What is a Rune

by Collin Cleary

  4. BRAND & THE PRISONER

  As I noted earlier, Brand was an important role for McGoohan both personally and professionally, and I think there can be little doubt that he identified strongly with the character. To begin with, McGoohan was a religious man. He received a strict Catholic upbringing from his parents, and initially acceded to his mother’s wish that he become a priest. Years later when asked by a fan who had been the most important influence on his life, he responded “Jesus Christ.” And, like Brand, McGoohan appears to have had something of a Christ complex.

  The Prisoner’s script editor George Markstein relates an amusing anecdote about McGoohan—one that is revealing, but also one that we should not read too much into. It was Christmas Day, during production of The Prisoner, and Markstein suddenly realized he wasn’t sure if he’d been given the day off. So he took a cab to the studio. He found it deserted, save for McGoohan sitting on a stool in the middle of a sound stage. “What are you doing here, George?” McGoohan asked. Markstein explained he wasn’t sure if he’d been told he didn’t have to come in. McGoohan responded, straight-faced, “George, on my birthday everyone has the day off.”

  To my mind, this little anecdote from Markstein reveals a good deal of self-knowledge on McGoohan’s part. Obviously, he didn’t literally think he was Jesus—but perhaps he did recognize a tendency in himself towards a Brand-like self-aggrandizement; a tendency towards messianism. And isn’t it obvious that this would be the case? After all, what kind of man does it take to create The Prisoner? Those who worked with McGoohan found him more Jehovah-like than Christ-like, if truth be told. By all accounts, he was alternately charming and intimidating. Orson Welles, no shrinking violet himself, stated that he found McGoohan “intimidating” when they worked together in a stage production of Moby Dick (directed by Welles).

  Actor Leo McKern suffered a nervous breakdown while being directed by McGoohan in The Prisoner episode “Once Upon a Time.” Years later he said of McGoohan, “He was almost impossible to work with and a dreadful bully—always shouting and screaming and yelling about the place . . . I felt a dreadful sense of pressure all the time, being shouted at.” Indeed, there are numerous stories of McGoohan’s tyrannical behavior during the filming of The Prisoner. At least one director was dressed down and sacked by McGoohan on the set only hours after he had started work. (McGoohan took over direction himself.)

  In one instance, the crew actually rebelled against McGoohan’s perfectionism. He was directing a scene in the episode “A Change of Mind” and had been trying for some considerable time to get one shot right. But by the late evening the crew had finally had enough. When 9 p.m. rolled around, the time work had been scheduled to end, the technicians simply turned off the lights in the middle of shooting and went home, leaving a stunned McGoohan to fume in solitude.

  Now, one can excuse all of this bad behavior on McGoohan’s part since The Prisoner is such a brilliant series. And it is easy to see that he felt such a drive to get everything right because he was a man with a mission. As anyone who has seen The Prisoner knows, this was no ordinary series—it was a modern morality play. McGoohan even christened his production company Everyman Films, after the fifteenth-century English morality play. The Prisoner was a commentary on our times—an indictment, really. His previous series, Danger Man, had enjoyed international popularity and made McGoohan the highest-paid actor on British television. The head of ITC, Lew Grade, had given McGoohan carte blanche on The Prisoner—sealing the deal with a simple handshake, and guaranteeing him complete creative control. With such resources at his disposal, and a guaranteed audience of millions, McGoohan knew what he must do. The opportunity could not be wasted. God had finally given him a big enough church, and he had to preach the evangel.

  Not surprisingly, the pressure got to be a bit too much for him at times. On one occasion while filming a fight scene he nearly strangled actor Mark Eden. Recalls Eden: “All the veins were standing out on his forehead, and I thought, if I don’t throw him off I’m gonna black out.” McGoohan admitted years later “I worked my way through three nervous breakdowns.”185 Eventually, he was micro-managing every aspect of production on the series. And anyone who did not share his vision—especially his conception of the series’ moral tone—was simply removed. George Markstein rather quickly fell out with McGoohan, and attacked him years later for his “megalomania.”

  McGoohan had a reputation in the industry as excessively moralistic and prudish. Most notoriously, he would not kiss his leading ladies. In all 86 episodes of Danger Man, McGoohan’s John Drake—a dashing secret agent during the heyday of dashing (and womanizing) secret agents—never once kisses or even flirts with any of the beautiful women who frequently starred opposite him. And many of my readers will have heard the story of how he turned down the role of James Bond when it was offered to him (ahead of Sean Connery), because he did not like Bond’s “amoralism.” (Though McGoohan revealed years later that it also had to do with the fact that he didn’t want to work with director Terence Young.) It wasn’t just Bond’s kiss-kiss, of course, it was also his bang-bang that McGoohan objected to. And so we never see John Drake carry a gun or deliberately kill anyone.

  In short, one can spot quite a few parallels between McGoohan and Brand, and I am convinced that McGoohan saw those parallels himself—both the flattering and the unflattering ones. There is no doubt that McGoohan could be a bit of a bully and megalomaniac—but I think there is also no doubt that he was a highly introspective and religious man, who recognized those tendencies in himself and understood that they were some of his worst features. In short, he was both attracted and repelled by the figure of Brand—who seems to have hit a bit close to home.

  So far, however, all that I have said merely helps up to see how Brand can illuminate Patrick McGoohan. But how does it help us better understand The Prisoner? Consider the following comment made by George Markstein in a 1984 television interview:

  My feeling is that McGoohan wasn’t really very keen on doing any other series [after Danger Man]. What he really wanted to do I think was to play Brand. He’d had an enormous success some years previously on the stage with Ibsen’s Brand and Brand personifies everything I think McGoohan would like to be: God! He was very good as God, so he wanted to play Brand . . . again. He was very, very keen to set up “Brand” as a film and I think that was really what he wanted to do.186

  I believe that Markstein is right, but I would go a step further: McGoohan did play Brand after Danger Man. Only not in Ibsen’s play, but in The Prisoner. My thesis, quite simply, is that Number Six is Brand. (There, it’s finally been done: for years people have wanted to hang a name on Number Six, and now he has one—just the one, I’m afraid, but it’s better than nothing.)

  Of course, more evidence will be needed to make a case for this; Markstein’s comment is intriguing, but it proves little. So let’s begin with a small but significant detail. Ibsen specifies in the stage direction of Brand that the character should be “dressed in black.” And given that he is a minister (referred to as a “priest” in Meyer’s translation) this is only fitting.

  Famously, our Number Six wears black throughout the series, but what is particularly interesting is his attire in the first episode, “Arrival.” When McGoohan awakes in the Village he is still wearing the clothes he had on when he was kidnapped in London. They are a black (or possibly dark grey) suit, over a black knit pullover shirt with three buttons. Notably, the shirt is buttoned up to the neck. The ensemble gives him a priest-like appearance—and it is uncannily reminiscent of the wardrobe McGoohan wore as Brand. In the 1959 stage production and telecast McGoohan wore a long, cassock-like black coat and black trousers, over a simple black shirt buttoned up to the neck (without any clerical collar). His wardrobe in “Arrival,” in short, looks like a modernized version of what he wore as Brand.

  Of course, the more important parallels are between the characterization of Number Six and that of Brand. In the essay on The Pri
soner I wrote some years ago, I made the heretical suggestion that the series’ attitude toward individualism is actually rather ambivalent. The suggestion is heretical because most fans think that the series is a hymn to individualism and non-conformity. And most fans think that Number Six is offered to us a moral ideal, and as an unqualified hero. But I reject this. Yes, McGoohan did deplore the conformism of modern society, as well as its homogenization and dehumanization. And he deplored the shrinking sphere in which individual freedom is possible. But another of his targets was the soulless egoism of modern life.

  In the final episode of The Prisoner we discover, of course, that the mysterious “Number One” is really Number Six himself. And I am not alone in thinking that this is the key to understanding the entire series. Here I must simply quote some lines from my earlier essay, because I can’t think of a better way to say what I mean:

  When the Prisoner enters No. 1’s chamber, he sees himself on a TV screen saying “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped,” et cetera [just as he said in “Arrival”]. Then we hear his voice speeded up, hysterically chanting “I! I! I! I! I! I!” And we see the image that closes almost every episode: iron bars slamming shut over McGoohan’s face, this time over and over again. Are we being told here that the ego is a prison? . . . [Number Six] does not turn from modernity to anything higher than it, or higher than himself. He turns inwards and wills himself as, in effect, an atomic individual. As I have said, the most significant thing about the Village is that it has no church. But perhaps the most significant thing about Number Six is that he doesn’t ask about this. . . . McGoohan is saying, “Fine. Reject society. Reject materialism and the modern world. But if you reject them in the name of your own ego you are buying into that primal, Biblical sin that is at the root of modernity itself: the placing of ego and its interests, narrowly conceived, above all else.” Without preaching to us, without ever mentioning religion, McGoohan invites us to rise above our No. 1, and turn our souls toward the Real Boss. One need not be a Christian, let alone a Catholic, to understand and sympathize with this message. . . . Does Number Six get the message in the end? Not at all. . . . The final shot of the series is the same as the very first: there is a thunderclap, and the Prisoner comes speeding towards us in his hand-built Lotus. He is caught in the circle: an eternal cycle of rebellion, leading nowhere, and certainly not upwards. He is still a prisoner—not of the Village or of society, but of his own ego.

  I was pleased to discover recently a quote from Prisoner producer David Tomblin which seems to confirm my interpretation: “If you sit down and look at it and think about it, it’s a man destroying himself through ego.” And McGoohan said of the series’ finale some years before his death, “Get rid of Number One, and we are free.”187

  So now I must speak of a dimension to the character of Brand that I did not explore earlier, but that should be rather obvious: at root Brand is an egoist. But, one might object, how can Brand be a Kantian—as I said earlier—and an egoist as well? The answer is that Kantian moralism is, in fact, egoistic in a peculiar way—and we see this facet taken to an equally peculiar extreme by Brand (which, by the way, is surely the reason Weininger found the character so attractive). For Kant, the moral will must be autonomous. Now, “autonomy” literally means “giving a law to oneself.” One must choose or will one’s own law, or make the moral law one’s own. To act morally, for example, out of fear of God is an example of what Kant called “heteronomy”: allowing one’s will to be determined by something other than the will itself—other than one’s own pure, free act of affirming the good as the good.

  If I can be forgiven the sin of embellishing Ibsen, one can easily imagine Brand caught in the following exchange (say, in Act Five of the play):

  GOD: I am the God of love. You must give up your “All or Nothing” and reconcile yourself to human fallibility. You must lower your sights and forgive others for their inability to live up to your ideal.

  BRAND: But to do that is to encourage human failure. We cannot give sin any quarter. And to forgive men their failings is to tell a lie: there is no salvation in having a partially clean conscience. It truly is All or Nothing.

  GOD: Brand, there are shades of grey . . .

  BRAND: Grey is a mixture of black and white. There can be no justification for accepting any of the black!

  GOD: Look, this is God you’re talking to here . . .

  BRAND: Then get thee behind me, Oh Lord. For thy law is no law at all. The love you feel for man—the love you lavish on him despite all his failings—is no virtue. And your promise of forgiveness does him no favor, for it merely comforts him in his weakness. Hear the voice of righteousness, Oh Lord! Follow me and be saved!

  It is Brand’s own law, not God’s, that he champions. It is his judgment he sets above all else. It is his vision that he adheres to, though it means the death and suffering of others. This “selfless” man, this man of “duty” and of God, is one of the most profoundly selfish characters in all literature.

  All the admirable traits in Brand are identical to those of Number Six: he is passionate, determined, resolute, strong, persevering, sure of his rightness, incorruptible, and uncompromising. But like Number Six, he is blind to the prison he has made for himself—the prison of his own ego. “Get rid of Number One, and we are free,” McGoohan says. This is advice we could give to both Brand and Number Six. The only difference is that the case of Brand is somewhat more ironic. He thinks that the “Number One” he is serving is God—when it is actually himself. Number Six, like modern man himself, never thinks of God. And he is bent on achieving a false and superficial freedom, if only the unseen “Number One” can be got out of the way. It never occurs to him that the “Number One” who imprisons him is his own self.

  There’s a great deal more that could be said here about The Prisoner and Brand. (For example, the voice of the provost—who wants all men to be equal and deplores individualism—is clearly the voice of “Number Two”!) And Brand really demands separate treatment. But I am convinced that in Brand we have an important key to understanding The Prisoner, and its creator.

  Some of my readers may wonder why I have bothered so much about a television series. But film is art, and I would go so far as to say that it is the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. It is capable of profundity, and of moving us in a way that no other art form can. And The Prisoner is a serious work of art, perhaps the greatest television series ever made. Like a great work of literature, it rewards us with something new each time we return to it.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right,

  July 12, 2013

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COLLIN CLEARY, Ph.D. is an independent scholar living in Sandpoint, Idaho. He is the author of Summoning the Gods: Essays on Paganism in a God-Forsaken World, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2011). Cleary is one of the founders of TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition, the first volume of which he co-edited. His essays have appeared in TYR, Rûna, and at Counter- Currents/North American New Right. A Master in the Rune-Gild, his work has been translated into Czech, Danish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish.

  Notes

  [←1]

  This essay was originally presented at the 2011 Rune-Gild Moot in Bastrop, Texas.

  [←2]

  See Collin Cleary, Summoning the Gods: Essays on Paganism in a God-Forsaken World, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2011).

  [←3]

  Edred Thorsson, Runelore (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1987), 115.

  [←4]

  In my essay “The Gifts of Odin and his Brothers” I take this discussion to a deeper level, and identify what it is about the human spirit that founds the possibility of seeing the world as an emblem book: our capacity to be arrested by the Being of things.

  [←5]

  Runelore, 117.

  [←6]

  Compare Old High German weralt, and Old Norse veröld. The common source is Proto-Germani
c *wira-alđiz.

  [←7]

  This does not lead to the postmodern relativist claim that there is no truth or no reality, only interpretation. Some interpretations are better (more plausible, more rational) than others given the available evidence.

  [←8]

  Phenomenology (literally, the study or science of phenomena) is a philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the teacher of Martin Heidegger. It attempts to describe the fundamental features of experience. Phenomenology does not deal with the concrete content of experience (dogs, rocks, stars, etc.—which are studied by the other sciences) but instead describes the ways in which objects are given to consciousness. Thus, any attempt to describe how the world, or aspects of the world, show up for us (or for our ancestors) is an exercise in phenomenological description.

  [←9]

  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 146. Henceforth cited and referred to within the body of the text as PLT.