THE UNMUTUAL PRISONER ARTICLE ARCHIVE
Patrick McGoohan's Mythical Village of the Absurd
by Kevin Plunkett
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life, and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe, poor fools…Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for the modern times. Find the beginning. The Odyssey
Despite the endless variety of interpretive frames applied to The Prisoner over the years, most fans and a number of scholars, amazingly enough, overlook the persistent and resonant mythic levels of McGoohan's cryptic and influential series, mythical allusions and echoes underscoring its psychological profundities. And although terms like allegory, psychodrama, surrealism, and Kafkaesque are frequently bandied about, their persistent interweaving with more reality-centered concepts of Orwellian surveillance states, espionage thrillers, and even the genre of tele-fantasies that erupted during the 60's, leave the impression of an exuberant mash-up of hallucinogenic ingenuity, offering endless range of interpretive freedom, yet lacking any semblance of a coherent core. But does art, even surrealism, ever really lack a center? Best to see the series, despite all the chaos and conflict that frequently disrupted the filming, as a journey into the unconscious of a single man, yet with universal relevance, because the unknown and unexplored borders of the unconscious contain a universal language. As Catherine McGoohan has often insisted, The Prisoner was very personal for her father, a fact reinforced by sharing his own birthdate with Number Six, and the brilliant tour de force of the penultimate Degree Absolute episode, McGoohan's own painfully crafted psychodrama, hearkening back to his own youth, and rife with Oedipal conflict--either father or son must die, or so we are told. McGoohan's peculiarly intense understanding (or misunderstanding) of psychoanalysis, with its elaborate interweaving of transference and counter transference whereby Number Six is killed, for all intents and purposes, when Leo McKern's Number Two dies. And thus Kenneth Griffith as president of the council can pronounce with much eloquence and passion that McGoohan's character having survived the final ordeal, the final test , will no longer be known by any number at all. And it's hard not to detect echoes of the Odyssey in Griffith's soaring rhetoric, rising at times to nearly cultlike exuberance, wel[l]coming a transition of power within the village: “He has gloriously vindicated the right of the individual to be the individual…the only individual…we applaud his private war…all that remains is the recognition of the man who is magnificently equipped to lead us. We concede…You know all. We plead for you to lead us…We are all yours. You have convinced us of our mistakes.”
This intertextuality suggests the persistent relevance of mythic structures--as championed by the depth psychology of Carl Jung and popularized by Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces. Old stories that do speak in modern times but only when each individual traces their beginning, in their own minds and soul. A call to action in a dark and fractured world, and eternally existential questions: where am I, who am I, what am I? Or to put ir more simply. What does it mean to be free and where is freedom to be found? Certainly not in the material world, requiring, therefore, an internal journey of allegorical and surreal dimensions.
1.
Tele-meta-vision
When Danger Man first premiered in 1960, so did an off-beat, Avante Garde comedy called The Strange World of Gurney Slade , starring Anthony Newley as a British actor who breaks the fourth wall of a sitcom he stars in, flees from the studio despite all the objections of the director and actors, to roam through the complicated byways of his quirky and fantastical imagination. Few of its viewers had much interest in this brand of meta comedy and very soon the show was relegated to the late-night graveyard and dropped entirely after the sixth episode. Yet Newley's eccentric performance beguiled the likes of David Bowie and Patrick McGoohan. The fifth episode in particular should appeal to fans of The Prisoner . In it Gurney Slade is telling an improvised fairy tale to a circle of children, in the 8-10 age range, about a magical tinker who comes occasionally to us, he says, once in our lifetime and makes one of our dearest wishes come true. The children are enthused, asking, what time will he be coming? Gurney struggles to explain that they have it wrong, it isn't so much a real man you can see or talk to, but more a poetic symbol, an allegory that represents our inner most thought. But still, like the main characters of Waiting for Godot , the children anxiously await his arrival. What time will he come? It mustn't be after nine when we need to be in bed. Newley's character throws up his arms in bemused frustration. Encapsulated in this brief comical interlude is one of the most baffling paradoxes of 60's television. Despite all its experimentation, endless irony, parody and camp, there is an undeniable reluctance to fully embrace non-realistic modes of narrative practice and vision. It was true then, as it is to this day. Despite claims to the contrary. And this paradox takes us to the heart of Parick McGoohan's existentially absurd soul.
In 1958, Harold Pinter's play Birthday Party opened on a small stage in London, closing after only eight performances, panned by critics as ridiculous and puzzling, with dialogue marred by half gibberish and lunatic rantings. Yet on March 22, 1960, a televised presentation of the play on ITV was seen by eight million viewers, not entirely unlike the viewers of The Prisoner when it premiered seven years later, no doubt baffled but also intrigued by the strangeness of a play unlike anything they had ever witnessed before. Not insignificantly, Pinter premiered two plays in London in 1960, The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter and premiered still another play, A Night Out on the televised anthology Armchair Theater. Also in 1960, Anton Ionesco's famous absurdist farce lampooning fascism The Rhinoceros premiered in London, directed by Orson Welles. And one year after that, Martin Esslin publishes his seminal work Theater of the Absurd , celebrating the importance of a radically original rethinking of theater along existential levels combined with dark, though liberating humor. A remarkably original and provocative exploration of the shattered world in the aftermath of WWII.
Although Patrick McGoohan never appeared in any of these plays, absurdist humor and an absurd vision of his contemporary world resonated throughout his entire career and life. He clearly celebrated the subversive eccentric style of these writers so prominent on the London stage at this time. And he saw in Harold Pinter (a future Nobel prize laureate and one of the younger generation of the absurdist wave, twenty years younger than Samuel Beckett), a kindred spirit. Celebrating him as a terrific author, who explored many of the social and political themes most central to McGoohan's own imaginative vision. Powerful echoes from The Dumb Waiter, for instance, resound throughout the degree-absolute theatrics of “Once Upon A Time,” a play containing the banal, the comical and the tragic about a pair of assassins controlled by some sinister and mysterious agency, during which one of the assassins eventually kills the other on orders from a faceless and inescapable and implacable power.
The purpose of this short essay, in anticipation of my upcoming book on McGoohan, is to tease out a series of similarities between The Prisoner and the Theater of The Absurd in greater depth than is normally pursued. Various writers and fans have certainly commented on this “influence,” but in rather general and superficial terms, and, frankly, do very little with it. Or some others have succumbed to what I call the absurdist trap, which is to say, they assume that because of the superabundance of absurdist humor, art and programming in the 60's that all absurdist self-expression is somehow of equal value in assessing a work as visionary and elusive as The Prisoner. Case in point, certain contemporary writers, in trying to provide a more nuanced context for understanding the inspired madness of “Fall Out,” frame it within the chaotic lunacy of 1967's Casino Royale , a disastrous sendup of James Bond movies, currently sporting a 20% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In contrast, my intent will be to explore a more philosophic understanding of the term “Absurd,” as spelled out in Martin Esslin's book, and defined as a lack of harmony between individuals and the irrational world into which they have been thrown to live. A world in which agency, individual fulfillment and even language collapse upon itself, but still there is an insatiable urge to discover self-realization within the meaningless chaos of this world, finding poetry, humor and even inspiration in the struggle for purpose and affirmation. Without a doubt McGoohan imbibed the spirit of this movement, and through his entire life, like some mythic trickster, nurtured a profound sense of the ridiculous and the perverse, the ultimate weapons against an entertainment industry where he never truly belonged. One of the most amazing traits of McGoohan, despite a variety of psychological scars that dogged him through his life, was his courage to craft an iconic television series that, in his own words, offered no hope to his main character in the end, insisting in a variety of interviews that freedom is an illusion, and that the source of all evil and suffering emanates within the individual ego incapable of integrating itself within the larger self. No wonder an American TV producer once claimed that The Prisoner series would never be embraced by Americans because its protagonist was a loser. And how wondrous that McGoohan in a rare mood of calm self-possession suggested the producer make his own series instead.
The absurdist philosophy that was so prominent in the 1950s and 60s ran parallel to the emergence of so-called café existentialism with its emphasis on the state of nothingness, the emptiness, at the core of human existence, that must be accepted and embraced before any semblance of freedom can exist. As Jean Paul Sartre once asserted, despair as experienced within the existential crisis was fully capable of yielding idealistic engagement, but only when brought forth into consciousness. Victor Frankl, an existential psychiatrist and survivor of a Nazi death camp, in far less philosophical terms, preached the gospel of tragic idealism, the ability to create meaning in the darkest of places, and even encouraged his fellow inmates to use humor as a survival technique. And Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity claimed that to exist is to make oneself a blank of being- and then cast oneself into the world. Yet the most important figure for placing McGoohan within the intellectual zeitgeist of post-World War II Europe is unquestionably Albert Camus, who rejected the existentialist label in favor of an absurdist one, and created this era's most famous definition of absurdity in his 1942 philosophical essay on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, whose eternal punishment of rolling the large boulder to the height of the hill only to see it roll to the bottom again, resulted from his defiance of the gods by attempting to capture death and save humanity from its horror.
For Camus, Sisyphus is a parable for the human condition-in fact Camus directly relates the myth to working class people laboring in factories. The same inexorable drudgery without end, sucking away all vitality and purpose. It's possible McGoohan never read the book by Camus, but he knew all too well what Camus evoked here from his own experience as the son of strict and impoverished Irish Catholic immigrant farmers. A world he could never fully love or escape.
Yet what interested Camus the most about the character of Sisyphus was his thought process as he walked to the bottom of the hill to resume the upward climb, insisting Sisyphus came to accept his fate and in the process gain a semblance of peace and happiness, and within each passing moment the capacity for passion and rebellion.
Camus plays a central role in my approach to The Prisoner in the connection he makes between absurdity and mythology, and by implication the various mythic structures that shape the irrational depts of the unconscious-as I rely heavily on Jungian analytical psychology, an area that has received far little attention to this point. And the fact that McGoohan claimed he never read Jung is of slight importance here. The series incorporates nearly every stage of classic mythic structure including a call to action and a battering gauntlet of ordeals, battles and tests, as well as a grandiose seduction/temptation drama (played out, of course, by Kenneth Griffith and Patrick McGoohan in the final cathartic episode). McGoohan was the type of curious and thoughtful, self-educated man who possessed a visceral level of intelligence, difficult at times to clearly articulate, yet capable of remarkable insights that challenged contemporary attitudes and understanding of psychology and culture. And even in this regard there are mythic undertones. As Joseph Campbell points out in his book, spiritual avatars like Jesus and Buddha also are part of the pantheon of mythic heroes, and he makes a considerable deal out of the fact that when Gautama reached total enlightenment he questioned if he should even share his insights with other people, fearing they would not even understand him. One of the gods convinces him otherwise, that he has much to offer the world. But the ultimate point here, independent of religious, philosophical or political beliefs, is that our own individual truth remains individual and unique to us. This perhaps was part of what entered Griffith's mind when he wrote the speech for the president of the council praising the purity of Number Six's private war. The totality and complexity of all his experiences. Simultaneously a strength, a burden and a prison.
2.
Martin Esslin
Given the short limits of this essay, it is impossible to engage in any sort of detailed analysis of this iconic series. But since there are such complex and nuanced connections between McGoohan's work and this period of absurdist plays, a general discussion of this literary movement can only deepen our understanding of the open-ended and surreal format he chose for The Prisoner.
Esslin's book was not so much a critical or factual analysis of a new cultural trend as a manifesto declaring the need for art to discover new and subversive ways to represent the world. Ways that inverted normative traditions of art, allowing art to exert greater influence on politics and history. These were not new ideas, but in fact echoed back to the post WWI era, and the astonishing explosion of radical experimentation in the arts--dadaism, surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism. The goal of these various movements was to reject rational, traditional models for art, and in doing so create an alternative reality, subverting the cultural norms and assumptions that allowed the carnage of the war to occur in the first place. They rejected the idea that art should mirror reality, or at the very least, employed a distorting mirror akin to those found in fun houses and carnivals, mirrors that also evoke the surreal/portal tradition embedded in certain magical and mystical traditions. [A mirroring and doubling tradition that reverberates throughout McGoohan's finest work].
In 1958 Kenneth Tynan, the drama critic of the London Observer , wrote a scathing review of the plays of Anton Ionesco, seeing him as a leading endorser of anti-realism in the theater, and by extension, a sort of anti-theater and even anti-reality ideology. As one would expect, Ionesco responded with a passionate rebuttal, which provoked a cultural firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic, which was unprecedented (even Orson Wells got into the fray). At its center, Ionesco's argument insisted that contemporary audiences needed to be shocked out of their lethargy and conformity, making them easy prey for oppressive political movements such as fascism. He argued that art needed to break down the sterile language of society, filled with cliches, empty formulas and slogans. As he saw it, you needed to split apart conventional attitudes and language in order to reveal the hidden sap beneath.
Despite Ionesco's strong political convictions, having lived under fascist rule twice in his life, he considered farce, ambiguity and fantasy as the most effective tools of literary revolt. This same ambivalence is shown in Harold Pinter, a highly opinionated, highly politicized writer, who was often considered arrogant and hot tempered by those not within his inner circle. But when asked what a certain play was about, his stock response was—what do you think it means? And he described his writing process in very simple terms. He never began with an idea or theme or plot but would imagine a room with several characters in it and proceed to develop these characters in such a way their true motivation would be kept obscure and hidden from the audience, whether these characters were telling the truth, lying, or a combination of truth and lies. Late in his career, and life, Pinter became highly critical of American foreign policy, and even wrote plays, though in thinly veiled allegory, about torture and human rights violations. And he insisted that political speech needed to be very direct and clear and forceful. But he felt that art speech, stage speech, and other forms of literature, often needed to be ambiguous, mysterious and absurd. Forcing the audience to immerse themselves more fully in the experience, grappling with language that called for endless interpretation, and reinterpretation, language so fluid that images and ideas rapidly shape-shift as in a myth or in a dream.
3.
San Quentin, Fall Out and Shadow Boxing
During one of his earlier tours with a traveling theater company, McGoohan was involved in a remarkable production of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party deep within mining country, and in fact nearly all of the audience that night in the half-filled theater were miners still in their work clothes. When there was a blackout in the theater, as if in a state of intuitive unison, the miners moved close enough to the stage to illuminate it with their miner lights, allowing the show to go on. The entire first act was performed under these conditions. A performance, fondly remembered by McGoohan, transcending so many barriers of education, sophistication and class. And likely reinforcing in his mind the idea that theatre was the most legitimate branch of acting. Or as he sometimes described it, the only honest way to earn a living from acting.
A similar situation occurred at San Quentin Prison in 1957 when members of the San Francisco Actors Workshop presented Waiting For Godot to 1,400 convicts. Members of the workshop must have worried at times, producing a play in a prison environment that had caused near riots when it premiered in major cities in Europe, but amazingly the convicts sat in rapt appreciation. Unlike Beckett who claimed he had no idea what Godot represented, these convicts when interviewed by reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle insisted they had no difficulty at all understanding the play. It spoke to them on many levels. The director had facilitated this experience by deciding not to provide any background or introductory material, hoping to create an atmosphere in which there were no expectations or assumptions on the part of the audience. All he asked them to do was listen to the play as they would a piece of jazz music, picking out whatever meaning they could. As described by Martin Esslin, the play had such an impact on inmates, characters' names and lines from the play became part of prison idiom and folklore. If only we could watch The Prisoner in a similar fashion, particularly the delightfully baffling and controversial conclusion.
In doing research for this book, I have repeatedly been struck by a peculiar level of double -speak within the great diversity of interpretations. On one hand honoring the dazzling imaginative reaches of the series, while relentlessly seeking to “decode” its meaning, defaulting in the end to a surveillance-based interpretation, which is far removed from psychological allegory or surreal provocation. And this confusion seems the result of considerable self-projection on the part of some writers onto McGoohan and his main character, with very little evidence other than heartfelt speculation to rely on. This tendency is even found in writers who apply Jungian concepts in framing the riddling ending of the series, claiming that Number Six is a totally individuated man, having survived the final ordeal of Degree Absolute. A highly dubious conclusion, as these traits are rarely found in a person in the first half of their life. As Jung often asserted, first you create a life and then you create a culture.
Individuation is a long, arduous process integrating the various aspects of the self, the core of the psyche, containing the unconscious, the conscious and the ego. All psychological experiences need to be integrated into this self in order to find inner peace and harmony. The self having been fractured and fragmented very early in our lives as a young child. And one vital stage in this process for a man is to assimilate the strengths of the woman within. The female principle. Not exactly a box checked off by Number Six.
The dramatic confrontation between the personas designated Six and One, and the symbolic merging of these two characters, is so startling in part because of the frenetic speed with which events and images flash before our eyes, a speed, according to film editor Noreen Ackland, that McGoohan often demanded in the series. On first reading the working script, Ackland thought to herself--I don't know what this is--but managed wonders, sustaining the trippy, hallucinogenic buzz of the episode while allowing its dreamlike rhythms and associative patterns to emerge as an underlying structure and resonance-echoing earlier hints scattered throughout the series that Number Six and the guardians of the village mirrored each other in numerous ways. Especially in the Checkmate episode where Number Six's lack of self-knowledge feeds his arrogance, dooming the planned coup and escape. His would be conspirators assuming him part of the oppressive system in the village. Just one of many bread crumbs scattered about for our edification and bewilderment.
When Number 6 attacks Number 1, he is described in the script as going berserk, the battle as extremely vicious, comparable to a human fighting a beast. Psychologically speaking, a battle with the beast within, the unknown and repressed depths of the unconscious which Jung famously called the shadow, needing to be brought into conscious awareness, but a process that can provoke considerable anxiety and turmoil, and Jung believed, a possible nervous breakdown. Inverting everything you believe about yourself and the world. An encounter no less frightening than Rover suddenly emerging from the depths of the sea.
Incrementally over the course of the final episode, Number 6 descends into a dark hole of ever escalating violence and destruction. Later, though, he and his fellow rebels regress temporarily, as they speed off in their cage on wheels, into a childlike state of hilarity and escape and the promise of freedom. Yet when Noreen Ackland suggested McGoohan be described in the credits as simply “Prisoner,” he agreed.
But this circularity of plot is hardly nihilistic. Or as problematic as many make it out to be. Rather the ending embodies a sort of ascending spiral curve symbolized by the spiral staircase leading to Number One. Traditional symbol of learning and transition. The completion of the first stage, having passed all the initiation rites, of a very long journey--like the ten years it takes Ulysses to get back home to Penelope.
Sources
The Prisoner : The Complete Series, Imprint Television, Everyman Films
McGoohan Interview, 1986, Classic Images, Barbara Pruett
The Theatre of the Absurd , Martin Esslin, 1961, Bloomsbury Revelations
The Myth of Sisyphus , Albert Camus, 1942, Vintage International
The Ethics of Ambiguity , Simone de Beauvoir, 1948