Image via Digital Spy

One visionary salutes another as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Prisoner’s U.S. premiere.

Here is part two of our interview with Alan Moore exploring his appreciation of The Prisoner, and its impact on his own work. (See part one of this interview.)

David Bushman: Apparently many, many people in the U.K. were incensed by the ending — the reveal of Number 1, the Delphian nature, etc. Do you remember your initial reaction to the series finale?

Alan Moore: I imagine you’re almost certainly right about the scale of public anger aroused by the Gnostic extravagance of that final episode, but that wasn’t at all my experience as a thirteen-year-old in Northampton’s Boroughs neighborhood, a district not widely regarded for its intellectual acumen. Down in the Boroughs, everybody that I spoke to, children and adults both, seemed far more stimulated and intrigued by that final episode than they were infuriated. I recall being in my local newsagents, probably to pick up the latest influx of American comics, and joining in with a conversation going on between the newsagent himself, Harry Trasler, and a regular woman customer who’d popped in for Woman’s Own and that day’s edition of the local Chronicle & Echo. They were enthusiastically discussing the final episode of The Prisoner and speculating wildly on what it had all meant. The woman customer had seized upon that shot of a rocket lifting off from behind the Port Merion skyline as evidence that Number One had been an alien from space all along, while I remember me and Harry Trasler being somewhat more cautious in our hypotheses. Everybody had a theory — an example of what I meant earlier about people enjoying a work of art more if they’re called upon to make a bit of creative effort — and I think that overall, in an area like the Boroughs that was impoverished not just financially but also intellectually and culturally, The Prisoner was seized upon because at last it represented something that, while being accessible and entertaining to working-class people, was also fiercely intelligent…as indeed were many of the working class themselves. It was programming that didn’t talk down to them, that exercised their imaginations, and from what I remember their response was both surprised and ecstatic, in keeping with my own. This supports my theory that rather than stupid, ill-informed people demanding stupid, ill-informed entertainment, what we actually have is a situation where stupid entertainment actually creates and encourages stupid people. If, instead of The Prisoner being a remarkable one-off it had been the start of a whole raft of such provocative shows, we might be living in a very different society today.

DB: One of the most interesting reveals of the series finale is that Number 1 — this overriding force of oppression and evil — turns out to be Number 6. What do you think is McGoohan’s message here? Do you agree with it? Are you at all a student of psychology? Do you subscribe to Jung’s theory of the shadow self?

AM: For me, this was always the central moment of the series; one that my mind returned to again and again when trying to rise to the challenge of that last episode. It seemed to satisfyingly answer the question that the show, by implication, was posing from the start: who is the One who keeps us all prisoner? McGoohan’s statement that our gaoler is us and has been us all along strikes me as one of the most true and liberating statements that I’ve ever heard.

I wouldn’t class myself as a student of psychology, other than that a writer who doesn’t understand at least basic psychology probably isn’t that much of a writer, but I’m obviously aware of Jung’s concept of “the shadow self.” I don’t think, though, that this is what was being evoked by that final unmasking. The shadow self is perhaps more an equivalent to Freud’s id, embodying our suppressed bestial urges — perhaps that penultimate reveal of the gorilla mask referred to this — whereas I think that Number One unmasked is more likely to be our controlling and, some would say, enslaving superego. We may prefer to think that it is an imprisoning doctrine, a government, a religion, a set of laws or our parents that are controlling us and limiting what we can do or be, but I suggest that none of those persons or institutions has ever physically prevented us from doing something that we genuinely wanted or felt compelled to do. Our lives, at least from our point of view while we’re living them, are a lot more down to us and our choices than we allow ourselves to think. I’m not saying here that “you make your own luck” or some guilt-evading nonsense like that, because that plainly isn’t true. What I’m saying is that many people who bemoan the lack of freedom that they’ve suffered throughout their lives — the freedom to, say, follow some personal dream or other — will, if they examine their motives truthfully, find that it was nothing but their own projected fears that held them back. This can sometimes be a fear of rejection or failure, but I think that just as often it is a fear of success; a fear of realising some long-held desire, because what then? Once you’ve achieved the position or the success you seek, what then? What if you can’t sustain it or hold on to it? If you’re only going to lose it, wouldn’t having a taste of it in the first place just be doubly cruel and heart-breaking? Wouldn’t it be better to always have the comforting dream rather than risk shattering it by trying to turn it into a workable reality? In short, I believe that a perfectly understandable fear of freedom is how we become, in effect, our own warders, to answer your earlier question. Freedom, to a lot of people, must sound like a cold and windswept place that has not even distant vestiges of walls or ceiling, and I think that a major part of McGoohan’s genius lies in bringing people, via an entertaining and intriguing route, to confront that perhaps uncomfortable but ultimately freeing and unshackling concept.

DB: I don’t recall ever seeing anything else like that ending here in the U.S. except perhaps for the season-two finale of Twin Peaks. I’m wondering if that was a show you watched, and if so what your thoughts are about it — especially the ending. (I’m also interested in your thoughts on the recent Season Three, if you watched and are inclined to comment).

AM: Yes, I was a huge admirer of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. I greatly enjoyed season two’s closing episode, and subsequently arrived at an interpretation of Fire, Walk With Me that, to me, was satisfying and answered all of my really important questions about the series. At the end of last year I watched the box-set of season three, and without wishing to denigrate all of the perfectly legitimate reasons why people loved that (presumably) final season, I’d have to say that with the exception of a few arresting images and atmospheres, I kind of wish I hadn’t bothered. Elements that I either hadn’t noticed or which hadn’t especially bothered me the first time, like the fact that the titular town is presumably twinned with Midsomer in that both have tons of bizarre murders and absolutely no black people, seemed a lot more intrusive in season three.

Another thing that stood out was Lynch’s customary Bizarro-Republican stance, whereby the intrusive supernatural evil in his stories always seems to be firmly rooted in the underclass. Structurally, it also seemed that there was rather a lot of irrelevant padding, notably the slapstick “Dougie Jones” digression, which didn’t seem to have anything atmospherically or thematically to connect it to the main narrative in any meaningful way.

Overall it seemed to me, as a large amount of Lynch’s later work does, to be relying on disconnected set-pieces and ultimately not saying very much. This may, of course, be a fault with me rather than with David Lynch, but while some of the most arresting and affecting moments in Lynch’s work have seemed to be plucked straight from the director’s subconscious mind and dreamlife, the ones that have best worked for me are those moments that, while dreamlike, work within the context of the overall narrative: for me, the dead man who is still standing upright in Blue Velvet or the whole of Henry’s collapsing and hallucinating mental landscape in Eraserhead work perfectly within their contexts, while a golden Laura-Palmer-infused egg sent from another dimension to what is apparently a nuclear test-site, which then hatches into a sort of insect-frog hybrid that subsequently crawls into the mouth of a sleeping young girl who, unless I missed something, is never seen or referred to again, really doesn’t, at least for me. If everything is weird, then, relatively speaking, nothing is weird. All of this is, of course, entirely subjective, and it may well be that the season three of Twin Peaks that I watched was significantly worse than the one everybody else was witness to.

DB: Last question: Is freedom a myth? And if so, is it even possible to summon the strength and willpower to resist over and over and over? And if not, how does one cope with this imprisonment without being compliant?

AM: If we take into account the fact that every object and every abstract concept in the world was originally a phantasmal structure existing only in someone’s imagination, then everything is a myth. Just as obviously, since these objects and concepts are all that comprise human reality, then everything is absolutely real. Thus, as with the quantum world, we seem to be left with freedom in a mixed-state superposition where it is simultaneously real and not real, a kind of Schrodinger’s Freedom that, as with the quantum world, seems to depend very much upon the observer. It could be argued that, with The Prisoner, the liberation of Number Six coms only when he has refused to see the Village as his inescapable prison any longer, at which point the whole enterprise reveals itself to be a wholly theatrical experience — with Klansmen singing “Dem Bones” — and Number Six is once more in a position of power and agency, free to leave the always-imaginary constraints of the Village whenever he wants.

It is important to remember that if freedom is a myth, then so too is the concept of power structures or the concept of control. In fact, for the hundreds of thousands of years that constitute our Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer period, when there were no leaders, when attempts to claim greater status were punished with ridicule or banishment, then freedom was the only myth in town. Since then, of course, there has been a steady encroachment on the way in which we conceive of society, and a few thousand years of concomitant social programming. This encroachment is a real thing, and as to how one summons the strength to resist it time and time again, a way that always works for me is to briefly imagine the alternative to resistance, for you yourself, for everybody, and for all their children and grandchildren. That, I find, can sharpen the dissenting mind wonderfully. For the truth is, there is no way to cope with imprisonment without compliance. In my opinion, and possibly in Patrick McGoohan’s, the trick is to recall that your prison and its bars — at least the mental ones — are entirely of your own manufacture. Free the mind and, as they say, the body may well follow.

Seen in this light, The Prisoner becomes a big and mouth-watering cake of a production, with succulent sultanas of plot and speculation, a frosting of cryptic mystery, and an enormous rasp-file at the centre of it.

Image via Liveright

Since I feel I probably short-changed you with question four, I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t ask: what, for me, is the most significant reference to McGoohan and The Prisoner that exists in my body of work? Hmm. Well, that’s a very interesting and insightful question which I wasn’t expecting. I suppose I’d have to say that the hands down winner is the brief scene in chapter twenty-five of my novel Jerusalem, the Lucia Joyce chapter, where in one of that chapter’s two memorable if largely indecipherable sex-scenes we have Patrick McGoohan riding a penny-farthing past a torrid alfresco coupling between his two Anglo-Irish pop-culture compatriots, Lucia Joyce and Dusty Springfield, while pursued by a bouncing and roaring weather balloon.

This invention was based upon the information that McGoohan was, for a time in the 1960s, being treated in Northampton’s St. Andrew’s Hospital, where Lucia and Dusty Springfield were also inmates. I have Lucia Joyce idly wondering whether McGoohan’s spell in the hospital, with its archaic buildings, its perfectly-kept green lawns and its air of regulated, tranquilised politeness, came before or after his remarkable television series. Was it a memory of St. Andrew’s, or was it a premonition?

Anyway, I hope that answers all your questions, and I look forward to reading a copy of this when it comes out. Be seeing you –

Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.

David Bushman has been a television curator at the Paley Center since 1992, excluding a two-year stint as program director at TV Land. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange (2016) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Sunnydale’s Slayer of Vampires, Demons, and Other Forces of Darkness (2017).