So I've started watching 'The Prisoner', onto Episode 3 (A, B & C), and so far I just keep thinking to myself that, apart from Rover and the totalitarian attitude of Number 2, this is an utterly perfect society. I'd love to live in a place like the Village.
Polite people, a rotating work-shift, hobbies and crafts to fill the time, radio to listen to, it just seems like a perfect place to go and live. Again, if you take out the more dictatorial elements.
Perfect ... if people willing to give up who they are ... and a lot of people are quite willing to do just that, alas.
The social critic & educator Neil Postman once wrote about the difference between the two classic dystopias, 1984 & Brave New World. In the first, people were ruled by fear & brutal control. In the latter, people were ruled by distracting them & making them superficially happy, so that they welcomed it. Postman's thesis (from the 1980s) was that the future was going to be more like the latter than the former (although the sheer brutal force of the former would still loom behind that latter -- as it does in The Village.)
Everything in The Prisoner is a metaphor, and this is mostly left up to your personal interpretation. I have my own interpretation of what you're seeing of The Village, and if you don't want to know I'll leave it concealed under a Spoiler tag, and I would urge you not to look at it so that you come up with your own interpretation.
The Village is a multi-faceted metaphor. The whole show is a conflict between the Individual and the Collective, where the Collective is doing what they can to get you to conform according to their own designs. But it's also a metaphor for one's own mind, the place where you go to be at a sense of peace to escape your own anxieties, but the anxieties are the ones in control. Number 6 says he resigned out of a crisis of conscience, and it's my own interpretation that he's not happy about that either. It may have been the right thing, but was it really? By leaving the service, he is also allowing the very thing that was bothering him about it unchecked and unmolested by his own presence and input. Toward the end, when he's having his final fight with Number 2, 6 has come to peace with his demons, and has beaten them. The reasons for his resignation and his troubled conscience were immaterial, it was the conflict about them that mattered. The Village served both to placate his sensibilities and to bedevil him about his conscience, a place of order supported by an evil that lurks in the hearts of everyone. If you're ever put into a position where you have to make life-changing decisions for other people, you would be conflicted too, and eventually it may wear at you, and you're struggling just to maintain your sanity.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the interpretations. Hell, I've got my own, the rather popular theory that about ten of the episodes didn't even happen, they were just trip-outs that Number 6 had (thanks to McGoohan's view of the episode count). I'm saying that as a physical thing, not an abstract idea, the Village could be a nice place to live, after removing the dictatorial elements and such.
Once the dictatorial elements were in place, could they be removed? That's the real question! :)
Indeed, it is a good question. But it might be best put in a different context. If the Collective were at all something that the Prisoner respected and admired, would he be so resistant to it? As such, the premise is that this individual is resisting against a collective that he had some issues with. If the dictatorial elements could be removed, why would he resist?
Part of the whole scheme that McGoohan was, perhaps unknowingly, was presenting was that the Village and the Collective that it represents is the tyranny of this Collective's influence on one's own mind, which is why, if you watch interviews of McGoohan, he says that Freedom is a Myth, and that the Prisoner, at the end, doesn't have his freedom, and that we're all prisoners. The question begs, "Prisoners of what?" We're prisoners of a mindset we've all internalized from society itself and maybe that wouldn't be so bad if the society was one we had some respect for, beyond whatever threats to our survival and well-being it may present? Our modern society, even back in the 60s, is rife with seemingly endless consumerism, Godlessness, debauchery, activism, unrest, perpetual work just to make ends meet, debts, and decay. What if it were different? Would we then be rightly considered contumacious against such a better society? That's something The Prisoner did not answer, but then again it wouldn't have been since McGoohan's target was the one he knew, not the one he didn't know. If he had known of another kind of world, say, something like from the Middle Ages, where there was a lot more stability, a lot more harmony, where your average serf only owed his lord 30-35 days out of the year (compared with 170 days the average American taxpayer owes the IRS), and worked 14-17 weeks out of the year to provide for his home and family, maybe he might not mind it all so much?
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One of the things I took away from the series is that there's no final victory or triumph, especially over oneself -- the struggle to be free (especially from oneself) is a continual one. And that the prisons we build for ourselves usually are to make our everyday lives easier, healthier, more comfortable & secure. (See My Dinner With Andre's discussion about the dangers of too much comfort.)
And this is why The Prisoner remains such a powerful series for me: even after decades of seeing it many times, it still inspires & provokes thought, and more importantly self-reflection.
I personally think the biggest clue as to the nature of the Village is in Many Happy Returns, where #6 wakes up only to find that the speaker isn't telling him "Good Morning," and the Village is completely deserted, except for a black cat. Then 6 builds a raft, takes some supplies, and escapes, returns to London, tells his people all about the Village, and then goes on a flight to find it, only to be dropped right back in there again.
You'd think that after the second episode, where he manages to escape with a supposedly Lithuanian Swimmer, he wouldn't bother to try to escape to England where he personally knew some of the people there, and they betrayed him to the Village already. But, more importantly, the very fact that it is implied, based on 6's reaction, that the Village was properly populated the very day before, only to have everyone, from the old-timers in the old-folks home, to the marching band, and the storekeepers and restaurant people, and #2 are all gone. If the Village can do that, why bother to attempt to escape to England? You and I'd have gone anywhere else, but he goes right back to England, and to London. Why?
Because it's the world he knows, the one he's comfortable with. And that's the key to understanding this show. He could've just as easily floated his way to the continent, maybe find a way to make it to the East, or even to America, maybe work his way to where he needs to go, and never worry about the Village ever again. But he goes to the world he knows, believing that he's been abducted by a foreign power, choosing to believe that, rather than the obvious - that he's been betrayed by the very elements inside his own mind - to keep him in his comfort zone.
Because, the comfort zone is our prison. It's the thing that prevents 6 from trying to fend for himself in the continent, to try to venture out into a world he doesn't know, perhaps find help somewhere, anywhere else. He goes to London, finds his place occupied by someone else (who we know later is #2), and here he begins to let his guard down after his harrowing trip. It appears his life may just in fact be returning to a sense of normalcy and under his own personal control. But it's a trap! A trap of the Comfort Zone.
The casual viewer of this series might not have picked up on this. I didn't the first couple of times around. But when I realized that McGoohan was trying to make a point here, I realized that this wasn't really so much of a mistake in continuity as it first appeared.
And so the show poses another question: what is your ideal world? Then it asks, "Would you be willing to give up your Self to get there?" Finally, comes the real bedrock of the thing: "Can a utopia exist if the people are automatons? Can your ideal world exist without you?"
This is the rationale behind seemingly pleasant, comfortable dystopias, such as that of Brave New World, and the fear-dominated ones like 1984. The late Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, said that there are two forms of dystopia: that of 1984, where we're controlled by what we fear, and that of Brave New World, where we're controlled by what we love. The latter is certainly comfortable enough (even though it appears that the drug soma is required at times for even the elite of society to make it through the day) ... but its inhabitant have no real depth or authenticity. They do have plenty of distractions & sense-satisfying amusements, and for many that's enough, even in our own society.
But if one starts to questions things, to delve into one's own being, to strive to become a personally authentic person, that becomes a danger to the ruling system.
I might have to read that book; it sounds insightful. That statement certainly is, about the fear/love control mechanisms. You know, I think Fahrenheit-451 might be a blend. It's a totalitarian "fear" State in many ways, but the inhabitants are, by-and-large, shocked and appalled by literature, much preferring the soothing torpor of television and noise. They love the sedative there.
The "love" control mechanism is, I think, the more insidious. It's harder to fight. Both exert totalitarian control, but only the "love" version feigns compassion. If somebody from our society said, "Children shouldn't be sexually molesting each other as a playground game," somebody from Brave New World would reply, "Oh, but they like it, and they have to learn about it sooner-or-later, so what's the harm...?" and frame it up like one was being a prude or closed-minded for objecting.
The other danger, of course, is that the controlled like it. It's harder to rally support. Everybody under the thumb of fear yearns to get out, but if you're being catered to, well, what's the difference? The Matrix does this well. The illusion is comforting. Give in. Don't make life unpleasant just for - what? - Truth? Come on... give in...
But, of course, The Prisoner managed to do all that as well.
Yes. Fiction that pokes at this stuff will, sadly, always be relevant. At least, for the foreseeable future.
There will always be power-mongers who seek to enslave others. They will do so by any means necessary. Fear and Love, stick and carrot - these will always been the tools to do so. As long as humankind seeks to dominate itself, we will need to be told to stand up and shout, "I am not a number! I am a free man!"