The Message Cycle and Guy Fawkes
Since the mid-to-late 2000s, the mask of Guy Fawkes has been used by activists and protesters, many of whom are anarchists, against politicians and government corruption, banks and other financial institutions, religious organizations, and various other groups that these activists deem “elites”. The association that these protests bear with the Guy Fawkes’s actual legacy, however, are nearly non-existent.
Guy Fawkes was a British Catholic in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At this time, British citizens were required to attend Anglican church services; refusal to do so was a statutory offense. Catholics were also barred from owning land, voting, or holding public office. To remedy the repressive situation that Catholics had been enduring, Fawkes and co-conspirators devised a plan to blow up the House of Parliament on 5 November 1505, killing the ruling class inside, and set up a Catholic monarch in their place. This plan failed miserably, as authorities uncovered the plot and arrested Fawkes well before the House convened. Fawkes was tortured, tried, and sentenced to death by hanging. To this day, the British celebrate Guy Fawkes Day by burning an effigy to commemorate the foiled plot.
Despite this longstanding tradition, Guy Fawkes’ legacy would receive a reboot nearly 400 years after his death. In 1982, Alan Moore began releasing a graphic novel series called V for Vendetta, whose protagonist wears a Guy Fawkes mask while fighting a white-supremacist, Christian fascist government that imprisons and kills its adversaries. The protagonist, simply known as V, aims to replace the police state with an anarchistic society, and unlike Fawkes, is not immediately foiled by the authorities.
In 2005, a film adaption of V for Vendetta was released, which Moore harshly criticized for being watered down and not aligned with the original sentiments and messages present in the written works from which it was adapted. Moore had deliberately created a character whose behavior was morally ambiguous at best and who forced the reader to question their beliefs about fascism, anarchism, and revolution; this ambiguity is replaced in the film adaptation by what Moore describes as a “largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives”, which he feels betrays the message as it was originally presented.
Despite Moore’s criticisms, the film inspired and impacted numerous protests around the world. The Guy Fawkes mask has been most famously adopted by Anonymous, the internet hacking group best known for releasing sensitive information, attacking government sites and servers, and creating access to online collaboration for protesters in countries with strict laws regarding political dissent. Protesters have also been seen wearing Fawkes masks during the Occupy protests (2011), the Egyptian revolution (also 2011), and Hong Kong protests (2014 and 2019).
The differences between the real life Guy Fawkes, the version portrayed in the novels and film, and the protests inspired by these portrayals, are staggering. Unlike Fawkes, the modern protest movements that use his likeness are not fighting a religious monarch or trying to install their own. Unlike V from V for Vendetta, these protesters are not fighting against fascist overlords, or as is the case for Occupy, the focus is sometimes not on governments at all. The way that Fawkes’s likeness has been transformed from that of a failed religious revolutionary to a symbol used by an anti-fascist hero who fights for anarchy, to a symbol of broad anti-elite protest perfectly illustrates the way that Meredith Davis’s message cycle operates and how symbols change their meaning based on the perception of their audience.
