Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site pyuxd.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxd!rlr
From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff)
Newsgroups: net.tv
Subject: Re: SPOILER: "The Prisoner": <1> my interpretation
Message-ID: <609@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Mar-85 14:54:06 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.609
Posted: Sun Mar  3 14:54:06 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Mar-85 08:26:47 EST
References: <6756@rochester.UUCP>
Organization: Huxley College
Lines: 85
Keywords: The Prisoner, SPOILER

> Here is my interpretation of what happened at the end.
> There is this society called the Village whose goal is no make its
> members conform.  The things that they are required to conform to are
> arbitrary and capricious, but it's not the pattern that matters, it's
> the conformance.  (This society is self-contained and autonomous.  It
> sets its own standards.)  Society's members are expected to be cogs in
> a machine, or, as Number 2 put it, "units of society".  I think the
> bicycle is a symbol of this:  it suggests the mechanical role of the
> units of society, and the quaint and arbitrary nature of this society
> whose only goal is to maintain the status quo. [LIUDVIKAS BUKYS]

Someone else also mentioned the small wheel pushing the large, as an
analogy of individual to society in the mindset of those who run the Village.

> Number 6 has consistently refused to conform.  Why?
> Well, his warders think they know.  They recognize that certain
> exceptional individuals are really "Individuals", that is, that they
> *will* *not* conform.  They have ways of dealing with the average guy,
> whose resistance to the `pattern of this world' is able to be worn down
> sooner or later.  Number 6 is not the average guy, however.
>
> Number 6 successfully survives all attempts to make him conform,
> culminating in a psychological battle-to-the-death with Number 2.  (I
> could say more about that; not today.)  The warders placed Number 6 in
> this "Degree Absolute" contest, even at the risk of losing Number 2,
> because they believed they couldn't lose.  If Number 6 lost, he would
> have cracked, and they would have succeeded in their goal of making him
> conform.  If Number 6 won, they would have discovered a true
> Individual, someone who sets his own rules, someone who is truly
> autonomous.  This is the only thing they understand! [LIUDVIKAS BUKYS]

I really liked this article and the whole explanation, but it leaves out on
important facet of that last episode.  If I may draw on this interpretation
to point out some other things:

At the very end of the last episode, as the Village is "liberated", as
its inhabitants run free, #6 returns to his own house in London, only to
discover (and semminlgy not to notice!) his door opening AUTOMATICALLY as
those in the Village.  What did this mean?  Is the world the Village?  Is
the village now the world?

Liudvikas Bukys' explanation points out that the technology of the Village
enables its leadership to force most average people to conform to their
standards, to follow their rules at their whims.  But #6 is a tougher cookie.
He does not conform so readily as any who preceded him.  They are making their
best effort to make him crack, to make him submit, to make him conform.
And, it appears that every effort to do so has failed, up to the very end.
So they admit that he, #6 has won.

> Or so they think.  And so might Number 6 think, sometimes.  When he
> enters the tower to confront Number 1, he discovers just another
> cog-in-a-mask, with a crystal ball in his hand, watching replays of the
> great moments of Number 6.  Come on, gang!  This is pretty obvious.
> The phrase is repeated.  "I will not be pushed, stamped, filed,
> briefed, debriefed, (etc).  I will not be... I... I... I... I..." while
> Number 6 pulls the orb-holder around, the camera zooms in on the number
> on the holder's chest.  "1"  "I"  "1"  "I".  `I am Number 1.'  Number 6
> is handed the crystal ball; the ball fills with the image of his own
> flesh as he takes it in his hand.  (Note the great symbol for a world
> turned in on itself.)  Number 6 stares into it for a second.  And lets
> it drop to the floor and shatter.

"I".  "1".  The individual.  Surely #6 is an individual(ist).  And surely he
has beaten off every attempt to make him conform, to willingly put on his
shackles, like Winston Smith, and proclaim that he loved Big Brother, or the
Village, or whomever/whatever.  Have they really lost?  What is it they've
done?

When #6 emerges from the Village, when he and all others escape, when he
returns to London (by road-----does this imply something about where the
Village really was???), he is free.  Or is he only "free"?  He returns to
his own home and seemingly fails to notice that it has become "Villagized".
Is the way to enslave and subjugate the individualist simply to let him
believe that he is free?

Is *this* the point of the final episode of the series (and of the series
itself)?  Are they saying that the 1984 world of George Orwell is not only
incredibly expensive and inefficient to maintain, what with constant
monitoring and controlling of EVERYONE, but that it is also incomplete in
achieving its goal of total subjugation of everyone?  Are they saying that
the "Brave New World" world of Huxley, where "Everybody's happy nowadays",
where everyone, even the "individualist", is free (or feels free), is the
"best" way to maintain a conformist society of individual human cogs?
-- 
"It's a lot like life..."			 Rich Rosen  ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr