The Anarchic Prisoner
Part 3:
A Change of Mind
It is
possible to link The Prisoner with the film of The Wizard of Oz...
Number
2: This is nonsense. How can The Wizard of Oz possibly bear any
relation to The Prisoner?
Number
9190771: Kneebone, shinbone... Ezekiel connected them bones, them dry
bones!
Fans of
The Prisoner have articulated the series to many other texts, often in a quite
arbitrary way. This model text is then used in an attempt to explain all
the discrepancies of The Prisoner. For instance, in The Long and Winding
Road booklet, Dave Barrie reports that one fan, Peter Shimmon, has read The
Prisoner in relation to the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death (61).
Thus Shimmon states that this is where the creation of Rover found its
inspiration - as a Ping-pong ball.
The beginnings of both The Wizard of Oz and The Prisoner are
quite similar. Both Dorothy and the Prisoner are knocked unconscious, and
awake to find that both their homes have somehow been transported to a
different environment. This is somewhat disturbing for them, even
although each had been in the process of running away from home at the time.
They find themselves in a strange, colourful village inhabited by strange,
colourful people. Bizarre architecture abounds. Both are confronted
by strange spheres, although this is where the difference ends, for Dorothy's
pink sphere is far more benevolent, dispersing to reveal the Good Witch
Glenda. Just as Dorothy is spied upon in the haunted forest by strange
mechanical birds with flashing eyes, so the Prisoner finds himself watched in
the woods by statues with flashing eyes.
Number
2: All very interesting, but hardly earth shattering, Number 9190771.
Number
9190771: On the contrary - this might explain why the Prisoner adopts the
feminine role in the Gothic genre.
Karen Langley has written that
however
unlikely, the taboo subject of sex rears its
head in the Great Prisoner debate - if only due to its
absence from the series and equally, the insistence by
some that the main character's identity problem was a
sexual one (62).
The star
of The Wizard of Oz was, of course, Judy Garland. Richard Dyer has
written about her status as a Gay icon for homosexual men. For instance, it
could be seen that 'gay men's use of Garland's image constituted a kind of
going public or coming out before the emergence of gay liberationist politics'
(63). That this may be the true reading of Number 6's character can only
be confirmed by this:
'The
sixth man' is a reference to Kinsey's findings on
the incidence of homosexuality in the American male,
a statistic familiar enough to provide the title for a
sympathetic expose of homosexuality by Jess Stearn
in 1962 (64).
Dyer
goes on to quote from one of his sources:
When
I was 13 or 14 the whole 3rd at school voted
what film they would like to see at the end of term.
My friend and I liked Garland and we wanted to see
The Wizard of Oz. We were labelled as 'poofs' and
also laughed at for being childish, unlike many other
3rd formers who thought they were so mature because
they wanted to see a sex film. Dr. No was the film
they finally chose (65).
Patrick
McGoohan also rejected the role of James Bond in Dr. No.
The Prisoner exhibits other characteristics associated with Garland as a
Gay icon. At the end of nearly every episode, the Prisoner is defeated,
but like a glutton for punishment, he always comes back for more:
the
come-back was the defining motif of the
register of feelings I'm trying to characterise, for
it is always having come back from something
(sufferings and tribulations) and always keeping
on coming, no matter what (66).
There
can be no doubt that homosexuality was still frowned upon (at the very least),
in the late 1960s. Indeed, as Colin Sumner writes, 'Simmons's survey
(1969) of the Californian public... showed... homosexuality was more
socially deviant than mass murder' (67). One could make quite a good gay
reading of A Change of Mind. For instance, the Prisoner has to fight off
two men at the beginning of the episode. His assailants could well be
'Gay-bashers'. In the corridor outside the Committee Room, the Prisoner
tries to make eye contact with the man holding the pen. The pen(is) man
feels uncomfortable under the Prisoner's gaze, and changes seats twice.
There is a pregnant pause in the hospital as the Prisoner holds of the gaze of
another man, just before he meets the 'Lobo man' for the first time. The
charges called out by the committee could have almost come from Sumner's
quotation of E. Goffman on social deviants:
These
are folk who are considered to be engaged in some
kind of collective denial of the social order. They are
perceived as failing to use available opportunity in the
various approved runways of society; they show open
disrespect for their betters; they lack piety; they
represent failures in the motivational schemes of society (68).
This may
be why Number 2 is so anxious to discover why the Prisoner resigned, turning
his back on the 'approved runways of society'.
The Prisoner encounters many attractive women in the Village
(such as Number 86), but never makes any sexual advances to them. This is
so even when he comes upon Number 86 on her own in a drugged state. The
Prisoner does lead her down to the ground, and says 'I've got something to show
you', but one can only assume that this double entrendre is meant to tease the audience.
In Once Upon a Time, Number 2 leads the Prisoner into the Embryo Room saying
'Till death do us part', as if both men were participating in a marriage
ceremony. However, the first hints of Number 2's incipient defeat is the
rather disrespectful way that the Butler awakes him from his slumber on the
table. In the fairy (no pun intended) tale version of The Prisoner, the
ogre (Number 2) is defeated, allowing the prisoner to gain possession of the
princess (the Butler). Throughout the series, the Butler (Angelo
Muscat), has been the stereotypical Victorian Angel(o) in the house, always
there to provide his master with nourishment, and with never a cross word.
However, before the lovers can run off together to catch a red bus
in Fall Out, the Prisoner must first face the 'enemy within', 'J. Edgar
Hoover's term for American communists', and all other such deviants (69).
The Prisoner must confront himself, and admit, once and for all, that he is a
homosexual, and that he will now be seen as a degenerate. People will
turn away from him as they did in A Change of Mind.
The Prisoner and the Butler then give birth to the other rebels,
in a fantasy of a reproduction which does not involve intercourse. It may
be then, that the genre of Fall Out is the critical utopia in which
the
more collective heroes of social transformation
are presented off-center and usually as characters who
are not dominant, white, heterosexual, chauvinist
males but female, gay, non-white, and generally
operating collectively (69).
Indeed,
The Prisoner has a number of uncanny echoes in another critical utopia:
Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In that novel, 'Homosexuals are
executed as "gender traitors"' (70). It is the Handmaids
themselves who execute male deviants. In the case of a rapist in the
film, they tear him limb from limb: in A Change of Mind, the Prisoner is
attacked by women bearing umbrellas in a not dissimilar scene, before he is
dragged off to face social conversion. Homosexuality also relates to the
Oedipus crisis. King Laius, Oedipus' father, raped and killed the son of
King Pelops: 'Laius's aggressive... homosexual act is the latent cause of the
curse and Oedipus's later suffering' (71).
Number 2: What do you
mean by bringing that up?
Number 9190771: It's all your fault, Dad...
Return to our Patrick McGoohan page to read the next part of Kevin Patrick Mahoney's The Anarchic Prisoner
61). Dave Barrie, The Long and Winding Road, Six of One, p.10.
62). Karen Langley, TV Zone, No. 38, January 1993, p.10.
63). Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Macmillan, 1987, p.145.
64). Ibid., p.144.
65a). Ibid., p.193.
65b). Carraze, op. cit. p.228.
66). Dyer, op. cit. p.150.
67). Colin Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, Open University Press, 1994, p.227.
68). Ibid., p.226.
69a). Pat MacPherson, Reflecting on the Bell Jar, Routledge, 1991, p. 30.
69b). T. Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, Methuen, 1986, p.45.
70). Kauffman, Special Delivery, p.245.
71).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Penguin, 1990, p.4.
