Twenty Years On, 'V for Vendetta' Reads Less Like Warning Than Wish

Alan Moore's Guy Fawkes mask began as a stylized stage prop in a 1980s comic and is now the 21st century's best-known symbol of anti-totalitarian protest — while remaining the intellectual property of Warner Brothers. That contradiction sits at the center of V for Vendetta, reissued on screen for its twentieth anniversary and reexamined here as both a cultural artifact and a political warning that has aged into something closer to familiarity.

Where the mask comes from

The image traces to 1605. Beneath the Palace of Westminster, a Medieval undercroft — 77 feet long, 24 wide, 10 tall — held 36 barrels of gunpowder. Thirteen recusant Catholic conspirators planned to kill King James I and over five hundred parliamentarians, bishops and judges on November 5. Guy Fawkes, found waiting by lantern the night before, became the sect's enduring face, burned in effigy for centuries at anti-Catholic celebrations.

Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, followed by producers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, turned that face — rosy cheeks, black eyes, Van Dyke beard — into a subversive icon. Lewis Call argues in Anarchist Studies that Fawkes has been "liberated from all permanent meaning," the mask now "a potent instrument for the promotion of postmodern anarchism." It has appeared at Anonymous actions, #Occupy, the Arab Spring, and pro-democracy protests in Turkey and Thailand. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain ban it; Russia banned the film as "LGBT propaganda."

Comic versus film

Moore's comic, published as an omnibus in 1989, imagined a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and the rise of the fascist Norsefire party in Thatcherite Britain. V, an explicit anarchist, lectures: "Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves... We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse."

The Wachowskis' 2005 adaptation, directed by James McTeigue, rerouted the material toward American liberal anxieties during the Bush years. Moore, famously displeased by every adaptation of his work, judged that they had Americanized it — trading moral ambiguity for a bootstrapping individualist and "anodyne liberal humanism fit for the NPR tote bag set." Credit where due: the filmmakers scripted a pro-terrorism plot a half-decade after 9/11 and less than a year after the London Underground attacks.

Not everyone agreed. David Graeber told The Village Voice in 2006: "I thought the message of anarchy got out in spite of Hollywood." Some far-left groups even used the film for recruitment.

What does the rewatch change?

Plenty, on this reading. Roger Allam's propagandist Lewis Prothero, denouncing "immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, terrorists" and preaching "Strength through unity. Unity through faith," now sounds like current cable news. The comic's reveal that Norsefire's leader loves an all-seeing supercomputer reads as pointedly topical. Against Palantir-era surveillance, the film's dystopia "can seem positively hopeful, not least of all because it appears to end."

The cast holds up: Hugo Weaving chewing scenery behind an unchanging mask; William Hurt as dictator Adam Sutler, recalling his Winston Smith; Stephen Rea, once the television voice of Gerry Adams after Thatcher's broadcasting ban, as the film's best asset; Natalie Portman's Evie, better than contemporary critics allowed despite the accent. Yet after Big Ben shatters to Tchaikovsky's 1812, the film offers no vision of what comes next.

The utopia deficit

Dystopia, coined as utopia's negation, now dominates: Children of Men, Snowpiercer, Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049 — with no equivalent utopian fiction in sight. Frederic Jameson writes in Archaeologies of the Future that utopia's best use is "making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment." Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, calls ours an age of the "slow cancelation of the future…a deflation of expectations."

Even rebellion is corporate property: The Handmaid's Tale belongs to HBO; the Fawkes mask is copyrighted by Warner Brothers, now owned by Trump ally David Ellison's Skydance.

The essay's answer lies not in the explosion but in Valerie's letter, written on toilet paper in a concentration camp by a lesbian actress tortured by the regime: "for three years I had roses and apologized to no one." Orwell's appendix implies Big Brother's order will someday end; Atwood's epilogue does the same. Roses wilt — but so, the argument runs, do regimes.