I’ve been watching The Prisoner lately, its goofy but so good, sort of wish there was more to chew on.
Found this amazing web 1.0 style Trot(?) boomer’s personal site featuring his rejected essays and correspondence from an 80’s era The Prisoner fanzine, where he argues with right wing fans about their interpretations and analysis of the show.
short essay Convergence on “The Prisoner”: From Leon Trotsky to George Orwell and Beyond
The Prisoner is still in my thinking the greatest television drama series ever produced in the English-speaking world. It has also produced a very loyal cult following. However, fandom carries with it a prevailing social content and orientation, which may not adequately reflect the objective merits of the object of worship. Though there is more diversity among Prisoner fans than appears on the surface, there is—or at least was a decade ago—a distinctive perceptible bias in favor of laissez-faire-capitalist libertarianism, the favored ideology of rebellion among alienated educated individuals with technical skills or above-average abilities or ambitions. That is most likely why my essay was rejected for publication.
Regardless, The Prisoner and the fandom it generated comes from an earlier stage of social development than the social configuration that produced the childish paranoid conspiracy-mongering of The X-Files.
The key statement to The Prisoner’s political world view can be found in the second screened episode, “The Chimes of Big Ben,” when #2 explains to #6 that the Village is the prototype of the coming world order. Whether the western or the eastern bloc or both or a third force runs the village is ultimately beside the point; they are all the same if the world is evolving in the direction of the Village.
Not only does this outlook carry on the theme from 1984; it carries on the lineage of the political concept of “convergence” first formulated in the 1930s and espoused since then mainly by right-wingers. According to the convergence theory the capitalist and socialist systems are growing more like each other and will ultimately become indistinguishable; the bureaucratic totalitarian state will be the common society of the future.
The most famous if not the first proponent of the convergence theory was James Burnham, author of the 1940 book The Managerial Revolution. Before we discuss Burnham’s book, published just after his turn to the right, we have to examine Burnham’s earlier association with Leon Trotsky and his participation and eventual disruption of the American Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Convergence theorists, whether or not consciously indebted to Burnham or its other originators, continued to ply their trade through the 1950s and beyond. Certain fascist science fiction authors who shall remain nameless here promoted the convergence theory. It is customarily a tool of the right-wingers, including the “libertarians,” who are also right-wingers, since by seeking to remove the limited protections that the social democratic state bestows upon the masses, they pave the way for the boundless despotism of big business. Once in a while, a “liberal” deploys the convergence theory, eg. in the film Network scripted by Paddy Chayevsky, who seems to me more of a bleeding-heart conservative than a liberal. Network simultaneously criticizes and mystifies the status quo.
letters pages Some Comments on “The Prisoner”
I am somewhat disappointed by the treatment of the deeper issues raised by The Prisoner.
