The escalating scale of the Coronavirus pandemic is keeping a lot of people prisoners in their own homes. The struggle of those in self-isolation to escape boredom has already produced many strange and entertaining results, such as the man who ran an entire marathon around his drawing room. Thanks to the unprecedented amount of entertainment now available at the touch of a button, many are finding this a perfect time to discover films and television series which may have passed them by. For those looking for something which will resonate with their present lockdown, I have a suggestion.
The Prisoner ran from September 1967 to February 1968, comprising a total of 17 episodes. Airing in the Friday night timeslot traditionally reserved for such conventionally enjoyable spy fare as The Saint, the show tore up the rules of its ostensible genre - here is a spy show where the main character is the one being perpetually spied upon - and reflected social fears back at viewers through a lens of avant-garde abstraction, heavily influencing such later series as Twin Peaks and The X-Files and delving deeply into the substance of existentialist philosophy which HBO's Westworld can only emptily feign at.
The premise is elegance itself: a government agent resigns from his job, but before he is able to leave the country, he is gassed and taken to The Village, a small coastal retreat from which he is unable to escape. His captors want to know why he resigned. He wants to know who they are. All in the Village are referred to only by numbers. He is given the number Six. The person in charge of the Village is Number Two. Who or what is Number One? The fiercely individualist Number Six resists having his personhood reduced to a number and his world reduced to a Village. "I will not make any deals with you," he says. "I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own." The more Six tests the limits of his prison, the more his prison pushes back, subjecting him to psychological experimentation which makes him question the degree to which his resistance might even be part of the plan.
The most surface-level reading of the series puts it as a battle between the individual and the State, or self-expression against conformity. It's an interpretation which fits, but is reductive. Six's defining characteristic may be his individuality, but though the series celebrates his keen sense of self, it also questions it at every turn. What does it mean to be an individual? Can a true individual ever exist as part of a community? How far should individualism be allowed to go before it becomes a threat to a stable society? Is social manipulation to ensure conformity therefore not just necessary, but desirable?
Six might be the lead character and the man audiences are expected to cheer on, but he is far from the suave, likeable heroes common to television at the time. His individuality is abrasive and confrontational, his voice lurching between soft-spoken friendliness and violent barks at a moment's notice. Star Patrick McGoohan (also the show's creator) was an eccentric, unpredictable performer, but with Six his trademark intensity is dialled up several fold. Six's values might be admirable in theory, but in person he is threatening and unstable. Much of this is down to the manipulation of the Village elders, of course: Six is a man under constant stress, having to be on his guard at all times and never able to trust anyone around him. This distrust is even used against him in one episode's superb twist where his method of discerning the guards from the prisoners becomes his downfall as his allies realise he has more in common with the guards than with them.
Implicit throughout the series is the sense that Six and the Village enjoy the test they pose to each other. Six may suffer and be maddened, yet without the conformity imposed on him by the Village, his individuality would have no way to express itself. The Village finds Six fascinating and occasionally useful as he attempts to smash the structure and safety it is designed to enforce. Every challenge he poses them makes them more efficient. In one episode, 'Free For All', he runs in an election for the role of Number Two, unwittingly allowing his rebellion to be commodified and his anger diminished into platitudes designed to make him more electable.
McGoohan always resisted giving a direct answer to questions of what The Prisoner was specifically about, realising that it was more important for viewers to to interpret the series themselves and challenge the prisons which were imposed on them from without and within. Today, for a series whose episode-by-episode concerns remain strikingly relevant - constant surveillance, data collection, machine learning, conformity masquerading as freedom - its refusal to provide answers is where it feels most radical. The age of smartphones and all possible information available at a click has broken existence down into a binary state of knowing or not knowing. People have allowed their sense of selves to be reduced to a set of labels and data categories, because it is easier to know than to think and easier to identify than to be.
I would posit that many who are suffering boredom in Coronavirus-induced quarantine are struggling because it is so rare these days to be left alone with only our thoughts and selves. When our lives become nothing but external projection and reception, it is painful to be cut off from the external and discover how little there is within. Individuality is a lifelong challenge, which like all freedom comes at considerable cost: it is inherently self-destructive and sets you apart from your peers, but also fulfilling in a way little else in life can be. The Prisoner is a work of art comprising countless layers and endless interpretations, but it is fundamentally the story of the self-isolation of free men.
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