THE CORRESPONDENCE OF ERNST GRAF & M.T.WHITE on the subject of V for VENDETTA & GUY FAWKES

 THE CORRESPONDENCE OF ERNST GRAF & M.T.WHITE 

on the subject of V for VENDETTA 

& GUY FAWKES

EG Friday 5th November 00:31

Have you seen this film? 

It's on at my local repertory cinema tomorrow and I'm curious to see it, with it turning Guy Fawkes into a world famous 'face' but I'm sure the cinema will be packed which I do not like.

MT 02:08

I have seen. And I hated it. Real pretentious piece of shit that somehow equates gay and Islamic persecution. Alan Moore, who wrote the original comic, also hated it.

EG 02:29

Yes just watched trailer, pretty risible, and Moore refused to have his name on the credits or take any royalties!

Think only extraordinary thing about it is the power it gave globally to the previously parochial English Guy Fawkes - every year now all round the world there are the ‘million mask marches’, everyone wearing that iconic Guy Fawkes mask.

It absolutely fascinates me the fact Guy Fawkes still 'lives' and has this cultural resonance more than 400 years after his failed attempt at 'terrorism'. This is why November 5th means so much to me.

MT 02:36

It certainly is fascinating. I drove by a protest outside a Scientology branch and all the protestors wore that mask. Quite a surreal sight. I actually knew about Guy Fawkes Day before that film ever cursed our screens, because it is celebrated in New Zealand, where my family lived for a few years. My father always mentioned it as the oddest holiday.

But if Fawkes was successful, we might not have the King James Bible, which as far as language goes, is just as influential as Shakespeare. So it’s quite a fateful day for writers who use English, eh?

EG 03:33

There are so many levels to Guy Fawkes.

Such an ambivalent or dare I say multivalent cultural figure. We burn his effigy on bonfires to celebrate his torture 400 years after the event. Yet the Fawkes mask is a popular symbol of heroic freedom and dissent. 

Absolute right what you say about the KJB and Shakespeare. If you stopped people in the street and said to them can you quote me anything from the KJB or Shakespeare almost everyone would say they know nothing of either, yet without knowing it undoubtedly quote from both every single day of their lives. So many expressions from both have entered the language as common parlance without people knowing their original source. 

The phrases and idioms of MT White and Ernst Graf will I believe be similarly ubiquitous in centuries to come. (I feel another 'correspondence' is coming on.)

MT 04:04

I can’t imagine someone not knowing the King James Bible or Shakespeare! Actually, I can, sadly. But I grew up with both, and don’t want to think of a life otherwise.

I agree, the phrases and idioms of Ernst Graf and MT White will outlive us, even build a legend unheralded thanks to a power that gives “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us”.

And likewise, our correspondences will be studied in schools, or back alleyways of a totalitarian state, or both.

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I didn’t say it to MT but hundreds of thousands of these Guy Fawkes masks are sold every year, which must make it (covid face nappies aside) the best-selling mask of all time, and every dime & cent of it goes to...Time Warner. In his current state I feared if I’d said this to MT now it would have broken him once & for all, so I didn’t. This is friendship.

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