Billy / Four Character Analysis
After first seeing the photos of Billy’s tattoos, I ended up going down a little rabbit hole of research to try and figure out what they might mean since we don’t get a lot of behind the scenes info about the 6 Underground characters. I have since then developed some ideas and analysis into Billy’s character and felt like sharing. I’m not debating this with anyone, this is just for fun.
The tattoos on his knuckles say something that looks like 2 2 E 5, it could also be 2 2 E S, but my research revealed some more interesting results with the former sequence. 22E5 lead me to 2+2=5 which is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984 and is seen as a slogan for anti-establishment, anti-fascism, and anti-authoritarian ideologies.
The anti-establishment ideologies align with those of parkour culture, which embraces a “freedom of movement that pays little attention to the instructions of [a] city”* and is a means of engaging in urban politics in a very childlike way because it encourages its participants (traceurs) to view a city as a playground and lets it become a “tool of freedom, of liberation, of individualised power without constraint and limitless exploration”*. Parkour is also a personal philosophy to free the mind of the limitations of physical movement within urban space. It is about reclaiming that space from the institution.
This also aligns with skateboarding culture, which we know Billy to participate in as well, which also reclaims urban space and espouses similar values. “Skaters imagine their bodies outside of the boundaries of urban design and re-appropriate environments designed to segregate or gentrify, imprinting their bodies on the city landscape.”* London has a rich parkour and skateboarding community, which is likely where Billy would have encountered these crowds initially.
It is likely that Billy had some professional training with regards to rock climbing, but that his immersion in the parkour culture lead him to pursue urban climbing and free climbing. While we can’t really be sure how he ended up associated with the thieves we see in his flashback scene, it’s easy to assume that he met them through the parkour and urban climbing circles or because he was simultaneously involved in an overlapping circle of traceurs who used their skills for their own benefit (in a Robin-Hood, eat the rich kind of way).
In the flashback scene Billy says he has been robbing his whole life, he also clearly has an issue with police, having twice (and only) referred to them as “pigs”. I’d assume his association with parkour, skateboarding, and theft all would have put him in situations where he needed to avoid and evade police in many circumstances. His politics reflect an anti-police rhetoric which makes sense in these circumstances. He references criminal records and reasons he’d been arrested, which don’t particularly contradict the values of the subcultures he was apart of. “No more getting arrested by the pigs just for being naked or just usual stuff. You know being naked, getting drunk, casual stuff.” It may be a stretch but nakedness is a form of self expression and rebellion in a society that requires people to be clothed, however it’s just as likely that Billy may have had a penchant for drunken disorderlies.
Trespassing, property damage, public intoxication, and indecent exposure would all be likely charges Billy could have faced before he “died”. There also remains shoplifting, theft, burglary, larceny, and grand theft as other possible charges, though he was clearly actively pursuing high reward scores given the jewelry he was stealing at the time of his “apprehension” by One. His skill as a thief must have been infamous enough in order to be on One’s radar at all, but he was evasive enough to have remained outside the clutches of the law.
His other tattoo, the LYPTA on his neck, lead me to less interesting results than the hand tattoo, however the translation and definition comes from Old Norse, and means “lift”. This could have a double meaning, using the definition in association to theft or being a thief, but it could also have some symbolism related to climbing and his title as “Skywalker” considering the meaning of “to raise” and “to cause to move upwards” and how many urban climbers seek to conquer skyscrapers among other urban edifices.
Take the following with a grain of salt, it’s more speculation than anything, and did not receive as much research as everything I considered above.
There’s also the matter of his scar, as well as his skillset with weaponry and reconnaissance that I’d like to consider. It is entirely possible that Billy learned these skills following his induction into the ghost program, however, it is more compelling to assume that he had some kind of formal training. Given his respect for Seven’s military experience (compared to a disparagement for cops), I would argue that Billy also had some army training himself, and possibly additional Adventurous Training in Mountaineering and Rock Climbing.
I cannot say I did as much research in this area, but my assumption would be that he went into training, but never completed it, or did not pursue the career very long. I don’t think his personality is especially military-oriented, but I do believe he might have tried to please his mother and applied. He has the scar before his fall in the flashback so it’s likely he endured some kind of accident. I would assume a fall impact or blunt force trauma, and suggest an orbital fracture by the brow, and concussion. Which would lead me into my next assumption, that such a head injury resulted in him being discharged from or lead to the cessation of training with the UK Armed Forces and a return to his previous associations with new skillsets.
Finally, and less seriously, I have some personal ideas and headcanons about the character that have not been analysed from the film in great detail, but are more observations of physicality Ben Hardy put into the role. The first is that Billy is ADHD and possibly dyslexic, but also multi-lingual, purely from having been around immigrant kids growing up and picking up the languages by ear. Such groups (ie, marginalized groups, poc, class, etc) would have lead him into the parkour and skateboarding communities. The ADHD headcanon speaks highly to the physical and hands-on nature of Billy’s skills, and that his intelligence and interests were largely influenced by the politics of the subcultures of which he was a part, and could have also influenced his inclination toward those cultures to begin with considering the impulsivity that would embolden him to learn potentially dangerous sport.