English 67

The Prisoner is stylistic precedent for later dystopian films: especially Brazil. The last episode of The Prisoner reminds me a lot of the end of Brazil. I am thinking of making this the final exam: watch the last episode of The Prisoner. Literary Interpretation? Interpret this: number six and the little butler guy machine gun their way out of a control center underneath the Village to the strains of the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.” No. six ends up back at his flat in London, followed by the same hearse and undertaker who kidnapped him in the opening credits. The process is about to start all over again. Be Seeing You.

The Prisoner, like Foucault, seems to laugh at the notion of individual liberty, which is frequently held up as the antidote to the U/dystopian. The Village’s repressive apparatuses are also its ideological apparatus: the enforced leisure and resultant vapidity, the cheerful reminders of constant surveillance (”Be seeing you”), The Village could have been designed by someone who studied Foucault’s theories of the “carceral” as a principle of social organization. The prison serves as model of the modern state: surveillance and classification which predicts the contemporary information driven dystopia (information gathering now accomplished by Internet service providers, handed over to the government without warrant or judicial oversight). No one is free who is implicated in the state. You can choose to obey or choose to resist, but not opt out. Be Seeing You.

Where Althusser had the State, its interpellation that creates “subjects” – under consumer capitalism, you can substitute “the market.” Advertisement is the process of interpellation – hey you, desire this thing that you do not need. The “market” and the state have now converged: Vons gathers our buying habits, ISPs gather our communications habits to sell to marketers, and to hand over to the NSA, FBI. And we let them, without a second thought. “The Information you have in your head would be quite valuable on the open market” says number two to number six in the first episode. So is the information in yours.
Be Seeing You.

“The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation” by science, by culture: information and taxonomization (1645). We internalize this carceral mentality in a million ways, notably in this country by obsessing over our bodily appearance and food intake: we police ourselves constantly.
Be Seeing You.

Truth is a commodity produced in various contexts for various purposes of contesting power. Truth does not ‘exist’ – it must be made to exist. There is no ‘truth’ outside of a political and social regime. (1669).
Who is number one? You are[,] number six.
Be Seeing You.