Pop Culture and Revolution

The inspirational stories meant to lull us into compliance

Yesterday was the 5th of November, known as Bonfire or Guy Fawkes Night in the UK. Guy Fawkes was popularized in the 2005 movie V for Vendetta based on 1988 comics by the same name. In the movie, V, the protagonist, is seeking to liberate the population from a tyrannical government. His strategy emulates that of Guy Fawkes and his compatriots who, through the gunpowder plot, sought to blow up the UK parliament. Of course, though, the movie fails to mention that Guy Fawkes was a religious fanatic who spent his life fighting against Protestants in Spain; and that the reason he wanted to blow up the Parliament was to instal a Catholic monarch. Not only did Guy Fawkes support the totalitarian rule of monarchs, but he also prefered them to be a specific religion.

Many will jump at this comparison and ask: What's the point of this history lesson? This is a fictional movie meant as entertainment! Well, this is exactly the point I’m trying to make. Revolutions and insurrections are a favoured Hollywood genre. As they deserve to be, they're entertaining and invigorating. Yet, we keep trying to draw political or life lessons from them. In this frenzy to see ourselves as revolutionaries, we fail to see that what these movies do is take us further away from anything revolutionary.

The Lebanon Connection

The fetishism of revolutionary pop culture is on full display in the ongoing Lebanese Uprising. On November 5 many were seen posting the phrase popularised by V for Vendetta as a time of reckoning for the government. “Remember Remember, the 5th of November.” Protestors were also seen wearing V masks, some painted their face in Joker makeup, and others wore the ‘Dali masks’ made popular by the hit Netflix heist series Casa De Papel. I want to be clear here that I am not writing this article to deride people on what is an individual choice of self-expression. But I find it interesting to explore why people choose this mode of political expression when the messages of the movies themselves are so abstracted from the specific contexts of revolution (wherever it may be unfolding) and when the political message of the movie, if any, is unclear. Is it because we have lost — that is, we are not aware of — a genuinely and locally generated expression of revolution? Are the masks and stories just used to fill in the gaps because we have nothing else to relate to? Or is wearing these masks a way to validate our revolutionary activity to others? To make it relatable to others who may not understand or be connected to events unfolding in front of us? And why is it that masks become such symbols of revolution, to begin with?

Cultural Subversion

It would make sense to start our interrogation with the source of this inspiration, the movies and series themselves and see what we can come up with. The three we can use, due to their popularity, are Casa de Papel, Joker, and V for Vendetta. The first commonality we see in these is that all of them present the revolutionary actors as individuals or a small group fo super soldiers. It was the sheer will, cunning, and painful planning, of an individual and group that lead to mass revolts. Joker is an odd one out here, his development story is largely reactive, and there is no planning or method to his madness. Also where V for Vendetta is outwardly revolutionary, Casa de Papel is not. There are hints of anti-statism in the series and a bit of a robin-hood narrative, but all of this is presented in the context of a self-serving bank heist. How did these all become symbols of revolution then considering that they go against everything we know about revolutions?

One can say that they touch on themes that we can all relate to as positive. Anti-totalitarianism, redistribution of wealth, state transparency and representation, and the provision of basic services to those in need. but we don’t need movies to tell us that these are good things, it is because we think of these things as good that we enjoy these movies and read into them as representative of those themes instead of the pieces of entertainment they are. Again, none of this is a bad thing, but if we are conscious of these latent themes in movies, what other latent themes in these movies may we be unaware of?

In the case of V for Vendetta, two things jump out. The first is that of a ‘dystopian’ future. V operates in an unrecognizable and future version of London. Here, the message is clear, problems are far away, they are not here. This temporal distance then provides a sense of security and a pinpoint definition of what ‘wrong’ looks like — not what we have today. The second is in the role of V himself. A supersoldier wronged by the totalitarian state trying to lead the masses out of Plato's cave. Here we see ourselves simultaneously in the protagonist and the people, waiting for the protagonist to show up and lead us not out of our lull, but our inaction. We are taught then, that there is no problem until we get to ‘dystopia’ and that we need a ‘hero’ to save us.

This pattern can also be found in the way we treat revolutionary historic figures. T-shirts of Che Guevara elevate him to a status above human ability. There is no doubt that what Che accomplished deserves to be lauded, but we need to remember that he was just a person and that the Cuban revolution was not just Che but a complex process that unfolded over 6 years. This elevation, meant to pay tribute to the Cuban revolution ends up detracting from any real understanding of revolution itself. The revolution ends up being a blip, a character, as good as a fictional movie.

Joker plays a different role. A beautiful movie where the contorted body of Arthur Fleck presented a perfect metaphor to the ailing society of Gotham. Joker’s reactiveness robs him of his agency, a feeling common to many of us who are impacted by government decisions that we have no control over. His response, however, is not a political statement, he even quips in one of the final scenes that he is “not political”. By the end of the movie, we see the Joker as a victim, created through circumstances not of his choosing. His violent outbursts as a natural reaction for being pushed too far. The message that is being portrayed then is not a revolutionary one, but that we should never let things get too far. The further Medicalization of Fleck is to reinforce the idea that this is not ‘normal’ behaviour and put a further level of distance between us and the anti-hero. This way it is easier for Fleck to become an ‘undesirable’ and seen as an enemy of ‘regular’ folk. Joker then should not be seen as a revolutionary icon, rather a warning story for the rest of ‘us’.

Finally, Casa De Papel and its anti-statist message do not reveal anything we don’t know. We are all aware that state secrets exist in every country. However, when the bank robbers go up against the state, it provides a cathartic release for us. Such a gargantuan task is commendable from a group of underdogs. By speaking of state secrets for us, they remove the burden for us to speak about them. All we have to do is encourage their ‘revolutionary’ behaviour from the sidelines without needing to think of our own complicity in upholding the system.

What these movies and series do is place the responsibility of revolution outside of us. Revolution happens over there, in the land of make-belief, under conditions that do not exist yet. Bertrand Russell once noted how our education system glorifies revolutionaries for their radical attitudes and acts but that we are quickly reprimanded for the sin of non-conforming. Movies act as a medium where we can get away from such reprimands and realize our fantasies in a way that keeps the system altogether safe from non-conformity.

The role of Masks

But here we face a major contradiction, people wearing these masks are in a revolutionary setting, they are not playing at revolution, they are doing it. No one is wearing these masks on a regular day on the way to work, they are either worn at times of protest or genuine revolutionary movements. So if the movies are anti-revolutionary as I have just set out and provided us with ways to disassociate with revolution, then why are they still worn? The answer is because a revolution is disassociative. Revolutions are such a disruptive social force that they seem as out of the world as the movies present them to be. Movies and the masks that represent them become our way of trying to cope with the disassociative quality of revolution because it is the only thing we can relate it to. They become signifiers of disassociation itself. That is the very function of a mask, to hide things, to act as a buffer and mediator between the outside and the inside.

Having said this, we should still be wary of reading too much into representations of revolution in popular culture. Ods are that masks would become redundant if people flung into the revolutionary settings had a better understanding of revolutions themselves. There is no shortage of ‘real’ studies, books, and movies about revolutions, how they develop, the challenges they face, and, more importantly, how organizing communities can lead to them. We should thus be working on developing our agency and our own understandings of revolution in our specific contexts so that, when the time comes, we don’t need a mask to mediate between us and the real world.