Need help with my writing homework on Thinking about Surveillance in the City. Write a 2500 word paper answering; Paradoxically, is supposed to express their free will, the people appear to be caught in the battlefield of different historical forces. The analysis of the visual texts representing these two forces comes below.

There is a complex of imagery in the purposely old style: the mask of Guy Fawkes, the red roses, the Houses of Parliament, and the private museums of V and Gordon Deitrich. These visual texts are accompanied by pathetic verbal texts, such as the name “Gallery of Shadows” (fig. 2) or quotations from Shakespeare. Curiously, almost all these attributes do not have merely decorative functions: they are of very rational use. For example, the mask helps to conceal V from the cameras (another instrument of surveillance). It also makes him invisible so that he can observe without being observed, like in Foucault’s prison inspector2. The same applies to the Houses of Parliament: besides their symbolic functions, there is a rational reason to choose them as a target. This reason becomes evident when the viewers observe the flow of protesters from the bird’s eye view (a characteristically panoptical, detaching perspective): the Houses of Parliament stand in the center of the city on the intercross of many ways (the roads, the underground train line, and a river) (see fig. 1). Its uniting role is remarkable also because it corresponds to the role of the main transportation channels during emergencies. Foucault gives an example of a plague-stricken town.

Museums are one more element. Their functions are reverse to the traditional museums: they are no more public displays of the arranged items of human culture with the pedagogical and imperial role but rather the enclaves where the&nbsp.artifacts are cluttered as the dear memories of the past (Mapplethorpe’s photographic art neighboring with Koran). And yet, their perfect organization still reminds of “an Enlightenment object” needed for “the curation of other objects”. As such, it establishes the pathetic role of the past, its ideals of love and freedom, “embodies the selection and control of artifactual national past and lessons in how people should access this past”. V’s home memorial to Valerie Page, a lesbian actress, is covered with red roses: in this context, the flowers are the symbol of love and something lost (Ruth, Valerie’s lover, used to plant roses).