I recently watched most of episode one of AMC’s remake of the classic Sixties TV show The Prisoner over at my friend Nina’s house. She has cable and TiVo and I have neither. Unfortunately her TiVo thought the episode was an hour long when it was actually longer than that. So it cut off before the finish.In any case, I wasn’t too upset. The show was good enough that I’d like to have seen the ending. But not so compelling that I can even recall now exactly where things were when the TiVo decided to stop recording.
I don’t think I could have been anything but disappointed in any remake of The Prisoner. The original show was a big part of my education as a young man. I first watched it with my first Zen teacher, Tim, on his little black and white portable TV set in his basement apartment in Kent, Ohio. Tim didn’t have cable then either (probably still doesn’t) and it was on a UHF station. So the reception was always lousy. And yet the show was so amazing that its power came through in spite of only barely being able to tell what was going on half the time.
The show was the creation of its star, the late lamented Patrick McGoohan. It was a profound meditation on the individual and his place and role in society, about personal freedom vs. one’s responsibility to one's fellow human, about the very nature of existence itself. And this was a TV show, for God’s sake! Not even some highbrow PBS thing either. It was made for commercial television, for mass audience consumption.
The problem with the remake is that the producers just don’t seem to get what The Prisoner was about. They seem to have a vague comprehension that the show was cool and mysterious. But they either don’t understand the underlying message or they don’t care. There is no burning desire here to say something heartfelt. At best, the folks who made the remake seem only to desire to make something weird. And while the original was indeed weird, it was much more than that. What we get in the remake is more like a low rent knock-off of LOST. It's certainly not the worst thing on TV. But it could have been so much better.
I suspect the problem is that while the original series was completely the brainchild of one single individual, the new one seems to have been made by a committee. Of course Patrick McGoohan didn’t make The Prisoner all by himself. He had writers, directors, actors and a whole lot of other people involved. But he did personally oversee every aspect of the show. It’s obvious that the new series has no such guiding hand. And it suffers for that, as does all art created by committee. This is also why most Hollywood movies are so incredibly bad – they are made by committee.
Good Zen teaching doesn't happen by committee any more than good art can be made by committee. This is why the Soto-shu, the organization that's supposed to represent Dogen's teachings in the modern world, can't ever hope to succeed in doing so. This is why most teachers name a single successor, not a board of directors.
Only Patrick McGoohan could make The Prisoner correctly. No one else could ever make The Prisoner the right way. They could certainly make their own show, which embodied the same attitude as The Prisoner. But they could not make The Prisoner.
Watching the remake made me think of the teachings of Buddha, Bodhidharma, Dogen, and all the rest of those guys. What’s interesting about really good teaching or really good art is that it bypasses the individual who expresses it and enters into a whole ‘nother realm. The Buddha’s teachings are not unique to the man Gautama Buddha. They are something universal that Gautama Buddha was able to express. This is why you don’t necessarily need to study what Gautama Buddha said in order to understand it.
Gautama Buddha expressed that stuff in a way that was uniquely his own, that came from his distinctive personality. So did Dogen and Bodhidharma and Gudo Nishijima and Dainin Katagiri and all the rest of them. Yet in a very real sense the greatest thing any of these guys did was develop the ability to step aside and allow the universal teaching to flow through them.
Yet that they let it flow though them is the key. They expressed this universal something in their own way. They did not immitate anyone else. They didn't do a bad remake of their teachers. They were not tribute bands. The old koan about Gutei’s finger expresses this very well.
Whenever Gutei was asked to express Buddhism he held up one finger. Guetei had a student. And whenever that student was asked about Buddhism, he imitated Gutei by holding up one finger. When Gutei heard about this he called the student to his room and asked him to say something about Buddhism. The student held up one finger. Gutei took out a knife and sliced the student’s finger off. The student was bawling his eyes out when Gutei said, “Hey kid!” The student looked up. Gutei held up one finger. At that moment the student got it.
Any truly great work of art expresses something universal that goes beyond that piece of art itself. The Prisoner expressed something essential and true. That’s why it still haunts those of us who watched it. The folks who remade the show were unable to catch on to what the show was expressing. Same with the guys who remade Godzilla. Same with almost any remake of anything. The rare cases where remakes work only occur when the people doing the remake either get what the original was about or when they use the original as a template to express something they themselves feel passionately about.
I’m not nearly old enough for anyone to start concerning themselves with whether I’ll leave a dharma heir or not. And yet a couple of people have already expressed worry about that to me. But I’ve already decided I will never name any dharma heir or successor. That would just encourage someone to do a poor remake of me, which would be truly awful. I’ve seen some poor remakes of great teachers already and they’re just as bad as AMC’s version of The Prisoner. Not that I’m a great teacher by any stretch of the imagination. Which makes it even more urgent that I leave no successors. Imagine a bad AMC remake of Petticoat Junction or That Girl or some other show like that. A dharma heir of me would be even worse.
What does that mean for my own dharma reception (reception being the other side of transmission)? I don’t know. Nishijima Roshi seems convinced I have manifested something of the attitude he received from his teachers. I can’t possibly judge if he’s correct or not. I suppose if I ever did see something like what I’ve grokked from my teachers in someone who sat with me I might be inclined to make some kind of formal recognition of that. But I think I’d probably keep it on the down low even if that happened.
Remakes suck anyway.
