"The Prisoner": What Happens When James Bond Goes John Galt

The Faster Times ^ | 11/4/09 | Richard Faulk

[steve-b]

...Part spy adventure, part science fiction dystopia, and part counter-culture influenced social critique, The Prisoner was groundbreaking television when it debuted in the fall of 1967....

And now, after decades of speculation and anticipation, of deals struck and scrapped, the British cult classic is about to become the latest pop-cultural institution to submit itself to reinterpretation. On November 15, AMC will debut its own version of The Prisoner staring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen....

...The question we see playing out on cable news, in blogs, in town-hall meetings, and public demonstrations is "Who do we imagine ourselves to be? What is the soul of America?" As is the case with definitional questions, the answer is typically expressed as a negative: We are defined against the thing that we reject. And, as is the case with family squabbles, the tone is uniformly nasty and ad hominem. Our political lexicon is distended with a list of new terms of invective, Rabelaisian in its length and grotesquerie: We are a nation of wingnuts, moonbats, birthers, FReepers, libtards, Paultards, snow-billies, nObamans, Christianists, liberal fascists....

If Patrick McGoohan, the crusty, misanthropic creator of the original Prisoner, had lived to remake his series, I'm certain he would have recognized this knotted up state of affairs, so ripe for satire--and would have relished jabbing a finger into our aching collective pressure points, sparing the fragile sensibilities of neither right nor left....

[wally_bert]

I will catch up next week, am on the road. It is appreciated.