Before V for Vendetta which was published in serial form throughout the s before being made into a film , Guy Fawkes costumes and effigies were only popular in the U. But as you've likely noticed, over the past few years the stylized mask has evolved into a global symbol of dissent, employed by everyone from shadowy computer hackers to Turkish airline workers. And although the masks are often used in anti-establishment demonstrations, one of the largest media corporations in the country gains the most from the masks' rising popularity.
Time Warner owns the rights to the image , and at over , masks a year, it is by far the company's best-selling facial costume. Anonymous The hacktivist collective Anonymous popularized these masks in when it launched Project Chanology , a movement targeting the Church of Scientology after the church tried to censor an interview with Tom Cruise on the web.
Members of the collective agreed to come out from behind their computer screens to protest the Church of Scientology , but needed a way to conceal their identities.
The Guy Fawkes mask was their chosen disguise. Although the collective has never officially stated the reasoning behind this choice, it's likely an homage to an eerie scene in V for Vendetta in which a group of masked protesters marches on the British Parliament. When asked why the mask was selected, one protester told The Boston Globe , "I can't say, not having contact with the inner circle — wherever they are, but I can say the image of people marching towards Parliament in the spirit of protest, that wall of masks, had a certain resonance amongst those who held negative feelings about organizations such as Scientology but also towards the government.
Since then, the masks have become a go-to symbol of the collective and anti-establishment movements worldwide. After Anonymous' first major political demonstration in , the collective began cleverly aligning itself with a variety of anti-establishment movements from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring.
It is, in part, due to these loose affiliations that the adopted emblem of one movement evolved into a global symbol of resistance. It's logical that OWS would appropriate the disguise of the faceless anti-establishment crusader from Lloyd's franchise.
Still, the mask doesn't carry such weight for everyone who dons it. Sid Hiltunen, an unemployed stockbroker who joined the OWS movement, told the New York Times , "If you want to show your support but are afraid you'll lose your job, just wear a mask — any mask.
While that era's children perhaps didn't see Fawkes as a hero, they certainly didn't see him as the villainous scapegoat he'd originally been intended as. At the start of the s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes' status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip's creation: it was the strip's artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.
When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference. To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.
It was also the year in which the term "Guy Fawkes Night" seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative 'bonfire night'. At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn't keep a good symbol down. When the film was made during the peak period of anti-terrorist legislation the golden touch of Hollywood was, it seemed, sufficiently persuasive for the authorities to permit a massed horde of extras dressed as the nation's most famous terrorist to cavort riotously in Parliament Square.
I don't think one need subscribe to any quasi-mystical theories about how the conceptual world of ideas can affect the substantial world of everyday existence in order to agree that, in retrospect, this could be seen as practically begging for it. After that, it wasn't long before the character's enigmatic Time-Warner trademarked leer appeared masking the faces of Anonymous protesters barracking Scientologists halfway down Tottenham Court Road.
Shortly thereafter it began manifesting at anti-globalisation demonstrations, anti-capitalist protests, concerted hacker-attacks upon those perceived as enabling state oppression, and finally on the front steps of St Paul's.
It would seem that the various tectonic collapses deep in the structure of our economic and political systems have triggered waves of kinetic energy which are rolling through human populations rather than through their usual medium of seawater. It also seems that our character's charismatic grin has provided a ready-made identity for these highly motivated protesters, one embodying resonances of anarchy, romance, and theatre that are clearly well-suited to contemporary activism, from Madrid's Indignados to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair.
In recent years, Guy Fawkes has become the poster child for anti-establishment protests, with activists donning masks of the 17th century British rebel at marches and demonstrations. Activist group Anonymous has been at the forefront of the push to wear the masks as an anti-capitalist statement, but this specific mask's history dates back to the s.
The hero "V" is the force for change. V takes on the persona of famous failed revolutionary Guy Fawkes through his mask. However, this time V succeeds in taking down the tyrannical government.
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