location:
Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Collection, disc 1
airdate:
25 September 1960
NATO opening: no
NATO openings so far: 1
NATO-less openings so far: 2
Vacation spoiled: no
Vacations spoiled so far: 1
We begin with a
blast of sound and a flurry of colourful floats – a carnival, or indeed
Carnaval, atmosphere. Then we shift to a
woman at a piano, playing the Fantaisie
Impromptu – not the opening allegro agitato,
but the succeeding moderato cantabile,
as though to emphasise the contrast between the frenzy without and the calm
within (a boundary that will shortly be broken). We realise she is blind when she reaches
forward to touch her braille sheet music.
A man arrives; she invites him to let himself in (the doors aren’t even
locked against what lies without). As
they chat pleasantly, he takes a gun from his jacket, a gun she cannot see ....
Our episode is
set in the city of San Pablo, in an unnamed country in Latin America. (Though we’re not told so explicitly, it
seems likely that San Pablo is the country’s capital. Most Latin America countries have a San
Pablo, but in no case as the capital – so unlike last time there
is no obvious candidate for the unnamed country.) Drake is here quite explicitly as a
representative of the U.S., speaking of “my government” and “our embassy” in
connection with it – no talk of NATO this time.
(Yet he pronounces “lieutenant” the British way – a mistake on the
actor’s part, probably, but it contributes nicely to the ongoing vagueness of
Drake’s identity.) And he has come to
San Pablo to identify an assassin, in order to prove that the assassination was
not a U.S. plot.
So, a forward-looking
subject matter, since the succeeding decade would be an especially fertile period for CIA assassination plots in Latin America – though the 1954 Guatemala coup (inter alia) would have been a relatively
fresh memory, even if the extent of U.S. involvement was not as widely
understood at the time as it would be later on.
Of course the notion of the U.S. trying to prevent a right-wing military coup, and to avenge a slain left-wing politician of whom Drake admits his
government disapproved, is a little hard to swallow, even in 1960. At least the regime that Drake is helping to
prop up is not portrayed in too rosy a light; though the police chief
(appropriately named Segur, as in seguridad)
is Drake’s ally and thus presumably a good guy, he tells Drake matter-of-factly
that he will arrange to have a pliable judge hear his case.
All the same, in
this episode we see little of the moral ambiguity that pervaded “Time to
Kill.” Here Drake is the good guy, and America
is the good guy too; both are framed for crimes of which they are innocent, and
both are vindicated.
Nevertheless, since
my aim in this project is to read Danger
Man through the lens of The Prisoner,
it’s worth pointing out that although Drake evidently believes that the U.S. is devoid of complicity in the killing of
Ingres’s brother, we have no proof that he is right; that Cortez committed the
act hardly settles the question of whom he was ultimately working for (“Who is
Number One?”), and so we can just as easily view Drake’s mission as one of covering up a U.S. plot rather than disproving one. Cortez himself might well not know the
identity of his ultimate masters, and so might be perfectly sincere in telling
Drake he wants Americans to butt out of his country’s affairs, even as he has
been their useful idiot all along. If
the killing has led to more anti-American agitation than had been anticipated,
the real fear of Drake’s superiors might be the potential success of the
agitators, rather than (as they claim) the army coup the agitation might
provoke. Drake can thus be seen as a
useful idiot in his own right, a cleanup man sent to defuse a left-wing threat
while being led to believe he is defusing a right-wing threat. (Imagine if Drake were to find this out
later. One can almost picture him
striding angrily down a hallway and into a government office, to resign ….)
Apart from the
political aspects, the episode’s main plot concerns an attempt to spook the
suspected assassin into giving himself away by convincing him that the sole
earwitness to his crime is also an eyewitness – a tricky job, since the witness
in question, Josetta Ingres, is the blind woman with whom we opened. (So, another pairing with a woman, though
again no romance – other than the slight hint of it in the way Drake kisses
Ingres’s hand at the end, though that can be read just as easily as
congratulations on a job well done.)
The idea that a
blind person’s recognising a voice (and scent) is less reliable evidence than a
sighted person’s recognising a face is of course absurd; but it’s not the
show’s absurdity (the episode makes a point of showing, more than once, that
Ingres’s hearing is more discriminating than that of a sighted person), but
rather a plausibly realistic absurdity of the legal system.
Ingres feigns
sightedness by having Drake watch her from a distance and relay instructions to
a speaker in her ear. I worry that in
reality, especially with so little opportunity to practice, this would work
about as well as Leonard Read’s flyswatter game, which Rose Wilder Lane
describes as follows:
Leonard
... has devised a parlor game, in his effort to get the definition [of liberty]
into another head .... The game requires two persons, one fly-swatter and a
fly. One person holds the swatter, but
can move only as the other person tells him to move; the object of both is to
swat the fly. This cannot be done, of
course. (The Lady and the Tycoon, p. 31)
But it works
well in the story – and (probably inadvertently) doubles as a metaphor for the
American style of imperialism: not direct conquest, but the illusion of
autonomy, with vigorous direction behind the scenes. Thus the real Drake personifies the private
face of American foreign policy, just as Drake’s amusing impersonation of a wealthy,
feckless, clueless gambler personifies its public face.
Be seeing you!
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