Be seeing you
AMC is in the middle of airing its miniseries remake of the classic 1960s British absurdism fable The Prisoner. And hey…it’s weird. I know, I know, it’s The Prisoner – it’s supposed to be downright odd, but the new version goes out of its way to telegraph its surrealism in a way that undercuts the creepiness.
Number Six wakes up in the desert; The Village
If you’re not familiar with the original version of The Prisoner, the basic idea is that a man wakes up in a place he’s never been before, an eerily picturesque town with no roads leading out, where everyone refers to themselves by numbers. People see him and greet him as Number 6, and despite his insistence that he has a name, that he lives in England, that there’s a world outside The Village, they claim complete ignorance. Number Six constantly tries to escape and is captured by giant floating white spheres that make funny wuwuwu sounds, he’s repeatedly brought before the guy who seems to be in charge, Number Two, and the whole thing is a big bizarre Orwellian nightmare.
Ian McKellen as an admittedly creepy Number Two
The remake, or at least the first installment, which aired last night, generally follows the original premise. A guy wakes up in the desert, wakes up again in The Village, discovers that no one seems to believe there’s any world outside The Village, and then spends the rest of the episode freaking out. He hijacks cars and drives them as far as he can before the big wuwuwu bubbles come for him, he stares moonily into the eyes of various sympathetic-seeming women until they get killed or captured, things are generally odd. In AMC’s new version, however, apparently it’s not enough to watch this guy struggle to reconcile his memory of reality with this new, disturbing utopian village. Just in case the Levittown-like housing developments and the loudspeakers announcing that every day is sunny didn’t sufficiently disturb you, you’re also constantly drowning in a deluge of disorienting wackiness. Cameras tilt sidewise while Number Six gropes through barren desert, flashbacks to Number Six’s previous life interrupt his present experiences, and the whole episode is like watching a malfunctioning movie projector, where images flicker and fade into each other and the sound doesn’t always match the picture. Just because Number Six is drugged and confused doesn’t mean the viewer needs to feel the same way.
Two of the weirder moments from the first episode - Number Six with a grenade in his mouth, and... wait, is that a sparkly Twin Towers looming over The Village? What the what?
Sadly, the result is a seriously diminished shadow of the original. Some of the problem is definitely the production, which values speedily unraveling bewilderment over a painstaking, piecemeal realization of just how weird everything actually is. The problem may also lie with us. Movies like The Matrix and even unsuccessful shows like Fringe work by asking us think of reality as malleable, and so the impact of waking up in a world that has little resemblance to our own may no longer have the same punch it did in the sixties. Whatever the underlying problem, ultimately I’d prefer to stick with the original Number Six until something better comes along.