On The Prisoner television show

McGill University campus, 1940s

The Beatles “Revolution 9” could be used as a surrealistic sound track, played over a psychedelic montage of images, for Patrick McGoohan’s television drama, The Prisoner (1967-1968). The protagonist in The Prisoner is played by McGoohan, a former secret agent who suddenly resigns his post but offers no explanation for his decision. McGoohan’s former employer finds his sudden resignation suspicious and McGoohan is abducted from his home and finds himself incarcerated at an unknown seaside location referred to as The Village; his identity is also attacked, he is referred to by his new name, Number Six; the head of The Village is, of course, Number One. The Village is a precursor, and suggestive of, the 15-minute city; in this case it is a place to keep former government employees, all with numbers for names, and they live in relative freedom (the freedom of farm animals), socializing, playing chess, reading The Village newspaper, and some inhabitants are informers on other inhabitants of The Village. The Village is no gulag, it might be called a benevolent incarceration, it is comfortable but no one can leave and the authorities are always attempting to either control or get information out of the inhabitants, and they are all prisoners. But Number Six is not a typical inhabitant, he fights back, he tries to escape. When interrogated Number Six repeats, “I Am Not a Number; I Am a Free Man”; his strength lies in his not surrendering to his jailers, his remaining freedom lies in his refusal to give up information about himself. He says, "I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!"  The whole series of seventeen episodes is a metaphor for our own existence; who do we believe and what do we believe? There is a penalty for noncompliance with the authorities, it is to be an outcast, detained, attacked, and denied one’s freedom; it is to be gaslighted. While other inhabitants of The Village have been pacified, Number Six constantly challenges the authority of his jailers; he is more determined than the other prisoners. No one escapes from The Village, attempted escape results in being chased down by an ominous giant inflated object called Rover, and inhabitants of The Village are constantly surveilled by CCTV. The Village is a dystopia somewhere between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; it predates the 15 minute city. What else can we take from The Prisoner? It is that we are now, and have always been, prisoners, prisoners of ideas, race, social class, wealth, privilege or poverty, politics, our birth, gender, age, and/or religion, and this has decided the purpose and meaning of our existence. Our prison is self made and no one can free you but yourself. The Beatles were fans of The Prisoner and a Beatles song, “All You Need is Love”, was played during in the final episode; is it any wonder that the refrain, "Number Nine, Number Nine", is repeated in The Beatles most idiosyncratic song, “Revolution 9”? The Prisoner is both a psychological and political metaphor for contemporary life, now more so than in 1967. I nominate Laurence Fox to play in any remake of The Prisoner or a life of Patrick McGoohan.                                                         

Be seeing you.

The Brave New World is Here to Stay

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

It's off to work we go,

 A few months ago I heard our former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney say that Canada needs a larger population, he suggested 100 million people as a population projection. When the interviewer expressed surprise at so many people inhabiting our country, most of which average people would find uninhabitable, Mulroney barked back, "Tough luck!" Yes, tough luck to anyone who disagrees with the former Grand PooBah!  

Increasingly, it seems to me, the world's single largest problem is overpopulation. People are everywhere, working, eating, defecating, screwing, drinking, smoking, fighting, arguing, being born, dying, and starting over again; we've become an existential threat to ourselves. Forget about climate change, there are just too many people wanting increasingly limited resources. According to Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited, overpopulation is the world's greatest crisis. Fewer people = less demand for consumer goods and less destruction of the natural world. 

I recall reading Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is a typical dystopian setting, it is 2021 and the world has been destroyed by wars and ecological disaster and most of the former inhabitants of Earth have moved to another planet. Meanwhile, there are people still living in our now impoverished and decaying society, in the ruins of apartment buildings, crumbling cities, and other remains of what once was. Think of present-day Detroit. The movie version of the book, Blade-Runner, embellishes Dick's novel, the visual depiction tends to exaggerate the future, it makes it worse than in the novel, but perhaps the movie makes it more realistic to our present-day; think of what we see on the news of some other American cities, encampments of homeless people everywhere, crazy and violent people, drug addicts shooting up on the streets, middle class people carrying concealed weapons for their own protection, and worse. However, there are other characters in Dick's novel, they are androids who have a perfect human appearance but aren't human. Androids are a product of technology and have a furtive and underground existence as they try to survive and blend in with human beings. The protagonist of Dick's book hunts and destroys androids, they fear him, and they will even betray each other for their own survival. In Dick's dystopian vision most of the human population has left the Earth; what is left of Earth is a place of devastation, of poverty, social isolation, and existential ennui. This is the wreck of a world mankind is working on creating.

 

The illusion of progress and Vincelli`s Garden Centre in late July 2021

If I remember correctly, in Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley writes that the main problem for the world is overpopulation. So many of the world's problems can be traced back to there being too many people; people are everywhere and they're destroying the planet with garbage, pollution, climate change, building houses on farm land, forest forests, destroying rivers, and causing the extinction of thousands of species of wild life. We are destroying the world with our own species. People are everywhere and it's not a pretty sight. 

I suppose there will be a resolution of this problem of overpopulation as more women are educated, there is a relationship between women's education and the number of children they have; women with careers generally have fewer children. As people become more affluent they have fewer children. This seems the only solution to overpopulation. As well, although the world has almost eight billion people we haven't had an increase in the number of gifted people, we don't have dozens of Newtons or Einsteins, nor do we have a few hundred Leonardos or Michaelangelos, or fifty Shakespeares cranking out works of genius. We are destroying ourselves as we proliferate; what will be left of the natural world by 2100? Will it be like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World? That seems one possible scenario...

There have been some extreme visions of a post-apocalyptic world; after the apocalypse the population is reduced, mankind is almost extinct. Yesterday, when I walked by Vincelli's Garden Centre, I was reminded of an old television show about what happens to civilization without people; for instance, they might show New York City and then, through computerized special effects, they show New York City in ten years, twenty years, and further off into a future without people. The asphalt streets are cracked and overgrown with weeds, windows are broken, buildings are beginning to collapse, the city is abandoned and overgrown with vegetation. It doesn't take long for coyotes and wolves to be walking along Fifth Avenue and the Empire State Building to collapse. Look at Chernobyl where, in 1986, there was a nuclear disaster, today wild life has returned, the place is overgrown with lush vegetation, and animal life has returned despite high levels of radiation. Tourists are visiting Chernobyl to see how a city that was once full of people going to work, spending time with their families, and enjoying life, has become a ghost city. It took just thirty-five years for nature to reclaim the abandoned city of Chernobyl but it won't be safe for permanent human habitation for many years, possibly for centuries. 

More of anything does not necessarily increase the value of that thing, it might even diminish its value. It has been said before that we are not as moved by the suffering of a million people as we are by the suffering of one person, for instance a child's dead body on a beach. More of a thing seems to diminish its value, and one recalls the photographs of Spenser Tunick in which he invites hundreds of people to pose naked, standing or lying down on a city street. I always found these photographs disturbing, the pink naked bodies remind me of the dead naked bodies of Nazi victims, bodies thrown into mass graves before being covered with dirt. It is all highly disturbing. I don't like Tunick's photographs but I can still recognize their message; his photographs remind us that too many human beings in one place has not made the human race more attractive, it has made it something less attractive, more vulnerable, more expendable. I would add that overpopulation is dangerous to the long-term survival of humanity.  

These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late July 2021,

Vincelli's Garden Centre a month after closing for good.

When I used to visit Vincelli's Garden Centre I never thought it would end up like this . . .