The Anarchic Prisoner
Part 5: Fall
Out
Prisoner
9190771: Right, grab your spade and don your pith helmet!
The
Prisoner was broadcast during 1967-68. The Social context of the era
seems to be particularly relevant, especially to the last episode. Such
relations have been inscribed within Foucauldian theory:
The
similarities which we perceive in the discourses
of a particular era, and which we rather vaguely
interpret as the spirit or common purpose of an age,
are, for Foucault, emanations of a strict, rigid,
epistemological age... So far from being a paradigm
that has been superimposed upon an era, or an analytic
reduction of the mass of discourse, the epistemological
arrangement is the ground and possibility of thought
itself, the potency of which the discourse of the age is
an actualisation. To this system of relations Foucault
gave the term episteme; to the science of its recovery,
'archaeology'... Foucauldian archaeology presents the
work of individual thinkers as entirely determined by
the epistemic configuration (85a).
It so
follows that The Prisoner was not 'the lone wolf' - there was also Anna Wulf,
the main character of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Anna is
instructed by her psychoanalyst to write a diary; instead, Anna compiles a
scrapbook of newspaper cuttings concerned with the Cold War - which seem to her
to be the 'truth' of several years in the fifties (85b). An attempt to
present the Cold War episteme in the same manner here seems appropriate.
In
that mystical year of 1967, the year of love-ins and
incipient revolution, one event, and not the least
important, passed almost unnoticed: the screening of
a work of art produced for television (86).
one
must not fail to mention the Paris evenements of
1968 in a book on cultural studies (87).
The
Prisoner + the Anti-Psychiatry Movement = 6 (88):
it
was the time of the loony. I suppose that R.D.
Laing's The Divided Self was one of the most
influential books of the sixties - it made madness,
alienation, hating your parents... all glamorous. God
knows what he did for people who were really mad,
apart from making them feel smug... but he certainly
set the pace for that crazy hinge of the decade from
1968 on (89).
Each
citizen, if repression really worked, was self-
divided into conformist front and denied demon Other
and anxiously seeking release from such tension by
stoning scapegoats like the Rosenbergs, or confessing
and being punished for crimes of deviance and dissent (90).
In A
Change of Mind, the Committee tries to 'cure' the depressive female poet,
Number 42 (Plath?):
I
wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so are many other
millions are so irretrievably their own special variety
of 'I' that I can hardly bear think of it. I: how firm a
letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical,
proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal
lines in quick, smug, succession. The pen scratches on
the paper I... I... I... I... I... I... (91).
Prisoner:
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or
numbered! My life is my own.
I I I I I I I I I
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII (92).
TV-cameras
were McCarthy's necessary medium for exposure, the visual image magically
convincing even
as the witness verbally denied all charges (93).
Number
86: First your frivolous attitude towards the committee. Most
dangerous. The hearings are televised. That is why your behaviour
is so important. You stand before the entire community (94).
In the film of The Handmaid's Tale, there are 'TV monitors on every street
corner; the TV logo is an eye on a pyramid' (95). In Free For All, Number
6 is faced in the council chamber by 'a large light in the shape of an eye',
which 'flashes at the top of a strange pyramid, almost Masonic in style' (96).
2. INT.
DAY. NUMBER 2'S CONTROL ROOM.
NUMBER
TWO WATCHES A CONVERSATION BETWEEN 9190771 AND 2872 ON A MONOCHROME VIDEO
MONITOR.
NUMBER
2872: You're mad. There's no way that you can explain the paradox
of The Prisoner. It's like the riddle of the Sphinx - no one can answer
it.
NUMBER
9190771: Oedipus did.
NUMBER 2:
And look what happened to him, my son.
Social
control now turned the idea of the welfare
state into a series of barriers against deviance and
revolution... But Orwell's 1984... was being proved
prophetic. Welfare was only being provided at the
expense of freedom to criticize and think
independently. It was a high price to pay (97).
Inmate
of Durham Buildings (Cathy Come Home):
I
was a prisoner of war and I spent five years behind
the wire fighting for this country, and I still feel I'm a
prisoner. I've never had a place of my own where I
could do what I like (98).
Whereas
in 'Cold War' SF oppositions of 'self' and
'other' redundantly re-establish the certainty of the
Law, of Culture (the maintenance of the Free World
the superiority of technology) in fantasy these
oppositions connote an absence of Law, of Culture,
and of meaning (99).
The
idea of the individual pitted against establishment
and society was a subject much in vogue in the 60's, an
age of conscious striving and self-awareness set against
growing bureaucracy and systemisation of that self-
same individual (100).
'Patrick
McGoohan is a man who is horrified by
bureaucracy and the inevitable misuse of authority (101).
Yet
this is the point at which we must remind the
reader of the obvious, namely that this whole global,
yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and
superstructural expression of a whole new wave of
American military and economic domination
throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout
class history, the underside of culture is blood,
torture, death and horror (102).
But
in Lessing's view, it is precisely the ideology
Showalter endorses which may lead to apocalypse,
for the individual cannot be confronted in isolation,
separated from a complex matrix of international
politics, environmental issues, multinational
economics and global military conflict (103).
As
Foucault puts it:
Yet
wars were never as bloody as they have been
since the nineteenth century...
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign
who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of
the existence of everyone; entire populations are
mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity... The atomic situation is
now at the end point of this process: the power to
expose a whole population to death is the underside
of the power to guarantee an individual's continued
existence (104).
Song
from Fall Out - voice of French Indo China (Vietnam)?: 'I, I, I, like you very
much'.
Wars
are great catalysts for social change and even
though it was not specifically our war, the Vietnam
war was a conflict between the First World and the
Third World, between Whites and non-Whites and,
increasingly, between the American people... and
Yankee imperialism. And the
people won (105).
The
space cadets of the sixties were exactly that:
children of the space age; personal space, spaced out
half the time and awed by the journey into space.
Theirs was the self-protective politics of the harmless;
it was flower power' (106).
One
of the interesting things about the music boom...
was the way that young white kids from the most
deprived parts of Britain, Liverpool... took to the
music of poor blacks from the most wretchedly
segregated and oppressed parts of the deep South of
the U.S. like ducks to water (107).
The
young rebel then sings a Negro spiritual, 'Dry
Bones' (108).
When
'all you need is love', the inadmissible tired old
moral agendas of the elite seemed like alien forces
from outer space, and their police agencies were thus
experienced as beasts from beyond (109).
ANARCHIST:
The prisoner has been charged with the most serious breach of social etiquette
- total defiance of the elementary laws whiich sustain our community,
questioning the decisions of those who we voted to govern us, unhealthy aspects
of speech and dress not in accordance with general practice (110).
According
to Clarke et al, working-class subcultures
are distinguished by their more collectivist, gang-like
qualities from the more diffuse and individualistic
forms of the middle-class counter-cultures associated
with hippies and students. Both were thought to
manifest a serious crisis of authority in Western
capitalism (111).
Do
you remember the Claimants' Union? It had a
slogan: 'Bite the hand that feeds you' (112).
PRESIDENT:
We have just witnessed the two forms of revolt. The first, uncoordinated
youth rebelling against nothing it can define. The second, an
established, successful, secure member of the Establishment turning upon and biting
the hand that feeds him. Well, these attitudes are dangerous, they
contribute nothing to our culture and they must be stamped out (113).
Whether
any of us ever understand history at the
moment it is in the making, whether we are ever
able to view the present in perspective, is one of the
many questions the novel raises (114).
In
the course of this episode this timeless series has
rediscovered its own era, and this short scene tells us
more than any history book ever will. The singing of
the escapees from the Village seems to resound like
an echo of the tremendous explosion of liberating joy
that shook the sixties (115).
Some
people accused everyone involved in Fall Out
of being "on drugs" (116).
NUMBER
9190771: Father.
NUMBER
2: Yes, son? - (117).
Return to our Patrick McGoohan page to read the next part of Kevin Patrick Mahoney's The Anarchic Prisoner
85a). Burke, op. cit. pp.62-63.
85b). Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, Panther, 1972, pp.241-51.
86). Carraze, p.5.
87). McGuigan, op. cit. p.15.
88). Sumner, op. cit. pp.272-78.
89). Angela Carter, 'Truly, it felt like Year One', in Sara Maitland, ed. Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, Virago, 1988, p.215.
90). MacPherson, op. cit. p.4.
91). Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Virago, 1991, p.226.
92). Hora, op. cit. p.57.
93). MacPherson, op. cit. p.82.
94). Carraze, op. cit. p.68.
95). Kauffman, Special Delivery, p.247.
96). Carraze, op. cit. p.68.
97). Sumner, op. cit. p.182.
98). Jeremy Sandford, Cathy Come Home, Marion Boyars, 1988, p.10.
99). Tulloch, Unfolding Text, p.128.
100). Helen Sawyer, Starburst, Vol.9., No.8., 1987, p.43.
101). Kenneth Griffith in Hora, op. cit. p.57.
102). Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', in New Left Review, 146, July-August 1984, p.17.
103). Kauffman, 'Goodbye', p.135.
104). Foucault, Sexuality, pp.136-37.
105). Carter, op. cit. pp.211-12.
106). Sumner, op. cit. pp.205-06.
107). Carter, op. cit., pp.212-13.
108). Carraze, op. cit., p.197.
109). Sumner, op. cit. p.205.
110). Carraze, op. cit. p.197.
111). McGuigan, op. cit. p.97.
112). Carter, op. cit., p.213.
113). Carraze, op. cit., p.198.
114). Kauffman, Special Delivery, p.225.
115). Carraze, op. cit. p.201.
116). Hora, op. cit. p.49.
117).
The Doors, 'The End' on The Doors, Elektra, 1968. Also, Jerry Hopkins, No
One Here Gets Out Alive, Plexus, 1991, pp.94-100.
