Theories about The Prisoner: Drama vs. Allegory

Why did No 6 resign?

• He found out about the Village, or at least that he was working for the sorts of people who ran the Village. He perceived either that the British secret state - perhaps even the entire British Establishment itself - had become so morally decadent (or had been so subverted) that it was no longer behaving constitutionally. It may even have been infiltrated by a malign agency or agencies unknown. In any event, No 6 felt in conscience he could no longer work for these despotic and amoral "new masters" (quite possibly some sort of X-Files-type shadowy one-world government sort of conspiracy!), so he resigned.
• He did not necessarily know about the Village, but he knew what sorts of things were going on there.
• It's possible that he did already know about the Village in principle, possibly even because he helped to devise it, only late finding out how his plan was actually being implemented - or perhaps, rather, abused.
• He found out that he was No 1 - or at least that his superiors were doing what they were doing at least partly in his name as Britain's number one spy. He no longer wanted to be a leading light in such operations.
• He may even have resigned in the hope of avoiding being sent to the Village (or somewhere like it) himself - though he would probably have been aware of what a vain hope this was. During the scene of his actual abduction, there is more than a hint of Stoic resignation in those blue eyes as he realises he's being gassed. Besides, his "beach holiday" doesn't seem like the sort of holiday he would really have enjoyed (being more of a skiing man), so it's possible that he didn't actually expect to get that far - though it's also possible that the beach holiday really was just an old professional cover he intended to use. (He doesn't actually deny the possibility in A.B.C., merely that he did not intend to "sell out".)
• Patrick McGoohan resigned - from Danger Man. Lew Grade asked him why. Though McGoohan never seems to have said so in so many words, clearly Danger Man was for him too idealised a version of the morally questionable reality of covert surveillance, subversion and guerrilla warfare that all modern governments perpetrate, both internationally and domestically!

Why do the No 2s keep asking No 6 why he resigned?

The original purpose of the Village was simply to protect the data of retired secret agents. If they just wanted to prevent No 6's information from falling into the wrong hands though, the No 2s would simply have killed him, but they didn't. They want to extract the information he has first. In order to do this they will destroy his individuality if necessary (or perhaps even if it's not necessary). In the "allegory" of The Prisoner, according to McGoohan, this was the actual point of the Village - to destroy the individual.

• At first the No 2s think No 6 resigned because he discovered something valuable and they want to know what that was. 
• Later on it becomes clear (e.g. in 'The Chimes of Big Ben') that they hope that if he answers just one simple question (i.e. about his resignation) he'll crack and tell them everything else he knows as well.
• It's also possible that they suspect and fear that he has discovered too much about their own operations - perhaps even the identity of No 1 himself.
• The No 2s themselves almost certainly don't know who No 1 is. This can perhaps be inferred from the evasive answers that many No 2s give about No 1. It is also stated implicitly in 'Hammer into Anvil' and explicitly in 'Fall Out'. In 'Free For All', when No 6 and No 2 are discussing the consequences of being elected No 2, the older man states, 'Number One will no longer be a mystery to you, if you know what I mean.' This sounds like an implicit admission that he doesn't believe there really is a No 1, except in a philosophical sense (e.g. No 1 is some sort of version of God in the Village's quasi-Masonic cult of "government power" - perhaps even Rover himself, which is not impossible, given that Rover is in one sense the supreme symbol of power in the Village. Indeed, at one point at that story's climax No 2's toughs actually seem to be worshipping Rover in some sort of inner sanctum within the Green Dome). For some of the No 2s then, No 1 is a "noble myth", though it's possible that there are others who know that the idea that No 1 is a noble myth is itself a lie. Some of the No 2s may indeed want to know more, so for some of them breaking No 6 to discover whether he knows who No 1 is - or at least whether he knows more about the Village and the powers behind it than they do - is a matter of personal concern to them, as well as of personal honour.
• It's even possible that some of them know (or suspect) that he is No 1 and wish to break him in order to replace him. (This may actually have happened by the time of 'Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling' and apparently has happened by the time of 'Fall Out', in which No 1 seems to be No 6's doppelgänger Curtis.)

Who is No 1?

• The original answer (and the only acceptable answer) to 'Who is No 1?' is of course that No 1 is No 6. He is the most important person in the Village, after all, and certainly its most important prisoner. It's not necessarily clear though whether or not he knows that he is No 1.
• The question is of course No 6's equivalent of 'Why did you resign?', the implication being that if he can get them to answer one of his questions then he will have turned the tables on them decisively. 
• He probably either knows the answer or suspects it even as he's asking the question. The difference though is that the No 2s themselves don't know who No 1 is. Whatever they may suspect, they only know that No 6 is important, not that he is No 1.
• It would be most satisfying to imagine that 'Who is No 1?' and 'Why did you resign?' actually have the same answer. Originally the idea was that No 6 had devised the idea of the Village but then resigned when he discovered how/that his idea had been realised. The Prisoner therefore is No 1 and he resigned because he is No 1 and had a change of heart about the Village and what was being done there - or at least he had a change of heart about his job once he realised the sorts of things that were being done by the people he was working for (i.e. the sorts of things that were going on in the Village). Having been the best agent in the service he became its most implacable opponent.
• If he knows that he is No 1 but knows that they don't know, then the question is really little more than a taunt.
• If he knows that he is No 1 and doesn't know that they don't know, then the question is presumably a genuine attempt to discover if any of them knows that he is.
• It's just possible that despite having resigned he, or rather someone posing as him, is still recognised as No 1; and so, in a classic game of bluff and double bluff, whereas the No 2s' objective is to discover whether he realises this, his intention is to discover how it is that the Village continues to function even though he himself is now a prisoner.
• It's just possible that the impostor who has replaced him as No 1 - the figure unmasked by No 6 in 'Fall Out' - is No 6's doppelgänger Curtis, who was not killed by Rover in 'The Schizoid Man' but only stunned. (Does Rover ever actually kill anyone?) It's also possible that Curtis was revived after 'The Schizoid Man' in much the same way as No 2 is in 'Fall Out'. Despite being brain-damaged by his trauma, he was given No 6/the true No 1's place at the "controls" of the Village.
• Implicitly there's not just a No 1. Above and beyond (or, indeed, below) the Village, there's also a No 0 - who is quite possibly the Butler, who still controls No 6 (but more subtly) even after he has left the Village.
• Another good candidate for No 0 is of course Rover - not just the supreme symbol of power in the Village but also the "reset", who returns escapees and thus returns everything to the status quo ante each time they attempt to escape.

Patrick McGoohan, who plays No 6, came up with the idea of the Village based around Portmeirion, which had been one of the locations for Danger Man. According to McGoohan though, No 1 is No 6's self. By implication then, No 1 = No 6, '1' is 'I' and '6' is 'me': one is the self as seen by oneself (the Prisoner himself) and the other is the self as seen by society (the Village). The Prisoner is his own worst enemy because he constantly "looks out for number one". McGoohan also made the point that you can't rebel against society all the time, otherwise you'd go crazy. So No 6 wants to escape from the Village because he rejects society. (He may even deny that there is such a thing as society.) But, as a member of society (i.e. as a number), he cannot escape it, even if he appears to have escaped and,for a time, to have shrugged off its label.

To a certain extent it's necessary to "retroject" this fable's moral onto some episodes, but it works remarkably well. The Prisoner cannot escape the Village because one cannot escape society, and even if one can escape society one cannot truly achieve the individuality of pure subjectivity without either going mad or accepting, to some extent, that one must also be an object of others' actions, observations and labels. One will always be numbered by other people, and even as oneself one must have a number - even if that number is, indeed, 'One'.

It follows though that in all probability each and every individual is No 1, and that anyone else who pulled off No 1's ape mask would see his own face. In as far as he has objective reality, No 1 is a faceless, protean being who represents the dark, utterly selfish, animal side of each man's nature. He can be unmasked and confronted, but he cannot be caught or restrained, let alone imprioned. It's quite likely that he is in charge not only of the Village but also of the world itself: the Village has its nukes, just as the outside world does. As such it it quite likely that he is the Lord of This World that Christ warns of in the Gospels - the Antichrist, Satan himself.

McGoohan: 'I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself.' 

...  

Audience member: 'Do you think there's going a strong popular reaction against "progress" in the future?' 

McGoohan: 'No!'

Ronnie Braithwait

Happy Commonwealth Day!

The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

Political Assassinations and Secret History

Auntie's recent series about Mrs T was as usual interesting as much for what it left out as for what it included. The convoluted but essential history of the Labour Party's vicissitudes in the 1980s was almost entirely neglected. The Falklands and the Belgrano were skated over briefly and the yomp to Port Stanley was barely mentioned. But most intriguing, given that the Brighton bomb was covered in some detail, was the absence of any assassinations.

Airey Neave in fact got several mentions from the time when he was Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager. But his assassination by the INLA was entirely ignored. And Ian Gow, who was similarly assassinated by the Provisional IRA, didn't so much as see the light of day.

On the one hand yes there's the BBC's commitment to the "peace" process. Mention Fenian violence and you'll get complaints. And on top of that there's Auntie's perennial implicit anti-Catholic bias, which in the case of Neave and Gow works in a particularly interesting way. Because Neave and Gow were almost certainly targeted specifically because they were "Catholics" (or rather, in Gow's case, an "Anglo-Catholic"). So even less reason than usual to mention them? Possibly!

But what about the Beeb's similarly perennial anti-Right bias? It may seem odd to complain about that Tory favourite old chestnut when considering a series that was for the most part admirably objective and even-handed. But one can't escape a lingering uneasy feeling that they wouldn't have wanted to make Neave and Gow into martyrs. Partly this will be because they wouldn't want people to know how right-wing they really were. The Far Left have always wanted people to think Mrs T was on the Right of the Party, when in reality she was always in its liberal pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-Rhodesia and anti-Apartheid "centre". And the libertarians conversely now want to claim her as one of their own. Either way, remind people that an Ulster integrationist and a pro-Rhodesian anti-abolitionist were amongst the Lady's closest political allies and you'll get more than just complaints.

Somewhere in the middle though is of course just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the role of political violence in a liberal democratic order. Neave and Gow were murdered for political reasons and, however unpalatable the truth may be, yes, political murders can work. Mrs T's career could have been quite different if Neave had lived. And Gow's death helped to isolate her in the Cabinet as her enemies within her own party plotted her downfall. It just shouldn't be surprising that a "liberal" Establishment doesn't like to imagine that even as recently as the 1980s we still lived in that sort of world.

Woke Fate*

All one can really say for all the post-T2 Terminator films up until 2019 was that at least they weren't boring. Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be not only offensively boring but boringly offensive. In fact boringly offensively offensive and boring more or less sums it up.

Of course the first Terminator was genuinely scary. The body horror was genuinely horrible and horrific. Its first sequel, like Aliens, was a high-octane action thriller, complete with a cute kid and gun-toting mommabear. And all the others have been footnotes not to the original concept but to that later derogation. Because Rise of the Machines was both disappointing and toe-curlingly bad, though it was at least amusingly so. Arnie's ditching Ed Furlong and teaming up with Mel Gibson cast-off Nick Stahl certainly didn't save it. Then Salvation was head-spinningly mad, and not quite redeemed either by Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese or by a typically over-the-top Christian Bale as John Connor. And finally Genesis was just bad full-stop, marred mainly by abysmal casting choices and even more abysmal liberties with the franchise's characters and ideas - although a silly plot and ropy special effects certainly didn't help.

The Alien franchise actually waited until number 4 before going self-consciously campy and kooky. But already by Alien3 it had ditched any sense that it was building a long-running saga by using its first few minutes to undo the happy ending of the previous film. The difference between that and the termination of John Connor in the first few minutes of Dark Fate is that casually (off screen!) killing off a cute little girl, a handsome young man and a cool funky robot was in retrospect very much in keeping with the bleak soulless Godlessness of the Alien universe - where there is no fate, but also no good and evil, and there probably shouldn't really be any happy endings. And that doesn't quite work in the Terminator universe, where the moral is supposed to be that we're all supposed to be in charge of our fates, because destiny is nothing but what we make of it.

So having seen unborn baby John Connor, bratty but adorable kid John Connor, twinky teen John Connor, angry adult John Connor and finally baddy (FFS!) John Connor, in Dark Fate we see boy John Connor go the way of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and that's before we've even got so far as the opening credits. And as with the Star Wars characters the moral apparently is simply that we don't need white men to save the world anymore. We can make do with a young Latina call Dani Gomez. Or Ami Diaz. Or... or whatever her name is.

And she doesn't need no help from no man neither, be he machine or otherwise! Because she's got her super-butch blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend to rescue her, and to help her to get across the Mexican border illegally (yes, really!).

And that's before we've even mentioned the return of kick-ass sexagenarian† Linda Hamilton!

Well, the biggest disappointment of Rise of the Machines was that Hamilton and Furlong weren't in it. The biggest disappointment of Dark Fate is that now they're both back, only he got no more than a computer "de-aged"†† cameo after the manner of Princess Leia in Rogue One, and she's little more than a Carrie Fisher clone from circa The Force Awakens. Her beauty has gone, as has any trace of wit or charm. All that's left is some dried-up aged sass.

Sarah Connor herself now seems to be doing little more than channeling Hillary Clinton. She's old, she's embittered, she's out for revenge, and she doesn't just hate machines anymore, because now she also hates both men generally and indeed motherhood. One can only assume therefore that Ami Gomez is supposed to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is presumably supposed to be... Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was a baddy, but now he's a nice liberal gun-toting Republican Texan who just wants to help.

What else? Well it's possible the writers may have tried to be wise to potential "Mary Sue"-type criticisms, because their (literally, physically) strong female characters do get bumped around a little bit. But the truth is than one never really feels for any of them. (Sarah Connor alone in one scene manages to bounce burly security guards around like babies.) And I'm normally the last person to demand more "sex" in my films, but sex is leaking out of modern films not because of some new wave of Puritanism or even because of the dreaded PG-13 rating but simply because of the Chinese market. (The Chinese don't like slow build-ups either, of course!) And I suppose in a movieverse where women don't need men to rescue them, why should they have any other sorts of "needs" either?

So fair's fair! This isn't a film the Terminator franchise needed, and it's certainly not one that anyone will want either to re-watch or to remember. Its possible fate can be termination, and with extreme prejudice.

*I thought of Snark Bait, but there's a certain sense in which this may have been the high point of Trump-era wokeness. For various reasons, Hollywood may be about to turn a corner politically.
†In one scene I think she literally kicks the arse of a muscular twenty-something security guard. (OK boomer?)
††What with this and the de-aged kids in [Sh]It, last year was perhaps the creepiest year ever for Hollywood boylovers.

Sam Callahan

Who are Bellingcat?

Or rather, and more to the point, what are they for?

The big argument (and in a sense it's their argument) for Bellingcat's activities, nay the organisation's very existence, is that they can do things that the state's intelligence services can't.

Whatever that means, frankly I'm calling bullshit. State intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic break the law almost routinely (or in our case try to find ways of getting around it). And obviously the state has resources available to it (especially money) that the dear old private sector can only ever dream of.

The only resource that the state's intelligence services currently lack - and they have done for fifteen years or so - is public trust. Blair's politicization of the UK civil service and the collective failure of the US "intelligence community" to stop 9/11, closely followed by the debacle over Iraq's WMDs (not to mention the joint decision by Blair's top spin-doctor and the BBC's even more sinister agents to hound a UN weapons inspector into an early grave), all served to damage ordinary people's image of the once proud guardians of freedom and democracy. And yes, the conspiracy to try and stop Trump, which included elements from within both the American "Deep State" and the British Establishment only served to deepen that tarnishing when (a) it failed and (b) it was also quite brutally exposed

So, with James Bond and George Smiley (not to mention Jack Ryan, Jack Bauer, and even Mulder and Scully) all on the naughty step, who was going to help when politicians in Pennsylvania Avenue or Downing Street need their smoking guns? Where are we to turn when we need an authoritative voice to denounce our enemies overseas - and by enemies I mean New Cold War foes (i.e. what remains of the "Axis of Evil", plus Russia)? The answer of course is those cool techy-type hipster kids with their laptops who know how to code. I mean, who doesn't trust hipsters? Am I right? Especially if they're funded by George Soros! And if they leaven their anti-Assad and anti-Putin stuff with the occasional shocking revelation about the US military, well that's even better.* 

So it should come as no surprise that besides Uncle George they're also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (i.e. with money from the American government - i.e. the White House and Congress, just in case there's any doubt about what people even mean anymore when they refer to that famously nebulous entity).

And of course as well as the authority of political "independence", the Establishment also get deniability when the cool kids fuck up. I don't know whether Peter Hitchens's "leak" from the OPCW about problems with their report about the Douma gas attack was for real or not. (My basic feeling is that in these international organisations there'll always be enough people on all sides for someone to be able to cough up a minority report about pretty much anything. You can't fool all the people all the time, but by the same token there are some people who really are just fools. And without getting into Hillary-type conspiracy theories one should always be alert for the smell of Russian bullshit as well as our own.) But we'll see. At least this time they'll be able to spread the egg over a couple more faces.

And of course they'll be able to blame Trump.

*That old vendetta between Langley and the Pentagon is never going to blow over.

Darwin worried about the impact of Christian concern for "the imbecile, the maimed & the sick" for this very reason. "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man." https://t.co/fR2kaOC4dY

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 16, 2020