Patrick McGoohan (1929-2009)
He played boxers, a gay priest, an evil scientist in Scanners, and an evil king in Braveheart, but Patrick McGoohan was best known for playing No. 6 in The Prisoner, a character who may or may not have been the same character he played in the earlier series Danger Man (a.k.a. Secret Agent, whence the great title song “Secret Agent Man”). Though my friend Christine Caldwell Ames once dismissed The Prisoner as “the libertarian Gilligan’s Island,” since it depicts repeated, failed escape attempts by a resigned secret agent trapped in a surreal island prison called the Village, the show was markedly stranger and more intelligent than almost anything else on television, and its concluding episodes — including a trial conducted by masked officials representing “Nationalism” and other collectivist impulses, a machine gun battle set to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” rocket launches, and semi-improvised absurdist dialogue — are among the strangest hours I’ve ever seen on television, up there with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
McGoohan was reportedly influenced by the surrealist G.K. Chesterton novel The Man Who Was Thursday, and his Queens/Ireland/England upbringing seems to have left McGoohan with a sense of both absurdism and moral outrage, something any intelligent libertarian can appreciate (and any rational person trapped in an insane situation). It led to episode plots that should, ideally, cause people to rethink some of their most basic political assumptions, as when No. 6 is told that despite his complaints he is in fact free — because the Village is a democracy, you see, and he’s even allowed to run for office. Who needs escape when you have democracy, after all? One big happy family.
Parodied on The Simpsons at surprising length (for a relatively obscure, old show) with McGoohan doing the voiceover, The Prisoner gave us ambiguous catch phrases such as “Be seeing you” (the standard farewell in the Panopticon-like Village) and “I am not a number, I am a free man!” — which became part of the recurring opening sequence. His most memorable speech may well have been inspired by the same anarchist philosopher who inspired the title of this month’s Debate at Lolita Bar (“Is Intellectual Property Theft?”), by the way. No. 6 says “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.” In a similar vein, Proudhon wrote (as one of the debate participants reminded me):
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Precisely. Would that Proudhon had seen property as an alternative. No one’s perfect.
McGoohan didn’t die. He escaped.
--Brad | 4:07 pm on the 14th of January, 2009
Incidentally, it was Prisoner fan Jacob Levy who told me of McGoohan’s passing — and Jacob who helped me out with the organizing of a “Liberty Awareness Week” back when we were at Brown, the climax of which was a screening in my dorm lounge of Prisoner episodes — of which the only viewer besides me turned out to be student Michelle Boardman, a fellow libertarian who now teaches law at George Mason — and, perhaps troublingly to some, was also the chief defender in Senate hearings from the Justice Department of Bush’s (arguably perfectly traditional) use of “signing statements” to explain which laws he’d consider held in abeyance pending their constitutional review.
Is she freedom-loving No. 6? Or authoritarian No. 2? Does 2 = 6? Six of one, half a dozen of the other? One more Mobius strip in the twisty-turny saga of order and anarchy.
And she and Levy have both blogged on the same site as presumed Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, Volokh.com, come to think of it. It all comes back to Levy — so let’s look at _him_ in greater depth in the next couple days.
Todd Seavey | 4:26 pm on the 14th of January, 2009
Fun facts about McGoohan’s _Scanners_ co-star Jennifer O’Neill: now sixty, O’Neill has been married and divorced nine times (that’s more than Las Vegas-dwelling Sheena Easton’s four!), was in the short-lived TV series _Cover-Up_ made famous by one of its stars (Jon-Erik Hexum) accidentally killing himself with a blanks-firing pistol, coincidentally accidentally shot herself in the abdomen once, and went from getting an abortion to becoming a devout pro-life Christian who wrote the following in her 2004 autobiography:
“I was told a lie from the pit of hell: that my baby was just a blob of tissue. The aftermath of abortion can be equally deadly for both mother and unborn child. A woman who has an abortion is sentenced to bear that for the rest of her life.”
Very David Cronenberg, in a way.
Todd Seavey | 5:29 pm on the 14th of January, 2009
“It all comes back to Levy — so let’s look at _him_ in greater depth in the next couple days. ”
In the context of The Prisoner, that sounds like I’m going to come under intense surveillance.
Jacob T. Levy | 7:36 pm on the 14th of January, 2009
I can see why The Simpsons would parody it at such length. The smoke monster on Lost (amongst other things) owes a lot to “the rover” that was seen on The Prisoner. That has to be one of the most visually arresting images ever to grace the boob tube. And that opening sequence? I’ve watched it on youtube, and it’s amazing how McGoohan was able to compress all the backstory you needed into less than two minutes of footage, dialogue, and music. I think it’s the earliest example, before The Simpsons, The Sopranos, The X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer of just how good television can be.
Mark | 8:19 am on the 15th of January, 2009
AMC also has some amazing production photos from The Prisoner on their blog:
http://blogs.amctv.com/the_prisoner_-_1967_production_photos/episode-9-checkmate-mcgoohan.php
Mark | 9:27 am on the 15th of January, 2009
I’m finally going to make the effort to track down all the Patrick McGoohan episodes of Colombo. I believe there are four of them. How about talking about that relationship? Peter Falk and McGoohan were good friends.
Omar Badawi | 4:06 pm on the 15th of January, 2009
Oh man, they’re easily available on the web, all four of them. There are even a few episodes he directed, and produced, but who cares about that. We want to see the actor. Here are the four Columbo episodes in which he appears: S04E03 – By Dawn’s Early Light – Columbo, S05E03 – Identity Crisis – Columbo, S09E03 – Agenda For Murder (352×264), and S12E06 – Ashes to Ashes – Columbo. Ta ta for now.
Omar Badawi | 4:24 pm on the 15th of January, 2009
Bit late in the day to table a factual correction, but McGoohan never played a gay priest so far as I know. In ‘Serious Charge’ he played a vicar who was *accused* of being gay, by a vituperative young ne’er-do-well from the village to which the vicar had recently been posted. The idea of the play was to show the corrupting ‘consequences’ of the laws that applied to male homosexuality in Britain at that time. It was 1955.
Moor Larkin | 6:19 am on the 16th of February, 2010