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attempts to escape and his captors efforts to extract unspecified, presumably
classified information from him. Number Six stays one step ahead of his
mysterious captors schemes, which usually involve trickery, mind control, or
psychological manipulation. He often nearly reaches freedom. But except in
the psychedelic last episode of the series, he is always recaptured and returned
to his Village prison.
Although most viewers probably assumed that Number Six was supposed
to be the same character that McGoohan played in his popular Danger Man
series (it was retitled Secret Agent when shown in the United States), this is
never explicitly stated. Instead, the audience is unsure of exactly who Number
Six is, why and by whom he has been captured, and what, if anything, his
captors want him to reveal. The Village is a place where conspiracy is incarnate.
But it is never clear how many of the Village s other residents are captives
and how many are sided with the apparently wicked people who run the
community. It is a murky story with an Alice in Wonderland feel. But its
novel depiction of the conspiracy theory theme helped the series become a
cult classic. Although the entire series consisted of only seventeen episodes,
it influenced later productions, such as the movie The Truman Show.
ATIME OF TUMULT
For the United States, 1968 was a year of upheaval. The Kennedy assas-
sination, though still an object of speculation, was history. America faced
too many current crises to spend much time focusing on that. They also
faced a polarizing election season, which had the added surprise of Lyndon
Johnson s announcement that he would not seek reelection in November,
a development that triggered a wild dash for the Oval Office among many
contestants.
Beyond the election, many events that year could be mentioned as having
a significant impact on the American psyche, but three will suffice to make
the point: two were the assassinations of both Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King, Jr.; the other was the increasingly dire turn of events in the
Vietnam War.
The shocking assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King,
Jr. deepened American anxieties. Many people felt that the United States
80 Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics
was veering into unknown territory; to some people it seemed as though the
nation was approaching anarchy.
The year of bitter combat in Vietnam, meanwhile, came at a time when
Americans were beginning to tire of that war and starting to demand answers
as to how and when it would end. Whatever their differences and these were
many what the new assassinations and the escalating violence in Vietnam had
in common was that they presented new, troubling narratives, with emotional
elements that made simple explanations hard to accept for many people.
After two decades of conspiracy theory thinking in politics and the media,
moreover, there was a readily available alternative to official explanation.
Perhaps there really was a conspiracy.
By 1968, therefore, a number of elements were lining up in American cul-
ture, affecting the mindset of many of those who were becoming increasingly
alienated from the cultural mainstream. Paradoxically, the original focus of
conspiracy theory had been on the outside, on external enemies especially
communists who posed a threat sometimes hidden and sometimes under-
estimated. Now, however, conspiracy theory thinking did not so much look
outside as within. It posed troubling questions: What if America s problems
were not caused by outsiders or by Americans who had sided with outsiders?
What if these seeming threats to the system did not originate outside of
that system, but rather from within it? What if the enemy is not them, but us?
Fueling such thoughts were the deep divisions that were emerging through-
out the nation. These cleavages were both many and varied. Now, it was not
simply a united American mainstream standing against threats, real or poten-
tial, from the outside. No, it was more often one group of Americans looking
with suspicion at other groups of Americans. The young were cast against
the old, though in that day what was considered old might not seem so
today. (Recall the often-repeated slogan: Don t trust anyone over thirty! )
The Women s Liberation movement seemed, to some, to cast women against
men; white was cast against black; war hawks against peace-niks; traditionalists
against hippies. And so it went.
Such high-relief contrasts were never fully accurate, of course. Things were
not that simple, and there were significant variations within, as well as across,
the different groups. But by 1968, many Americans felt that the glue holding
their society together was starting to come undone.
No one controversy fully captures the complexities of the chasm that was
widening between Americans, but developments in the Vietnam War probably
played the largest part in shaping the American cultural and political climate
of the next few years.
In 1968, North Vietnamese leaders determined to make a grand push to
the South in hopes of bringing the war to a swift conclusion with terms
favorable to the communist regime in Hanoi. At the same time, Lyndon
Johnson was eager to keep American forces from defeat, but he was also
increasingly troubled by the increasingly vocal and violent antiwar protesters
Shock and Upheaval 81
whose message was seeping into the mainstream. As both sides acted to
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