WILL WE “BE SEEING YOU?”
By
JERRY AHERN
Two weeks ago, Sharon was browsing through TV Guide and noticed that the Independent Film Channel (IFC) was running the original 1967 series “The Prisoner,” the brainchild of the seriously brilliant Patrick McGoohan – actor, director, producer, writer, two-time Emmy winner and thinker. Sharon and I first watched the saga of “Number Six” when it was new to the USA and aired as a summer replacement series. This was in 1969. It was produced for British television in 1967. There were seventeen episodes, each an hour in length when shown with commercial interruption, as the series was intended to be seen. Over the intervening years, “The Prisoner” has shown up on Public Television and in the home video market. It’s available on DVD and, one of these days, Sharon and I’ll stop promising ourselves to buy “The Prisoner” and actually buy it.
Although totally different one from the other, one wouldn’t be stretching credulity to say that Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” is to television what Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is to literature. McGoohan’s masterpiece is that good. McGoohan – who created, produced, acted in and directed much of “The Prisoner”—threw in everything, clues galore to what was really going on. Everything from the id, the ego and the superego to superspy action comedy to a psychologically quirky western is included as Number Six resigns from British Intelligence, is knock-out gassed, kidnapped and awakens in “The Village.” The Village is run by “Number Two.”
At this juncture, if you are unfamiliar with this classic, you might be asking, “Who is Number One?” Oddly enough, that’s what Number Six continually asks when the various Number Twos – they don’t last long, failing in trying to break Number Six – demand to know why he resigned. Number Six will not reveal any information, because he does not know on whose side the mysterious Number One’s malevolent minions happen to be. Number Six defiantly proclaims, “I am not a number, I am a free man!”
This is heady stuff for television. As this is written on October 4th, IFC has only run the first six episodes, three each Friday night. They will run the remaining episodes ganged together. Or, you can go to AMC’s website and see the episodes. AMC, on November 15, 2009, will be showing the new original mini-series version of “The Prisoner,” starring Jim Caviezel as “Six” and Ian McKellen as “Two.” If the new mini-series will be even almost as good as the original, it will be a landmark television event. If the in-your-face individuality or death philosophy of McGoohan’s original is made “politically correct,” it will be very sad. Hopefully, “Six” will truly be “Number Six,” the ultimate rugged individualist who will never break.
McGoohan’s Number Six is undiminished. “The Prisoner” is just as resonant today as it was when Sharon and I were first impressed and inspired by it forty years ago. If you believe in individual liberty and despise big, intrusive government, you owe it to yourself to see the original McGoohan series. And, you owe it to McGoohan’s memory – he died after a short illness at age eighty, on January 13, 2009 – to give the new mini-series a chance. Number Six was wonderfully quotable. Picture, if you will, the leading Congressional Democrats trying to push their socialist agenda and a defiant man seething with controlled rage shouting, “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered. My life is my own.” As my old high school creative writing teacher Jim Norris used to say, “Good stuff!” As they say in The Village, “Be seeing you!”
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
If I’m interpreting the comments made by the writer of the show correctly, this *reboot* is addressing the Fall-Out of such liberty as Number Six demanded in 1967. The writer recently is quoted: “McGoohan’s (Prisoner) was about the assertion of the individual. Mine was more, ”What if the arrogance of the individual became our undoing?’”
So be careful what you ask for….
)
I’m tempted to say that either series was/will be too cerebral for the American populace..but I have been labeled cynical at times…….or maybe just factual…..?
The Prisoner and the Village seem to be a canvas onto which we can project our own ideas and ideals. I enjoyed and still enjoy the themes of the original series, and agree with the overarching theme of individuals resisting the tendency of society to impress us into castes or reduce us to faceless drones, while holding a worldview that is in many respects opposed to yours, Jerry. I guess art and entertainment may be the common ground where we can all meet and enjoy each other’s company.
First. I wish you’d post on this site more than once every 5 weeks, or so. Secondly, we need to watch the tendency to deify the individual, just as the socialist deify the collective. As a conservative, I recognize that there is a balance between individual liberty, and the requirement for a stable society, in which liberty can flourish. So, every time a law is passed, you have a trade-off. A lessening of restraint promotes individual liberty but lessens societal cohesion. A raising of restraints increases the survivability of the social fabric, but you risk limiting individual liberties to the degree that they effectively cease to be liberties. My point is that, individuals having the freedom to do anything that seeps into their minds is not a therapy for societal ills. There must be an internal mechanism within individuals that will cause them o restrain their own appetites, rather than forcing the government to pass all tese laws to hem in a populace with NO self-restaint. (That was imprecisely stated. It wasn’t intended as a defence of all that is done in the name of social cohesion. But it was a starting point.) For now, individual liberty and societal restraints must be a balance to each other. The only other option is apopulace that is much more moral than the populace we have in our day. This was the assumption of most of our Founders, as well.
JEEEEEEEEEEEEERRREEEEEEEEEEEY!!!! WHERE ARE YOU???