Robert Owen & The Prisoner: Harmony in America

This post was originally written for Marginalia Review but I don’t think they’ve published it so I queued it up here instead.

This week*, after a decade and a half, I have had to accept that my beloved and well-worn Prisoner tee has died. Bought for me by my dad, with whom I share a love of the show, and truly worn to death, the shirt was a way for me to showcase my membership to a television elite, for The Prisoner is not something that one is casually into.

A sort of sci-if spy story with all the hallmarks of classic British television, The Prisoner is a series that opens up the more you watch it: curators list their recommended order in which to watch the episodes, fan community around the show thrives, both online and in-person, and the show’s structure and creation story only serve to confound attempts at understanding. If you haven’t come across it before, it’s only one season and you could binge it in a day (though that would put you into some kind of fugue state)… You might come for the beautiful scenery or the retro-futurist aesthetic of globe chairs, weather balloons, and handheld telephones, but its slow pace and strange mix of themes will mean that, if you don’t turn off the first episode bored, you will become ever-more delighted as you fall into this dramatisation of the Absurd.

About the same time as I got into The Prisoner, my family and I went on holiday to Scotland and day-tripped to New Lanark, causing me to become obsessed with Robert Owen. Owen was an industrialist who, upon marriage to an heiress, moved to Scotland to operate her family’s cotton mill. Although his father-in-law had operated with principles that were relatively egalitarian for the age, it was Owen who catapulted the mill into the public eye as he gave his workers homes, education, and family security – and Owen who became a public speaker and theorist whose lifelong commitment to the trade union movement and fair treatment for workers ought to put him on the curriculum and found him being cited as an influence by Marx. New Lanark mill has been a UNESCO world heritage site since the 1980s, and now operates as a museum that testifies to the UK’s role in the cotton industry and the social order of the late 18th and early 19th century.*

You might think that the only connection between these two erstwhile passions of mine is Wales: one is a story of dogged individualism seeking freedom, set against the backdrop of Portmerion, a peculiar citadel on the Welsh coast that is woven into the narrative of the whole show, whilst the other is a collectively-minded Welshman whose work prefigured Marx and Jamie Oliver, but when they put themselves in the American landscape both The Prisoner and Owen chose harmony as the word that would best encapsulate their American sojourn. What does the episode ‘Living in Harmony’ have in common with the project to create the utopian town New Harmony? How can a show which presents utopia as dystopia and a man whose ideal society – as set out in his writings – has each person perform according to his age and role, apparently idealising the dystopia that The Prisoner rebels against, be anything but opposites?

Robert Owen lost £40,000 – over a million dollars in today’s money, and reportedly 80% of his fortune – on his project to create a town where he would ‘try to the full extent’ to live by his principles. In 1825, he bought a town in Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. He was already a well-known British reformer, and his choice to relocate to America was entirely motivated by his thought that setting out into the ‘Empire’ would allow him more freedoms to create a society where, in his perception, there had not been one before, and he would not have to oppose the social norms that created his contemporary society. The result was unsuccessful, though a successful experiment may have resembled the setting for The Prisoner – The Village: Owen’s vision was that workers gain credit to use at the town’s shop, and elections that were free but which only placed the people’s candidates as part of a board under his own stewardship, demonstrating his vision as limited by his experience of the world. As G. D. H. Cole says in his preface to Owen’s most famous text, “the manufacturer of those days… had a tremendous hold over his employees. The houses in which they lived, the shops at which they bought provisions, the entire village as well as the factory belonged to the employer”.* In The Village, main character Number Six lives under conditions like the one benevolent mill owner Owen gave to his people, provided with everything aside from freedom.

In The Prisoner, the town of Harmony is also a failure, one which echoes Owen’s. It is presented as a typical western town, an imitation of the popular spaghetti westerns of the time with an even lower budget, before it is revealed to be a soundstage on the outskirts of The Village (whose location is never articulated in the show but in which everybody speaks with a cut-glass British accent). Harmony is a liminal space where the actors are the show’s characters, each bringing their motivations and desires to the episode in a deeply meta story. This is possible because in The Prisoner it is the roles and structures which are fleshed out and developed over the course of the series, not the characters: the main antagonist Number Two is played by a different actor each week* and the people Six tries to escape with are not people he has a bond with outside of their perceived shared aims and ideals. This episode is a reformatting of the show, a retelling of the first episode (or, indeed, the premise of the whole series) in a fresh genre, creating the impression of a timeless struggle against anageless authority. Beyond authority, yet still within the bounds of both the meta story and the framing device, is The Kid. The Kid is a character who serves Number One, not Number Two, and as such exists in the liminal space of Harmony as well as the final episodes. He lets ‘the judge’ (Number Two) hit him, unflinching, knowing that he serves a higher power but, ultimately, dies by his own hand, stuck in the play-acting and unsure of his own identity.

Kid shows that there is no agency: not for Kathy, the episode’s designate sexy lady, whose assault is both fictional and real; not for the people who touch or speak to her only to find themselves facing Kid’s rage; not for anybody in the story who finds that the judge overrules their actions and Kid enforces – but not even for the judge himself who, is in fact, Number Two, revealed as a participant in an experiment chaired by The Kid (unmasked as Number Eight). Death is the final action: the fake setup was Kid’s, the failure to cease embodying a character was Kid’s, and the only justice that comes to him is a self-inflicted death. Can there be a higher power to answer to than oneself? Kid’s actor does return, to take on the identity of Number 48 in the final episode. Like any character in the show, it is not clear if this is the same man, but he is there, singing eerily, whilst Six, too, finds out he is his own higher power.

Arguably, it in in this episode more than any other than any other that McGoohan appears to be bringing his own star-persona-hang ups to the role of Number Six, an option that was always open to him in his capacity as showrunner but which he has chosen to employ here. His nameless, vagrant sheriff seems to articulate McGoohan’s own philosophy when he says “I agreed to wear the badge, but not the gun”: McGoohan famously refused to portray James Bond and The Saint, not once but twice, and forced a credo of ‘think first, shoot later’ on his spy-thriller shows. This is the clearest indication across the series of McGoohan’s identification with Number Six, as he shows us the motivations that are shared by himself and his character and transposes his own reluctance to engage into a dramatised story within a story, placing Six as an actor as well as (possibly) an erstwhile spy. Alongside this all this is Kathy, set up by the show-within-the-show to be a love interest, but in whom Number Six shows only a human interest: to him, she is a miscarriage of justice and a person in danger, not a potential mate, which is a direct analogue to the makers of Danger Man casting the sexiest possible women opposite McGoohan as a joke after he refused to kiss women other than his wife and him, instead, becoming friends with them, bonding over things like the difficulties of parenthood as he did with Adrienne Corri. Still, though, in Living in Harmony Six does have to wear the gun, and he finds over the course of the story that he cannot change the structures the town presents him with as others seem to buy into them. The way to leave Harmony and return to The Village is to reject authority and turn to vigilanteism – though, the episode carefully suggests, not for oneself, but to represent the small collective begging you to save them. This is departure from life in The Village, where Six constantly rejects authority and carves out the space for small acts of freedom, and echoes Owen’s struggle to create a power structure in his own Harmony, one built on intelligent, principled rule over people willing to help choose and then submit to authority. The ultimate objective of Six’s endeavours is as it was for Owen, both as he is powerless in The Village and as he takes on life within the structures of power in Harmony: each man desires freedom, for himself and those around him. “… Possessing by nature strong intellectual faculties and a high moral sense, [he] cannot resist feeling an irresistible desire to set [his] fellows free from the mental bondage.” Is this not the motivations of Number Six, couched in the words of Robert Owen?

There is debate about how far McGoohan was acquainted with the New Harmony project: IMDB, the internet’s oracle of film trivia, suggests that although there are numerous towns with the name ‘Harmony’ in the US, “the most relevant of these (at least for “Prisoner” fans)” is Owen’s town. This tidbit, presumably put there by a dedicated McGoohan fan like myself, goes on to quote the resident (also quoted on the New Harmony Wikipedia page) Josiah Warren: “our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.” It is an obvious quote to use, not simply for its shallow (yet effective) research methodology, but because within the episode “Living in Harmony” the united interest is very much at war with Number Six’s individuality. It is clear that, although they come from opposite ends of the power structure, with McGoohan allying himself with underdog Number Six instead of owner and operator Owen, both men seek to acknowledge and improve the human impulse to follow a leader and free not simply themselves but others. McGoohan inhabited a more cynical world: a world of television and advertising, a world post Owen’s experiments and a world post-war in which the evils of a previous generation hung palpably in the air for all, unlike Owen, who, working directly in the cotton business had an access to the great atrocities of his time that most did not, and that is evident in how they chose to engage with their ideas. Both Owen and McGoohan were aiming to not simply vocalise but act upon the human forces they saw in the world – one as the most successful television actor of his time and the other as a rich man – but Owen’s collective failure became McGoohan’s individualist hope and responsibility. Though his Number Six is repeatedly thwarted and finds himself living, trapped, in The Village, in every episode he tries, for himself or with others, once again for freedom. Harmony is a word which, in music, means a lack of discord, and which usually suggests a second line of music beyond the melody, running parallel, where the elements combine differently. Living in harmony, then, does not have to mean a slavish dedication to the usual path or what others want, but can mean a pertinent question to power, a subculture respectfully detached from norms, or the inclusion of people rejected by others to create a richer, more complex society that benefits all of its members. This word ‘Harmony’, then, was used by both Robert Owen and Patrick McGoohan to demonstrate not simply the peace of a coherent society, but the power held by outliers and the value of giving a place in the social order to dissent.

Despite the clear connections, there is no actual evidence that McGoohan was aware of the New Harmony project, and The Prisoner stands alone as an exploration into utopian experiments and individualist freedoms and responsibilities. Whether McGoohan was inspired by New Harmony or not, the episode communicates associations with American individualism that reflect the lessons learned from the Indiana township, and regardless of whether the similarities between the two projects are intentional a watcher can come away from The Prisoner with the same ideas that a reader can from the works of Robert Owen.

* Some time ago now, in fact, but it remains the impetus for the article to be written.

* Owen’s focus on working conditions notably did not extend to the slaves that picked his cotton. His relationship with that great atrocity was complicated: although he did not own any plantations and acknowledged the humanity and prowess of the black people he met touring the West Indies, he used slave labour as a comparator in arguments to support the white working classes and took no part in the abolitionist movement, so in many ways his egalitarianism only stretched as far as white bodies and his own experience. Read more.

* G. D. H. Cole, “A New View Of Society by Robert Owen”, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927

* There is some overlap of Number Twos, with Leo McKern having the most appearances at three – though really this includes a two-parter.

* Owen’s ‘A New View of Society’ in “Works of Robert Owen, vol 1”, Pickering & Chatto, 1993

On This Topic:

• This documentary by some other kids who’ve become interested in Robert Owen
• This is the t-shirt – I probably won’t buy it as I rarely wear black OR t-shirts these days, but I can vouch for the quality and versatility should anybody wish to buy it for themselves – it has been a staple of my wardrobe for 15 years
• If you’re going to get into The Prisoner, pay attention to the order of episodes as it can change the way you interpret the show
• A museum history of benevolent capitalist mill owners, for further reading

To-Do:

• I have a lot of reading and writing to do tbh
• Book a dental appointment
• Book birthday things (yay)

Today’s Culture:

• Happy London Month of the Dead!
• Taylor Swift is taking me to the BFI Imax for the first time this month
• Since there’s no end to summer in sight (boo!) I’m transitioning my wardrobe with suits.