‘V for Vendetta’: 10 Years Later, A Mask Endures

Hugo Weaving in ‘V for Vendetta’

It’s been 10 years since V For Vendetta premiered in U.S. theaters on March 17, 2006. The adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Watchmen author Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd, written and produced by Matrix masterminds Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and directed by James McTeigue, stars Natalie Portman as a young woman in a dystopian, fascistic Britain who becomes embroiled in a revolution started by a mysterious masked figure known as V (Hugo Weaving). It was a modest hit that’s had a long life on home video, but its real legacy is an unexpected one: the iconic Guy Fawkes mask that V wears has become a signature image of protest politics in the early 21st century.

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Guy Fawkes, for the uninitiated, was an English Catholic who attempted to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. This “Gunpowder Plot” is commemorated in the U.K each year on Nov. 5, with the burning of effigies, lighting of fireworks, and sightings of children wearing paper ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks with a distinctive mustache.

When Moore began work on V For Vendetta, a reaction to the right-wing government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, his collaborator Lloyd suggested that they use a Fawkes mask “as an emblem” for their revolutionary central character. V’s Fawkes-like visage haunts the comic (which was eventually completed in 1989), and covered the collected graphic novel, which was hailed as a classic.

Reviews were divided on the Wachowski-led film adaptation — for example, New York Magazine called it “a welcome blast of pop subversion,” but LA Weekly dubbed it “a dud” — while box office was decent but hardly a blockbuster. Even so, via the image of the V mask, it’s lingered in the culture long after its theatrical run.

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It first became associated with real-world protests just a month or so after the film was released, when a group of anarchists donned the masks outside Time Warner HQ to protest what they saw as the film’s appropriation of their politics. But it got more attention in 2008 when hacker collective Anonymous donned the masks when protesting against the Church Of Scientology.

The mask soon became regularly associated with the group, which also took up Nov. 5 as a date of significance. Subsequently, Guy Fawkes masks appeared in large numbers during the mass protests in Wisconsin in 2011 against Gov. Scott Walker, and again during the Occupy movement, with even Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wearing one in London in October 2011.

Between 2012 and 2014, crowds of protesters in Guy Fawkes masks were seen far and wide, in countries including Poland, India, Thailand, Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, and Venezuela to name but a few. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates went so far as to ban the wearing of the masks after the Arab Spring.

V’s original creators were clearly pleased at the far-reaching influence of the character’s image mask. As Moore told The Guardian, “It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction…. It turns protests into performances. It creates a sense of romance and drama.” Lloyd, who drew the original image, told the BBC he was “happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.”

‘V for Vendetta’ scene: Get their masks off!:

But while the mask wouldn’t exist without Moore and Lloyd (and while Anonymous may have latched onto the image after its use in a popular 4Chan meme called “Epic Fail Guy”), one shouldn’t underestimate the role the film played in making it iconic, exposing V’s trademark visage to a much wider audience than the comic ever would have.

The movie also puts more emphasis on the idea that the Guy Fawkes mask isn’t something held by one man, but a symbol. In the book’s conclusion, V is killed and Evey (the character played by Portman) takes up his mask and fulfills his mission. The same thing happens in the movie (“Behind this mask, there is an idea,” V tells the villainous Creedy in a line appropriated from the original text, “And ideas are bulletproof”), but the Wachowskis add a scene where a huge crowd of people, all wearing Fawkes masks, descend on Trafalgar Square.

It’s this scene that best predicts, and likely inspired, its use in the recent waves of protest. As Lloyd said, “My feeling is the Anonymous group needed an all-purpose image to hide their identity and also symbolise that they stand for individualism,” and that image became the one specifically featured in the movie as a group of anonymous protesters took a stand against the powers that be.

Ironically, despite the anti-corporate message of Anonymous and Occupy, the movie’s backers Warner Bros have had an unexpected windfall from the protests. The Guy Fawkes mask as featured in the film, the one that’s become an anti-authority icon, is actually a trademark of Time Warner, and with as many as 100,000 masks being sold worldwide at its peak, according to the New York Times, that turns into a tidy profit for the corporation.

The V For Vendetta mask has popped up in headlines less frequently in the past few years. But on its 10th anniversary, and with a leading presidential candidate pushing what sounds to many like an authoritarian agenda, it could be set for a comeback: Anonymous recently posted a video declaring “total war” on Donald Trump, a message delivered by a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

Watch the ‘V for Vendetta’ trailer: