Each credit of the Prisoner repeats, in a condensed version, the first scene of the series. The character played by Patrick McGoohan, blue eyes, blond hair, clad in dark suit, resigns from his mysterious job by punching the table. As he prepares his suitcase, he is gassed in his London apartment and faints before waking up groggy in a replica of his home.
Opening the blinds, he discovers that he is not in London, but in a small village with colorful buildings at the edge of an estuary. Quickly, he realizes that the inhabitants and inhabitants with wacky apparel do not carry a name, but numbers and that one can not escape. At the head of this prison camp that is more like Club Med than Dachau, there is №2, whose personality changes each episode, sometimes even faster. Nobody knows who is N ° 1.
Fake news and cell phones
In the cast of the many experts in the series, there is Jean-Michel Philibert, who released “The Prisoner: A Modern Mythology” and the English Rick Davy, author “The Prisoner: The Essential Guide”. For both men, one scene, in particular, recalls elements of our time. In episode 4, while the hero, №6, has repeatedly tried to escape, the enigmatic leaders of the village propose him to be a candidate for an election with fuzzy contours. “A journalist questions N ° 6 on his campaign, describes the French author. He refuses to answer and realizes that his answers have been printed in advance. It’s a satire of the media that fits well with our modern democracies. “
Miles away, Rick Davy, unknowingly, abounds: “The reporter ignores what he is told and creates fake news, his own responses, like those that flood the media today.” The short interview is barely over until №6 is given a copy of the village newspaper, the Tally Ho, where his remarks are already printed in black and white. Philibert comments: “It sums up the instantaneity and desperate cynicism of our world.”
“The addiction to the smartphone is the most visible manifestation of the fact that we all become like the inhabitants of the village”
The event is just unfolding as it is already info. False or real. An immediacy made possible by mobile phones, already used by the protagonists of the Prisoner and completing a masculine look made of blazers on long-sleeved t-shirts and a pair of trainers not very far from the current fashion. “In 1968, it was prophetic to use wireless phones, Today, the majority of Westerners are glued to their phone, at work, in the street, at the table, in bed. I believe that this addiction is the most visible manifestation of the fact that we are becoming a bit like the inhabitants of the village. ”says the expert.
In the series, the use of laptops is however reserved for high-ranking characters, those who control — or at least think of controlling — the others, those who take turns day and night in circular rooms to constantly observe the inhabitants they wish to extract “information” in a clinical as well as abstract way.
Surveillance, numbers, security
This metaphor of the administration, of the technocracy that wants to control everything, is especially that of mass surveillance. “From the first episode, we show N ° 6 extracts of his entire life, on various screens,” says Davy. №2 tells him “people want to know everything”, and it seems true in today’s society. What we eat, how we vote, what our interests are, everything is collected, shared, sold and preserved by social networks, banks, stores, and governments. With social networks, everyone knows what everyone is doing. “
Oddly enough, everyone is also aware of what the author is saying. But everyone accepts him, including himself and Jean-Michel Philibert, yet long-time warned. “It’s all the contradiction that must be assumed, between enjoy a space of freedom of expression and accept that a commercial organization like Facebook collects information about me, he defends himself. Our surveillance company has the particularity that we are our own supervisors, it is we who give “information” through our screens. To click is to denounce oneself. “
“Security sells well, it’s a good argument for accepting the decline in individual freedoms”
Like villagers, who report information to the authorities in place, we are, by our use of social networks, “accomplices of the registration and control”. Philibert admits so, he is “well aware of being file, classify, stamp and number”. If the most famous sentence in the series is “I’m not a number, I’m a free man”, it seems that nowadays it’s not really the case. “We are all numbers,” Rick Davy says. I’m sitting at table # 4, I have a hotel room number, a social security number, a cell phone number, a postal code, a street number … Try, for a single day, to do without all these numbers. You’ll see it’s complicated. “
In the series, №6 is given a kind of cardholder, containing many identity cards, flooded with numbers. The Prisoner predicted our portfolios stuffed with various cards but especially something even more immediate at the time. In the village, there are few angles that surveillance cameras do not control. Today, these same devices are almost banal. More or less consciously, we decide not to pay attention, opting for security rather than freedom, accepting that our deeds and actions can be known to others in exchange for the hope that a terrorist attack can be foiled.
After the broadcast of the first episode, on September 29, 1967, the American city of Olean places cameras on its main shopping street in the same month of the following year. Five years later, the New York police do the same on Times Square, failing to curb crime. Before the United States, it is in the small German port of Peenemünde that the first video surveillance system is installed. It was in 1942 when the Nazis wanted to watch the launch of their V-2 missiles, used on the Belgian and British populations.
“№6 knows very well that he is no less free in the village than in London,” adds Philibert. It is simply confronted more strongly with the choice that we want to face daily: freedom or security? A bit more of one or a little less of the other? Security is selling well, it’s a good argument for accepting the decline in individual freedoms. “
Standardization and reality TV
Just as the inhabitants of the village — except N ° 6- accept to be stuck, we agree to share our information. Why? Often, because we do not care a bit. Or, at least, because we are willing to pay the price so that we can continue to live the same existence as others, to talk politics with a friend who lives in Morocco, even if it is possible that someone can read the messages exchanged. We work too hard to think about questioning the quality of his freedom.
In the Prisoner, individuality is quasi-criminal, one can be ostracized from society if one is different. As you have to wear some clothes bought by kids around the world to be accepted at school, etc. In the series, the captives burst out laughing when N ° 6 claims to be an individual. According to Rick Davy, many people in today’s society are identical and accept the status quo. Things are not so bad, as long as the living environment is nice.
“In the village, everyone plays a role in comedy or tragedy written by the leaders”
The village softens its inhabitants with drugs and games. We soften with drugs, alcohol, sport that “only serves to kill time,” wrote Philibert in his book and therefore, games. “Unfortunately, we are sometimes reduced to occupy our lives, fill us with emptiness, it saddens. It is a golden prison, for us Westerners, who enjoy consumer goods and leisure created on the misery of the rest of the world. Put an individual in front of a screen and he abdicates his life to contemplate a show.
And put on the other side of the screen individuals like him, he will sometimes be more subjugated, fascinated by the parody of life of the characters of reality TV, which he sets for hours, rather than live his existence Real: “In the village, it’s the society of the show, asserts Philibert. Everyone plays a role in the comedy or tragedy written by the leaders. We often contemplate the spectacle of society on our screens. The television news tells us what to think, the reality show tells us what to feel. I collected testimonials on these shows of “show is a reality” that show that production manipulates filming.
Sometimes the fiction of reality TV and reality end up getting confused. It is there that Donald Trump becomes president, N ° 2 of the big crazy village that is the United States, indeed, the world. Because Patrick McGoohan said it himself before his death in 2009: “It’s the world that has become the village”. It remains to know who is really N ° 1.
