How "V for Vendetta" Inspired the "Occupy" Movement

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How "V for Vendetta" Inspired the "Occupy" Movement
November 9, 2011
John Scalzi
Filmcritic.com

A couple of years ago, when I wrote up my list of the best science fiction films of the first decade of the 21st century, I included on my list what I think most people would have considered a dark-horse candidate, the 2006 movie V for Vendetta. This is what I wrote about it at the time:

"My vote for the Most Underrated Science Fiction Movie of the Decade, this is the Wachowski Brothers' best script of the decade, and the best Alan Moore adaptation -- the author's outright contempt for Thatcherite England is successfully ported into our own turbulent political era, making for a dystopic movie that I think people will eventually see as wholly representative of the frustrations and paranoia of its era. I could be wrong. Let's check back in a decade."

As it turns out, we haven't had to wait a decade.

Look at the various "Occupy" protests around the country and the world and you'll see the film's imagery (and to be accurate and fair, the imagery of the graphic novel upon which it is based) staring back at you: the Guy Fawkes mask worn by V, the antihero of the story.

It's not a coincidence. In the film and graphic novel, V wore the mask as he struggled to right the wrongs of a fascistic regime and used Guy Fawkes himself as a symbol of someone who sacrificed everything (including his own life) to try to right what he saw as the wrongs of the government. In the real world today, those protesting in the Occupy movement see themselves as doing the same thing -- not only against the government (or indeed, perhaps not primarily against the government) but against corporations which they believe have placed their own interests against the interests of the common weal. By appropriating the masks as a symbol, the Occupy protesters are putting a face on their movement -- a face of revolution which gained its largest popularity through a film.

There are a number of ironies at play here. One is that the film version of V for Vendetta was disowned by Alan Moore, the author of the graphic novel, who among other things decried what he saw as the bastardization of his work for corporate gain -- the corporation in this case being Warner Bros., which made the movie and which is part of the same larger corporation that owns DC, the comic book company which published the graphic novel. One wonders what Moore thinks about both the Occupy movement appropriating his idea of using the Guy Fawkes masks and the knowledge that much of the impetus for that use comes from the movie, rather than his graphic novel.

Another irony is that at least some of the Occupy movement members don't seem to have gotten the memo about who Guy Fawkes was, what he did and how the hero of both the graphic novel and the film went about fomenting change. In a USA Today article about the masks and the Occupy movement, one protester is quoted as saying, "They're very meaningful masks. ... It's not about bombing anything; it's about being anonymous -- and peaceful." Well, no. Guy Fawkes tried to bomb the English Parliament, and in V for Vendetta, novel and film, there are bombs aplenty. Nor is V particularly peaceful as he goes about murdering and torturing people and blowing up buildings in his quest for vengeance and revolution. The Occupy movements have indeed been largely peaceful to date, but "peaceful" is not what the mask symbolized.

That said, it's a mistake to dismiss the Occupy movement's use of the mask as a symbol because its use doesn't track 100% with how it is used in the film and the book. One suspects the protesters are looking past the movie's need for exciting action scenes and the book's nihilistic reaction to '80s Britain to find a common thread between their real-world protest and V's fictional battle: a feeling that, as one character puts it in the movie, "It's all gone wrong, hasn't it?" And that putting things right is going to take more than just half-measures; it's going to take real and wrenching change.

I watched V for Vendetta again just the other night -- on the 5th of November, as it happens, which is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, and which has significance in the film and book. What's going on in that film isn't what's going on in the real world. But it's not hard to see why, here and now, the film, the graphic novel, and their symbols are speaking to so many of those who are protesting.

I have to say I feel pretty smart for having suggested a couple of years ago that V for Vendetta might end up being more influential than people suspected. On the other hand, I kind of wish I didn't live in a time where so many people saw so many resonances between the world of that film and our own.