vendetta (2005). We deal in art, not objective observation and experimentation. Since it is based upon a graphic novel, the film is at its very inception intertextual, paralleling the text from which it was derived, the details of the corresponding narratives constantly interpreting and reinterpreting each other as they intersect and diverge for a variety of pragmatic, conceptual, aesthetic, and inadvertent purposes. The respective narratives dangle like parallel membranes or strings, waving or vibrating (because they are not stable) at similar yet separate frequencies, and occasionally slide against or crash into each other, generating particularly evocative interpretive structures, not in the text, but in the mind of the reader, and there are as many texts as there are readers and viewers. Each subject (re)creates the text within the workshop of filthy creation, fashioning Adam and/or monster out of his or her own experiences and predispositions (Allen 7).