Huh?

 

I guess I confused some people over on my Prisoner newsgroup with my last picture. The picture was more allegorical then most and I should have explained what I meant. They really were thinking "what the heck does this lady mean by this picture?"

A little background as to where my mind was at when I did Ghost Ship. My mother is very soft hearted and had been feeding a couple of stray cats outside while we endeavored to find homes for them. One of them showed up with three little kittens. The morning of the day I did the picture my mother found one of the babies had been killed by a raccoon and she was devastated. I think that the death of the kitten and trying to comfort my Mom was the reason that the cemetery picture jumped out at me.

One of the things I love about the Prisoner is that it can be looked at from more then one level. Taking a literal interpretation of the show I felt that the cemetery showed that the warders believed that once they got someone to the Village they were there until they died. If you believe, like I do, that there is a spirit that survives after the physical body dies then the prisoners in that cemetery are now free of the Village and can take that ghost ship and leave the Village. So in the end they have triumphed and the Village no longer has control over them.

 

The second way to look at it is as an allegory where we make our own prisons or village with our fears, hatred, prejudices, anything that can keep us from achieving our full potential as a human being. It is only when we overcome those things that we impose on ourselves that we are free. In that case the cemetery would stand for our “killing” those self limitations and freeing ourselves to sail away into freedom and achieving our full potential. I use Rover in this case as a symbol of our fears. You might notice that he doesn’t cast a shadow because he isn’t solid or real in a philosophical sense. He is like the Id monster in Forbidden Planet.

 

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