Beneath the seventeenth-century Palace of Westminster there was a hidden Medieval undercroft, enduring like a line of erased poetry not fully obscured as new verse was written over it. The undercroft was some 77-feet long, 24-feet wide, and 10-feet tall: perfect dimensions in which to hide 36 barrels of gunpowder. Had all that mixed sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter been ignited when King James I opened Parliament on November 5th, 1605, it would have completely obliterated the hodgepodge of Medieval and Tudor buildings where the kingdom conducted its business, killing not just the monarch but over five-hundred parliamentarians, bishops, and judges as well.
Although this regicidal plot had thirteen conspirators, recusant Catholics who thought that toppling James’ government would lead to greater emancipation for their persecuted coreligionists, it’s Guy Fawkes who is most associated with the plan. Oft-quipped as being the only man with honest intentions to enter Parliament, Fawkes was discovered in the late hours the night before the attack was scheduled. Agents of the king found the auburn-haired soldier illuminated by an iron lantern, waiting patiently in the damp basement with a box of matches.
In the centuries after, the sectarian zealot Guy Fawkes would be figured as a boogeyman, burned in effigy every year at anti-Catholic “Guy Fawkes Day” celebrations. Today, however, he’s become an unlikely subversive icon. Comics author Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, followed later by the film producers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, have resurrected a stylized mask of Guy Fawks, with rosy cheeks and black eyes, marked with his distinctive Van Dyke beard and a wide-brimmed hat, as the 21st century’s preeminent symbol against totalitarianism.
The Guy Fawkes mask has become a signifier for opposition to not just injustice or inequity, but against the pervasive, and not unfounded, feeling that we’re all speed-running towards dystopia.
V for Vendetta, both in Moore’s comic and the Wachowskis’ film, is the science fiction tale of a vigilante battling a futuristic dystopian government in Britain. In both versions, Fawkes finally gets his intended target. The Neo-Gothic edifice of the Houses of Parliament are destroyed in a cacophony of righteous fire, the clock face of Big Ben shattering as Tchaikovsky’s “The 1812 Overture” thunders over loudspeakers.
That Fawkes would attain such a status is odd. The monarchy he rebelled against was certainly authoritarian. But the intention of the Gunpowder Plot wasn’t to topple theocracy so much as it was to replace the Protestant variety with a Catholic iteration. Nonetheless, as Lewis Call argues in Anarchist Studies, Guy Fawkes has become “liberated from all permanent meaning,” the mask of his bearded, harlequin face now a “potent instrument for the promotion of postmodern anarchism.” The mask is now associated with the hacker collective Anonymous and the #Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and pro-democracy protests in countries as varied as Turkey and Thailand. Banned in Saudia Arabia and Bahrain, just as the film V for Vendetta was banned in Russia as “LGBT propaganda,” the Guy Fawkes mask has become a signifier for opposition to not just injustice or inequity, but against the pervasive, and not unfounded, feeling that we’re all speed-running towards dystopia.
Moore’s comic, published as an omnibus in 1989, detailed a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, along with the subsequent near-future rise of the fascist Norsefire party in the United Kingdom. This V for Vendetta figures the eponymous mono-lettered hero, explicitly as an anarchist, albeit one who also happens to be a mysterious swashbuckler in a Guy Fawkes mask. “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves,” lectures V from behind his mask. “We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.” The political context was clearly Thatcherite Britain, with declared anarchist Moore drawing equally from critical theory and a particularly English punk ethos,.
During the Bush years, the Wachowski-produced screen adaptation spoke more to liberal Americans’ anxieties. That shift in thematic orientation didn’t much please Moore, who is notoriously unpleased by every adaptation of his work. Still, a certain credit must be given to the filmmakers, who scripted what is basically a pro-terrorism plot (but only righteous terrorism) just a half-decade after 9/11, and less than a year after dozens of innocent people were killed in an attack on the London Underground.
Still, despite the edginess of the film—which is arguably better plotted than the original—Moore isn’t wrong about treacly Hollywood politics sweeping in. V is transformed from a morally ambiguous Übermensch into another Marvel action hero. By Moore’s estimation the Wachowskis and their director James McTeigue had irrevocably Americanized his material, turning what was a complicated moral allegory into a tale of a heroic, bootstrapping individualist, with the film advocating not a genuine anarchistic politics so much as an anodyne liberal humanism fit for the NPR tote bag set (and that’s before the kitsch of Stephen Fry’s performance as a dissident late night host).
Not all were in agreement with Moore, however. Lloyd took the film on its own merits. David Graeber, beloved anarchist anthropologist, opined in a 2006 interview with The Village Voice that “I thought the message of anarchy got out in spite of Hollywood.” Indeed, some far-left groups used the film as a recruitment opportunity.
Regardless, when rewatching the film, just rereleased for its twentieth anniversary, it’s hard not to detect more of the vengeful Count of Monte Cristo than Peter Kropotkin in the movie, more Zoro in the sword play than Mikhail Bakunin—more entertainment than anarchism.
V’s tutelage Evie Hammond (played far better by Natalie Portman than contemporary critics allowed for, despite the awful accent), claims that her mentor was “you…and me. He was all of us.” Still, it’s hard not to still conclude that the actual hero of the movie remained very much still the expected hero of the movie. He’s less a character conceived of by George Orwell or Arthur Koestler than a figure from a Rudolph Valentino flick. The high-camp sword fighting and the punning alliteration, the Phantom of the Opera crypt where V sits with rescued old masters while he listens to jazz vinyls is undeniably fun. Hugo Weaving as the titular caped crusader positively chews his scenery from behind his unchanging mask. William Hurt as the dictator Adam Sutler was a master stroke of casting as it recalls his role as Winston Smith in the New Wave adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Five. Sad-eyed Stephen Rea (an actor who supplied the voice of Gerry Adams on television after Thatcher had banned anyone supposedly associated with the IRA leadership from speaking) remains the best part of any film that he’s in. But for all of that, after the masonry and concrete of Westminster have fallen, there’s no real sense of what’s to come next, how a new society is to arise when the fireworks cool and the Tchaikovsky is silent.
Drawing as it did from the years of the War on Terror when the Patriot Act was still new, V for Vendetta references the Anglo-American “Coalition of the Willing” in the Iraq War, with shades of Abu Ghraib in the secret prisons to which dissidents are spirited away. Yet rewatching the film twenty years later, it operates with an eerie prescience.
The movie begins with a television broadcast of Lewis Prothero, a former concentration camp guard who is now chief propagandist for Norsefire and played with oily efficacy by Roger Allam (an uncanny stand-in for Iraq War cheerleader Christopher Hitchens). Prothero inveighs against the collapsing, godless “Ulcerated Sphincter of Arse-erica” as he puts it, before denouncing “immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, terrorists. Disease-ridden degenerates. They had to go. Strength through unity. Unity through faith,” sounding nothing so much like Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile, in the original comic Moore reveals that the Norsefire leader (named Adam Susan in Moore’s version) is in love with an all-powerful supercomputer which is the actual absolute leader, a plot point with rather obvious contemporary correspondences with the technocratic ghouls who’ve commandeered our own government.
Two decades after it was released, in our own season of Palantir surveillance and algorithmic propaganda, omnipresent flock cameras and public executions performed by ICE, V for Vendetta is uncomfortably familiar. Nonetheless, by comparison, the society in this film can seem positively hopeful, not least of all because it appears to end. What was once warning is now perhaps wish fulfillment.
“Utopia,” a word coined by the Thomas More in his 1516 romance, is a pun on the Greek translation for “No Place.” Its opposite, “dystopia,” first used perhaps as early as the middle of the nineteenth-century, is a negation of utopia. The two concepts are inextricably connected, with one person’s perfect society being another’s torture dungeon.
Thrilling to totalitarianism and apocalypse at the movies and in our pages, we were perhaps content to fantasize about living in anything short of true dystopia.
Today the adjective “utopian” is most often used as a political slur, not as a description of a genuine ideological project. “At best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment,” writes Frederic Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. In a moment when utopia remains nowhere but dystopia seemingly everywhere, what’s the utility of this particular narrative, of any of these stories? With no deficit of dystopian tales—Children of Men, Snowpiercer, Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049 and so on—the mind struggles to think of any kind of equivalent utopian fiction.
Mark Fisher, among Jameson’s most astute readers, writes in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? that ours is an age defined by the “slow cancelation of the future…a deflation of expectations.” Thrilling to totalitarianism and apocalypse at the movies and in our pages, we were perhaps content to fantasize about living in anything short of true dystopia. Our nightmares, it seems, have precluded the possibility of our dreams.
Dystopias are meant to offer us means of rebellion and protest—but even these are the intellectual property of massive corporations. The habit from The Handmaid’s Tale is owned by HBO, and the Guy Fawkes mask is copywritten by Warner Brothers, now owned by Trump ally David Ellison’s Skydance. What, then, do we need to be able to envision not just opposition to dystopia, but something genuinely hopeful?
Even while every utopia contains the seeds of its opposite, so too does any dystopia provide, even briefly or contingently, intimations of a different way of doing things. Of the possibilities of a better world born out of struggle against totalitarianism. The possibility of hope.
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its chilling invocation of the future of the human race being akin to a boot stomping on a face forever, nonetheless contains a short academic glossary at the end which implies that Big Brother’s order shall someday end. Similarly, Margaret Atwood took that same sentiment to a more complete conclusion in the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale. While neither novel has anything that contains a happy ending, much less utopia, they do imply that this too shall pass.
V for Vendetta’s moment in that regard isn’t the explosive conclusion, but rather in a concentration camp epistle penned on toilet paper and left for Evie to discover when she is (ostensibly) imprisoned by the regime. The account of an actress named Valerie, jailed and tortured by the government because she is a lesbian, it lays out a poignant—a beautiful—philosophy of life lived amidst the constraint of a repressive state.
Valerie recalls being rejected by her parents after coming out to them, meeting her lover Ruth on set in 2015 (a date that felt worryingly close when the movie came out), and their subsequent arrest and presumed execution. Despite the horrific conclusion to her life, Valerie describes it as one lived with integrity and honesty, telling a reader whom she can’t possibly know that despite their mutual unknowability that she loves them. In recalling the love she and Ruth shared, she simply says that “for three years I had roses and apologized to no one.”
Roses, then, are the antidote to dystopia. Though flowers must wilt, so too do regimes ultimately fall.
As a principle this isn’t mere vanilla liberalism. It is a point almost theological, almost mystical, in its import about the sovereignty of the self, about the republic born through love towards those who are not us. In the meantime, gather our rosebuds as we may, but let us gather the bulbs too, so that our orchards may yet blossom. Because in the moment of the rose’s existence, there is—however temporary and however short—that blissful perfection which stands in opposition to those corrupted kingdoms of this world.
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