Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2019 March 20 • Wednesday

There are many books about the British TV show The Prisoner. I know this because I collect them.

One of the most recent and most entertaining is I Am Not a Number: Decoding The Prisoner, by filmmaker Alex Cox of Repo Man fame.

A few things make Cox's book different from the rest. The first and most obvious one is that this might be the first such book written by a filmmaker, and Cox is a particularly interesting filmmaker whose imagination and eye are easily aligned in sympathy with the restless and critical vision that Patrick McGoohan struggled to realize in The Prisoner.

And so while Cox isn't the first author to give each episode of the series a close reading, his perspective includes substantial knowledge of the realities of film production: and while The Prisoner was a television program it was produced as a series of short films shot in 35mm.

Which brings us to the next point. Cox insists on examining the episodes not in their broadcast order but in their production order. This makes sense, considering what the production was actually like, alternating filming on location in Portmeirion, in Wales, and on an MGM soundstage in London. Work on one episode would begin before the previous one had finished.

There are various writers and directors for each episode and perhaps only two people with a unifying idea for the series, and those two people, George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan, had differing ideas and inevitably grew to be more in conflict with each other.

Alex Cox has been around and seems to have compassion for everybody involved. He's also quite witty:

As an actor, McGoohan seems to have two speeds, like my old Chevy Impala: low, in which he is entirely credible, low-key, and frequently charming; and high, in which his voice suddenly leaps in pitch, he often shouts, and he tends to smash things.

This is followed by Patrick McGoohan saying much the same thing about himself. Elsewhere Cox is persuasive in his deductions about why McGoohan made certain choices and decisions and since his tone is consistently positive and lovingly critical, it's a pleasure to go along with him.

Going along with him is not the same as agreeing with him, though. His astute analysis and puzzle-piecing of the series grants him an entirely reasonable and defensible alternative theory as to the identity of The Prisoner's main character and the enigmatic "No. 1", but it didn't dislodge my previous, admittedly messy and inconsistent ideas about same.

The show itself, after all, is wildly inconsistent, as Cox acknowledges, and I suspect that it started as one thing and ended as another. Following a trail of textual breadcrumbs to arrive at a conclusion that was intended from the beginning might not be possible. But Cox's analysis and interpretation are, I think, the best I have ever come upon, and his book is a delight.

Among those delights are his spotting what has been previously overlooked. Had anybody before drawn our attention to the vital role played by casting director Rose Tobias Shaw? Or to a possible connection with the CIA's psychedelic drug experiments and the death, possibly murder, of Frank Olson?

Cox is an erudite guide who can suggest a connection with Jean Cocteau's Orphée on one page and with McGoohan's starring role in a 1958 episode of a television anthology drama on another.

I do think, however, that he makes an error of judgement in calling Operation Mincemeat "obscure", since it was the subject of a successful 1956 movie (The Man Who Never Was, which was even parodied on The Goon Show as The Was Who Never Man), and was a very well known World War II story, possibly even better known in the U.K. in the late '60s than it is today.

Cox's thesis depends on The Prisoner's not being a continuation of Danger Man and McGoohan's character not being a spy. To support this, Cox points out No. 6's lack of tradecraft. As a "spy", at least as a fictional spy in the fictional spy world of 1960s pop culture, which probably involved some small amount of overlap with real-world espionage of the time, Cox makes the case that No. 6 is surprisingly bad at being a spy appearing to lack both knowledge and experience.

This is fine as far as it goes but it would be more convincing if supported by counter-examples. Going by the same standards, John Steed and Emma Peel are probably pretty lousy spies too, I think. Though they aren't really spies. They aren't really anything. The vagueness of their identities is part of the charm of The Avengers.

But what of Napoleon Solo and the others we might encounter? What of George Smiley and Harry Palmer? Or Danger Man's John Drake, to pick a more pertinent example. How does No. 6 compare to them? I honestly don't know but here's an opportunity, perhaps, for Cox to strengthen his argument.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, and Cox's book delicately addresses how much has changed since McGoohan's series first aired. In his analysis of the episode "Hammer Into Anvil" he writes:

The apparent 'bomb plot' references contemporary events. The 1960s and 1970s saw a series of bomb explosions, set by the IRA, to undercut support for English control of Northern Ireland. We all grew up with the possibility of bombs, and with bomb threats, but we got on with out lives regardless: the media-stoked paranoia, imprisonment without trial, and armed troop deployments which we know today would have been unthinkable in England in 1967.

Later, in an epilogue, the final episode of the series brings forth this observation:

Anyone who visits Parliament today, with its bomb-proof crash barriers, surveillance cameras, security guards and armed police, can see where the Imperial Project has led us over the last fifty years. A few years back I and a small crew were stopped and cautioned by the London police for pointing a video camera at the Houses of Parliament from across the Thames. In 1967, McGoohan, McKern and company just showed up, without permission, and shot The Prisoner's closing sequence there.

And:

Freedom of movement, freedom to point a camera, freedom from detention without charge, freedom to enter a building without being pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed and numbered by uniformed security sentinels, all this and much more has been swept away. What is London today but The Village, surveilled, monitored, under the watchful eyes of private security companies, the police, MI5, GCHQ, NSA, and all the other acronyms which give us limited permission to function according to their terms?

That's certainly one of the strongest impressions left by the conclusion of this remarkable television program. Patrick McGoohan wasn't a perfect person and The Prisoner not a perfect creation, but there is much in both worthy of our respect and consideration.

Respect and consideration are certainly due also to Alex Cox and this book of his. Be seeing you.