The Unforseen Politics of The Prisoner
Trapped in a community which, if tight-knit, is only so because of the shared spiritual cost of their situation. Attempts to subvert the system from within prove useless. You are made into an interchangeable part, a cog in a system of which you cannot even see the full shape--that is, assuming that you were not already. Individuality and rebellion are regressed over time to the state of a child's tantrum, and thus ever more easily dismissed. You lose the ability to trust even your fellow sufferers, and so soon you do the work of your minders for them, in grinding each other down. It is by design a life sentence: even if you are to escape, or are ejected, released, your time there has changed you.
I quit my job, recently.
And while comparing the dehumanizing corporate policies to that of The Village would be a banal observation at best (and melodramatic at its core), the obvious and prosaic similarities between the two has heightened my sense of kinship with Number Six as I rewatch the series this month. I'm showing it to my wife, who is seeing it for the first time, and it certainly took her no time at all to understand, as many of us do, that the series is as relevant and as important now as it has ever been.
But... here's the thing. Coming back to the series now, at a synchronistically opportune time in my life, I find that I view the series differently than I have before. I grew up with The Prisoner hard-wired into my cultural lexicon, not only because it had been long-cemented as a classic by the time I was born, but also because I spent my youth following a certain prototypical counter-cultural template. The Village as metaphor for conformism, for nameless authoritarianism, all of the works that have followed, ones keyed closer to my generation (say, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles), draw from that metaphor just as Patrick McGoohan's show drew from the potent works that had come before it (Huxley, Orwell, et al). But in more closely-empathizing with The Prisoner than I have in years, putting myself in the place of McGoohan's Number Six (however fatuously)... it occurs to me, you know, most of it's his own damned fault?
I'm thinking of "The Schizoid Man," here, but it doesn't really matter which episode you choose. One reason I use this example is that it's one of the best episodes that wasn't in the original seven, as it understands the conflicts at the heart of the series in the way some of the other extraneous episodes don't. In "The Schizoid Man," every one of Number Six's flaws and many of his strengths are played against him (see also "Checkmate").
Number Twelve (As Six): You know what, why don't we settle this like gentlemen?
Number Six: You're claiming to be a gentleman too?
Number Twelve: Oh very good, very good indeed. That line is very worthy of me.
One of the side-effects of Number Six's individuality and intelligence, the two things that form the spine of the show and the reasons that his struggle is so compelling, is that Number Six is one arrogant son of a bitch. That's the thing about righteous indignation, isn't it? You have something to hold over, a moral superiority. This is often in Number Six's case expressed through a dry-as-desert wit, a sneering satisfaction. We're so fully on his side that it's difficult to notice the first time through, but he's kind of an asshole (unless, I presume, you're attempting some kind of feminist reading of the thing).
Thing is, Number Six spends so much time lording it over the forces of conformity and institutionalization that he never actually does anything. Episodes like "Hammer Into Anvil" and "The General," in which he aids the community, frequently feel forced because the story's not about a hero overthrowing a ubiquitous villain, it's about victory over those forces merely in the act of surviving and living (If you're still holding that Morrison cheat-sheet, the closest analogue would be Boy, who ejects from the whole thing entirely while staying aware of what she's seen).
The thing about absurdist television - and The Prisoner is definitely absurdist, particularly in its finale - is that the audience is liable to walk away with more than what actually impresses upon them. In one particular case, I'd suggest that we maybe took too much from the show. If it was prescient about so much, from the surveillance state to credit cards, it was unfortunately also dead-on in how we would respond to being controlled. Not solely in the faceless mob that populated much of The Village, but also in Number Six's condescension and his use of humor to supplant action.
We view comedians as our only honest reporters, respond to tragedies with dark humor on Twitter, blah blah di blah... this part doesn't need me lecturing. The U.S. in particular is divided more than it has been since perhaps the Civil War, and our self-righteous arrogance (on either side) diminishes the ability to argue against a crumbling society. We wind up like Number Six, tap-dancing as we're led from a small prison to a larger one--a metaphor especially potent for liberals (like myself), missing only a carton of "Yes We Can" T-shirts.
Postscript: A note about self-righteousness... if The Wire is our great post-9/11 drama, peering under the carpet at everything we've swept underneath, then surely our great post-9/11 comedy is Arrested Development, which in its portrayal of a Nero-fiddling upper class is offset by Jason Bateman's portrayal of the "good son" whose self-righteousness slowly reveals itself to be a maladjusted arrogance that places him firmly in the same dysfunctional place as the rest of his family--its deliberate Godfather parallels have been used to dangerously acerbic effect. But, of course, the cult obsession over Arrested Development, even with its struggles on the network, dwarves the critical fervor for The Wire, which didn't need the subtext. Just goes to show you.