The Prisoner: Living In Harmony

Every hero has his kryptonite, and for the best heroes, the kryptonite is often another person.  So Luke Skywalker will not use the Dark Side of the Force until Darth Vader voices aloud the prospect of turning Luke’s sister instead.  So Spider-Man cannot be opposed until he is distracted by a threat to Mary Jane.

These kryptonites are not merely a useful plot device, a way of luring the hero into greater dangers than his inherent virtues and discretion would normally allow him.  They are also a symbol for one of society’s most potent weapons against the individual.  To wit, his friends.  No man who cares for someone else is without weakness.  No man who loves someone has nothing to lose.  And so in the end, even the most passionate revolutionary has a stake in the status quo.

Only by learning to abandon such things can the hero be free from weakness.  So Keyser Soze, when enemies attempted to take his family hostage, chose to shoot the family rather than gives his enemies a constant weapon against him.  So George Clooney says in Heat, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat…”  So Eastwood’s “Man with no Name”, or his Dirty Harry, or most of his heroes, while defending the innocent with a caring detachment, are all unattached monoliths, emotionally impregnable.  Only this way can they engage in total war.

The weapon can be used in reverse, too.  So in “Living In Harmony”, once the woman Number Six decides to care for is killed, Number Six himself is provoked to violence.  In wars throughout history, the defense of loved ones and domestic safety are almost universally at least nominal casus belli.

As in “Living In Harmony” so in real life.  At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the entire conflict Number Six entered upon, and the city and people he had fought, were all illusory, and that he was still a prisoner in the Village.  Just so, the tools that authority uses to manipulate our wills are mostly dreams and lies, and when we learn to look beyond them, we are only in a very cleverly-constructed prison.

The Prisoner: Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

“Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” contains a lot of thematic overlap with a previous episode, “The Schizoid Man”.  In both episodes, the guardians of the Village make radical attacks on Number Six’s sense of identity.  In the earlier episode, they sedated him for weeks, grew a mustache onto him, added moles, and changed his hairstyle.  This time, they used a magical device to transplant his mind into a completely different body and erase all memory of his captivity in the Village.

While adding little on a philosophical level to “The Schizoid Man”, “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” is notable for its degrading depiction of Number Six’s former spy organization, which is ultimately supposed to represent all authority.

First, there is the plot entire.  The reason for switching Number Six’s identity this time is not merely sadism, as it was in “The Schizoid Man”.  Instead, the idea is that once Number Six finds himself in a body not his own, he will find the doctor who invented the device, who has gone into hiding.  In finding this doctor, Number Six will lead the authorities to him, so that they can capture him and force him to make some desirable improvements to the device.  If we do not find such a scheme to be great evil, it is only because we have been jaded by the past actions of the leaders of the Village, and our own leaders.

But the authorities are not merely evil, they are incompetent.  Once the doctor returns to the Village, in a mere few hours, he tricks everyone, transfers his own mind into the body of one of the Village’s operatives, and escapes.  The entire plot, the expenditure of so much manpower, was all for nothing.  Does this not remind us of our own futile wars against elusive terrorists who time and again slip through our fingers?

While Number Six is searching for the doctor, he has a number of revealing encounters with his superiors in his spy organization.  Their reactions are equal parts astonishment and utter indifference; we can sense that there is no real friendship or warmth among such men.  Their skepticism is untempered with sympathy.  What’s more, it is revealed that one of the men is the father of Number Six’s fiancée (before his own kidnapping).  The man has not told his daughter anything at all about Number Six (not even a mundane lie); such considerations are secondary to the requirement for secrecy.  To these men, the exercise of power is the only end in life.

Finally, “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” contains a brief but interesting exchange on the contributions of science to society.  Number Two is trying to persuade the doctor to fix his device:

Doctor: “How [Rutherford] must regret having split the atom.”
Number Two: “Yes… almost as bad as splitting the identity of two human beings.  Unlike all the king’s men, only you can put them together again.”
Doctor: “Don’t rely on it.”
Number Two: “Why make this stand now?  You must have known what you were doing when you invented the wretched process.”
Doctor: “Only people like you make it wretched.”

We are inclined to take a middle ground.  The pursuit of knowledge is not evil, but its application to evil ends is necessarily evil.  The power-mongers and oppressors are evil, and their tendency is to use knowledge for evil ends.  But that does not excuse the scientist from some share in the responsibility for that evil, for he made it possible.  What’s more, we are inclined to think that all of us would use that knowledge in the same way, did we have the power to wield it.

The Prisoner: Hammer into Anvil

“Hammer into Anvil” is the second episode in The Prisoner that deals with jamming (see here for an introductory description).  In this episode, it is Number Six jamming Number Two.

“Hammer into Anvil” has little new thematic material after “It’s Your Funeral”, but it stands out in other ways.  For one, Number Six has an unusually large share of the balance of power in this episode.  Compare to “A Change of Mind”, wherein Number Six was fighting for the very possession of his own mind, and only winning by means of a few lucky breaks; in this episode, he takes the initiative at the outset, and doesn’t lose it once for the entire episode.

“Hammer into Anvil” gives a more personal portrait of the paranoia of the Village leadership than “It’s Your Funeral”.  In “It’s Your Funeral”, the jammers play on the paranoia inherent in the methodology and actions of the Village leadership.  They use the obsession with constant surveillance to distract the leaders.  In “Hammer into Anvil”, most of the guardians seem suspicious of whether Number Six is actually plotting against Number Two.  It is only Number Two himself that becomes seriously concerned.  His paranoia does not merely distract him, but causes a complete emotional breakdown that renders him incapable of fulfilling his leadership role.

Overall, there’s not much here.  This is a “light” episode, at least for The Prisoner.  There are several amusing fight scenes, one in which Number Six just seems to be having fun.

The Prisoner: A Change of Mind

“A Change of Mind” is one of the most memorable episodes in the Prisoner series.  It features an attempt by the guardians of the Village to manipulate Number Six using social pressure.

The guardians apply this pressure by leading the citizens of the Village to declare Number Six “unmutual”, or unconcerned with the welfare of the community.  The interpretation is straightforward.  “Unmutual” is a label like those that weigh down our political discourse now as then.  McCarthyism was not much more distant to the original watchers of The Prisoner than September 11 is to us today, so my favorite synonym is “communist”, a related word.  Today the words are socialist, liberal, progressive, fascist, extremist, radical.  All of them indicate that a person’s ideology makes him unfit for public discourse or service.  All of them can also be applied for a wide variety of very vague offenses, just as “unmutualism” in The Prisoner.

The utility of unmutualism – to today’s politicians, not the guardians of the Village – is its apparent autonomy from the political apparatus.  In modern society, the Constitution presents those in power from using the legal machinery to silence undesirable positions, so they must manipulate the people to either not here such positions or to silence them themselves.  This is why in the Village Number Two claims to have no control over whether Number Six is declared unmutual.  Nonetheless, when a group of hostile and badgering neighbors confronts Number Six, Number Two and his advisers are spying on the entire scene and chuckling with delight.  One imagines Karl Rove doing the same thing when he reads the Drudge Report (or the Wall Street Journal, now that it’s been taken over by Murdoch).

The reason that unmutualism is such a favorite tool is that it seems to circumvent people’s ability to think critically.  Otherwise intelligent people, having a considerate debate about public policy, can be completely derailed by the introduction of a loaded term like “unmutual”.  Immediately, the debate ceases to be about the issue at hand, and becomes a defense of the person so accused, who must immediately distance himself from any taint of unmutualism, or risk the illegitimation of anything that he might say.  Just so, in the Village, during one villager’s rehabilitation, some citizens are having an interesting and seemingly erudite debate about whether a failure to acknowledge a greeting is a misdemeanor when Number Six interrupts.  The villagers completely lose their train of thought and start accosting him as unmutual.

Hypocrisy is one shade of unmutualism.  Even in intelligent circles today, there is often considerable effort to discredit political figures or parties by demonstrating that they are hypocritical.  So the left-wing intelligentsia (e.g. Jon Stewart) has made much hay with Republicans’ outrage over the recent use of “reconciliation” to pass healthcare reform; to do so, they have recalled Republicans’ own frequent use of reconciliation during the Bush presidency to pass controversial legislation.

It seems the theory is that rather than debating the merits of the current claims that reconciliation is an inappropriate use of power, the Democrats wish to avoid such debate and tar their opponents with logical inconsistency (even though they themselves are equally hypocritical, having also taken the opposite side of the debate from that they currently occupy during the Bush years).  None of this is to the point, because even if the Republicans reach different conclusions now than they did ten years ago, that does not mean their current arguments are invalid; it means that one of their two sets of arguments, either this one or the former one, is invalid, and it remains to be determined which set it is – which is what the point of the debate was in the first place, before hypocrisy and unmutualism started being thrown around!

Sadly, the only way to defeat unmutualism seems to be to join it.  So in “A Change of Mind”, Number Six defeats Number Two by instigating a citizen to accuse Number Two of unmutualism, thereby discrediting him.  Number Six knows that the citizens are sheep and will not evaluate the claim – as soon as they hear the word “unmutual”, the rest is predetermined.  Never mind that he himself has been subjected to this abuse and thought it unjust; what is important is to win.

It is a shame that all pretenders to power in the modern era think that their ideas are too important to be fairly and calmly evaluated, and must instead be propped up with rhetorical tricks and the fire hose of unmutualism.

The Prisoner: It’s Your Funeral

“It’s Your Funeral” features an assassination attempt on an outgoing Village leader by his successor. The would-be successor engineers the assassination attempt by brainwashing a villager to be the assassin.

The assassination would go off without a hitch, except for the intervention of Number Six. Number Six is alerted to the plot by the would-be assassin’s daughter. Fearing reprisals against the innocent people of the village, Number Six promptly warns his superiors of the plot. They ignore him, because they believe the assassin to be a jammer (someone who frequently distracts the secret police with fake plots and schemes, more on this later). At the last moment, Number Six takes matters into his own hands and stops the assassination.

The question is this: why did Number Two, the architect of the assassination plot, allow Number Six to discover it? Number Two takes great pains to ensure that the would-be assassin’s daughter tells Number Six about the plot. Number Two is downright giddy when Number Six, not knowing of his involvement in the plot, comes to warn him, and Number Two makes sure the entire encounter is caught on film.

Initially, we suspect that all of this is a plot to subvert Number Six into being a “good” prisoner, ratting out bad prisoners and behaving submissively to his superiors. But the writers do not develop this angle. Instead, they later reveal that the filmed encounter is used as the source material for additional, faked recordings of Number Six warning other Village leaders of assassination attempts. The reasons for this are arcane, especially to those who have not watched, but the point is that all of the machinations of the succeeding Number Two appear to be directed at confusing and beguiling his predecessor Number Two, rather than Number Six.

Again, then, the question becomes, “Why tell Number Six at all?” No suitable explanation occurs.

This is exemplary of one of the ways in which I wish the entire Prisoner series had been more subtle. Here we have the introduction of the intriguing concept of jamming, sure to be an element of prisoner behavior in any advanced prison, as well as a potentially interesting attempt to manipulate Number Six’s behavior. But in the end, all of these machinations appear to be directed at the sole purpose of saving the prison’s controllers the trouble of paying a pension to the retiring warden. How boring is that? What’s more, is it not a bit disappointing that the sociopaths controlling the prison (and by analogy society) are so banal and venal in their malfeasance?

Of course, this may very well be the point. When every element of society has been examined, it turns out that there is no central, controlling intelligence with grand aims, good or evil. There are only individual actors with petty aims. Often, the power those actors exercise over their fellows is not correlated wit the grandeur of their aims, but rather the pettiness. For it is by greed and love of common things that men accrue power.

Jamming, incidentally, is a delightful foretaste of the methods that in our future, and in China today, may be necessary to escape surveillance by the police. The concept is simple: we presume the wardens of our prison have the ability to monitor us day and night, in any medium. We know that their primary interest is in the security of their own power, and the prevention of mischief. We use this desire against them, by fomenting countless plots of the most dire nature, none of which ever materialize. The result is that the wardens exhaust themselves in monitoring us, and become forced to ignore our threats.

For example: it seems likely that the feds are now scanning our blogs, e-mails, and web search patterns for indications that we are involved in terrorist activity. The best answer to such a horrendous and unconstitutional invasion of the state into private affairs is to frequently mention terrorism in private correspondence, in incidental and harmless ways. Terrorism, terrorism, blowing up pink puppies, cuddling federal building, flying plane, terrorism, killing purple kittens and petting presidents, et cetera. It also wouldn’t hurt to include several links to suspicious websites that no law-abiding citizen would have any good reason for promoting traffic to – unless he had quite a sense of humor. I probably reject every sentiment in the aforementioned webpages (terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, and building home-made bombs), but to be honest, I haven’t read a word of any of them. Don’t build home-made bombs!

I must note it is with some trepidation that I (who have never made home-made bombs, I swear) make this post, for I suspect that I am in truth exposing one of the few methods of resistance that will be left to us. (For it will be many years before computers can distinguish between satire and sincerity…) As such, this website now contains pernicious and subversive material that is a threat to those who claim to represent the people. A note to any would-be data miners: I assure you that my motives are purely mercenary and sensationalistic, and that it would be far cheaper to pay me off than to waterboard me.

The Prisoner: Many Happy Returns

SPOILER

“Many Happy Returns” returns to one of the main themes laid out in “Arrival”: the perfect prison.  Specifically, the primary, overarching aspect of the perfect prison is that escape is impossible.

In this episode, Number Six gets farther than he ever has before, to London and the agents of the British spy collective, even to his own doorstep.

What is the message?  I’m inclined to think there is little of the social allegory in this episode, and much of the dramatic; we want to believe up until the very end that Number Six has really made his escape this time.

The Prisoner: The Schizoid Man

“The Schizoid Man” led me to reflections on my youth.  The nominal theme of the episode is not so much individualism as individuality.  Number Six’s guardians find a man who looks just like him, start calling him Number Six, and try to convince the real Number Six that he himself is an imposter.

In a way, society steals all of our identities just as the guardians stole Number Six’s.  Number Six is the classic rebel, set at odds with society, wanting nothing from it and seeking only his own freedom.  Like him, we begin life rashly and impetuously, rebelling against authority and vowing eternal animosity to Number One, or as we might have it, “The Man”.  But as time goes on, we find that we want things, that we’re willing to compromise our animosity for some bread.

The process is sometimes called maturation, but it is as much the death of one individual as it is the completion of another.  The rash individuals, the impetuous youths, would never make the compromises that their older, more mature selves make.  The arguments of the social machinery are compelling.  First, there is status, wealth, and all the feminine accoutrements that come with them.  Then, there is security and peace, not just for oneself, but for children – there is nothing that makes a man appreciate the status quo so much as children.  Finally, there is old age: we have worked hard all our lives, on the promise that others would take care of us later; now that later is come, and by gorm let law, order, and the social contract be upheld, but most of all, let us have our entitlements!

For some of us, sadly, we are not so riddled with greed that we cannot sense our own loss.  In this way, what pains Number Six the most during the guardians’ mockery is when his imposter is put to trial and tortured.  What really disturbs Number Six, I think, is to see someone else having won his position in the Village, the position of the rebel.  Similarly, during one of his countless escape attempts, a friend who betrayed Number Six during the charade, and played along with the guardians, comes up to him and begs his forgiveness, insisting that she would not compromise herself if she could do it all over again.

But like her, we almost always do make that compromise.  We give in to the Man, we take his money, and watch his television, and become passive and good.  We come to consider children, possessions, and fine things the goods of life, shackles though they may be.  We pity those of our friends who did not learn to make the compromise, the Number Sixes who never give up.  We pity them because they do not have the things that the Man has given us, and we do not share our things with them.

I have written all of this from the perspective of the rebel, but as I have asked from the outset of “The Prisoner”, what is the alternative?  Are not children and wives and fine things the goods of life?  And if we must purchase them from the Man with our freedom, is it better not to have the goods of life?  There must be some middle road, but “The Prisoner” does not show it to us; we must find it ourselves.

The Prisoner: The General

“The General” is a broad-based satire of modern education. It mocks deconstruction and examines the shortcomings introduced into education by the necessity of educating huge numbers of people.

There is much in “The General” to suggest a desire for a return to a study of the classics and the Great Books.  In several places, “The General” criticizes modern education, represented by the Village’s Speedlearn program, as empty.  “Finding things a bit strange?” the Professor’s wife asks Number Six.  “That is the trouble,” he replies, “I can’t find anything at all.”  When he steals into her house, he enters a tastefully decorated room filled with draped busts.  One is inclined to suspect that they are Greek or Roman, but when Number Six removes the drapery, we are surprised to find that they are busts of the leaders of the Village.  In other words, the leaders of the modern educational movement idolize only themselves, and not the great thinkers of the past.  Finally, the question that Number Six uses to destroy the General (which turns out to be a computer) is simply “Why?”  He asserts that no machine can answer this question, nor any human.  All of these examples point to a thesis that education ought not merely to fill our heads with science and the sterile literature of today’s educated class, but instead to teach us true art, to expose us to things that stir the soul and suggest where we might find meaning.

One scene, in which Number Six inquires of the Professor’s wife why a student is standing on his head (“to gain a new perspective”) reminds us that satire of education is an old art.  Recall a similar scene from Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Strepsiades is examining Socrates’ “Thoughtery of wise souls”:

Strepsiades: …[W]hat are those fellows doing, bent all double?
Disciple: They are sounding the abysses of Tartarus.
Strepsiades: Why do their rumps point toward heaven?
Disciple: They’re being taught astronomy too.

The hollowness of modern education is further examined with “Speedlearning” itself.  Speedlearning’s motto is “100 percent entry, 100 percent pass.”  In just fifteen seconds, Speedlearning enables all of the citizens of the Village learn a complete college course in history, and they can then go about quoting to each other facts about the Boer Wars.  The knowledge turns out to be shallow, though; the citizens know the rote facts, but they attach no meaning to them.  When Number Twelve, a sneaky rebel, asks Number Six, who has just finished the Speedlearning course, “What was the Treaty of Adrianople?” Number Six responds “September, 1829″.  The students of Speedlearning are unable to adapt the facts they have learned to new situations.

I think there is much value in this satire.  We live in an amazing age.  The Earth is more populous than ever before, so much so that up to six percent of all people ever born are walking the Earth today.  Literacy and the availability of accumulated written wisdom are both more widespread, and reaching far greater absolute numbers of people, than at all previous points in history.  Despite all this, the student of history knows that the behavior of people today is not substantially different from the behavior of the uneducated masses of forgotten eras.  We are still subject to xenophobia, jingoism, manipulation, greed, and religion.  How can this be, given the nearly free availability of knowledge?  The failure cannot be in anything but the agents we have chosen to disperse that knowledge, educators who have seen fit to mock and destroy the accumulated wisdom of ages.

For those fortunate enough to have studied the classics, some secrets are known.  Plato could not teach us to be wise, but he at least filled us with a desire to be wise.  He could not teach us the truth, but he at least assured us that it existed.  What is the ignorance and denial of modern America but a complete escape from the desire to know, and the belief in absolute truth?  We see in the anti-intellectualism, the anti-scientific movement, and the race for wealth only the simple fact that people have not been taught to strive for goodness and wisdom.

The Prisoner: A, B, and C

“A, B, and C” brings the guardians into the most sacred precincts of individualism: man’s private thoughts. The new Number Two and his assistant use a magical drug to induce Number Six to dream about a night when, they believe, he must have made his decision to resign; they then watch his dream, looking for clues about why he resigned. The guardians of the Village, just like all figures of Power in real life, will not be secure until they can calculate exactly the individual’s motives.

Of course, the guardians have the arrogance to believe that they already know why Number Six resigned. They believe that he “sold out” to the other side, presumably the communists. Throughout “A, B, and C,” as Number Fourteen and Number Two manipulate Number Six’s thoughts, they put him into situations where he has the opportunity to sell his allegiance, his services, and his information to the other side.

Number Six never takes these opportunities. After he bucks every attempt that Number Two makes to discern his loyalties, he says that he resigned because he was “going on holiday,” and hands Number Two some travel brochures as proof. It seems the games of power, money, and information that Number Two and the powers-that-be enjoy so much mean nothing to Number Six; he merely wanted some peace and quiet, and some time to think. This is as close as we get through “The Prisoner” series to finding out why Number Six resigned, aside from the comment in “The Chimes of Big Ben” that he resigned as a matter of conscience. Put together with the information in this episode, the conclusion seems to be that Number Six quit his job as a spy because he was not sure that he was living the life he wanted to live, and he wanted some time to think about it.

That this conclusion is so incredible to the authorities, that they never accept it even though Number Six has practically told them so, is an interesting satire. The rulers are convinced that the quest for money, power, and adventure drive men. It is because it is this quest that has gotten them to their own positions of power. Men who contemplate, men who retreat when their consciences voice doubts, and men like Number Six, who have their own, private motives for doing things, are incomprehensible to the animals that lead us. These animals, or leaders, have a relentless appetite for advancement; Nietzsche called it the “will to power”. Number Six, and most valuable, thoughtful individuals in society, are not leaders because they are driven by something higher than Nietzsche’s will to power: their own ideas of right and wrong.

The Prisoner: The Chimes of Big Ben

“The Chimes of Big Ben” is more adventure and less social commentary than the usual episode of “The Prisoner”. A beautiful new prisoner, Nadia Rakowski, arrives, and she and Number Six begin to trust each other. They plan an escape attempt. Number Six builds a boat, disguising it (with some lack of subtlety) as an art project. Number Six and Nadia escape to a nearby village, where one of Nadia’s friends from her spy days uses a gun to deter the ruthless white ball that guards the prison. He then packs Number Six and Nadia into a pair of large crates and ships them to one of Number Six’s trusted superiors in England. At this point, the superior begins debriefing Number Six. He is skeptical of Number Six’s tales of the Village, and demands an explanation for why he appeared from the other side of the Iron Curtain after resigning for no reason. He hints to Number Six that Number Six’s tale would be more believable if he would only explain why he resigned, but Number Six then becomes suspicious. He opens up a cabinet to find that the sounds of street life outside are coming from a tape recorder, and then he opens up a door to find out that he has actually been shipped back to the Village!

The most telling point of the episode is the final encounter. Number Six detects the trick by noting that the watch he had in the Village shows the same time as the clocks in London, despite the fact that the Village is supposedly in a different time zone. I cannot help but feel, however, that the behavior of the man debriefing him is supposed to have helped him detect the trick. The man shows the same behavior as every other guardian that Number Six has encountered; he is singlemindedly obsessed with finding out why Number Six resigned. The message is simple: authority – or autocracy – always wants the same thing. It is flexible in its means, but the ends never change. The authorities rule their subjects, but they are slaves to their own desires. In the Village, the guardians, as Number Six cannily observes in “A, B, and C” are as much prisoners as the prisoners themselves, just like Plato’s tyrant.