There have been a lot of words written about The Prisoner.
To be frank, most of those words haven’t been very good. I’ve long felt frustration that there wasn’t a good book, a really good book, about it. Many attempts, even by the usually reliable, have stumbled, often over the same things. Inevitably in any pop culture phenomenon a fandom will collect, a bubble in which the same received and accepted lines of thinking will whirl round and round like odd socks in a tumble drier.
The production has certainly been very well covered (most notably and reliably in the fantastic Andrew Pixley’s ‘History/Illustrated History’, which accompanied the Network DVD/Blu Ray box sets). But that can’t help being, even when fascinating, inevitably a little dry.
Critique of The Prisoner has been hamstrung both by unquestioned assumptions and by the grim academic ideologies of Critical Theory, deconstruction, etc, which have seeped from the universities over the decades since the series was made. Trying to evaluate The Prisoner using ‘theory’ is like using the techniques of The Village - with which they have much in common - to understand the world.
The analysis we have seen has been mostly either glib, or leaden, or wrong-headed, or often just wrong.
The Prisoner does deserve to be analysed. When I first encountered it, it set off fireworks in my head that are still exploding. This is true for many others. It is a mass-produced product, made in a heated rush - but it is endlessly fascinating and, often accidentally, it is profound. Just not in the way people say it is. There have been many other satisfying and thoughtful TV series, and particularly of late, many (generally excruciating) attempts at significance and meaning by them. I don’t think any of them come anywhere near The Prisoner in that regard. It is television’s best shot at entry into the Western canon.
For about thirty years I’ve been banging on to fellow disciples about all this, and the answer always came back, ‘Well, you should write it’. Here goes.
The plan, which may change a bit as we go, is to move through The Prisoner in its production order. (By ‘annotated’ I mean stopping to notice things, not literally annotating scripts.) There’ll be a close reading of every episode, and that may sometimes stretch to several posts. Along the way, and as they arise or occur, there’ll be digressions in detail about matters arising.
So for example there’ll be a close reading of Dance Of The Dead and then offshoot posts about Mary Morris, the eighteenth century and its evocation in the series, speculation on the recruitment, work routine and life of an Observer, Carnival and Lent, film editing, where does the food in the Village come from … and probably lots more depending on what fires up my neurons. I’ll be wondering about the fictional world as if it was real, because that’s fun, and looking from the real world too.
To begin, here’s a quick rundown of some of the most irritatingly wrong things people repeat about The Prisoner, and my rebuttals. I’ll be going into greater detail about all of these as they arise in the course of the work, but I think this will give a good taste of where I’m setting out from. Here are some of my big, broad noticings about The Prisoner.
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