What should I believe?
It’s an odd question, but it’s one we have all had at one point or another. We may have not even expressed this question consciously – we may have absorbed what other people told us, and adapted their belief system, making it our own. We get it from our parents, our friends, or… Some of us… well…
Some of us get a large part of what we believe in – what is right, wrong, or neither – we get it from a piece of entertainment. An album. A movie. A TV show.
Obviously, this is not the way most people do it, and sometimes it can be a VERY BAD THING (see: Charles Manson) – but nature abhors a vacuum. The need is there, to have SOMETHING to believe in.
I believed in Patrick McGoohan.
Not as a person, really – I believed more in what he messaged to me and many many others through his performance in and writing of the classic TV show The Prisoner.
- That the rights of the individual to BE an individual is the most important right any of us have.
- That knowledge, without context and wisdom, is useless trivia.
- That we are not numbers.
- That we are beholden to no one save ourselves.
- That our life is our own, to do with as we see fit.
- That the government, the mob, cults of any kind – they are NOT on your side.
- That we make our own prisons.
- That you can’t escape yourself.
And so on.
I would have loved to have been near McGoohan in 1968 to see his reaction to how the finale of The Prisoner was received by the public – when they expected some type of James Bond Villain reveal as to who #1 was. The leader of the Village, the warden, the Big Bad.
In the end… it was #6 himself, behind the mask… The monkey mask of “I”…
The viewers were outraged. The press wrote scathing critiques.
He probably laughed his head off.
Patrick McGoohan died today at the age of 80 after a prolonged illness. I am incredibly remorseful, as I never had the chance to meet him in person and tell him the impact of and my enjoyment of his work. And of course he did much much more than The Prisoner (I loved his appearances in Columbo, his work in a little-known movie called The Hard Way, and his Academy Award-nominated role as Longshanks in Braveheart).
But The Prisoner is the work that impacted me, that had a huge role in making me who I am today… and the reason my first born son has the middle name Patrick.
Rest in peace, sir. And thanks.