London’s Burning: Remembering Guy Fawkes and Seventeenth-Century Conflict in V for Vendetta

Abstract

While the claim above by scholar Lucius Shepard specifically and accurately applies to the Wachowski Brothers’ film V for Vendetta, the historical detritus the film heaves onto our screens is provocative for a scholar of the early modern era. This 2005 film, set in the near future of the 2020s, begins and ends with a depiction of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605: opening with Guy Fawkes being arrested in his cellar of explosives, then skipping ahead to his public hanging (a two-minute sequence), and closing with the Parliament building going up in a glorious pyrotechnic spectacle. Famously, the latter event did not take place on November 5, 1605, because the former did. Although the destruction of Parliament in Vfor Vendetta is set in our future rather than a revision of early Stuart history, this denouement inevitably portrays an alternate history and forces the question “What if?” From 1605 to the present, an incalculable number of pages have been written on what the Gunpowder Plot was and what it meant. To tell their story in Vfor Vendetta, the Wachowski Brothers tap the ambiguity, multivalence, and efficacious mutability of the history surrounding the Gunpowder Treason and the subsequent annual celebrations to commemorate England’s deliverance on the fifth of November. So why did the Wachowski Brothers choose this historical framework and what did it mean to them?

Popular culture commonly upchucks the passions of history in distorted form as story panels and chunks of technicolor.¹