I ask because the masks are popular amongst activist types, including OWS. And since the fifth of November is nearly upon us, it seems an appropriate time to ask if Fawkes is someone the Occupy supporters would really wish to evoke.
My own understanding is that Fawkes objected (reasonably) to the poor treatment of Catholics in England, but there’s no particular reason to believe he was any sort of figure of tolerance - Fawkes’ preferred regime may simply have switched the repression from Catholics to Protestants.
The people who wear it do not wear it in the name of Fawkes but in the name of Anonymous. Anonymous members do not wear it because they think highly of Fawkes, they wear it because it looked cool in V for Vendetta and because it has become an Anonymous symbol.
And even then, they’re more about the aesthetics of V for Vendetta (most specifically, the final scene of the movie, which is not in the book) than the specifics of the V character & his ideology. The mask is to be understood as a symbol of spontaneous unity in defiance. Also of looking wicked cool.
At the time Guy Fawkes was alive, the Catholic Protestant wars were ongoing and it was a major point of contention throughout the continent and in England. Fawkes sided with Catholicism and wanted to see it restored in Britain.
I’m sure he had some amount of grievance against the government, but if Catholics had been put into power like he wanted, Protestants would probably have the same grievances against the new government. What he wanted was for everyone to hold the same religious views as himself, not to give the common man more voice, to get rid of a corrupt king, or anything else of that sort.
Say that Romney, through whatever means, was elected the Vice President after the next election. If a group of Mormons tried to assassinate the President, so that Romney would get the job and establish Mormonism as the state religion, that would be about the closest modern equivalent to the Gunpowder Plot. Personally, I’d vote that that’s not overly admirable.
As stated above, the use of the mask has more to do with V For Vendetta and the idea of freedom through anonymity than it does with the actual Guy Fawkes, who I imagine most American liberals would have little use for.
Eh, I don’t know that they wouldn’t.
I mean, sure, the historical cause the historical man championed was undeniably inconsequential bullshit masquerading as something of import. Most political causes are.
But taken as a symbol, he’s still one guy who was prepared to fight the entire government “alone”, and pursue his ideas to the bitter end. That’s always a popular archetype, even when the ideas themselves are forgotten or completely ignored. (which IIRC is why V chose to adopt his likeness in the first place - as a committed anarchist, I sort of doubt V would have cared much for the aims of the Gunpowder Plot). Sort of like Guevarra - agree with his ideas & methods or don’t, I’d wager most of the people who bear his mug on their T-shirts don’t even know thing one about them – but you can’t deny he was one charismatic and driven motherfucker, and the iconic pic is pretty powerful even in a vacuum. It just oozes “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”, doesn’t it ?
But this all makes the use of the masks today pretty darn meta, when you think about it: real-life symbols for a concept born from the visuals of a film based on a man who used it as a symbol for *another *concept, which itself had precious little to do with the original purpose of that symbol which was intended as the crude, mocking caricature of a real-life nobody who achieved nothing. Worn ironically.
In the immortal words of the philosopher Reeves: woah.
This is incorrect. Guy Fawkes was a hired gun of a plot organised by a group of young Catholic noblemen - there were ten conspirators in all. If he were alive today, he would be the equivalent of a traitorous mercenary (he fought in the Spanish army, our big enemy) and terrorist. He’s like an American muslim going to fight with the insurgents in Afghanistan against the US army, then being recruited by extremists to set off a bomb in Washington. Not a very admirable figure at all. He is only remembered over the other conspirators because he was the one caught guarding the gunpowder.
Guy Fawkes was not the instigator or leader of the gunpowder plot anyway. Quite the reverse: he was the low guy on the totem pole, the prole whom the aristocratic plotters recruited to take the real, physical risks for them, the patsy. The chief plotter was Robert Catesby.
Ideologically, in wanting to destroy the current (relatively tolerant by the standards of the time) government, they were probably closer to the Tea Party than OWS or Anonymous (although not very close to any modern ideology, really).
I have thought that the difference in endings between the movie and the book represent another British / American division.
Book: V is dead, long live V! The symbol is taken up by an heir and the legacy continues. Sort of a royal succession.
Movie: We have all learned to be V. The ideals are immortal because we all share them, they are not embodied in one person.
(And that is the extent of my literary criticism for this month.)
An AH scenario just occurred to me where that works, and all England’s dissenters and sincere Protestants of all kinds flee to the colonies, and the American Revolution comes early . . .
I’ve always been amused that the V for Vendetta movie came out 1 year after the london underground bombings and portrays the good guy as a revolutionary that blows up parliament house by a bomb in the underground.
Imagine the response in the US if a british film was released 1 year after 911 that portrayed a fictional US future fascist state that a revolutionary destroyed by flying a plane into the white house?
(I actually like V for Vendetta, both the book and the movie, and I was in London going to work when the underground bombings happen… I just find the cultural differences somewhat intriguing…)
And yeah the masks look cool, but both the Real Guy Fawkes and V in V for Vendetta are not really who I think OWS should be evoking as a role model.
I don’t think it would have worked, even if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded. England was, by that point, too Protestant. As bad as the anti-Catholic backlash was after the failed plot, it would have been even worse, had it succeeded.
The film was actually pushed back most of a year from its original Nov 5 2005 release date (Guy Fawkes day, obviously), so it wasn’t nearly as close as it could’ve been.
But in anycase, a US film studio filmed the X-files movie depicting the gov’t complicit in a plot to blow up a Texas federal building two years after the Oklahoma City bombing, and in that case they were filming after the actual terror attack, and so couldn’t plead ignorance on what the scenes significance would be given recent events. So we seem to be alright with movies that recall terrorist attacks on our own soil to.