“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!
My life is my own!”
From “The Prisoner” (1967)
A few years ago, I bought a boxed DVD set of the old series “The Prisoner” starring Patrick McGoohan, who died at 80 on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
My wife has been obsessed with the show since childhood. We watched the whole thing over that winter. It was a bit dated, but most of it held up. Unlike many series, it actually had a conclusion with a final episode where everything was sort of resolved. It was not set in the future, but was vaguely futuristic, and quite prescient in pointing to some trends in information and control that outlasted the Cold War era.
The themes of identity, torture and mind control echo to this day, in the news and in cultural artifacts like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and the Fox series “24.”
Read the rest of this entry »
