The Prisoner #011: Rollerball reference to Prisoner?

Published in

· 12 Jul 2023

Date: Tuesday, 26 April 1988 13:12 mst
From: dji at SBCS.SUNYSB.EDU (the dirty vicar)
Subject: Prisoner #011
To: lippard at BCO-MULTICS

The Prisoner #011 02/18/1986 Moderator: Dave Iannucci (iannucci@sjuvax.UUCP)

Topics

Rollerball reference to Prisoner?
First of a series of old USENET articles

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From: William Gasarch <princeton!seismo!mimsy.umd.edu!umcp-cs!gasarch>

Caught this item on net.movies and thought I'd send it in

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Subject: Prisoner/Rollerball Link
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I caught the first few minutes of the film "Rollerball" on a local broadcast and noticed that the character played by James Caan, an individualistic hero who is upsetting the corporate trend of the day, carries the number SIX on his rollerball uniform. Coincidence?
... gt (#1 Maynard G. Krebbs Fan)

Rollerball was a pretty good movie, and did have some of the same themes as the Prisoner. Unfortunaley the violence skewed that point, and it took a second viewing too realize that.

gasarch@maryland

Please order meal by number.
I am not a number, I'm a free meal!!

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From: allegra!packard!topaz!pyuxd!rlr

(also posted to)
Newsgroups: net.tv
Subject: Re: The Prisoner
References: <491@kitty.UUCP> <495@kitty.UUCP> <327@unc.unc.UUCP>

The last episode of the Prisoner was just played here in New York. I was wondering if anyone else has ever seen it, and if so, if you could explain to me exactly just what happened? I watched it, but was totally mystified by the show. It was totally unlike all the other episodes I have seen.
... [LARRY LIPPMAN]
Granted, this episode is just a little bit bizarre. I do have my own hypothesis about what the episode was trying to say. In the end, Number 6 finds out that he is Number 1. He finds out that he is in fact an individual, under no one's control but his own. At least this is what he is allowed to believe. No matter how hard he tries, his beliefs, decisions and in fact his whole persona are influenced by other people. Specifically, the gov't still has control of him. He is just allowed to believe that he is in control. This is what's going on in the courtroom, when he is trying to give them a speech. He is now Number 1 but no one will listen to him (is he in fact, in charge?). The fact that he is not in control of his own life is also demonstrated at the very end. When the butler goes to the front door of Number 6's (now Number 1) apartment, the door opens automatically. He is free, but is he really? [PETER LITWINOWICZ]

I've had similar feelings about that last episode (and the series in general). I've also come to the conclusion that part of the message therein is that the way to enslave "ultimate individuals" is to make them FEEL that they are free, all the while controlling/directing their behavior in some manner, contrasting the "1984" style of totalitarianism with the (apparently much more successful) "Brave New World" style of despotism ("Everybody's happy nowadays"). But...

Then again, "they" (the show's writers) may be just playing with our minds. They may have written the last episode so that people for years to come would discuss it and say "wasn't that bizarre?"

For that last episode the "writers" were Patrick McGoohan himself. I'm not positive, but I think the original series was slated to be 13 episodes (a standard for British TV series), but the distributors requested (demanded?) another four (which were made somewhat later). I get the feeling (from the general feel of the shows) that among those four were the one that took place in the "old west" (which starred the actor who played "young man" in that final episode), called "Living in Harmony", and the episode in which #6 was actually reading a fairy tale all along to a group of children (with the confrontation with the mad scientist dressed as Napoleon in the same lighthouse where #6 eventually met #1?), called "The Girl Who Was Death". AND the final episode, "Fall Out".

If you think about it, the penultimate episode ("Once Upon a Time") provides a neat enough wrapping up of the series, in its own hazy way. (An article posted in February by Kevin Dowling at Rutgers, excerpting from the Prisoner Episode Guide, indicated that I may be right at least in part. He said that "Once Upon a Time" was the 13th episode to be filmed, representing the end of the first "season", and that "Fall Out" was not filmed till several months later. This would account for Leo McKern's very different appearance in "Fall Out" from the way he looked in "Once Upon a Time".) How does it end? With #6 proving his individuality over #2, who dies in the process, and getting the chance to meet #1. As the episode ends, he walks off with the bald "supervisor" to meet #1, and that's it. Fini. Any *less* "deep" than "Fall Out"? Not really. But you do get the feeling throughout that episode that McGoohan was indeed having a good laugh at our expense. I've heard a story (unsubstantiated as yet) that the actor who played "young man" was a friend of McGoohan, who just happened to have a "hit" single out at the time of the filming. The song? "Dem Bones"!!! (or whatever that song is called) At times it almost seems like he picked up a book on Freud, and opened it randomly to different pages and included whatever he found that could be surrealistically interpreted as being "deep" (this WAS the sixties, after all!) into the script (?).

I think one of the "deepest" interpretations I've yet heard came from a friend of mine. When #6 confronts #1 in the "tower", #1 is at first dressed like just another white robed figure with a black/white mask (although he had a "1" on his robe). But #6 reveals #1's identity by *repeatedly* *and* *successively* *removing* *masks*. The first mask, half-black, half-white, represents cold black & white logic and reasoning on the exterior. The second, the monkey face mask, represents the animal within us that we hide under the outer mask. But the innermost mask, the one we hide most thoroughly of all, is the true face, the true self. (If that's not deep, what is?)

No, my friend does NOT partake of illegal chemical substances, nor do I.

I vacillate between believing that this episode really has that deep meaning I like to think it has and believing that McGoohan is just having a great big laugh on all of us. Sometimes I think surrealism can best be defined as the art of making people think that something has meaning when it doesn't.

I think it's also worth noting that a great deal is made of asking what is the real reason that #6 did resign. When we, too, ask the same question (as the keepers of the Village did), we are missing the point. The point is NOT the reason that he resigned. The point is that it's HIS business and no one else's.

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