Beginning in 1982, Alan Moore wrote V For Vendetta, a comic eviscerating Thatcherite England by pitching Thatcher’s brand of fascism by pitting it against a complete anarchism. Using the face of Guy Fawkes, V pitched himself as a man of the people against a xenophobic dictatorship straight out of Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thatcher’s brand of conservatism became a central focus, where modern “democracy” was seen as oppression through thought control.

Through the mid 1990s, Joel Silver, producer of The Matrix, had picked up the movie rights to both V For Vendetta and Watchmen. And, before The Matrix, the Wachowskis had written a draft of the screenplay that would become V For Vendetta. By the time that George W. Bush was elected president, Silver and the Wachowskis found a similarity between Thatcher’s Britain and Bush’s America, finally transposing the politics of the British graphic novel to American politics. Paralleling the comic’s dictatorship to Bush’s government, and V’s anarchism to then-blossoming liberalism, V For Vendetta became a movie for the 90’s that was ultimately disowned by Alan Moore.

And, for good reason. V For Vendetta is not Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta. Instead, it’s a movie intent on pushing a political landscape of rebellion. Told through the awakening of Evey Hammond, V For Vendetta foretells an awakening of a slumbering discontent public against a government they know are screwing them over (though they don’t know how). V, taking on the visage of Guy Fawkes’ mask, becomes a folk hero for the public, and everybody is empowered to rebel against the system.

In the ensuing time period, an internet collective known as Anonymous would coopt the Guy Fawkes mask for their brand of leaderless anarchic political upheaval. Leaderless movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter would find cultural cache in the places where the public had once idolized celebrity like Martin Luther King, Jr or Malcolm X. Charges that V For Vendetta was really ghost directed by the Wachowskis would find footing as credited director James McTeigue would struggle in the ensuing decade, only finding success in episodes of the Wachowskis’ required viewing series Sense8. And, V For Vendetta itself will rise and fall in cultural acclaim, in the same manner as Fight Club, as the public struggles with the film’s politics and the reaction to the film.

V For Vendetta airs on HBO2.