Editor's Blog
AMC is bringing back the best tv show ever (granting it some leeway for its time), The Prisoner, for a six hour miniseries.
AMC is bringing back the best tv show ever (granting it some leeway for its time), The Prisoner, for a six hour miniseries. It’s coming up on November 15, and with this and Mad Men, I’m going to have to start to remember where AMC is located on my cable service.
Here is a very sharp and entertaining bit of cultural criticism that sees the initial impulse of the 1960s show that inspired everything from electronica bands to cyberpunk authors as having been associated with the hippie counterculture, but finds that now the "poles have flipped." The individualist paranoia of the ’60s hippest show may now be associated with John Galt and (gulp) Glenn Beck:
"Re-viewing The Prisoner, I didn’t feel as though I were looking back into the 60’s so much as I was looking at today reflected in a funhouse mirror. The Prisoner’s schizoid vision of a world split between mad institutions, which destroy freedom and corrode the spirit, and a few raging and alienated holdouts still speaks to the zeitgeist — but the political poles have flipped since 1967. The pot-smoking, radical hippie has been replaced by the gun-toting, reactionary tea bagger; in place of the Stalinist aphorisms of Mao’s Red Book, we have Manifest Destiny redux in The 5,000 Year Leap, a.k.a. Glenn Beck’s Red Book. Unlike the older generation, today’s rebel dropouts are not inspired by the spiritual restlessness of Hesse’s Siddhartha or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Their motives are economic and punitively moralistic, and their model is John Galt, the libertarian hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Seething with resentment that the fruits of their honest labor are used — via the tyranny of taxation — to subsidize their less deserving fellow citizens, they fantasize about dropping out of the system, or in their patois ‘going Galt.’ "
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5 Comments
Best show ever, can’t wait to check this new adaptation out. Sad Patrick McGoohan is not with us today.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The Prisoner was not a celebration of hippies. McGoohan was a traditional Catholic (he refused to play James Bond for moral reasons) and the series was a conservative critique of the superficial, free-love, technocratic Brave New World he saw developing around him. You never noticed how hippie-like so many of the happy idiots and their activities on the island are?
You may want to post your thoughts to the author of the article I’m pointing too, since I’m recommending his post… Since I’m not saying anything other than what is in the post, I am not wrong (or a number) and you are a poor reader.
I must be a really poor reader, because I got the impression you were endorsing the article. Phrases like “sharp… cultural criticism” tend to give the impression that you agree with something. When you repeat and endorse someone else’s errors, you’re still wrong. By the way, there’s no need to be so touchy; my comment wasn’t meant in a hostile way – just correcting the record.
Fair enough But, you know, Marshall McLuhan was a conservative Catholic and that didn’t make his observations any less against convention, deeply influenced by and embedded in the sixties gestalt and, if you will, "hip." The Prisoner (original) was stylistically psychedelic. It used The Beatles "All You Need is Love," but it used it ironically, supporting your point that their was a critique of – as well as an appeal to — the hip 60s sensibility. Lots of room for ambiguity there.