|
| Foundation |
| News & Print |
| Postage Stamp |
| Photo Gallery |
| Web Links |
Written and designed by Arlen Schumer |
Though Twilight Zone creator/head writer/narrator Rod Serling worked with a number of other renowned writers on the series—science fiction luminaries Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and George Clayton Johnson among them—their combined works all fall under a set of recurring themes of Serling’s, “The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone.” |
“The place is here… the time is now… —Rod Serling’s opening narration to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode,
A true pilot episode in that it included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with The Twilight Zone—isolation, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem all too real—“Where is Everybody?” is finally a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from one’s self.
Acted out in the twilight zone between dream and reality, the aptly-titled “Shadow Play” concludes, “We exist, of course, but how? In what way? As we believe, as flesh and blood human beings?” In “A World of His Own,” the lighthearted sister episode to “A World of Difference,” a writer brings his characters to corporeal life, admitting to his disbelieving wife, “Fictional characters come alive! They come alive so vividly that they make decisions of their own…they become so strong that sometimes they take over the whole story!” That concept is taken to an ironic, horrific extreme in “The Dummy,” unarguably the archetypal version of every ventriloquist’s nightmare, easily besting the films Dead of Night (1945) and Magic (1982).
Trapped in a literal twilight zone—a white, circular void (turning the TV screen into a puppet theater shadow box)—the “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” cry out, “Where are we? What are we? Who are we?” Their answers become metaphors for the nature of identity and existence, making this Ionesco-like story the most didactic—and dialectic—of Twilight Zones. Its surprise ending segues right into “Living Doll,” where Telly Savalas’ gradual belief in such a thing—“I’m Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you!”—is akin to Inger Stevens’ dawning acceptance of her own true nature in “The Lateness of the Hour.” Jack Warden loses himself in his robotic companion in “The Lonely,” only to bitterly learn, in the end, the value of his own identity: “Reality’s what I need because what is there left that I can believe in? The desert and the wind? The silence? Or myself?” |
“Clocks are made by men; God creates time.” —from Rod Serling’s closing narration to “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,” 1962 The time element was a cornerstone of The Twilight Zone, a dimension Rod Serling described as “timeless as infinity.” “The Time Element” was a precursor to The Twilight Zone, an episode of Desilu Playhouse’s 1958 season that Serling, by then a triple-Emmy Award-winning television playwright, expanded from his own radio play. The hour-long drama, about a man who believes he has gone back in time to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, received more mail than any other Playhouse that year, prompting CBS to commission a pilot episode for The Twilight Zone: “Where is Everybody?” Once in The Zone, Serling would continue to explore time and its discontents.
“The Trouble With Templeton” was TV writer-producer (Dr. Kildaire, Police Story) E. Jack Neuman’s single Twilight Zone episode. Aging stage actor Booth Templeton goes back in time to his favorite speakeasy—“Yesterday and its memories is what he wants,” Serling had narrated—and is startled to see his longed-for wife and best friend. “And yesterday is what he’ll get,” Serling warned. What follows is one of The Twilight Zone’s most stunningly written, staged, lit and choreographed scenes, turning what had been a somewhat sentimental exercise into something more tragic and true.
Returning to the suspended animation device, “The Long Morrow” is a sequel of sorts to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode; the isolation tank-testing that the astronaut-in-training hallucinates through in “Where is Everybody?” was intended to prepare him for isolation in deep space—“the long morrow.” Teetering on the edge of soap opera—but never falling—this is another beautifully-worded script by Serling, evidenced in this interior monologue describing the state of suspended animation: “It’s not just the long deep sleep that comes when the fear has left…the cold is felt…the slipping away of feeling is noted and succumbed to. The mind functions…time is distorted, jumbled, telescoped, accordioned…but there is a sense of time, even so…” Even bad makeup doesn’t ruin the poignant sorrow of the episode’s climax, which is similar in pathos to that of “The Trade-Ins,” but with the age—and gender—of the lovers’ roles reversed.
A strong case can be made for “Walking Distance” being not only the best time-travel episode of the series, but the best episode of The Twilight Zone, period. Everything about it is literally note-perfect: Serling’s beautifully-worded script, full of an aching, nostalgic longing for his own childhood; Gig Young’s sensitive performance as Serling’s doppelganger, photographed for posterity by Twilight Zone Director of Photography George T. Clemens in a series of arresting, character-revealing close-ups; and Bernard Herrmann’s truly haunting score, a wistful whine of strings that underscores all the yearning and melancholy associated with the futile quest to recapture youth. “Walking Distance” has subsequently become the benchmark against which all such time-travel television shows and films—Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Gets Married, Big—are measured. But never bettered. |
“I shot an arrow into the air; it landed I know not where —from the episode “I Shot An Arrow Into the Air” by Rod Serling, 1960 Rod Serling’s attitude toward the Space Race of the Sixties was evident in The Twilight Zone’s science fiction episodes: space ships never reach their destinations, or crash if they do. By failing to solve our moral and ethical problems here on earth, Serling implied in episodes like “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air” and “People Are Alike All Over,” we’ll never get to where we want to go—anticipating the platform of all anti-space advocates since (the chain of compromises in integrity that led to the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster proves the relevancy of Serling’s warnings).
These episodes “play” like adaptations of the E.C science-fiction comics of the early Fifties: tight morality plays that climax in abrupt reversals in human/alien perspective. Richard Matheson’s nearly dialogueless episode on the subject turns the tables on “The Invaders” by making them “the little people.” And Agnes Moorehead’s immortal, mimetic performance is a tour de force (she had actually studied with Marcel Marceau), making the episode a Twilight Zone classic. (Matheson’s best one-hour effort, “Death Ship,” follows, which is similar to the Ray Bradbury story, “Mars is Heaven”).
|
“It was the twilight zone of the American culture. —Richard Matheson, 1990 Perhaps the single factor most responsible for the success and longevity of The Twilight Zone was Rod Serling’s acute ability to identify primal American fears and build stories around them, set in commonplace surroundings—a psycho-American gothic of sorts.
“Little Girl Lost” and “It’s a Good Life” toy with the destruction of the nuclear family. In the former episode (elaborated into the movie Poltergeist in 1982), the little girl in question disappears through a dimensional warp in her bedroom wall, her disembodied voice echoing throughout the split-level ranch house; in the latter (remade, but not bettered, by director Joe Dante in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie), a little boy with supernatural powers (future Lost in Space star Billy Mumy) physically and emotionally cripples the adults around him—surely every parent’s nightmare. Recurring nightmares that seem more real than awakened reality are the stuff of “Perchance to Dream” and “Twenty-Two.” The circus dream sequences in “Perchance” (“It was the kind of place you see only in nightmares—everything warped and twisted out of shape—but it was real, too”) and the descent into room #22, the hospital morgue (“Room for one more…”) are among the most visceral Twilight Zone scenes ever filmed.
Shatner’s other pre-Star Trek appearance follows, “Nick of Time,” again portraying a man struggling to regain control of his life, this time from the grip of a dreary smalltown luncheonette’s demonic fortune-telling machine. Superstition also plays a role in “The Jungle,” about a particular dread of every New Yorker: crossing Central Park at night! The episode’s grisly final scene ranks as one of The Twilight Zone’s most surreal juxtapositions.
On a par with Inger Steven’s performance in “The Hitch-Hiker” is Anne Francis’ star turn in “The After Hours,” Serling’s most accessible Twilight Zone episode; for who has never been afraid of being locked in a department store at night? By tapping into such deep-seeded American neuroses, Serling mirrored the anxieties and apprehensions of his audience, as this excerpt from “The After Hours” closing narration testifies: “Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?” |
“I am a human being! I exist! —from “The Obsolete Man” by Rod Serling (1961) Invariably, when Rod Serling’s name is brought up, The Twilight Zone comes to mind a lot faster and more often than “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Patterns,” or any of his other live dramas from the Golden Age of Television; yet many of the themes Serling would later clothe in fantasy and illusion in The Twilight Zone were first explored in those Fifties teleplays. His most recurring theme—alienation of the individual through bigotry, racism, and corporate and technological oppression—was that of the “Obsolete Man.”
Another sensitive outcast was bookworm Henry Bemis in “Time Enough at Last.” His obsession, like Daly’s, for quietude far from the maddening crowd, saves his life, leaving him the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust; it also figures in his downfall (the abrupt, downbeat tone of the ending—remarkably pessimistic even for Serling—accounts for the high esteem this episode is held in today). In the tale whose title inspired this essay, “The Obsolete Man,” Burgess Meredith somewhat reprises his Bemis role, playing a librarian aptly-named Wordsworth who is condemned to death by the fascistic Chancellor of “The State.” Against outsized German Expressionist sets, the episode suggests Kafka’s The Trial (though it predates Orson Welles’ film adaptation by a year) as might’ve been written by Ayn Rand. The closing narration, unusually delivered on-camera by Serling, achieves relevant poignancy in light of subsequent events in global politics: “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete.
|
The first words spoken by Rod Serling at the beginning of “Where is Everybody?,” The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, not only introduced the concept to an unsuspecting 1959 television audience, but helped usher in the Sixties as well. Wandering through a strangely deserted town (the same Bedford Falls set used in It’s A Wonderful Life), an amnesiac played by Earl Holliman decries, “I’ve looked and I haven’t seen anybody around…maybe they’re all asleep or something, but literally, there hasn’t been a soul”—Serling himself observing the sleeping giant that was America in the Cold War conformity of the Eisenhower Fifties.
“And When The Sky Was Opened” uses the space program as a vehicle to similarly explore the nature of identity. “Person or Persons Unknown” poses the question, “What would you do if, all of a sudden, everybody started telling you, you weren’t you?” In “A World of Difference,” an actor who believes he is the man he plays discovers, “How thin a line separates that which we assume to be real with that manufactured inside of a mind,” presaging the later-Sixties psychedelic reaction to life being like a movie.
Dummies, doppelgangers, duplicates—The Twilight Zone was rife with them. “Mirror Image” is concerned “…about different planes of existence, about two parallel worlds that exist side by side; and each of us has a counterpart in this world, and sometimes…this counterpart comes into our world…” Taking place in a nondescript bus station, peopled by drab figures immobile in the stark Americana like an Edward Hopper painting brought to life, “Mirror Image” is the most Hitchkockian of Twilight Zone episodes—the suspense as palpable as the rain that beats down throughout the show.
“Escape Clause” is his contribution to the Faustian genre of soul-selling-to-the-devil stories, in this case in exchange for immortality. As usual, the seller gets less than he bargained for: “Immortality—what’s the good of it? There isn’t any kicks, any excitement!” bemoans David Wayne in a manic performance that, along with the devilish irony of Serling’s ending, makes this the best of the more lighthearted Twilight Zone episodes.
Playing off the ubiquity of the TV westerns that glutted the era’s prime time schedules, “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” transports its protagonist forward in time to confront the modern frontier. Picking up from the same Death Valley location, “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” sends a gang of modern outlaws into the future, via suspended animation. The episode’s ironic denouement delivers a grim economic lesson to those who would speculate on gold futures.
An offbeat addition to “The Time Element” is The Twilight Zone’s repackaging of “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge,” a short film adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce story that won first prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. A terse tale of a Civil War Confederate spy’s last moments before execution, “Occurance” forecasts the recent novel and film Jacob’s Ladder, which transferred the setting to the Vietnam War. Exposure as a Twilight Zone episode enabled “Occurance” to win an Oscar in 1964, fitting homage to one of the many past masters who helped shape Serling’s timeless classic.
He perceived that the benign quest into space nevertheless carried with it the destructive imperialist desire to invade and conquer. The need to subjugate others brings on the downfall and comeuppance of the delusional, demagogic astronaut in “The Little People,” as well as the leader of a band of space colonists in “On Thursday We Leave for Home” (Serling’s best one-hour episode from the brief 1963 season). 
The notion that “the invaders,” by the very definition of the term, could be anything but benign, is found in the ironically-titled “To Serve Man,” to wit: “As a race we’re unaccustomed to charity; brutality is a far more universal language to us than an expression of friendship form outer space.” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” also details aliens’ deceptive manipulations of earthmen’s fear and greed to further their conquest. An equally-scabrous indictment of Cold War McCarthyism, “Maple Street” is the epitome of the “we have met the enemy and they are us” approach: “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves,” Serling concludes, and speaking for the invading aliens as well as the viewing audience, “All we need to do is sit back and watch.” 
In “Third From the Sun” and “The Shelter,” Serling zeroed in on the great post-war fear, the looming threat of nuclear war. Both episodes predated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with “Third” offering a prescient description of what would become known as M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction).
Both episodes suggest psychiatry as a panacea for their protagonists’ delusions, treatment that fails a recovering mental patient who thinks he sees a gremlin on an airplane wing in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (also remade in Twilight Zone: The Movie with John Lithgow reprising William Shatner’s role). When Shatner yanks open the window curtain to reveal, pressed against the glass, the full face of the gremlin, the degree of audience identification with Shatner’s startled reaction more than compensates for the relatively poor costume and makeup of the gremlin itself.
Another urban nightmare—allowing a stranger into your apartment—is the focus of “Nothing in the Dark” (though it’s primarily remembered for the co-starring of a young Robert Redford), while “The Hitch-Hiker” plays on the fear of picking one up. Both shows utilize the shopworn character device of “Mr. Death,” but with redeeming Twilight Zone fillips.
Serling’s breakthrough, the Emmy-winning “Patterns” (1955), was a “Death of a Salesman”-inspired indictment of grey-flannelled Babbitry, with new kid on the corporate block Richard Kiley knocking heads with CEO Everett Sloane over over-the-hill exec Ed Begley, the “obsolete man” in this story. Serling returned to this milieu years later in The Twilight Zone with “A Stop at Willoughby,” starring James Daly as a thirty-somethingish commuter tired of the rat race, pummeled by his boss’ daily harangue, “This is a push business! A push-push-push business! Push and drive! All the way! All the time! Right on down the line!” Daly’s response, feebly admitted to his ultra-materialist shrew of a wife, would become a familiar refrain of the Sixties’ counterculture: “Some people aren’t built for competition. Or big pretentious houses they can’t afford. Or rich communities they don’t feel comfortable in. Or country clubs they wear around their neck like a badge of status.” Seeking refuge in “Willoughby,” a turn-of-the-century haven that exists only in his mind, Daly steps off his train—to his death. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” indeed.
“Obsolete, maybe, but until then, still in power, clamping down on all those who refuse to conform—even to standards of physical beauty. The sister episodes “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” and “The Eye of The Beholder” share this theme. “Number Twelve” boasts a number of touches that illuminate much more beyond the confines of the story’s setting, a futuristic hospital where patients undergo “The Transformation” into vacuous look-alikes: the casting of the real-life Supermodel of the day (1963), Suzy Parker; naming the doomed heroine “Marilyn” and her girlfriend, a proto-Valley Girl, “Val” (who recites the State anthem, “Life is pretty/Life is fun/I am all/And all is one!”); the suggestion that class differences remain even when physical differences do not; the recreational drug of choice, “Instant Smile”; the original mid-program commercial for “Thrill” dish detergent that offers women “a new pair of hands”; and Serling’s timely, concluding narration: “Portrait of a young lady in love—with herself. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible.”
In “The Eye of The Beholder,” Serling takes the age-old adage about beauty and gives it such a thorough Twilight Zone treatment that it remains the series’ quintessential episode. The script is a hallmark of Serling’s style: strong on theme, poetic dialogue, morality, and suspense, capped by a truly unforgettable ending. When it was originally telecast in 1960, chances are bandaged plastic surgery patient Janet Tyler was seen as Serling’s symbol for the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement; but now, the generic hospital setting and talk of quarantining those “similarly afflicted” reeks of AIDS ignorance, while the dialogue about conforming to society’s norms parallels the ongoing debate over censorship in the arts. Serling’s message of tolerance and compassion finally reveals that we are all Janet Tylers beneath our bandages, faceless and invisible to a society that would prefer nothing more than to render our individuality…obsolete.