“If we had put some of the stuff that’s happening today into the film back when we were making it, the studio would have told us we were being ridiculous,” James McTeigue, the director of the 2006 film V for Vendetta, tells Big Think. “But V almost seems tame now, a bit like child’s play.” McTeigue sees the film as prophetic: “It was definitely pointing the way to where we ended up.”
Few movies leave a legacy as large as V for Vendetta. Although it was met with mixed reviews and modest commercial success upon its release, McTeigue’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name has never truly left the zeitgeist — and there are a couple of reasons.
The first has to do with the film’s themes. Moore’s graphic novel — written in the 1980s and illustrated by David Lloyd — attacked the Conservative government of “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher. When the film version came out, many viewed it as a critique of Bush-era illiberalism in the wake of 9/11. And with today’s anxieties about mass surveillance, authoritarian tendencies, and national leaders attempting to control media, it’s not hard to see why the film still resonates with audiences two decades after its release.
The second reason has to do with the film’s audience and imagery. A testament to the eponymous vigilante’s iconic exclamation that “ideas are bulletproof,” his grinning, mustachioed Guy Fawkes mask has become a popular sight at demonstrations across the globe, from the U.S. and Venezuela to Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. But how did this happen, and what does it mean?
Guy Fawkes Day
To understand what the Guy Fawkes mask means to real-world rebels, we first have to understand what it means to V the character. As the film briefly calls upon us to “remember,” Fawkes was executed for his involvement in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot: an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic conspirators to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate the Protestant King James.
To commemorate its failure, the day the plot would have taken place — November 5th — was later declared a public holiday. Fawkes, who had been assigned the job of lighting the gunpowder, was not only burned in effigy, but over time, people also started wearing masks that caricatured his distinct appearance.
The meaning of this holiday changed. What began as a sober commemoration of a solemn event evolved into a night of bonfires and fireworks, and feelings associated with Fawkes shifted from negative to positive. By the time the Industrial Revolution rolled around — and English Catholics had been officially emancipated — Fawkes was seen less as a villain than as a folk figure.
This is also how V seems to see Fawkes. Though the character never really explains why he chose this particular figure as his revolutionary alter ego, his preoccupation with Fawkes’ larger-than-life (and, frankly, different-from-life) reputation rather than the man himself underscores his belief that symbols are more powerful than people.
Behind the mask
If certain members of Anonymous — the hacking group first credited with adopting the Guy Fawkes mask for real-world demonstrations — are to be believed, V for Vendetta largely owes its political currency to circumstance. Since the hackers decided they would all wear the same kind of mask, they had to pick one that was readily available in stores, and instead of Batman’s, they ended up settling for V’s. (Interestingly, Moore has listed Batman as one of his many, many inspirations for the revolutionary.)
The primary purpose of the masks was to provide anonymity. Anonymous is, as the name implies, anonymous. Normally striking from the shadows of the internet, this time they were coming together in person, placing them at risk of identification. On top of this, they were protesting the Church of Scientology, which has a long history of surveilling and harassing its critics.
At the same time, people were not unaware of the masks’ cultural connotations. Thanks to the film, Guy Fawkes was now thoroughly and explicitly linked to revolution, anarchism, and vigilante justice. In the graphic novel, V’s methods and motives are questionable. But on screen, he is presented as a more or less conventional superhero: someone dedicated to fighting the good fight, and turning the world into an unquestionably better place as a result. In short: someone many strive to emulate.
If picked for unrelated reasons, the film seemed to inspire the demonstrators. Gathering and posing for photographs, they intentionally mirrored one of the film’s last and most memorable scenes, where ordinary Londoners take up V’s call to action and march across the street wearing his mask: a single force, united behind a single purpose.
The power of symbols
The masks provide other advantages, too, most of which are likewise explored in the film. For both Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which started using them in 2011, they reflect the fact that the demonstrations are decentralized and leaderless, making them difficult to break apart. (Masks obviously also make criminals more difficult to identify, which is why some nations have criminalized wearing masks in certain contexts: Some allow them only in lawful protests, not riots; others ban them during any public protest.)
Because symbols are abstract, they can mean different things to different people. “There’s value in abstracting away from what you’re trying to comment on,” McTeigue says. “With the film, we sprinkled enough in there that although the story is set in the U.K., you believe it could happen anywhere.”
Although you’d have been more likely to see the Guy Fawkes mask at left-coded protests over the past two decades, it’s not strictly worn by progressives. In the early 2020s, for example, anti-COVID-lockdown protesters in the U.S. and U.K. sometimes wore the mask, as did at least several people at the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
According to one scholarly article on V for Vendetta, the citywide adoption of V’s Guy Fawkes mask is especially powerful because it signifies the people challenging the monopoly on representation held by the state, which the philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes defined as the “sole actor of the body politic.”
If image and narrative are two of the primary tools that the film’s fascist government uses to ensure the loyalty (or docility) of its citizenry, then V uses those same tools to dismantle that relationship. Early in the film, he hijacks the state broadcast network to announce a visual spectacle of his own: the destruction of Parliament. In the end, the symbol of government — the building — makes room for the symbol of the people: the masks.
How fiction changes the world
Popular music, books, films, shows, video games, and other media do not simply reflect society’s problems and aspirations back at itself. According to French historian Patrick Boucheron, who covers this subject in his 2025 book Political Fictions, they also — in a way — predict the future by exploring how those problems and aspirations could play out over time.
V for Vendetta is hardly the only piece of pop culture to work its way into real-world demonstrations. Recently, another image of fictional origin — the pirate flag of a Japanese manga and anime franchise called One Piece — became a prominent protest symbol in countries like Indonesia, Nepal, and India.
Like the Guy Fawkes mask, the One Piece flag does more than create a feeling of solidarity between protesters. By identifying their own struggles with those of a well-known fictional hero, they not only tap into a narrative that their opponents cannot easily control, but also generate sympathy abroad: anyone familiar with One Piece — the manga alone has sold more than 600 million copies globally — may be predisposed to sympathize with protesters waving the pirate flag, regardless of what the protests are actually about.
“All fiction is an escape from the everyday,” McTeigue says. “But when you escape, you are able to imagine a lot more than when you’re in the drudgery of ordinary life, trying to figure out whether someone on the news is actually telling you the truth, or whether they’re in their own echo chamber.”
Ends and means
V’s strategies may be effective, but are they also justifiable? Reading the graphic novel, one could make a strong case that they are not. Moore presents V as mentally unstable, and frequently frames his use of violence as being little different from the violence of the state. Moore also leaves his ending ambiguous, leaving readers to wonder whether V’s actions actually made Britain a better place.
The film version of V, though more traditionally heroic, also has his share of moral ambiguity. At some point in V for Vendetta, V’s protégé Evey (played by Natalie Portman) is imprisoned and tortured by the fascist police. Or at least, so it appears. After refusing to give up information about V — even under threat of execution — Evey is unexpectedly let go, at which point she discovers that her torturer was none other than V himself. He didn’t want to do it, he tells her, but he had no other choice: To pick up his revolutionary cause, she first had to be put to the test.
Movies — especially Hollywood movies — are full of characters who have convinced themselves that the ends justify the means, however horrible. They’re great for storytelling, imbuing scenes with drama and tragedy. But in real life, such lessons arguably risk glorifying and legitimizing political violence, something many Americans fear has become more common and accepted today than it was in the past, even if certain experts have their doubts. (A recent survey found that about one-third of Americans reported that political violence is at least sometimes justified to advance a political cause — a share that didn’t change much from mid-2024 to mid-2025.)
Less controversial is V’s belief in the dynamics and potential of mass protest itself. Reflective of real-world research showing that the biggest protests start because of some sudden, unexpected event (such as a scandal or accident) rather than long-standing grievances, V shows that one small domino can set off an entire avalanche. “It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey,” he says in the graphic novel, “for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and it’s gone.”
This article How “V for Vendetta” became more than a movie is featured on Big Think.