Prison Break, Hamlet and Patriotism

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This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

2nd February 2008

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Wentworth Miller, who plays Michael Scofield in the hit series Prison Break, has candidly admitted that his role (like those of his co-stars) requires a lot of ham acting. And yet Prison Break has captivated audiences across the globe, not least in South Africa. I’m one of those who can’t wait for the third season to be broadcast locally. Still, in trying to understand the great appeal of Prison Break, I find myself looking beyond the obvious criteria of Miller’s good looks, Scofield’s brooding intelligence and our inverted sympathies in the cops’n’robbers chase. Instead, it seems to me that Prison Break draws on the archetypal themes of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 

I know what you’re thinking. Does every film or TV show, from The Lion King to Star Trek to Bollywood blockbusters, have to be spoiled by relating it to Shakespearean drama? Granted, it would be facile to depict Scofield as a smouldering Hamlet, cellmate Fernando Sucre as the trusty Horatio or troubled doctor and recovering addict Sara Tancredi as the victimised Ophelia (although, on this score, there is a neat symmetry – the complexities of Tancredi’s relationship with Scofield send her back to drugs and she almost dies from an overdose, echoing Ophelia’s madness-induced suicidal swim, while her controlling father is a senator who kowtows to the presidency in the same way that Ophelia’s father Polonius does the king’s bidding). But there’s more to it than that.

Consider all the parenting problems. Hamlet’s melancholy disposition is chiefly attributable to the death of his father the king, and the ready willingness of his mother to remarry. In the second season of Prison Break, the producers were careful to make psychomaniac escaped cons like ‘T-Bag’ and ‘Haywire’ more likeable characters by showing that they had daddy issues, while ‘C-Note’ Franklin is himself an absent albeit doting father and Sucre is a heart-of-gold but equally embattled father-to-be.

Most importantly, it was the inexplicable departure of Scofield’s father while he and brother Lincoln Burrows were youngsters that cemented their fraternal bond even as it set the course of their divergent careers as loner engineering genius and small-time crook respectively. When it transpires that their father was in fact an ex-employee of ‘The Company’, a shady corporation that has corrupted the heart of the American government, and that he fled to become an agent of the equally amorphous organisation that is trying to bring down The Company, we are surprisingly close to the crux of Shakespeare’s most famous play.

Hamlet had his father taken away from him by his treacherous uncle, Claudius, who killed the old King Hamlet and stole his crown (and wife). This causes Hamlet tremendous personal grief, but it also affects matters of state: when he finds out that his father was murdered, it becomes his responsibility as heir to the throne to set things right by enacting vengeance on the fraudulent Claudius and taking his place as king. In the same way, almost from the start, Prison Break has fused private and public concerns. We are deeply interested in the fates of the fugitive convicts and their families, but we are equally fascinated by the bigger picture – a picture that matches our concerns about the current White House incumbent and his political/business associates.

Hamlet declares, “Denmark’s a prison”. This is usually taken to mean that he feels oppressed, both physically and psychologically, in his own country. He is not being neurotic: Claudius gets Polonius and Hamlet’s old college buddies to spy on him (an early version of state surveillance, of which there’s plenty in Prison Break) and eventually tries to have him killed. But, given that royals often used to refer to themselves in the third person, Hamlet could also be saying that being Denmark – being the rightful heir to the throne, with the attendant obligations – is like being constrained in prison. This would explain why he’s willing to be sent away to England; leaving Denmark means leaving his responsibilities behind.

Season one of Prison Break was about getting out of Fox River Penitentiary. Season two was, initially at least, about escaping the US; but it soon became clear to Burrows and Scofield that they couldn’t just flee the country. They had the chance to complete their father’s work, take down The Company and the corrupt presidency, and save Tancredi and Lincoln’s son LJ at the same time. Hamlet finally climbs out of his self-indulgent slough and, fighting pirates on the way (just as Scofield and co battle the desert rats of New Mexico?), returns to Denmark. He eventually takes revenge on Claudius, which is a paradoxical act: to kill a king is treasonous, but in this instance it is patriotic. Hamlet also dies, but Denmark is at least rid of a villainous ruler.

If, as a minor character famously notes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, then it seems the same is true of the conspiracy-riddled United States today, as much in real life as in the imagined world of Prison Break. The implication of reading Hamlet onto Prison Break is that (just as Claudius has usurped power from the old King Hamlet) The Company has duped the American people who, in a constitutional democracy, should be the true government. Corrupt businesspeople and politicians have ‘stolen’ the American ideal. The only avenue left to the young Hamlets of the USA is a form of guerrilla warfare against their own state.

In real life, this does not involve guns and punch-ups and exploding cars (as in Prison Break) but it does require the courage both to point out the deceits inherent in the George Bush orthodoxy and to protest vehemently against their consequences. Thus, despite the falsely-named Patriot Act, true patriotism is manifested in ‘unpatriotic’, or even ‘anti-patriotic’, behaviour.

This is nothing new. Oscar Wilde’s poem “Ave Imperatrix” offers a strong critique of British imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century (“crowned by sword and fire,/ England with bare and bloody feet/ Climbs up the steep road of wide empire”). Yet it has been described by writer and anthologist George Macbeth as a “mixture of patriotism and compassion”. The compassion is not just for indigenous peoples subjected under the British realm, but also for the thousands of soldiers who died as a result of their government’s war-mongering. The patriotism is a complaint against both these forms of injustice – a patriotism towards a ‘different’ England, one unlike the greedy colonising nation derided by Wilde.

It is coincidental but nevertheless significant that, of all England’s colonial pursuits, Wilde chose to focus on the terrain of present-day Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; what the British started in the Middle East, the Americans have made catastrophically worse. There is, finally, a growing consensus in the US that criticism of American imperial interests is not unpatriotic.

Here in South Africa, we are still uncomfortable with the notion that true patriotism typically involves opposition to the government. We are able, retrospectively, to identify members of the struggle against apartheid as patriots, but when it comes to present-day problems the ANC and the government have demonstrated a strong disliking for those who criticise their people, policies or implementation.

Certainly, a large measure of support for and pride in the achievements of post-apartheid South Africa is necessary to counteract the Afro-pessimistic urge that asserts itself with all-too-familiar tinges of racism (whether the racism of white towards black or the kind of black self-loathing described by Steve Biko). But an equal effort should be spent by civil society in critiquing both government and business.

The problem is that public dissatisfaction – particularly amongst the demographic who can afford M-Net or DSTV, and thus watches Prison Break – is not often articulated in a calm, analytical manner. On radio phone-ins and around braais, in workplaces and on innumerable cellphones, the message is shared with impassioned but incoherent voices: our state, too, is rotten. In matters of safety and security, health, education, economic transformation, infrastructural development ... the list goes on. The underlying motif of Prison Break – ‘Trust no one’ – resonates with deep collective fears about what is happening in this country.

Absurdly, we find ourselves cheering on a group of criminals, those very people whom law-abiding South Africans (a relative term, for none of us can claim never to have broken the law) agree are the scourge of the nation. Of all the escapees, only Scofield had never actually committed a crime before going to prison, and even his record is blemished during the attempt to secure freedom. It seems some kind of mental disconnect is in operation; to local viewers, crime in the US is acceptable – even glamorous – under certain circumstances, but this could never be the case in South Africa.

A few fictional cop shows or real-life detective stories set here at home have been well received. Arguably, their success is based on our fascination-cum-paranoia regarding crime, but invariably in these cases the criminals are clearly the bad guys. A Prison Break set in South Africa wouldn’t work: not just because there’s no challenge (all you need to get out of jail is a jar of vaseline, a wad of cash or a presidential pardon), but because we really – really – want our convicts to remain behind bars.

The producers of Prison Break came under fire for extending the series beyond the basic escape narrative. But American audiences, hungry for onscreen endorsement of their misgivings about the US government, have lapped up the show’s growing conspiratorial convolutions. Local viewers will no doubt do the same. We should be aware, however, of the double irony involved when we applaud criminals on the run.
 
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