The Anarchic Prisoner
Conclusion
With the
large role that Patrick McGoohan played in the production of The Prisoner,
especially considering his directorial role, it may be appropriate to apply
Auteur theory. This theory originated in the French film journal Cahiers
du Cinema, which employed the concept of Mise en scene: 'the various elements
that went into the staging of a shot' (136). Thus, it examined how the
director operated, and revealed how some directors were better than
others. Auteur was used to locate a single author for any film.
However, McGoohan only directed four of The Prisoner's seventeen episodes.
Carraze and Oswald relate that McGoohan also received help from other directors
in the episodes he directed: 'it is hard to imagine Don Chaffey remaining idle
and not helping his friend' (137). Indeed, it is difficult to see
McGoohan as the single author of The Prisoner. For example, there was
such a great rush to produce Fall Out that 'Kenneth Griffith wrote his own
part, so incomplete was McGoohan's script' (138) - hardly the (in)action of an
Author-God.
There is a further dimension to this, for 'film critics
often felt that the star of a film was perhaps finally the crucial factor in
the film's meaning' (139). ITC's own publicity for the series stated that
McGoohan was the author of The Prisoner (140). Rosalind Coward asserts
that television is an industrial, collaborative process (141), and Jonathan Coe
makes the same articulation:
And
are liberal humanist critics prepared, even now,
to give up their fetish for finding "organic unity" in
a work... when the vast majority of good popular
culture is based on collaboration, with all its
attendant compromises and inconsistencies? (142).
Yet, it was this very question of authorship which disrupted the production of
The Prisoner. In an interview in ITV, George Markstein, The Prisoner's
script editor, insisted that he was the Author (143). It was he who provided
the model of the Village. As a journalist, he had discovered that there
was a place in Scotland, Invelair Lodge, where the British government held
people who had knowledge of sensitive information during the Second World
War. Ironically enough, Markstein actually played a role in the opening
sequence of every episode. He is the man in the underground office to
which the spy hands in his resignation. Thus, McGoohan's and Markstein's
tempestuous relationship was dramatised on screen every week! It was to
prove prophetic, although the roles were reversed when Markstein angrily
resigned before the last four episodes. His reason was this:
Nobody
wants to know about script writers. It's
actors who sell a series to the public. One [reason
for quitting] was his [McGoohan's] claiming sole
creative credit for somebody else's idea and concept (144).
The fans of The Prisoner place a great emphasis on McGoohan as the
author. However, in their eagerness to find out as much as they can about
the production of The Prisoner, they go beyond this limiting category.
The fans go to great pains to discover what role each participant played
in the series, whether it be the music (Ron Grainer and Albert Elms), the
photography (Brendan J. Stafford), or even actors who were on screen for all of
five seconds (Patsy Smart). For Helen W. Robbins, the question of
authorship is no mystery - it is all to do with womb envy: 'laying bare its
origins in men's anxieties about creativity, and especially about controlling,
keeping, and getting credit for their productions' (145).
NUMBER 2:
Does that mean you won't be wanting me to mark your work?
For
instance, Sir Clough William Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, might reasonably
dispute Markstein's authorship of the Village. Thus the collaboration
model of television production is far from perfect. There could, however,
be a solution. Perhaps it would be better to view television production
as Polyphonic ('composed of many voices'). This comes from Mikhail
Bakhtin's literary criticism, 'to oppose mimetic and univocal conceptions of
the text' (146), to complement Cultural Studies use of Polysemia: 'the
possibility for multiple readings by different readers' (147). Via the polyphonic
reading, all those involved in the production of The Prisoner can get their
full credit. Besides, television production does not easily allow the
voice of individual artists (which may be why they are so rare in this field):
'It was to be admitted... that it was this same attitude,
commercially suicidal, that made The Prisoner an artistic masterpiece' (148).
Sean Burke has written that 'many, many readers have been
convinced that... The Death of the Author is quite wrong and yet have been stymied
by their inability to say quite why' (149). It may be that Roland Barthes
overstated the case of the Author. For instance, Colin MacCabe has
written that
The
play which stands for all of the socially conscious
drama at that time... is Cathy Come Home. Brilliantly
acted and directed, it showed how fragile was the
affluence of the post-war years and how easily one
could fall into a grim under-class which did not know
that poverty had been abolished (150).
To this,
one can only add the despair of Cathy's writer, Jeremy Sandford. Despite
Cathy's notoriety, the rate of homelessness in England had increased tenfold by
1988 (151). Salman Rushdie, in his critique of The Wizard of Oz writes
that 'I've done a good deal of thinking these past three years, about the
advantages of a good pair of ruby slippers...' (152). Condemned to death
by people who have not read The Satanic Verses (because that would be
blasphemous), no doubt Rushdie would regret his ever becoming an Author.
The audience invites the Individual to speak in Fall Out, but none of them
listens to what he has to say. Number 2 sums it up: 'Such is the price of
fame'.
Rosalind Coward writes of The Sing Detective that
What is important about this approach to the series is
that it emphatically reveals the importance of the
viewer where the meaning of the text ultimately (if
anywhere) resides. What we need to recognise is that
viewers of this series are being called on to recognise
(and use) television genres and codes in order to
recognise the differences between fantasies, and
between fantasy and reality. No text could more
vividly illustrate Barthes's description of what makes
up all texts, 'the text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from innumerable centres of culture' (153).
To
contradict Coward slightly, one could argue that The Prisoner is even more
applicable to Barthes' theory. In comparison with The Prisoner, The
Singing Detective positively telegraphs its fantasy sequences. For
instance, in Free For All, Number 6 has won the office of Number 2. As he
leaves the polling station, he is clearly under the delusion that the Village
crowd is cheering him. Instead, they just stare at him, leading the
viewer to wonder just how much of the election was going on inside Number 6's
head in the first place. This sense of unease could be related to the
series as a whole: 'Did it really happen or was it only happening in the
Prisoner's own mind?' (154). However, this is not to argue that The
Prisoner should be placed in some kind of literary canon above The Singing
Detective. In Postmodernism, the idea of the canon becomes a
nonsense. The text themselves may be a fixed constant, but we are not: we
can change our minds. The only way a permanent canon could be created
would be if we were all to undergo Instant Social Conversion (A Change of
Mind): to be lobotomised.
NUMBER
9190771: In the course of researching The Prisoner, I watched the episodes
several times. Each time produced new meanings. The episodes
remained the same, but I had changed. For instance, when I first saw Fall
Out at the age of 12 in 1984, I was shocked and appalled by it. I could
not even begin to comprehend it. It was not like anything that I had seen
on television before. Yet 12 years later, and after half a decade of
University education, it seems to make so much more sense. And thus has
my appreciation of it has grown. Who knows? Perhaps in 30 years
time, the appreciation of Cold Lazarus will similarly grow.
Some might argue that this reading is over reliant on French theory.
However, in Six of One (The Prisoner fanclub), 'the French section is the third
largest, after Great Britain and North America' (155). Patrick McGoohan
wrote Once Upon A Time as a tribute to Samuel Beckett, who also had a large
French audience. Indeed, if the 'text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from innumerable centres of culture' (156), then one can make some very
subversive readings. Barthes' Death of the Author was published in
1968. The Prisoner was broadcast in France in 1968 (157). The
Prisoner avoided closure - the first shot is exactly the same as the last, the
Prisoner racing his car on an empty road. As Patrick McGoohan himself has
said, 'Explanation lessens what the piece was supposed to be: an allegorical
conundrum for people to interpret for themselves' (158). Barthes wrote
that to refuse to fix meaning was 'truly revolutionary' (159). If it is so easy
to apply Foucauldian theory to The Prisoner, could it be because the programme
inspired the theory? There are certainly strong grounds for suspecting
that Colin Sumner, author of The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, has been
watching The Prisoner. Within the space of five pages (206-210), he
mentions three ingredients of Once Upon a Time and Fall Out: the Beatles'
All you need is Love, Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage' speech, and the
concept of the psychological Career (which Number 2 uses in an attempt to break
Number 6).
However, Sean Burke ruins the Barthes theory: 'Written in
1967 - and not, as is often supposed, in mind of the student uprising - The
Death of the Author was first published in France in 1968' (160). Indeed,
according to Foucault's episteme theory, these ideas will out. They may
even appear simultaneously.
NUMBER
2: And on what do you base that assertion?
NUMBER
9190771: It happened to me. Right in the middle of writing this
dissertation, the Sunday Times published an article by Bryan Appleyard, which
linked The Prisoner to The Singing Detective, and The X Files (161).
NUMBER
2: Where's your X Files section?
NUMBER
9190771: It became an Ex File!
If, at
times, writing about The Prisoner seems analogous to writing about Cultural
Studies, then the reason might be that they have a common subject: 'The Village
in The Prisoner could be a microcosm of the world and the whole series... has
been described by Patrick McGoohan, as a "social commentary" on
society in general' (162). That is why the Prisoner's London home opens
with the same automatic buzz as his home in the Village in Fall Out - he would
be a Prisoner in any society.
Jim McGuigan has written of 'popular' television that
The system does not 'belong' to the people [Andrew
Goodwin argues]; they may enjoy consuming the
programmes, but they have precious little control
over production decisions or access to programme-
making (163).
It can only be assumed, then, that Desilu and Paramount were deadset on
creating a whole new genre of homoerotic fiction when they produced Star
Trek. Constance Penley's article illuminates this whole area: that
programme makers have very little control of what consumers do with, or read
into, their products (164). It would seem that what was wrong about Barthes'
Death of the Author was its picture of readers as being weak and defenceless in
comparison with the Great Author. After all, 'it is estimated that as
many as 90 per cent of new products fail despite advertising' (165).
NUMBER 9190771:
How powerful are the authors who reside in bargain dustbins? How powerful
are authors who don't even get that far?
Reading is an all pervasive human activity. We do not just read books, or
film - we also read people. As Elizabeth Mahoney writes of Northanger
Abbey's heroine: 'through reading novels she gradually learns to read others
and to understand herself' (166). That is why the Russian Formalists and
the American New Critics were partially mistaken when they tried to erase the author
from the text. They did not understand that the way we read books is
related to the way we read people - and everything else. What else could
fool us into believing, along with Number 2, that there is a bomb in the cuckoo
clock which Number 6 carries in Hammer into Anvil? We recognise that
Number 6's body language is threatening. When Lacan theorised that we are
all integrated into language, he did not just mean the written, the spoken
word, or French and German. The senses can read many languages.
As Patrick McGoohan has said of Fall Out's audience, 'The
majority expected a James Bond-type ultimate evil villain and when they got
Number 6's alter ego they were none too happy. They... felt cheated'
(167). Reading is not a passive activity, as the writers of detective
thrillers know. Readers do not just swallow the words on the page: they
race along, and try to construct their own ending. As Janet Wolff writes,
'The work is now seen as a dialogue between author and reader, and interpretation
recognised to be provisional and situationally specific' (168). The
Prisoner has dialogues with all the Number 2s. In each dialogue, a power
relationship is established. Number 2 will use force to find out why 6
resigned, and 6 has to outwit each and every single one (or 2, in this
instance). It comes down to the Sphinx in the end. By the answer of
a single riddle, Oedipus will either liberate Thebes or die. Just as the
Sphinx can kill Oedipus, so may she die if he answers right. According to
Jean-Paul Sartre, the work of art is reliant on the reader to be recognised:
the
writer appeals to the reader's freedom to
collaborate in the production of his work... You
are perfectly free to leave that book on the table.
But if you open it, you assume responsibility for
it. For freedom is not experienced by its enjoying
its free subjective functioning, but in a creative act
required by an imperative. This absolute end, this
imperative which is transcendent yet acquiesced in,
which freedom itself adopts as its own, is what we
call a value. The work of art is a value because it is
an appeal (169).
The use of this Existentialist concept might be denigrated for being
unscientific, but this reading of The Prisoner has tried to adhere to
Barthes. To be truly 'revolutionary', one must refuse 'reason, science,
law', as The Prisoner did (170). This dissertation has tried to be as
revolutionary as that text. Now all one needs to do is to avoid closure -
Return to our Patrick McGoohan page to read the rest of Kevin Patrick Mahoney's The Anarchic Prisoner
136). Coward, op. cit. p.80.
137). Carraze, op. cit. p.137.
138). Ibid., p.225.
139). Coward, op. cit. p.82.
140). Carraze, op. cit. p.140.
141). Coward, op. cit. p.82.
142). Coe, op. cit. p.10.
143). Roger Langley, 'Cool Customer', In the Village, No.10, Spring 1996, pp.14-20.
144). Ibid., p.16.
145). Robbins, op. cit. p.136.
146). Burke, op. cit. p.48.
147). Wolff, op. cit. p.123.
148). Carraze, op. cit. p.221.
149). Burke, op. cit. pp.21-22.
150). Colin MacCabe, 'Death of a nation: Television in the early Sixties', in Critical Quarterly, Vol.30, No.2, Summer 1988, p.35.
151). Sandford, op. cit., p.5.
152). Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, British Film Institute, 1995, p.19.
153). Coward, op. cit. p.87.
154). Hora, op. cit., p.9.
155). Carraze, op. cit. p.239.
156). Barthes, Image, p.146.
157). Carraze, op. cit. p.3.
158). Ibid., p.6.
159). Barthes, Image, p.147.
160). Burke, op. cit. p.20.
161). Bryan Appleyard, 'Why we need the lies about secrets and spies', in The Sunday Times: Culture, 13 October 1996, pp.4-5.
162). Hora, op. cit. p.5.
163). McGuigan, op. cit. p.128.
164). Penley, op. cit., pp.479-500.
165). Mica Nava, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism, Sage, 1992, p.189.
166). Mahoney, op. cit. pxxviii.
167). Carraze, op. cit. p.6-7.
168). Wolff, op. cit. p.120.
169). Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, Methuen, 1950, pp.32-34.
170).
Barthes, Image, p.147.
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