Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture 1442260319, 9781442260313

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Twilight Zone Harbingers
2 Irony’s Philosophical Legacy
3 Technological Irony
4 Invasive Irony
5 Martial Irony
6 Sociopolitical Irony
7 Domestic Irony
Conclusion
Videography
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Irony in The Twilight Zone

Science Fiction Television Series Editor: A. Bowdoin Van Riper From Starship Captains to Galactic Rebels: Leaders in Science Fiction Television, by Kimberly Yost, 2014 Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: Confounding Purpose, Confusing Identity, edited by Sherry Ginn, Alyson R. Buckman, and Heather M. Porter, 2014 Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation: Fifty Years of Storytelling, by Marcus K. Harmes, 2014 The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues, edited by Jason Barr and Camille D. G. Mustachio, 2014 Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series, edited by Michael D. Goodrum and Philip Smith, 2015 The Paranormal and the Paranoid: Conspiratorial Science Fiction Television, by Aaron John Gulyas, 2015 Time Travel Television: The Past from the Present, the Future from the Past, edited by Sherry Ginn and Gillian I. Leitch, 2015 Science Wars through the Stargate: Explorations of Science and Society in Stargate SG-1, by Steven Gil, 2016 Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture, by David Melbye, 2016

Irony in The Twilight Zone How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture David Melbye

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Melbye, David. Title: Irony in the Twilight zone : how the series critiqued postwar American culture / David Melbye. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Series: Science fiction television | Includes filmography and videography. | Includes bibliographical references and index. LCCN 2015032340| ISBN 9781442260313 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442260320 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Twilight zone (Television program : 1959-1964) | Irony on television. | United States--On television. Classification: LCC PN1992.77.T87 M46 2016 | DDC 791.45/72--dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015032340 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my father, Roy Wilbur Melbye, supporting my endeavors even not so lucrative.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Twilight Zone Harbingers Irony’s Philosophical Legacy Technological Irony Invasive Irony Martial Irony Sociopolitical Irony Domestic Irony

1 29 57 85 105 133 157

Conclusion

189

Videography

197

Filmography

205

Bibliography

207

Index

211

About the Author

225

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Acknowledgments

Truth be told, I could have used more time, material, and outside input with this project. (I’m sure this is a common enough feeling.) As it happened, just after I committed to writing this book, I was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach cinema courses at the Royal Film Commission in Amman, Jordan. Nevertheless, I had enough time left over during my nine months abroad to tackle the suitcase full of books and articles I was compelled to bring with me. If I had remained in Los Angeles, it is probable I would have sought out peer consultations and even more research material, not to mention opportunities to visit UCLA’s and other television archives. My teaching activities in and around Jordan segued into an assistant professorship at an all-women’s university in Saudi Arabia, where, despite their expressed interest in supporting faculty research, I was expected to teach four semester courses at the same time. I managed to write a bit, but only during a ten-day religious holiday. And because my visa wouldn’t allow me to leave the country, I was forced to forfeit my invitation to present my work in a science fiction panel for a film and history conference in Madison, Wisconsin. After returning to the States in late December, I began what was probably the most intensive period of focused effort in my life, writing practically every day, all day. Ironically, though, I may never have gotten through this project outside of such circumstances. So with this concession to irony, I want to acknowledge, first, the patience and understanding of my series editor, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, who, in addition to encouraging my book proposal from the get-go, negotiated an extended deadline and tolerated my absence from his conference panel. I didn’t mind his putting the fear of God into me toward the end, so as to make sure I turned everything in by its absolute deadline. Similarly, I appreciate the understanding of Rowman & Littlefield’s senior acquisitions editor Steix

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phen Ryan, who allowed me to preserve my content beyond the specified word limit, and who granted me extra time to reestablish my voice wherever I saw deviations therefrom in my edited manuscript. Once I knew I would be returning abroad to teach after Jordan, I enlisted the research assistance of Theresa Wynn, working on her master’s at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Theresa, also keenly interested in The Twilight Zone, was enormously helpful in tracking down discussions of irony in the writings of Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida, as well as recent articles pertaining to their work. I am only sorry I was unable to provide her with more experience, according to more ideal circumstances. Amidst my six-month period of intensive writing, I was able to make it out to the UCLA Film and Television Archive once, at least, and, on this occasion, I received some productive advice from Mark Quigley, their access archivist. Beyond his logistical advice on obtaining permissions, etc., he informed me of a number of 1950s science fiction series anticipating The Twilight Zone. I was impressed with his knowledge. For the cover art of my last book, Landscape Allegory in Cinema, I enlisted the help of my good friend Ruley Espiritu, whose seasoned experience in graphic design certainly contributed to that book’s cover being featured in a showcase of Interfolio’s published clients. I am grateful for his time and insight in helping me realize this next study’s cover design. Lastly, I want to express my deepest heartfelt appreciation to the supportive friends who hosted me for extended intervals during this intermediary period of dedicated book-writing. They include Alexandra Matejic, James Burke, Jacquelyne Dahms, and Barbara MacMullin. Beyond the comfort and quietude their homes provided, their company was an essential diversion from my daily grind. My love goes out to each of them. Reaching deeper into the past, I shall also pay lip service to Dana Polan, one of my professors in graduate school at USC, who endeavored to teach an undergraduate course on The Twilight Zone and allowed me to be his assistant. Because there was little in the way of discussion on the topic here, aside from a standard acknowledgment of twist endings, I was inspired to write a paper for him exploring the use of irony in the series toward social critique. I included a brief treatment of irony’s philosophical legacy as a foundation for my larger attempt to subdivide the series according to its ironic themes. He commended my work, although I merely proceeded to file away the paper in my course notebook among so many more school notebooks in stored boxes. Years later, when I noticed an announcement for a book series on science fiction television, I exhumed the paper and expanded it into this study. So, in addition to relishing his continued professional guidance, I am grateful to Dana for having offered that course.

Introduction

I could say I am inevitably of the “Twilight Zone generation.” I grew up with the show. This is not to say I was even alive when its weekly prime-time episodes were originally broadcast, from 1959 to 1964. Rather, as a native of Los Angeles, I became familiar with it through its local syndication on KTLA Channel 5. Despite its being one of the few remaining vestiges of American television’s black-and-white era, competing with so many in-color alternatives, it was my favorite program. This isn’t so surprising, considering KTLA aired it not just once a week but twice every weekday, at noon and then again at midnight. And I relished KTLA’s annual ritual of hosting a “Twilight Zone Marathon” on holidays such as Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and New Year’s Eve. So, rather significantly, it was on television more than emerging prime-time shows. In these conditions, I got to know all of its 156 episodes fluently, something that wouldn’t have been as possible across its original five-year run on CBS. In my youth, then, The Twilight Zone had already been well assimilated into popular consciousness and had become a cultural fixture still rich with entertainment value. Second only to I Love Lucy, it would persist well after other black-and-white favorites had been retired from televised accessibility. So, rather conveniently, I take great pleasure in finding myself in a position to validate the many hours of leisure time I spent with this classic series—through the productive attention I bring to it now. In its vast cultural legacy, the original black-and-white television show The Twilight Zone has been somewhat erroneously categorized as a “science fiction” program. Perhaps this is most attributable to cable’s Sci-Fi (now “SyFy”) Channel adopting the series’ syndication after it left its former home on KTLA (at least in Los Angeles). And, thankfully, the Sci-Fi Channel preserved KTLA’s ritual holiday marathons. On the other hand, in order to xi

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make room for more commercial breaks, the Sci-Fi Channel began to curtail the episodes, as was and still is common practice with cable syndication. And, ultimately, the channel’s umbrella of “science fiction” programming did a certain disservice to the legacy of a show that had far greater ambitions. No, it really isn’t quite accurate to categorize The Twilight Zone within the genre of science fiction, for it is so much more. What really makes the series stand out from popular contemporaries such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, safely within the mystery genre, and The Outer Limits, more decidedly science fiction, is its vast, eclectic range of narrative contexts. Indeed, it is often a science fiction show, with so many projected dystopias and ill-begotten space-age enterprises. But The Twilight Zone also ventures into the past to paint its unlikely scenarios, and, sometimes, past and present are even juxtaposed as parallel universes. Really, we oughtn’t take for granted what is suggested by Rod Serling’s own attempt to categorize his series’ content as falling somewhere “between science and superstition.” AN ATYPICALLY FORMULAIC SHOW But if the Twilight Zone series defies the sort of genre categorization its contemporaries cannot, it is nevertheless a formulaic program. And beyond the majority of episodes penned by Serling himself, the show’s other principal writers, like Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, would also embrace this narrative formula. Rather than citing any trapping of science fiction or fantasy, I am referring at least partly to its surprise twist endings, or what Serling himself referred to as “snappers.” Whichever period—past, present, or future—and in whatever context between probable technologies and metaphysical whimsies, the weekly episodes sought to thwart audience expectations by overturning their logical finales. The series’ pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” places a solitary character (Earl Holliman) within an uninhabited town, only to reveal that his predicament is the hallucinatory consequence of an aerospace isolation test. Another case is Serling’s episode “People Are Alike All Over,” in which Roddy McDowall plays an astronaut arriving on Mars, who, after being accommodated within his own suburban middle-class domicile, discovers he is the subject of a zoo exhibit. And the list goes on. One could almost imagine a “Twilight Zone” manifesto framed in Serling’s office, above the desk where he so busily clicked away on his typewriter, pronouncing its first tenet: “Don’t forget the snapper!” And then Rod could have merely pointed to it upon first interviewing his potential contributors. More probably such a manifesto was implicit enough in Serling’s first string of Twilight Zone teleplays, commencing with “Where Is Everybody?” In the next episode, “One for the Angels,” a trinket salesman (Ed Wynn)

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forestalls Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) from claiming a little girl’s life at the last minute by forfeiting his own. In the third, “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” a bedraggled gunfighter (Dan Duryea) faces an eager neophyte (Martin Landau), only to discover each has purchased the same advantageous elixir from one “Henry J. Fate” (Malcolm Atterbury). The fourth, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” has an aged movie star (Ida Lupino) obsessing after her silverscreen heyday until she literally reenters one of her old films. And the fifth episode, “Walking Distance,” depicts a jaded businessman (Gig Young) revisiting his childhood to finally learn how to cope with the daily pressures of his adult metropolitan world. The first of these is a plausible piece of presentday science fiction; the second, a charming parable of metaphysical selfsacrifice; the third, a Western fable interwoven with old-world superstitions; the fourth, a melodramatic Hollywood fantasy; and the fifth, an existential experiment with time travel. However they may tamper with perceived realities, each of these seemingly disparate scenarios culminates with a similarly abrupt turn of events. This becomes the series’ most persistent motif. And although some episodes can be exempted from this narrative formula, they nevertheless exude a pervading sense of irony. A more sophisticated narrative device than establishing mere “strangeness,” irony has a raw entertainment value. Audiences take much pleasure in observing a world where characters and events turn out, in some way, to be contrary to what they seemed. This formulaic invocation of irony constitutes the show’s basic appeal. Accordingly, other popular television shows of the time, like the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits, would also experiment with ironic surprises in their narrative structures. But none would depend on irony as much as Serling’s series. According to his underlying agenda, irony functions well beyond mere entertainment—as a larger means for social critique. When Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow declared American television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, he allowed The Twilight Zone to be an exception, calling it “dramatic and moving” and suggesting it should be considered among the programs capable of enriching people’s lives. 1 The cancellation in 1960 of the last live-format program, Playhouse 90, whose final teleplay was Serling’s, demarcates the end of television’s so-called Golden Age. But in the guise of its otherworldly, often campy scenarios, Serling carried over his approaches to live television into what might otherwise have been reduced to more “wasteland” schlock. In addition to his relentless social consciousness, such approaches include his emphasis on character development and dramatic situations, traceable to his most successful teleplay, “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” also airing on Playhouse 90, in October of 1956. The Twilight Zone, along with shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, would attempt as much as possible to preserve the “Golden Age” standard of quality amidst the rising pressures of cost minimization, since live programs

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were not as cost-effective as pre-filmed ones. And, at the same time, these programs sought to preserve mass-market appeal. Nevertheless, as it did with Playhouse 90 in 1960, CBS would also eventually cancel The Twilight Zone, in 1964, after a five-season run. After his Western series The Loner ran for less than a season from 1965 to 1966, Serling returned to the supernatural in 1970, in the form of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, a series more oriented around horror and the occult. Unfortunately, CBS ripped this latter program from Serling’s creative control, and so merely his on-screen presence as its host, as well as the mysterious ambiance of the earlier anthology series, remained in Serling’s visionary wake. All told, the succession of Serling’s major television entries, from Playhouse 90 to The Twilight Zone to Night Gallery, implies a larger cultural trajectory of popular audience tastes from “high” to a mixture of “high” and “low” to just plain “low.” It is within The Twilight Zone’s intermediary moment that irony thrives—where even such campy science fiction trappings as robots, Martians, and flying saucers are encoded or, better yet, potentiated with virulent social critique. Too often reduced to science fiction, this complex television series contributes to a vast cultural tradition of narrative irony, especially within the modernist sensibility exploding in the media of the postwar era. A DEARTH OF TWILIGHT ZONE STUDIES Beyond my long-held passion for this particular television series, my most immediate incentive for pursuing this study is the unfortunate lack of responsible academic treatments of the subject. When I produced a paper of similar intentions during my doctoral years, there were very few book-length resources available. Even up to this point, the most commonly cited is Marc Scott Zicree’s 1989 guide, The Twilight Zone Companion. Indeed, this enduring reference book provides a laudable degree of production trivia within its succinct coverage of each episode. However, if it is ultimately to be deemed a “companion,” then Serling’s classic television series requires no enemies. That is, a guidebook intended for fans of the show, if nothing more, oughtn’t lean so apparently toward the condemnatory as Zicree’s treatment does. For example, in wrapping up his account of a first-season episode, he declares: But then perhaps a major part of the trouble resides in the fact that the story isn’t much of a fantasy. If you assume that the child is a hallucination on Helen’s part, manufactured by her subconscious in an attempt to bring her to a realization about the identity of the killer, then the episode isn’t fantasy at all. Like “Where Is Everybody?” “Nightmare as a Child” is totally rational. And for The Twilight Zone, anything that remains so grounded in reality must be considered a disappointment. 2

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I, for one, disagree. And, as a regular viewer, I never found myself at odds with this particular episode for such a reason. Fantasy or hallucination, the female protagonist’s nervous encounter with this strangely omniscient child is compelling enough. In our own fin-de-siècle, in fact, it has become noticeably common, perhaps even cliché, for films to depict lifelike characters turning out to be otherwise, in a list that includes The Sixth Sense (1999), Fight Club (1999), The Others (2001), Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), Shutter Island (2010), and Gravity (2013). It matters less how these films ultimately justify their characters’ transformation into nonentities. Instead, audiences take gratification from having the perceived presence of these characters revoked. After all, our greater experience of narrative culture cultivates a presumption that depicted characters are to be considered actual, that is, until any given plot thwarts our expectations with a surprise twist. Even more “grounded in reality” is Serling’s fifth-season episode, “The Jeopardy Room,” wherein a Soviet assassin (John van Dreelen) falls prey to his own booby trap when his accomplice (Robert Kelljan) unthinkingly answers the telephone the former had rigged to explode. Once again, Zicree confirms there is no element of fantasy, though he admits the episode is nonetheless “fascinating.” 3 In this case, at least, the series would seem even willing to discard the supernatural for the sake of a still-ironic turn of events. Suffice it to say, Zicree is keen to pinpoint so many flaws in the writing, direction, casting, factual details, and overall plausibility across The Twilight Zone’s five-year repertoire, but his so-called companion index becomes an unfortunate forum in which to do this. A similar index of production information and attendant critiques is Don Presnell and Marty McGee’s A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964. This 1998 offering uses a template similar to Zicree’s, though it dispenses with his transcription of Rod Serling’s voice-over prologues and epilogues, as well as stills from the show. Moreover, it becomes readily apparent that these authors seized an opportunity to update and improve a ten-year-old reference guide. In their preface, they acknowledge the importance of Zicree’s Companion but also expose its flaws, noting that his episode airdates are sometimes “erroneous” and that his critical discussion is often “either negligible or entirely absent.” 4 To address their latter point, I concur that Zicree often eschews offering his own criticism, allowing the responsible parties to do the dirty work for him instead. For example, his guide claims, “Richard Matheson’s story is an interesting one, but somehow ‘Young Man’s Fancy’ never really hits the mark. ‘The ending, I hated,’ says Matheson. ‘It was the way I wrote it.’” 5 So, by quoting Matheson’s objection to his own teleplay, Zicree conveniently assumes a vague stance. In any case, these issues were easy enough to amend in the latter index. The results provide an accurate continuity of original airdates, followed by production credits, a synopsis, and two or three paragraphs of critique with supportive

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production details for each episode. The commentaries tend to be more comparative than Zicree’s Companion, making constant reference to other episodes, and often grouping them according to theme and genre. And even if these authors are no less judgmental in drawing attention to so many plot flaws and other weaknesses, they counterbalance their criticism with praise more consistently than Zicree manages to do. In their own critique of the same Twilight Zone episode, for example, they conclude, “Serling’s ‘Nightmare as a Child’ is a really good premise diminished by a couple of plot holes and a hasty resolution. Also, it is difficult to sympathize with such grim and brooding characters as Helen and her younger self (Markie).” 6 And then they also point to this entry’s atypical lack of a fantasy element, and productively list all such cases in the series. However, they do not denigrate the episode accordingly, as Zicree does. Again, I find myself having a different impression of the series and am less apt to find fault with particular episodes. Of course, some are better than others, and for reasons worth considering. If I were to endeavor such an index, then, I might simply offer “strengths” and “weaknesses” headings in my commentary to make the guide more systematic—and balanced. Other reference guides have emerged since Presnell and McGee’s, namely Bill DeVoe’s Trivia from The Twilight Zone (2004), Martin Grams Jr.’s The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (2008), and another companion of sorts, called simply The Twilight Zone, by John Blake, evidently slipping along with this 2012 book into the Zone itself, if either ever existed at all. All told, DeVoe’s and Grams’ efforts represent opposite poles in the spectrum of fan-oriented guides now available, with the earlier two guides falling somewhere in between. That is, DeVoe’s caters to pleasure-seeking devotees by offering word search puzzles, photo quizzes, match games, chaser quizzes, and a jumbo crossword puzzle, while Grams’ could be described as a “phone book” of production information for those determined to scrutinize the minutiae of each and every episode’s history. Including a foreword by George Clayton Johnson, much of the latter’s exhaustive research is thought-provoking, such as when Grams identifies the few examples of adult, rather than merely juvenile, science fiction on television prior to The Twilight Zone. Among these, for example, is the 1953 teleplay “The Outer Limit” for Robert Montgomery Presents, a Cold War parable of flyingsaucer intervention, based on a 1949 short story by Graham Doar appearing originally in the Saturday Evening Post. But where Grams’ factoids and production notes extend far beyond those of either Zicree’s or Presnell and McGee’s guides, no critical analyses are offered whatsoever. Rather, this hearty volume compiles only straightforward, objective information—and a lot of it. For researchers of the series, at least, this most recent in the pattern of one-upmanship with these companions stakes a worthy claim, though it lacks all the personality of Zicree’s, for

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example, with its articulate intolerance. (Also, Grams’ unwieldy tome opts for separate indexes, sandwiching its title index between a final appendix and its regular index. Though well-intended, this entails an inefficient experience for a ready researcher such as I, being compelled to dig in with my thumbnail and hope I’ve landed in this precise range of pages, rather than simply flipping open the usual rear index and locating the episode.) Suffice it to say, because none of these three reference guides decisively negates the other two, I conclude they are all indispensably fun and useful for fans and researchers alike. (But, again, you may find yourself storing the most recent of these with your yellow pages, unabridged dictionaries, or old encyclopedias.) The first book-length study dedicated to The Twilight Zone, and not attempting to function as a quick-reference guide, is Peter Wolfe’s In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling (1997). Unfortunately meandering between common themes, iconography, and stylistics, its presentation is simultaneously too dense and too scattered to be useful. Wolfe’s efforts are not lacking in insight here, only a clear sense of organization. Even his chapter titles contribute to the book’s opaqueness, with such examples as “Ghosts Who Laugh,” “Slippages and Constancies,” and “Under the Spotlights”— poeticism that would be more acceptable if Wolfe clarified the chapters’ focus at the outset, which rarely happens. Even when Wolfe does identify an important thematic element, he rapidly wanders on to something else, as a cursory examination of “Slippages and Constancies” illustrates. The last sentence of the chapter’s first paragraph reads: “While suggesting that accepted guidelines block us from participating in a larger, more generous reality, the series also warns us that, inhibiting though they may be, these same guidelines prepare us to cope with the reality that suits us best.” 7 In other words, by way of projecting human struggles within imagined realities, The Twilight Zone sets out to prove that our common experience dictates the parameters of the reality we are ultimately equipped to live in. But such a theme is vague enough to apply broadly across episodes, making the examples he isolates to this chapter seem arbitrary. His chapters’ roman numeral subdivisions (I, II, and III) also lack cohesion, with their respective initial focus being “fear,” “self-importance,” and “regret” as universal conditions. And the last of these is my own attempt to glean a theme from what reads as an immediate plunge into episodes involving time travel as an attempt to correct the past, a recurrent Twilight Zone premise Wolfe covers earlier in the book. Ultimately, the study resists the pursuit of a central purpose beyond merely extolling the virtues of the program. Albeit haphazardly, In the Zone at least explains why fans love the show so much. A more productive study, although covering a broader subject than the series itself, is Gordon F. Sander’s Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man (1992). This is a well-researched biographical account, particularly helpful toward understanding Rod Serling’s personal leg-

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acy of social consciousness and critique. The book proceeds attentively through the “chapters” of Serling’s life, including his youth in Binghamton, New York; the influence of Norman Corwin on 1930s radio; Serling’s harrowing experiences in World War II; his development as a scriptwriter for early television theater; his rise to Golden Age fame with “Patterns” on Kraft Television Theatre and then “Requiem for a Heavyweight” on Playhouse 90; his climactic Twilight Zone years, and their aftermath with his brief forays into feature-film screenwriting; his short-lived Western series The Loner; and, eventually, Night Gallery. Sander’s book also notes the formulaic structure of The Twilight Zone, which, in turn, encourages my own purpose, to correlate the series’ strategic use of irony to Serling’s persistent social consciousness. In his account of the “acme” of Serling’s career, Sander affirms, “By now, The Twilight Zone format was fairly simple. As Richard Matheson described it, ‘The ideal Twilight Zone started with a really smashing idea that hit you right in the first few seconds, then you played that out, and you had a little flip at the end: that was the structure.’” 8 So, as I suggest earlier, the show’s additional writers were quick to recognize Serling’s repeated use of irony. And although Sander would imply otherwise when saying “by now” in reference to the series’ second season, this strategy was established from the get-go, especially with Serling’s proto–Twilight Zone episode “The Time Element.” Airing on Desilu Playhouse in November of 1958, the narrative depicts a protagonist having dreams of going back in time to warn Honolulu of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—only to be killed in the attack himself. In any case, I rely on Sander’s study, since it serves to strengthen arguments for a fundamental connection between irony and social critique. Two more recent academic studies are worth noting. One is Noel Carroll and Lester H. Hunt’s collection of essays entitled Philosophy in “The Twilight Zone” (2009), and the other is Leslie Dale Feldman’s Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (2010). The former suffers from what is inherent to academic collections striving after the cohesiveness of a single-authored study. The editors attempt to create a semblance of cohesion among a number of scholars typically having idiosyncratic perspectives, according to his/her academic experience and personal insight. And, ideally, such cohesiveness makes available a larger understanding. Lester H. Hunt announces such a purpose in the volume’s introduction: The series required a generation of viewers to revise the expectations that guided them in interpreting and appreciating narratives, and challenged them to think about fundamental issues. This book is for people who want to take up this challenge and reflect on these revised expectations. One’s thinking on any issue is apt to be most effective if done together with a companion who can help one to identify and clarify issues. It can also help, though of course in a different way, if they take provocative positions on the issues involved, posi-

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tions to which one might be inspired to respond. The essays in this volume are meant to provide such help and stimulus. 9

In this case, then, the companion is actually a book made up of several companions, each in its own way seeking to elucidate ways in which The Twilight Zone frustrates viewers’ expectations. But, as the collection’s title implies, such a unilateral purpose is pursued within the rather broad parameters of “philosophy.” In these circumstances, the attendant risk becomes an obfuscation of what such a book’s reader should come away with. This problem is also apparent in the way the editors organize these essays. They are divided into three categories: 1) essays focusing on one or two episodes; 2) essays on the series as a whole; and 3) essays on “aesthetic issues raised by distinctive features of the series, such as issues about genres, or about modernist narrational strategies.” 10 Here, the second and third categories would not, at first, appear mutually exclusive. Or, if they are mutually exclusive, it isn’t clear how. In other words, the volume’s editors rightfully attempt a logical framework for this aggregation of essays, but their categories lack integrity. The first two are merely logistical, while the third is more conceptual and abstract. And so, somewhat ironically, the best of intentions as stated suggests an opposite outcome for the reader greeting these essays as a coherent study of The Twilight Zone. On the other hand, a researcher seeking specific analyses may land upon something useful in Carroll and Hunt’s collection, upon deeper investigation. Such is the case for my own purposes, in particular with Carl Plantinga’s essay “Frame Shifters: Surprise Endings and Spectator Imagination in The Twilight Zone.” Here, the author is principally concerned, as I am, with the show’s ironic twist endings. He arrives at his discussion pragmatically, through a general categorization of narrative conclusions, including “closed,” “open,” and finally “surprise” endings, of which “frame shifter” is a specific type. 11 Closed endings, typically associated with the classical Hollywood paradigm, provide the viewer with a feeling of satisfaction or closure, at least in terms of plot. This applies to both “happy” and “sad” endings, of course. An open ending, on the other hand, refuses to provide a sense of closure, and so leaves the audience wondering what final action or event should happen based on the implications of the plot, up to that point. And then there are twist endings, which Plantinga further subdivides according to the nature of the narrative surprise. He distinguishes, for example, between characters surprised by a turn of events, viewers surprised by a turn of events, and both surprised together. Then he differentiates between characters/viewers having sudden “prospects” and characters/viewers acquiring sudden “understanding,” hence between logistical and psychological dimensions. And then he switches to audience response again, by contrasting “resolutions of ambiguity” with entirely “altered frames of reference” in Twilight Zone plots. 12

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Subsequently, Plantinga implies a more thematic level of interpretation, by delineating the difference between optimistic and pessimistic surprise outcomes. He finally arrives at his term “frame shifters,” which, he claims, is a specific combination of his previous distinctions. 13 In clarifying this combination, however, his previous efforts to categorize the precise nature of narrative surprises would seem less relevant, since the term really only applies to a particular kind of audience response. Any character’s degree of surprise, in other words, may or may not contribute to the viewer’s. Plantinga might have focused simply on identifying means by which the audience is surprised in the first place, in terms of both plot and theme. For my purposes, Plantinga’s term “frame shifters,” however circuitously he arrives at it, serves well to confirm the correlation between irony and social consciousness. He describes the requisite conditions for twist endings as follows: Many episodes of The Twilight Zone have endings with a particular combination of the elements listed above; they feature spectator surprise (as opposed to character surprise), surprises of understanding (rather than surprises of prospects exclusively), and lead to a rapid and decisive shift in an epistemic frame of reference. These episodes are also deflating rather than elevating. 14

Then, Plantinga lists several episodes but suggests there are certainly more. Ultimately, he makes the following conclusion about this type of surprise ending in the series: To summarize, both the affective responses and mental activities elicited by Frame Shifters are designed to prompt critical thinking in the spectator. The jarring nature of the framework shift generates an emotional response of surprise that initiates further cognitive activity because it is intended to foster curiosity and fascination in its wake. If it works, it also causes a kind of cognitive dissonance in the spectator whereby previous epistemic frameworks must be discarded for new ones generated by the text. This is an exercise in perspective-taking that is beneficial in its own right, since it might legitimately be thought of as a useful mental exercise of the imagination, and since it clearly implies that the accepted moral or ideological frameworks of a given culture are relative and quite possibly seriously flawed. 15

The bottom line for Plantinga, then, is that this particular type of surprise ending is worth distinguishing from others because it, alone, is capable of provoking a critical response in the viewer. I think he is being too exclusive, however. I prefer to argue that a more general presence of irony in any given episode signifies an attempt, especially in the larger pattern of the series, at communicating social critique. His findings also suggest an episode’s ending must be downbeat in order for the surprise to establish a sense of “dissonance” in the viewer’s mind. And this dissonance, in turn, compels the view-

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er to acknowledge flawed social conditions, according to alternatives imagined or implied in the context of the narrative. Such an assertion would certainly correspond to most social consciousness films, with their characteristically tragic endings, but this is still inconclusive. I am more inclined to emphasize the nature of an ironic twist for its own sake, rather than deciding its ability to prompt social critique is so contingent upon specific conditions. Otherwise, so many Twilight Zone episodes could hardly qualify as more than lowbrow entertainment. Nevertheless, Plantinga makes an important contribution toward understanding the larger cultural connection between irony and social critique. Feldman’s Spaceships and Politics uses a strategy somewhat akin to my own, at least in the spirit of an encompassing categorical approach to the series. Hers, however, is narrowly self-serving in terms of her specific expertise in the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Specifically, she sees Serling as having a “Hobbesian dark side to his personality,” according to the key aspects of “fear,” “greed,” and “glory” within Hobbes’ political philosophy. 16 These are certainly recognizable themes in The Twilight Zone, though certainly not the only ones. I see fundamental problems with this premise for a book-length study. For one, interpreting Rod Serling’s world view solely within parameters of political philosophy seems limiting. Certainly Serling’s liberalism is well documented, and certainly some Twilight Zone episodes deal directly with politics, such as “The Obsolete Man,” “The Mirror,” and “He’s Alive.” But so many more do not, that is, unless we are to decide the human condition is inherently political, and, even if that’s true, I’m not sure political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were setting out to prove this alone. Rather, they embarked from such a premise to further probe the individual’s relationship to a given state and its systems of governance, and I think even Feldman is aware of this. Nevertheless, she claims: Rod Serling said humanity was his business. He was a writer using science fiction, The Twilight Zone, to show human nature and political themes such as fascism, the individual v. the state, war, justice, and prejudice. Though many of the shows include violence and humans at war, some shows include the theme of magic and generosity. 17

Beyond reducing the generically complex series to straightforward science fiction, Feldman’s approach, again, overextends the category of “politics” to equate it with “humanity,” as Serling’s target for critique. The second fundamental problem here is simply that, on the whole, she equates “Rod Serling” the man with “Twilight Zone” the show, even if she acknowledges other writers at points. This is a pivotal point from which I diverge with my own approach, which is to consider the series moreover as a cultural artifact,

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rather than a manifestation of one auteur’s vision. Accordingly, I deem it more fruitful to explore the specific cultural conditions informing Serling’s, as well as Beaumont’s, Matheson’s, and various other contributors’, dispositions—political, philosophical, and otherwise steeped in irony. The closest to a proper book-length cultural study of the show, if its attention to The Twilight Zone weren’t confined to one section, would be M. Keith Booker’s Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files (2002). Unlike the aforementioned offerings, Booker’s clearly situates the series within the larger history of American television, particularly as a reflection of postwar culture. Furthermore, he maintains an overarching framework in his analysis by way of modern and postmodern theory, both anticipating and affirming post–World War II cultural transformations. The following passage corresponds to the previous section’s central point: In some ways, the series was rather formulaic: each episode begins by setting up an extraordinary situation, usually involving science fiction or supernatural motifs; the middle part of each episode dramatizes and elaborates on this situation; each episode then ends with a surprising (and, presumably, thoughtprovoking) twist that makes the situation even more interesting than it had originally appeared to be. Indeed, the situations and ideas explored in the series were interesting enough that the formulaic structure did very little to diminish the popular (and critical) perception of the show’s creativity and brilliance, especially because the unusual, fantastic, and far-fetched scenarios put forth in the various episodes always retained a clear sense of relevance to contemporary reality, their strangeness merely serving as a defamiliarizing device that helped to provide insights into and perspectives on a number of the concerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s. 18

Although Booker corroborates a fundamental relationship between episodes’ narrative structure and the series’ unrelenting social consciousness, I think his specific paradigm is less applicable. Even with Serling’s first few episodes, for example, Booker’s three-act structure doesn’t quite hold up. It applies perfectly to the premiere episode, “Where Is Everybody?” where the first act places a male protagonist (Earl Holliman) in an unpeopled town; the second act depicts his search for understanding; and then, at last, the third act reveals the larger context of his having merely hallucinated the entire predicament. The second episode, “One for the Angels,” is the same: a pitchman (Ed Wynn) encounters a personification of Death (Murray Hamilton); he negotiates a bargain with the latter; and, surprisingly, he is able to distract Death from the latter’s intentions in order to save a little girl. The third episode, “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” also establishes a metaphysical premise, when peddler Henry J. Fate (Malcolm Atterbury) makes a gun materialize right beside the ailing drunkard (Dan Duryea), on the ground on the

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frontier town’s main street—and the second and third acts proceed accordingly. However, the fourth episode, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” establishes no such far-fetched scenario beyond the context of a typical drama: an aging, has-been film actress (Ida Lupino) confines herself to her living room in order to project examples from the prime of her career. This first act captures the viewer’s interest through the character’s slightly eccentric obsession with the past, but nothing metaphysical occurs until the episode’s twist ending, when her agent (Martin Balsam) confirms, by restarting her projector, that she has somehow managed to reenter her former celluloid universe as her present self, and yet among all her former costars in their original roles. Appearing only a couple of episodes later in the first season, the famous “Time Enough At Last” establishes merely a bank clerk’s obsessive reading habits in the first act. The unusual scenario only commences in the second act, with a nuclear holocaust, and one of the most tragically ironic twists comes in the third. So there are exceptions to Booker’s would-be formula for the series. While it is important to recognize The Twilight Zone as formulaic per se, I resist assigning such a particularly rigid formula to the series, notwithstanding its conventional use of a three-act narrative structure. Rather, I point to the merely formulaic presence of irony in Twilight Zone episodes, even when it is established without the use of a formulaic surprise twist ending. “Walking Distance,” only the fifth episode in the series, is such a case. Booker’s formula applies, at least with the first two acts: in the first act, a middle-aged businessman (Gig Young), returning to the hometown of his childhood, finds himself transported back into the gentler lifestyle he longs for; in the second act, he attempts to communicate with his boyhood self (Michael Montgomery) and his parents there. But the third act serves, instead, to bring his timetraveling experience to its thematic resolution: he is returned to his own time, but only after his boyhood father (Frank Overton) helps him realize he mustn’t be nostalgic to the point of forgetting how to embrace the present. The only twist, though perhaps not so surprising, is that he retains a limp from the physical injury he suffered as a boy when his adult self pursued him so desperately. The irony here is contained within the oft-considered quandary of time travel and one’s ability or inability to change history. In this episode, we are given the impression that the protagonist really can’t interfere with the physical past, though he may try. He would seem more of a ghostlike intruder—visible but unwelcome—whose visit is ultimately fleeting. And yet, ironically, he does manage to alter history, albeit superficially, by causing his boyhood self to fall off a merry-go-round while trying to evade his grown-up pursuer. This seemingly trite plot detail would seem almost tacked on, but is just enough to inspire deeper consideration. It is precisely this ex post facto intellectual activity The Twilight Zone’s narrative irony intends for the viewer, as a means toward arriving potentially, at least,

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at an acknowledgment of an implicit social critique at stake. Here, for example, is contained an attack on capitalism and the rise to prominence of the corporate executive as the definitive American middle-class career path in the postwar era. Serling had already produced a more explicit indictment of corporate culture in his teleplay “Patterns,” to which I return later. Booker also recognizes the larger significance of irony in The Twilight Zone, though not quite as its most fundamental means toward mobilizing social critique. In reference to the science fiction episodes “The Little People” and “The Invaders,” both containing ironic reversals of physical size as an indication of dominance, he claims: Such reversals, suggesting the relativism of all perspectives, provide key instances of the way in which The Twilight Zone serves as an important marker of the postmodern turn taken by American culture, and particularly American science fiction, in the long 1950s. In fact, The Twilight Zone, despite its lingering love of the Western literary tradition and its modernist aspiration to the condition of High Art, contains some of the clearest signs of the beginnings of postmodernism in the long 1950s, especially in its persistent self-conscious irony and its incessant interrogation of conventional boundaries, such as those between Self and Other and between Reality and Fiction. 19

Here, Booker suggests The Twilight Zone’s strategic presence of irony represents a pivotal point between modernism and postmodernism. At least in this passage, “modernism” is associated with a traditionally serious literary mode, striving for social consciousness and ways to improve the world. And then irony, specifically in terms of The Twilight Zone’s surprise twists, is to be associated with “postmodernism” and a self-conscious break with the former agenda. In even more reductive terms, which Booker cites according to Brian McCale’s distinction between modernist epistemological and postmodernist ontological contexts, this cultural turn can be characterized as a former pursuit of truth resigning itself to a sense of futility. But I don’t see The Twilight Zone’s formulaic irony so conclusively as a break with Serling’s former Golden Age agenda for social consciousness. And even Booker’s previous passage would suggest irony is both a “defamiliarizing” and “thought-provoking” means toward social critique. It is almost to prove here that irony only serves, rather, to undermine social critique. Such is the opposite conclusion of my purposes, and so encourages a deeper inquiry. For one, there could be confusion in the specific nature of the irony Booker refers to. Earlier in his study, he points to The Twilight Zone’s incorporation of irony as “ludic” and declares such comic episodes as “among the weakest.” 20 But this is not the same type of irony identified with respect to the “reversals” described above. “Ludic” irony here refers to the overall tone of certain episodes behaving playfully with otherwise serious situations. A more precise case of such irony is typically referred to as “black comedy,”

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wherein disturbing subjects like murder or death, in general, are made to look silly or otherwise amusing. Such a case is the second-season episode “A Most Unusual Camera,” wherein an antique camera anticipates the immediate future, and, ultimately, the successive deaths of the characters exploiting it for their moneymaking schemes. For example, after realizing his own body is among the bodies in the camera’s final photo, a French hotel attendant (Marcel Hillaire) implausibly trips out the hotel room window himself. Although both Zicree’s and Presnell and McGee’s guides are quick to point out the absurdity of this finale, the generally light and satirical tone of the episode validates any such breach of verisimilitude. Rather, it is just this sort of ridiculous ending that befits a black comedy. (And, really, how would a person trip out of a high window in any realistic context, unless they were shoved?) As it turns out, ample playfulness can be found even in the darkest Twilight Zone episodes. “Time Enough At Last,” often remembered for the bitterly ironic final moment when the bookworm protagonist (Burgess Meredith) accidentally breaks his glasses, includes many comedic moments, such as when he slips, calling his customer (Lela Bliss) “Mrs. Murdstone,” or when he pauses to pick up a magazine just after his employer (Vaughn Taylor) finishes berating him. The other form of irony, as I have said, is simply that of the plot, when characters or situations turn out to be the opposite of what the audience expects, as in the tragic case of this protagonist. It is arguable both kinds of irony serve to amplify social critique. If so, then Booker’s signifying moment for postmodernism may warrant further consideration. None of these books, as such, pinpoint irony as the sole overarching principle of The Twilight Zone. Booker’s chapter on the show, however, comes the closest when he cites Mikhail Bakhtin’s application of the classical genre Menippean satire to his discussions of Dostoevsky and the modern novel. In this allegorical mode, realism is deliberately suspended in order to expose larger moral flaws in a given society. Accordingly, exaggerated personas, such as those described by the third-century Athenian Theophrastus in his Characters, are made to inhabit a universe not beholden to natural laws. Booker explains, “For Bakhtin, Menippean satire is an especially carnivalesque genre and thus includes all of the characteristics that he typically associates with the carnival, including a fundamental ambivalence, an irreverent attitude of rule-breaking and boundary-crossing, and a tendency to reverse or ignore typically observed hierarchies.” 21 And Booker rightfully affirms that such a category applies rather well to The Twilight Zone. Henry Bemis, for example, in his overstated bookishness, becomes the ideal target for the ironic deprivation of his reading glasses in “Time Enough At Last.” Another example is Walter Bedeker (David Wayne) from the episode “Escape Clause,” whose mythic degree of self-importance makes him fodder for the Devil’s ironic offer of immortality, eventually forfeited. Managed

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through fantastical circumstances, the ironic twist becomes all the more impacting when a caricature, rather than a believable character, is somehow thwarted in his obsessive raison d’être. But when Twilight Zone episodes are behaving ironically per se, they are not always functioning as satires, even if they are nonetheless directed at a societal issue. Many are quite decidedly sober and humorless, such as “The Eye of the Beholder,” famous for its surprise reversal of a supposedly disfigured woman (Maxine Stuart) turning out to be beautiful (Donna Douglas), especially when juxtaposed with the grotesque faces of the medical staff. Still, Booker could easily counter that the “ugly” society here should accurately be described as “carnivalesque,” even if no humor is attached. And then I would mention the episode “The Long Morrow,” as stern in tone as the former, where a long-distance astronaut (Robert Lansing) disconnects himself from the same cryogenic technology preserving his lover’s youth to surprise him upon his return. Instead of anything ostensibly carnivalesque here, only a bit of science fiction allows for a tragically ironic outcome. However limited these publications are in their attention to irony, they still demonstrate a potential to inform and substantiate my own arguments, and so serve as productive references, along with various articles appearing over the years about the show. Embarking from what has already been said about The Twilight Zone, then, my purpose is to explore the presence of narrative irony in the series and its specific correlation to social critique, within the larger context of American postwar culture. I strive to incorporate concurrent television shows also symptomatic of the times, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in addition to science fiction films and literature, and any other popular media behaving somehow ironically—in order to identify social problems and injustices. And toward comprehending the fundamental connection between irony and social critique, I attempt to trace cultural trajectories of irony in philosophy and the humanities as far back as classical Greek society in occidental thought and expression. To be absolutely transparent to any reader seeking (or wanting to rule out) other possibilities here, this is not a reference guide or a Twilight Zone fans’ companion offering systematic and succinct coverage of every episode. Nor is it a biographical treatment of Rod Serling as the unquestioned auteur of the series. Lastly, it is not merely a collection of academic essays assembled precariously according to unproductively broad categories or contexts. At the same time, it is unabashedly academic, appropriately single-authored, and intended for readers having a reasonable familiarity with the program. Accordingly, I engage with what has already been published in all of the above permutations as well as in articles about the show, toward substantiating an overarching argument about The Twilight Zone and postwar American culture as a whole. But I do not always provide plot summaries for episodes I cite. This introduction and the subsequent chapter are less an overview of what is to come than a foundation

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both theoretical and contextual. In other words, I spend relatively little time providing summaries for the forthcoming chapters. My table of contents, eschewing any poeticism, should do well to delineate the categorical approach I am taking here. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Minow, “Television and Public Interest,” 1961. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 116. Ibid., 412. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History, 3. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 232. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History, 62. Wolfe, In the Zone, 125. Sander, Serling, 165. Carroll and Hunt, eds., Philosophy, 2. Ibid., 2. Plantinga, “Frame Shifters,” 41–44. Ibid., 45–47. Ibid., 47–55. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 54. Feldman, Spaceships and Politics, 2. Ibid., 132. Booker, Strange TV, 53. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 53.

Chapter One

Twilight Zone Harbingers

It is understandable that The Twilight Zone is so commonly categorized as science fiction, based on tendencies of its content. But the more familiar a viewer becomes with the series, the more apparent it is that such a classification is misleading, in terms of both plot and thematic intention. Stated simply, its episodes are not always oriented around fictionalized science and technology. Nor do they always contain attendant warnings about where sundry scientific progresses may lead. By the same token, it is hardly difficult to understand why the show is so often associated with the vision of Rod Serling in particular. After all, he did write (or adapt) 92 of its 156 episodes, including its first eight entries (not forgetting his would-be pilot “The Time Element”), which served to establish the narrative parameters of the show, in terms of both eclecticism and irony. And his auteur association with the show was substantiated by his audio prologues and epilogues, as well as his alternately visual presence for both. (Even in the first season when he was not yet appearing in episodes, he would appear briefly afterward to describe the following week’s episode.) Nevertheless, it is more productive to contextualize both Rod and “his” show within the larger cultural conditions of American society during the postwar era. The source material for the show was not always Serling’s, and a handful of other writers coming from similar sensibilities would embrace the task of working within Twilight Zone parameters, ultimately to the effect of maintaining the show’s consistency. Not only was outside source material by popular science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury relevant to these parameters, but so was a more generalized span of literature and cinema of the time. In other words, even if there hadn’t been any previous television program quite like The Twilight Zone, its references to influences both literary and cinematic abound. And rather than referring to such elements as actual references, it might be more accurate to call them 1

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cultural “confluences” between artistic works. A good example is the fifthseason episode “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which was purchased as a previously made and award-winning film project from 1962, based on Ambrose Bierce’s nineteenth-century short story. Its abrupt twist ending made the film appear (after trimming some length) as if it had been produced under the auspices of the series’ own conditions and agenda. Implicit in this case is a concurrent presence of narrative irony not only in other media, but also across different eras. I think it is important to consider the cultural implications of both. At the same time, Serling’s own work prior to the arrival of The Twilight Zone should be considered, especially where narrative irony aligns with social critique. There is little question as to Serling’s agenda for social consciousness, just as the title of Gordon F. Sander’s biography would imply in its designation of him as “Television’s Last Angry Man.” However, the strategic use of irony in mobilizing Serling’s “angry” social commentary may be less apparent. First comes the question as to how Serling became an “angry man.” Sander explains: A child of the 1930s, when social concerns and realist aesthetics dominated the arts, Serling was an early devotee of Norman Corwin and the other angry young men who populated the airwaves during the Roosevelt era. Like Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Orson Welles, as well as Clifford Odets and the agitators of the legitimate stage of that era, Serling fervently believed that the theater of the air, like the other literary arts, in addition to being entertaining, should be both relevant and provocative. Serling saw the dramatist’s role in American society as that of an agent of change and a spark to controversy. Or, as he put it in a speech to the Library of Congress in 1968: “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of the time.” With television, Serling was able to fulfill the writer’s role as he defined it. 1

Serling’s formative years were spent across the Great Depression and World War II, both periods of relative discomfort and struggle, and, essentially, the antithesis of the suburban complacence of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Here, the outspoken writers of his youth, especially as radio voices, were more liable to make a lasting impression on his young mind. For example, the “golden boy of radio,” Norman Corwin, set a precedent with his CBS show Norman Corwin’s Words without Music, the first program to overtly associate its writer with its content. In radio plays such as “They Fly through the Air with the Greatest of Ease,” intended as an indictment of the Spanish Civil War’s Guernica bombings, Corwin, along with many of his peers, used entertainment to address social issues. Sander affirms, “Serling’s mordant Twilight Zone lead-ins, his love for the common man, the parablelike quality

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of much of his later writing, the sophisticated sound effects, the occasionally purple prose, the cautiously optimistic world view—all these aspects of Serling’s work have their antecedents in the works of Corwin.” 2 But Sander also cites a crucial difference between Corwin and Serling, in that Corwin avoided controversy whereas Serling coveted it. In terms of provoking controversy, Orson Welles, of course, would also set a precedent for Serling and The Twilight Zone with his infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast on October 30, 1938. Accounts of that evening’s events in the CBS studio testify that even after Welles was urged to break off his narration according to reports of panic-stricken listeners, he persisted. He denied this at subsequent Federal Communications Commission hearings, protesting his ignorance of the deleterious effect his broadcast was having on radio audiences across the country. Regardless of the facts surrounding the incident, it revealed the potential for science fiction, in particular, to speak to national fears, even to the point of being taken for reality. The source material, H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, was hardly contemporary or otherwise intended to comment on American culture in the postwar era. Nevertheless, its incorporation of wider fin-de-siècle fears of an apocalypse had an even more palpable application within the context of the Cold War. The narrative became more acutely allegorical in the moment of Welles’ broadcast, in that these space invaders could just as easily have arrived from the Soviet Union. Beyond a science fiction template for inciting fear and controversy, Welles’ historical moment, however premeditated as such, introduced a powerful sense of irony. Radio listeners interpreted something fictional, even farfetched, as something real. Because the general scenario of a comprehensive, organized invasion had an immediate cultural relevance, popular audiences responded to it with due consideration. While it may not have provoked any deeper attention to Soviet politics, Welles’ broadcast at least held a mirror up to the collective consciousness of the American people—and to their paranoia. And this irony of projecting all forms of malevolence on outsiders would become thematic for The Twilight Zone. Serling himself may not have intended to pay homage to Welles, but several of the episodes he penned narrativize the misunderstanding arising from collective paranoia. I address such episodes in a later chapter. Within general conditions of Depression-era America, the specific circumstances of Serling’s identity, upbringing, and early social experiences also shaped his eventual disposition toward controversy. Sander’s biography covers these circumstances thoroughly. He points out how Serling’s physicality or, rather, his shortness prevented him from taking part in varsity sports, and so instilled an obsessive desire to overcompensate in other ways, namely in cultivating his intellectual talents. Sander emphasizes the influence of Serling’s parents, attributing Rod’s penchant for oration to his father,

4

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and his overall intelligence to his mother. Also, his mother was decidedly liberal and encouraged her son toward social activism, which accounted for young Serling’s aggressive involvement in the school newspaper and a number of philanthropic school organizations. And Serling also experienced social intolerance as a young man, in being banned from a non-Jewish fraternity at one point, even though he identified less with Jewish traditions than would characterize him as such (and would eventually become Unitarian). All this to suggest Serling’s adult disposition as an “angry man” was both a matter of nature and of nurture. His compulsion to fight the good fight would eventually impel him to volunteer for military service, and, of course, his grueling combat experiences in the Pacific theater during World War II would further impact his already critical world view. In the immediate postwar years at Antioch College, his pursuit of a career in radio would seem predictable enough, even to the point of modeling himself after Norman Corwin, along with seeking any means to stir up Wellesian controversy in his own radio shows. But such was not to be for him, with the postwar decline of radio and concurrent rise of television by the end of the 1940s. By this time, as Sander confirms, radio had lost its provocative flavor, for example, with Corwin’s own passing into obscurity. At the same time, there was much anticipation for the new medium. A variety of talent converged upon it, especially coming from the theater arts, in order to reestablish the highbrow narrative standard radio once had. This was to be television’s so-called Golden Age. GOLDEN AGE TELEVISION It was the adoption of theater’s live format, in addition to its modernist tendency toward social critique, that made television “golden” during the 1950s. Although the first live dramatic anthology, Kraft Television Theatre, began six years earlier, it was Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” on Philco Television Playhouse in 1953 that launched a proliferation of what Sander calls “Broadway on the air.” In comparison to the spectacular Hollywood product of that time, “Marty” was closer to Italian neorealism and its most influential film, Bicycle Thieves (1948). This is a seemingly mundane scenario concerning everyday working-class people, or, in other words, a complete digression from the pattern of classical Hollywood in portraying heroic protagonists amid epic contexts. Furthermore, the eponymous protagonist of “Marty,” played by Rod Steiger, is a homely man attempting to court a homely woman (Nancy Marchand), characterizations atypical of Hollywood stars of the time. And, as Sander affirms, the new medium encouraged a previously unrealized sense of intimacy with the on-screen visual narrative, more akin to theater, but with the possibility for close-ups and varied perspectives. Hence, dramat-

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ic emotional exchanges between characters could be privileged over grand spectacle. So, really, this was theater, though intensified as such through multiple-camera technology. These conditions all serve a social consciousness agenda—and work toward making an ultimate comment about poverty or some other form of social injustice in a given society. Chayefsky later claimed he sought only to portray a simple love story, but there is much more at stake in “Marty” than the protagonist’s inability to find a wife. In an immediate context, the teleplay explores urban transformations within the traditional rural household. It reveals how the “old-world” European family remaining together in a large house, even after children become adults and get married, was becoming less practical to the younger, American-born generation than occupying a smaller apartment, even if it meant separating from parents. In this immediate context, Marty’s aunt (Augusta Ciolli) sees herself becoming obsolete when she is approached to move out of her son’s apartment, and, in turn, she convinces Marty’s mother (Esther Minciotti) she will have to endure the same fate. In a more universal context, the narrative explores the role reversals individuals attempt for selfish ends. First, Marty’s mother switches from encouraging her son’s search for a wife to scorning his new love interest, that is, once she anticipates it will jeopardize her own stability. Then, Marty’s best friend (Joe Mantell), who also encourages him initially, ultimately tries to dissuade him from his pursuit as soon as he realizes it may compromise their bachelor camaraderie. Finally, Marty himself swaps roles with his friend, mockingly telling him to find a wife before it’s too late. The point is not whether Serling himself noticed the function of narrative irony in this influential teleplay. More importantly, the irony contained within the pattern of social hypocrisy here anticipates The Twilight Zone’s narrative strategy for irony’s sake alone, as a wider cultural phenomenon. And here, at least, this ironic pattern announces the social critique rather overtly. Although “Marty” demonstrated the potential for television to be a legitimate, socially conscious art form, its subject matter was by no means controversial. It would be for subsequent productions, such as Reginald Rose’s 1954 Studio One teleplay “Twelve Angry Men,” to tackle more difficult issues. By way of citing television director Fielder Cook’s account of television’s “golden” era, Sander suggests creative freedom was essential to the vitality of its programs—and the ability to take on taboo subjects. 3 According to Cook, such freedoms could only exist because of the new medium’s lack of established conventions. It’s almost as if to imply any artistic medium’s “golden age” ensues at its inception and continues until its production conditions become systematized toward minimum cost and maximum profitability. In other words, creative freedom must inevitably be compromised for commercialization. This is true, but only as long as advertising is relied upon to finance production. And this, of course, differentiates network-era televi-

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sion from today’s premier cable network programs, since the latter are made possible by the consumers’ subscription fee rather than advertisements. This issue of creative freedom vis-à-vis corporate sponsors was especially fundamental to Serling’s own development within the rise of television. At first, his social consciousness might have seemed unfettered, but, soon enough, he would begin to feel restricted at every turn. The two most significant incidents of censorship were his teleplays “The Arena” and “Noon at Doomsday.” Though Serling intended the former as an intimate glimpse into the US Senate and its oft-unharmonious proceedings, the eventual production obliterated any reference to current political issues, instead portraying an oblique cacophony of individuals vaguely debating with each other. The latter production, originally based on the 1955 racist-driven murder of African American Emmett Till, was even more extreme in its alterations. The location was moved from the South to New England, and the victim was depicted as merely “foreign” rather than black. Serling was fearlessly outspoken in his frustration. According to Sander, the press responded as follows: In a 1957 Television Age article, “Billion Dollar Whipping Boy,” “Rod Serling,” the magazine opined, “considered by some as the top scripting talent uncovered and nurtured by television, lamented that commercial TV programs won’t buy a script which has ‘the faintest aura of controversy’ about it, and insisted that the writer is constantly ‘hamstrung’ by ‘taboos and imposed dogmas’ that emanate from the sponsor.” After noting Serling’s complaints about the treatment of “Noon on Doomsday,” the magazine declared: “Trade observers, balancing Mr. Serling’s complaint against the proposed reason for sponsor ‘pressure’ in this instance, cannot help wondering whether he would have felt the same about such ‘unreasonable’ pressure if, in addition to the script’s author, he was also one of U.S. Steel’s stockholders.” 4

The magazine could have put it more simply by stating, as if to his detriment, that Rod Serling’s first priority was evidently not the financial profitability of his work. Indeed it wasn’t, else he wouldn’t have made his sentiments so transparent. At the same time, he ultimately had to capitulate to his employers and to evolving standards of the television industry. That is, he would have to find an effective compromise between network parameters for attracting sponsors and maintaining the modernist agenda that propelled him as a storyteller. SERLING AS AUTEUR The nature of Serling’s apparent transition away from the Golden Age mode of television narrative, specifically in terms of its overt social consciousness, harkens back to the medieval function of allegory, both in literature and in

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the visual arts. In his Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Angus Fletcher explains: In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words “mean what they say.” When we predicate quality x of person Y, Y really is what our predication says he is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into something other (allos) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader. Pushed to an extreme, this ironic usage would subvert language itself, turning everything into an Orwellian newspeak. 5

Here, we need only to insert “visual” in front of “language,” replace “open and direct statement” with “content,” and “reader” with “viewer” in order to apply the same definition of allegory to visual media—and television. “Orwellian newspeak” refers to a made-up language invented by the totalitarian state in order to restrict individual freedoms in George Orwell’s dystopian (and anticipatory) novel 1984, published in 1949. But Fletcher’s notion of ironic language as finding its ultimate degree as a form of political subjugation could be misleading. Later, he clarifies: At least one branch of allegory, the ironic aenigma, serves political and social purposes by the very fact that a reigning authority (as in a police state) does not see the secondary meaning of the “Aesop-language.” But someone does see that meaning, and, once seen, it is felt strongly to be the final intention behind the primary meaning. 6

The term “Aesop-language” would refer to Aesop’s Fables wherein animal narratives culminate with a pronounced “moralitas” (Fletcher), in the form of a proverbial phrase, akin to Serling’s Twilight Zone epilogues. The animals, as in Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, stand for human attributes, and their interaction suggests a larger moral significance beyond the plot events themselves. Fletcher suggests, however, that ironic usage per se serves to circumvent censorship and so communicates meanings exclusively to a civilian audience. Ironic usage should still be clarified further, for it moves beyond the simple irony of swapping humans for animals. It is more important here to consider the intended effect of narrative irony and not simply the means of establishing it. Fletcher says: The price of a lack of a mimetic naturalness is what the allegorist, like the Metaphysical poet, must pay in order to force his reader into an analytic frame of mind . . . it suffices to point out that by having a surrealistic surface texture allegory immediately elicits an interpretive response from the reader. 7

The operative term here is “surrealistic,” denoting any deviation from the real or the natural. Such a narrative strategy is not ironic merely for depicting

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animals, caricatures, or otherwise exaggerated characters in place of believable human beings. Irony can also derive from plot events not proceeding as we assume they should, according to natural laws. And Fletcher suggests, just as Carl Plantinga and M. Keith Booker do, that this surreal “irony” beckons further interpretation. Because Serling eventually saw the television industry as something of a police state, it is understandable he would make such a bold transition from the realism of the live, theatrical mode to the surrealism of The Twilight Zone. But I should, again, emphasize that a “surreal” narrative is not always ostensibly fantastical across episodes. In a few cases, a narrative can also be simply ironic. Still, a mostly bizarre set of circumstances would become the formulaic norm for the show, and this would serve to suggest innocent intentions to its sponsoring network CBS, just as a medieval allegory like Roman de la Rose managed to keep its sexual topics concealed from the Church. In this section, at least, I lean toward an auteurist account of The Twilight Zone. This is productive insofar as Rod Serling was the predominant writer for the show, and, more importantly, he established its ironic narrative formula through its first string of episodes, whether science fiction or otherwise. By the end of the 1950s, he had also established his reputation as an “angry man” of television, both with his major teleplay successes “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and with several other acclaimed stories for CBS’ Playhouse 90, including “Bomber’s Moon,” “The Velvet Alley,” and “The Rank and File,” all dealing with morally complex issues and/or social problems. But his purpose was being increasingly undermined. His work, especially when it touched on racism, was censored, or, if not, sponsors often insisted on petty script changes if and when stories could in any way impede the advertised products. And, simultaneously, Serling acknowledged the decline in popularity of the live television format, amidst the rise of less heavyhanded programming, such as game shows and Westerns. So, in order to maintain his agenda for social critique, he would have to seek a form of compromise, which William Boddy calls Serling’s transition to “Hollywood television.” 8 This went even as far as recasting himself in the media. In a 1959 television interview with Mike Wallace, intended at least partially to promote his new anthology series, Serling conceded he would no longer attempt anything “important” or “delve into current issues.” 9 Subsequently, and rather ironically, he made the following defense: I stay in TV because I think it performs the function of providing adult, meaningful, exciting, challenging drama without dealing in controversy. I think it’s criminal that we are not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils that exist, of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society. I think it’s ridiculous that drama, which by its very nature should make a comment on those things which affect our daily lives, is in a position, at least in terms of television, of not being able to take that stand. But these are the facts

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of life, and they can’t look to me or Chayefsky or Rose or Gore Vidal or J. P. Miller or any of those guys as precipitators of some big change. 10

Here, it sounds as if Serling contradicts himself. He would remain in a medium eschewing controversy and yet, at the same time, he decries its inability to be controversial. This is really to say he realized he would need to couch his controversial themes in escapist content, especially if he wanted to achieve more creative control than he had known during television’s Golden Age. Genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and Western, as a means to deviate from realism, could all be exploited toward reinvigorating and maintaining Serling’s former agenda. Sander affirms, “Television’s prophet-outcast adopted the mantle of master fantasist—or video Aesop—using the television as a prism through which to view America’s tormented soul.” 11 And so, at least at the point of the series’ inception, Serling really was something of an auteur, in that an encompassing social agenda, along with a formulaic approach to communicating it, was already poised through his vision alone. In order to promote The Twilight Zone’s premiere in a newspaper ad, the network, of course, would only acknowledge Serling’s fame for its own sake, before focusing on the novelty of its narrative formula: Rod Serling, one of television’s most famous playwrights, brings you an extraordinary dramatic series, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, defined by the author as “The land that lies between science and superstition, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. You will find the bizarre, but the believable; the different, the shocking that is yet understandable. Its tales must be shown; they cannot be told. And each carries with it its own special surprise.” 12

ANTHOLOGY FILMS At the same time, Serling’s auteurism, if taken too far, obscures the cultural forces and influences driving him toward The Twilight Zone, especially those less immediate to his own career path. And though he would appear at this point to have invented a fresh approach to television, it is important to consider where the marriage between social consciousness and irony might also have existed, both in his era and before. Other discussions of the show refer to Twilight Zone episodes’ so-called special surprise as an “O. Henry ending.” In Steven D. Stark’s study of 1960s television, for example, he says, “Like O. Henry, Serling’s specialty was the plot twist at the end.” 13 And Rick Worland in his article on “TV political fantasy” claims, “Most Twilight Zone episodes build to a twist ending in the manner of O. Henry.” 14 To clarify, O. Henry (or William Sydney Porter), most prolific in the first decade of the twentieth century, earned prestige as an American short-story writer

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and was known particularly for both his social consciousness and his clever twist endings. Though less remembered in recent years, his legacy was reinforced, in particular, with 20th Century Fox’s 1952 release of O. Henry’s Full House. Taking a more popular approach at the time, this anthology film collected some of the author’s most-remembered works, including “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Clarion Call,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” and “The Gift of the Magi.” Each story is introduced by John Steinbeck in a rare appearance, and even he affirms the author was a “social critic, humorist, and technician” and that “our folklore is full of O. Henry.” 15 The film begins with a reenactment of O. Henry incarcerated and taking direct inspiration from a neighboring inmate who refused to be bailed out of his state-sponsored livelihood. Subsequently, Steinbeck draws a volume down from a bookshelf and begins to read “The Cop and the Anthem,” all about a homeless man (Charles Laughton) seeking any means to be returned to prison. A series of attempts is made, including kicking a policeman in the rear, but, uncannily, the rascal is exonerated or simply passed over every time. Only after seeking temporary refuge in a church is he inspired to recant his ways, and yet, upon setting off to reinvent himself, he is finally arrested and sentenced to ninety days’ prison time for vagrancy. This ironic conclusion would seem less vested in signaling social critique than establishing a moral dimension of comeuppance. The system is only “ready” to punish this huckster when he prefers to remain a free man. A prescribed moral order to the universe is in perfect keeping with the nature of closure to be found in classical Hollywood films, and is also fundamental to so many Twilight Zone episodes. Nothing in the narrative appears arbitrary, and everything appears predesigned. The ironic twist endings of these cherished stories may not, however, be as significant as the release of this film anthology of adaptations during the 1950s, in anticipation of Rod Serling’s own anthology series. The structure of these mini-films, each having its own director, bears close resemblance to that of a Twilight Zone episode. As there are five films constituting the 120minute anthology, each film is roughly 24 minutes, just like most Twilight Zone episodes. More importantly, Steinbeck launches each episode by reading directly from the adapted tale. For example, to introduce “The Cop and the Anthem,” Steinbeck recites: When wild geese honk high of nights, and ladies without fur coats grow kind to their husbands, then you may know that winter is near at hand, and that the time has come to resolve one’s self into a Committee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigors. If, in addition, one is a denizen of the city’s parks—like our good friend Soapy here, the need is not only great, but a state of real emergency may be said to exist. 16

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We see Steinbeck open a book to the first page of this story, and we see the text he reads appearing as the first paragraph. However, versions vary, and “Soapy” is often referred to in the first sentence, before the wild geese are mentioned. It isn’t important to determine why such variances occur, or even if the above is, in fact, an edited version, adjusted for the film’s purposes. The point is that such an introduction incurs the semblance of a literary mode, complete with an official orator. The passages we hear contain the eloquent, highly descriptive style of written prose, rather than what would be typical with a voice-over narration in a feature-length film of this or any other period. If this version was, indeed, edited from the original, then what we hear and see on the depicted page is certainly more poetic, by beginning with the image of wild geese, rather than the mere mention of Soapy moving “uneasily” on his bench in Madison Square. This is the selfsame template for Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes. Although he found his niche in television, his influences were clearly literary, with O. Henry plausibly among them. His pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” begins with merely a single sentence, but already by his second and third episodes, Serling’s literary voice is in full effect. For example, his prologue to “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” reads as follows: Portrait of a town drunk named Al Denton. This is a man who’s begun his dying early—a long, agonizing route through a maze of bottles. Al Denton, who would probably give an arm or a part of his soul to have another chance, to be able to rise up and shake the dirt from his body and the bad dreams that infest his consciousness. In the parlance of the times, this is a peddler, a rather fanciful-looking little man in a black frock coat. And this is the third principal character of our story. Its function: perhaps to give Mr. Al Denton his second chance. 17

And here is the prologue for the seventh episode, “The Lonely,” of a similar length: Witness if you will a dungeon, made out of mountains, salt flats and sand that stretch to infinity. The dungeon has an inmate: James A. Corry. And this is his residence: a metal shack. An old touring car that squats in the sun and goes nowhere—for there is nowhere to go. For the record let it be known that James A. Corry is a convicted criminal placed in solitary confinement. Confinement in this case stretches as far as the eye can see because this particular dungeon is on an asteroid nine million miles from Earth. Now witness if you will a man’s mind and body shriveling in the sun, a man dying of loneliness. 18

These are both comparable to the duration of Steinbeck’s chosen passage, or are even longer-winded, not to mention the aggressive use of figurative language and descriptive word choices. It is as if Serling were reading from some unnamed volume, pulled down from the same ceiling-high bookshelf

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we see in Steinbeck’s would-be study. Of course, unlike O. Henry’s Full House, Serling would also include just as literary epilogues, usually culminating with a direct reference to the “Twilight Zone” as the final arbiter and all-encompassing context for every narrative, however idiosyncratic. And there are further similarities worth noting. The diction of the characters themselves is also rather literary, even artificially verbose. To return again to the film adaptation of “The Cop and the Anthem,” Soapy, shortly before he is finally arrested, confesses his plight to his vagrant companion: “It isn’t my body that’s sick, it’s my soul. For the first time in my life, I view the horrible pit into which I have tumbled into degraded days and unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties, base motives that have made up my useless existence.” 19 This is very close to the original prose, reading as a narrative description of Soapy’s newfound perspective rather than his own blubbered string of words here. So, in its adaptation to the screen, O. Henry’s literary mode is preserved at the expense of realism. Especially through the screen persona of Charles Laughton, this on-screen Soapy seems too erudite to be such an incorrigible jailbird. If anything, his ironic turn of events becomes more cruel than justified in this mini-film. Serling’s characters, also, would often command such an eloquence, yet, to be fair, Serling’s literary impulses would be restrained by his theatrical, “crackling” approach to dialogue, which he had honed to perfection during his live teleplay years. In this sense, the first several Twilight Zone episodes already transcend the template of this film adaptation of O. Henry stories, since their literary mode is mostly confined to Serling’s prologues and epilogues, allowing a more theatrical, if not realistic, depiction of characters. If these O. Henry adaptations remain too literary in their characters’ dialogue, they do so forgivingly in order to emulate the experience of reading, still very much a popular pastime at the time of the film anthology’s release. As I suggest earlier, I do not set out to prove Serling actually read O. Henry, and, by the same token, I oughtn’t suggest he must have sat down to watch the film O. Henry’s Full House, being inspired, in turn, to employ it as a template for The Twilight Zone. If he did not, though, I could just as soon argue this “Twilight Zone template” was already an established cultural phenomenon in the decade culminating with the advent of Serling’s television show. Contained within this template are a literary prologue, a high dramatic interaction of colorful characters, and an ironic twist ending—all within a span of twenty-five minutes or so, as a part of a larger anthology. The only fundamental difference is The Twilight Zone’s science fiction and supernatural elements or, rather, its “imaginary” premise. Serling’s early string of episodes would even appear to abide by a similar proportion of comedy to drama. Although “The Cop and the Anthem” is light enough in tone, the fourth story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” is decidedly slapstick. Serling’s second episode, “One for the Angels,” assumes a similarly comedic tone,

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though if this indicates Serling hoped to achieve a similar eclecticism as O. Henry or the 1952 anthology film, his series would rapidly gravitate to a predominant dramatic mode, with only occasional exceptions. Ultimately, there is the matter of how such a template is conducive to social critique. In terms of O. Henry’s Full House, this becomes clearer across its narratives, just as is the case with The Twilight Zone. It is precisely the governing presence of irony that mobilizes the larger thematic intentions of these five moral fables, taken together. Again, the first tale, “The Cop and the Anthem,” establishes a moral universe wherein a man is sentenced to prison time only after he resolves to make no further attempts to be arrested. That is, his exploitation of the penal system turns against him only after he is imprisoned against his will. In the next tale, “The Clarion Call,” a young New York policeman (Dale Robertson) identifies a murderer, his former companion (Richard Widmark), through a gilded “Camptown Races” pencil given to them as a prize in a singing contest. When the culprit reminds the officer of his thousand-dollar debt to him, the officer, at first, retreats but eventually returns with the money after selling the murderer’s whereabouts to a local newspaper. Here, the irony derives from a circle of events where two seemingly unrelated “debts,” one monetary and one legal, finally resolve each other through what appears to be haphazard circumstance. As before, an ordered universe restores itself by providing the means through which one man can repay an old debt and another man can be brought to justice, both in the same stroke. The third tale, “The Last Leaf,” involves a rejected woman (Anne Baxter) who takes ill and convinces herself the remaining leaves on a windblown tree shall determine her longevity. Upstairs, a failing painter (Gregory Ratoff) struggles to produce marketable work, due to his propensity for premature abstraction and a stubborn refusal to portray familiar objects. In a final moment of self-sacrifice, the old man perishes in the storm after rendering the illusion of a last-remaining leaf on the tree outside the invalid’s window, thus inspiring her to recover. And so an artist unable to find his place in the universe, ironically, saves another human being’s life with his craft, but forfeits his own life in the process—and a sense of order is again restored. In the fourth tale, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” two confidence men (Fred Allen and Oscar Levant) kidnap a small boy (Lee Aaker) and solicit his family for $250, but when the child proves to be resourceful and even malicious, they end up paying the parents the selfsame sum to restrain the brat from terrorizing them further. And so, in a simpler ironic turn, these men answer for their transgressions against others. The fifth and final tale, “The Gift of the Magi,” perhaps the best remembered of all O. Henry’s stories, depicts a pair of impecunious young newlyweds determined to buy each other expensive gifts for Christmas. In a bittersweet ironic outcome, the husband (Farley Granger) discovers his wife

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(Jeanne Crane) has sold her precious hair to afford him a matching watch chain, and then he confesses to having sold his heirloom timepiece to purchase her a set of bejeweled combs, which she can no longer wear. Even if nothing precisely metaphysical occurs in these narratives’ sequence of events, their uncanny outcomes call attention to a governing moral universe, itself metaphysical. Irony, then, becomes the affirmation of metaphysical forces that are themselves indicative of social critique. In other words, restoring each of these characters to a universal order, wherein ethics and destiny override chaos and contingency, becomes a powerful means to rout out any/ all societal deviations from ethics and destiny. Any gratification an audience may take from the portrayal of such a universe comes with the price of acknowledging selfish human drives and our need for a sense of individual purpose. As varied as these tales may seem in their characters and tone, it is their overarching social critique, mobilized through ironic events, that binds them together into a cohesive narrative agenda. Such can also be said of The Twilight Zone series, taken as a whole. (Also notable is that two actors in O. Henry’s Full House, David Wayne and Warren Stevens, would appear as principals in the Twilight Zone episodes “Escape Clause” and “Dead Man’s Shoes” respectively.) To pursue a probable trajectory of harbingers more immediate to O. Henry’s Full House and its format as an anthology film leads readily to the series of successful W. Somerset Maugham adaptation films: Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), and Encore (1951), the last of which appeared only in the previous year. Here, Maugham himself establishes the production template of the author observed in his handsome study, where he provides a bit of background before introducing each story. (John Steinbeck “stands in” for O. Henry in the later film.) And just as would be duplicated in the 1952 Fox release, a closely framed hardcover volume opens to the first page while the author’s voice is heard reading the introductory passages, before the film dissolves into the first scene of the story proper. These UK-produced minifilms run about thirty minutes each, and are generally handled by separate directors, casts, and crews, just like the Hollywood anthology film and television series to come. Ironic plot twists are, again, the rule of thumb for these tales. In Quartet’s first tale, “The Facts of Life,” for example, an upscale British father (Basil Radford) grants his son (Jack Watling) permission to travel to Monte Carlo to play in a tennis tournament, as long as he promises not to gamble, lend money to anyone, or otherwise become involved with any women. The young man ends up doing all three: trying his hand at roulette, lending a portion of his winnings to an alluring female (Mai Zetterling), and then spending the evening with her after she returns his money and gains his confidence. Rather ironically, however, he comes out ahead in the end, after retrieving his stolen cash, along with the femme fatale’s accumulated booty,

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from a potted plant in her hotel suite. The father laments such an outcome, of course, since it will encourage his son in the future, though one of his companions recommends he resign himself to his son’s good luck. The irony here might seem to suggest practicing good ethics is futile where haphazard chance is the final arbiter. However, the young man’s naiveté, to some extent, relieves him of the usual thematic display of selfish deliberation and even personal responsibility. Instead, the focus of this narrative’s familiar moral universe gravitates to the female character, clearly depicted as targeting the lad at the very point of his success at the roulette table. She becomes the character who must be “punished” through seemingly arbitrary events, in order for societal equilibrium to be restored, and, at the same time, the young man is sufficiently “admonished” through the nearly shameful results of his recklessness. This adaptation is very close to the short story, save for two elements, both revealing the cinematic medium’s strengths and weaknesses. The film embellishes the nightclub scene, only described in a few sentences otherwise, as if to brandish its ability to showcase performers and dancing couples appearing only fleetingly in the reader’s imagination. But, more significantly, the subsequent scene in the woman’s hotel room is altered. For censorship’s sake, the film has the young man sleeping on a couch in a sitting room outside his counterpart’s separate bedchamber, protected by French doors, whereas the story places them in bed together within a single room. Aside from the eschewed sexual intimacy here, such a concession to production codes compromises the narrative’s credibility, since it is far more likely she would hide her stolen money within the privacy of her bedroom and outside of the young man’s purview. No such alternative is available in the written version, making the potted plant far more plausible and even inevitable. And so the young man’s good luck, and the irony ascribed to it, would seem to have more to do with the woman’s own clumsiness than reestablishing the ordered, moral universe at stake here. As an anthology film, Quartet also employs irony as a unifying narrative strategy, although it may depend slightly less on plot twists. Still, a critique of British middle-class conceits and family politics conglomerates the four disparate tales effectively enough. The first three tales, at least, focus on the potentially harmful effects of parental influence. “The Alien Corn,” for example, concerns another young man (Dirk Bogarde) poised to assume a career path appropriate to his father’s position and title. Instead, he vows to become a concert pianist. After his ambitions are bluntly thwarted by a famous performer’s judgment against him, a shotgun blast from within the estate announces his death. The family’s first priority is to clear their name of any apparent suicide with the help of a local jury, decisively ruling out any such possibility for a young man of stature. This outcome makes a damning social comment on any subculture honoring social status over individualism,

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and yet I would not describe it as an ironic twist. Rather, it is a logical consequence of a scenario wherein a family enforces such an unaccommodating do-or-die contract for the young man’s future. And it is clear his smitten cousin (Honor Blackman) has conceived of this undermining scheme only to serve her own interests in him. Her intentions are nicely reinforced in a more memorable sequence where the young man performs for his judge (Françoise Rosay), with his family members present. A superimposition sequence over his cousin’s face depicts each of three earlier moments in which she solicits his affections, all as if to imply her anticipation of the audition’s outcome. Also, of course, the film features the piano performance itself and the visual nuances of the judge’s expressions, along with everyone else’s in the room. But where this adaptation would appear to use cinematic technique and sound to its best advantage in serving the story, this is a drastic departure from the source material and its thematic purpose, unlike the previous anthology film. Rather than simply presenting a moral fable about landed gentry, Maugham’s story explores an idiosyncratic situation wherein a Jewish family seeks to establish inroads into British high society and parliamentary power. The author spends a good deal of descriptive energy in delineating the difference between Jewish and Anglo-Saxon characteristics before finally arriving at the principal plot of the scion and his steadfast musical ambitions. His defiance derives not only from his artistic goals, but also from his family’s collective, systematic denial of their cultural roots. Since this heir apparent becomes essential to their continued assimilation, the stakes are much higher than the film’s portrayal of an otherwise typical British upper-crust family. And so his implied suicide becomes a final protestation to a compromised identity, beyond his squelched ambitions. If I appear to digress here, it is only to suggest Maugham’s stories were not invulnerable to modification, as long as the resulting motion picture bundle achieved a consistency of tone strictly lighter, in some cases, than what the author intended. It becomes apparent across these three anthology films that Maugham was less interested than O. Henry in irony as a narrative device, at least according to what we experience on the screen. But this is not to say the former author’s still-satisfying conclusions are devoid of twists. Trio’s first tale, “The Verger,” for example, demonstrates that a man (James Hayter) ignominiously dismissed from his church employment for never having learned to read or write can still be successful as a shopkeeper. The irony emerges from his final postulation that if he had learned to read and write, he would have remained merely a verger. In the next tale, “Mr. Know-All,” an obtrusive blowhard (Nigel Patrick) aboard a cruise ship finally proves he is still selfless enough to deliberately lose a bet over the authenticity of a pearl necklace, in order to save a couple’s marriage. This may be unexpected, though not as powerfully ironic. The final tale, “Sanatorium,” is mostly

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sentimental, covering an array of institutionalized individuals and their interpersonal dynamics—and culminating with the matrimony of two whose exodus is said to severely diminish their life expectancy. As it seems, the presence of irony also diminishes in these latter two tales. Suffice it to say that the next trio of half-hour narratives and the final Maugham anthology film, Encore, maintain a social critique by specifically exploring the tension between selfish and selfless behaviors, even if the slightly ironic conclusions are less impactful than the surprise twist endings that earned O. Henry his literary reputation and that, in turn, characterize The Twilight Zone. No further Maugham anthology films would appear, but their popularity was enough to spur Hollywood into releasing O. Henry’s Full House only a year after Encore, in 1952. By this time, this particular portmanteau formula was established enough to inspire adaptation of an American short-story author who pursued social critique through similarly amusing twists. So, despite the relative agedness of O. Henry’s tales, their structure and agenda fit the mold rather perfectly, and the resulting anthology film, as I’ve suggested already, mostly closely resembles Quartet, whose success even Maugham himself acknowledges in his preamble to Trio. Taken together, the twelve adaptations of Maugham’s and O. Henry’s material reveal a range of irony whose degree of shock value becomes tantamount to the impact of its intended critique. Hence, the ironic outcomes of “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Alien Corn” make these films the more memorable of the bunch, not excluding the provocative turns in “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Facts of Life,” and “The Verger.” ANTHOLOGY TELEVISION SERIES Pursuing a chain of harbingers one step further, in terms of both O. Henry and Maugham, leads inevitably to the late-nineteenth-century short stories of Parisian author Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant’s work anticipates the modern short-story form in a number of ways, but most characteristic is its surprise twist endings. Naturally, many of his tales have been adapted to both film and television in a global context. Of particular note is his story “The Necklace,” first published in 1884. Famous for its bitter ironic conclusion, the narrative follows a lower-middle-class woman’s insatiable desire to ascend into higher social circles, despite her having married a clerk of modest means. Her husband only magnifies her hopelessness in presenting her with an invitation to an elegant Ministry of Education soiree. After begging four hundred francs out of him for a suitable dress, she borrows a diamond necklace from a wealthier friend. Her ensemble is a smash, only the necklace goes missing, and she and her husband struggle for ten years to repay the debt for its replacement. Finally, after she has noticeably aged from the years of hard

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labor, she confesses in public to her friend, who, after barely recognizing her, admits the original necklace was only an imitation. This story would inspire a number of subsequent writers to derive plot twists from inauthentic jewelry, especially Maugham’s “Mr. Know-All,” adapted as the second film for Trio. “The Necklace” has been adapted numerous times, even as far back as 1921 for a British silent feature, but probably the most relevant adaptation in this context was for CBS television’s dramatic anthology series Your Show Time. Episodes were approximately twenty-five minutes and were mostly adaptations of canonical short stories by such authors as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank Stockton, Mark Twain, and, of course, Guy de Maupassant, whose ironic tale would serve as the series’ debut in 1949. The episode would go on to win an Emmy Award for Best Film Made for Television at the first such awards ceremony in 1950, the same year Maugham’s parable of disparate pearl necklace appraisals would appear in Trio. Akin to Quartet’s adaptation of Maugham’s “The Alien Corn,” this television film is something of a departure from its source material, and, in general, strives to mitigate the severity of the author’s intended indictment of bourgeois social politics. Just as the Maugham anthology films would be imitated in O. Henry’s Full House, Your Show Time and its syndicated version, Story Theater, commence with the “Bookshop Man,” played by Arthur Shields, addressing the audience from within a handsome library/study. Like the narrators in the anthology films, he introduces the story by pulling down a volume and reading from the first page. For “The Necklace,” Shields declares, “Great stories are about people, and under the unfamiliar clothes we recognize ourselves. The diamond necklace, therefore, could be about you and me.” 20 In this manner, the television series makes a rather deliberate attempt to legitimize its source material, even to the point of patronizing the viewer. There are also a number of significant plot changes. Early on, for example, a scene is added wherein Mathilde visits her prosperous friend in her dressing room and discovers the diamond necklace in advance of the soiree. Back at home, she appropriates a curtain sash and ecstatically pretends it is the necklace adorning her neck. These are worthwhile dramatic embellishments to the protagonist’s desperation for social status; however, after the party, the film departs from the short story in important ways. First, during the portrayal of the couple’s ten-year drudgery in repaying their debt, the narrator returns and posits: “She had a selfish heart. For the first time she felt a sympathy for someone else’s pains. Would this new understanding bear fruit or would it wither amidst so many troubles?” 21 All too literally, the film introduces an unprecedented narrative crossroads, deriving a hint of suspense from the moral question of whether the protagonist can overcome her selfish

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attitudes or not. Mathilde then vows to learn bookkeeping and help her husband repay his curmudgeonly creditor, also not part of the original story. Finally, instead of a scene where the withered Mathilde stumbles into her affluent friend on the street, she and her husband are portrayed at home celebrating the repayment of their debt when her old friend Elsa suddenly shows up and announces her return to Paris. They exchange their confessions about the necklace, but where the story ends abruptly in this moment, the film develops a bit further, with Mathilde’s husband asking her if their ten years were wasted. In a telling visual, she smiles hesitantly and cuddles up to his hand. The film maintains its didacticism with the narrator’s epilogue, explaining that Elsa’s returning the necklace made the couple’s life a lot easier, but what helped even more was “something they’d found during their lives of struggle together, something more precious than the diamond necklace itself.” 22 Anticipating Rod Serling’s on-screen deliveries, the narrator then lights up a fresh cigarette to introduce the next week’s story. In this television adaptation, the darkly ironic ending and its comment on middleclass values are swapped for a tale of moral redemption, wherein a selfcentered woman discovers mutual understanding and responsibility through seemingly misfortunate but not irrevocable circumstances. This form of pandering to wider audience tastes through lighter content is the very thing Serling would come to resent about American television. At any rate, for my purposes, this particular case is productive toward illustrating how social consciousness, potentiated through ironic circumstances, is just as soon pasteurized if and when the irony is tamped down. One could pursue similar threads of influence almost indefinitely along these lines, namely socially conscious stories with twist endings, adapted for American television anthology series. I shall consider one further example, but not merely because it fits this description as do the previous ones. Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet,” one of his many short stories also known for their surprise endings, would have palpable influence on one of Serling’s own Twilight Zone teleplays. As with Maupassant’s, O. Henry’s, and Maugham’s work, Chekhov’s stories were adapted to a half-hour format and included in multi-season anthology series during the 1950s, such as Ford Television Theatre (on NBC and ABC) and Your Favorite Story (on NBC). “The Bet,” published in 1889, describes the aftermath of a fiery debate on the morality of capital punishment versus life imprisonment. Protesting against the position that life imprisonment is more humane, an affluent banker offers two million rubles to anyone who can remain in solitary confinement for five years. Countering the challenge, a young man promises to do so for fifteen years. Next, the story describes the progression of these years, and how the prisoner fills his time, playing the piano and reading classic literature, scientific textbooks, and so on. At the point of releasing him, the now-impoverished banker reads

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a journal entry wherein the prisoner, motivated by his acquired contempt for humanity, renounces the money and vows to exit his cell five minutes prematurely so as to forfeit his victory. The old banker retreats in the throes of his bedraggled conscience, and the prisoner escapes through a window. Serling would, in turn, take inspiration from the story and/or its 1953 Ford Television Theatre adaptation in order to pen the Twilight Zone episode “The Silence,” airing in April of 1961 within the second season. Rather than faithfully adapting Chekhov’s source material, or even watering it down for television audiences, Serling made a notable change in order to maintain his authorial status. The characters and basic scenario—a wealthy older man (Franchot Tone) challenging a young man (Jamie Tennyson) to an extended duration of solitary confinement—are preserved. However, it is the young man’s garrulousness to which the older man initially objects, and so the bet involves not only his imprisonment, but also his forfeit of any form of speech. A bitterly ironic conclusion is also maintained in Serling’s teleplay; however, after the older man confesses he can no longer pay his promised sum, the prisoner reveals he had the nerves to his vocal cords severed as his only recourse to winning the bet. This ending is much more concrete than the existential nature of Chekhov’s prisoner railing against the futility of all human wisdom. Furthermore, Chekhov’s prisoner never bothers to find out if the banker would honor his debt. Serling’s teleplay also contains a double twist, since both men are chastised for agreeing to terms neither could ultimately abide. It isn’t enough to say Serling simplifies his ending for the teleplay medium. Rather, I would say he makes it less literary, and yet is nonetheless able to preserve the ironic circumstances wherein each party must acknowledge his impetuousness. Despite their differences, both narratives point to human vanity and the transitory nature of existence, and yet Serling’s suggests a more practical degree of futility in attempting solitude. As a result, the Chekhov-inspired Twilight Zone episode is less immediately philosophical, more palatable for a television audience, and still potent in its social critique. Because this episode, as Marc Scott Zicree affirms, eschews both science fiction and supernatural elements, it would seem a better fit for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, an anthology series that ran for ten years, beginning in 1955, and was syndicated for many years thereafter. Although directing only 18 of its 361 episodes, Hitchcock saw to it that already published stories were adapted for the thirty-minute slot in order to guarantee a degree of quality, while, at the same time, delivering consistently gratifying surprises. And also like The Twilight Zone, the series was eventually expanded to a fifty-minute format, becoming The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Martin Grams Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom affirm in their Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion:

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Not only had there been numerous anthology shows exclusively devoted to this type of melodrama, but even such “prestige” series as Kraft Television Theatre and Studio One and the like were not beneath presenting an occasional “thriller.” Even the “twist” ending with which the Hitchcock series was to become so strongly identified was somewhat old-hat by 1955. Suspense, Sanger, The Web, The Clock, The Unexpected, Rebound, The Whistler and numerous other series devoted to suspense melodramas—several of which were explicitly predicted [sic] on surprise endings—had come and, in many cases, gone by 1955. Clearly something new was needed. 23

They refer here to Hitchcock’s uniquely entertaining persona, not only setting this series apart from its predecessors but ultimately selling the show to popular audiences, since Hitch’s reputation as a master director was already well established through his ongoing legacy of film work. Alfred Hitchcock was a bold departure from the usual scholarly introducer, in that he assumed an ironic disposition toward the dramatic material. Also unprecedented was his ability to mock his own sponsors, and, just like twist endings, this demonstrates irony’s ability to draw attention to its intended targets. (Otherwise, the sponsors would never have allowed it.) By the same token, Hitchcock’s reputation limited the scope of viable source material. Grams and Wikstrom quote him as confessing: I too am trapped. I can’t make any picture I want to. I’ve got to make a suspense picture. If I don’t, the audience keeps waiting for the body to be found. Same with television. I’ve got to have the surprise, the twist ending. The advantage of my show is that the husband can murder his wife and bury her in the cellar. Retribution can be dealt with at the end by me. 24

And so, while his series’ twist endings were just as formulaic as would be The Twilight Zone’s, Hitchcock in his epilogues was also able to validate any morbid content by simply “promising” the perpetrators were brought to justice—something previous programs hadn’t attempted. Accordingly, more time could be devoted to building up to a dramatic murder, rather than having to allocate for its aftermath. All the elements making Alfred Hitchcock Presents fresh are apparent in the series’ first episode, “Revenge” (October 1955), based on a story by Samuel Blas. Just like the Bookshop Man in Your Show Time, Hitchcock introduces himself, the genre of the show, and his role as commentator. But he also appears to check the actors off-screen, sees they are unprepared, and declares it a good moment for a sixty-second advertisement. No previous television host had seemed so spontaneous with his program’s format. The episode portrays a young couple (Ralph Meeker and Vera Miles) newly settled within a mobile-home community. The husband returns from a day’s work to discover his wife assaulted and left for dead in the bedroom while smoke billows from the oven. She survives, but remains traumatized, only

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vaguely recalling a man in a gray suit attacking her. On their way to a hotel, she points to a man with his back to them walking along the sidewalk, and the husband follows him up to a hotel room with a large wrench up his sleeve. Shadows on the wall evasively depict the husband braining the stranger with the wrench. As the two of them continue their journey, the narrative provides a certain twist when the wife suddenly announces that she sees her culprit again, though no one is in sight this time. Then Hitchcock reappears to restore order himself by declaring the husband would answer for his crime, and that, in general, one oughtn’t take justice into his own hands. He also makes a quip about retitling the episode “Death of a Salesman,” which serves to downplay its rather violent content. Nevertheless, little or no larger social critique appears to be at stake here, beyond Hitchcock’s own moral pandering to network standards. By privileging morbid twist endings, Alfred Hitchcock Presents may, indeed, have immediately anticipated The Twilight Zone more than any 1950s science fiction or supernatural series did. And although their content would appear otherwise divergent, the fact that the former series adapted the same source material for a fifth-season episode in 1959 as would The Twilight Zone for its fifth season’s final production is telling. Ambrose Bierce’s most anthologized American Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” first published in 1890, is divided into three sections. In the setup, a fairly routine incident atop a railroad bridge in the woods is described, with Union soldiers preparing and finally hanging a condemned Southerner. The only unusual aspect here is the author’s inclusion of an interior monologue, in which the condemned man posits to himself a desperate chance of freeing his hands and throwing off the noose in time to save himself and escape down the river below. In the second part, a succinct backstory of condemned Peyton Farquhar relates how a Federal scout, dressed as a Confederate, had tempted him to blow up a nearby railroad bridge and thereby impede the advancement of the Union army. And the final section returns the reader to the scene of the hanging and its aftermath. Farquhar discovers himself miraculously alive and his senses “preternaturally keen and alert” for some unknown reason. 25 This section then expends the majority of its prose in describing his uncanny and elaborate escape down the river and through the forest, somehow evading any number of rifle rounds and even a cannon fired upon him. He eventually finds himself approaching his front porch whence his wife emerges to embrace him. And then, all too abruptly, his escape ends. Farquhar is once more at Owl Creek Bridge, where the noose of his hangman’s rope has jerked tight, and he is quite dead. In the teleplay for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the adaptation is mostly faithful. The scene atop the railroad bridge is just as described, with soldiers preparing their victim. The middle and third sections are altered, however. The backstory becomes the bulk of the plot here, with Farquhar (Ronald

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Howard) not only receiving word of the bridge from his disguised comrade, but also proceeding to a military tent to propose his plan to the commanding officer, who tries unsuccessfully to discourage him from making the attempt. Even his subsequent capture is depicted. After the rope breaks and he escapes, Farquhar soon encounters his captors again, further down the river, and a fight ensues between him and the original scout. He overcomes his enemy, and then a black slave never before mentioned in the story offers to escort him through the wilderness, singing a spiritual all the while. Finally, the scene of his final reunion with his wife is described faithfully, with his neck jerking backward and an abrupt cut to his execution at the bridge. Edited slightly from Robert Enrico’s 1962 French film La rivière du hibou, the Twilight Zone episode, airing in 1964, also digresses from the source material, but with important differences. Instead of fleshing out Farquhar’s backstory, this adaptation dispenses with it altogether and takes a more experimental tack by portraying his escape in terrific detail. Most notable is the sequence after he removes his bonds underwater, in which trees and insects are magnified with a detail impressively faithful to what the story describes as his “preternaturally keen” awareness. The film includes a mock blues ballad whose lyrics affirm Farquhar’s awakened consciousness here. By the same token, and totally unlike the Hitchcock adaptation, very little dialogue is included in this version, save for a few outbursts (with a noticeable French accent) from the Union soldiers. As in the story, the fugitive (Roger Jacquet) is carried downriver and arrives at a sandy bank where he copulates with the warm sand, and then he proceeds alone through a forest toward his home. The final sequence is somewhat similar to what we see in Hitchcock, save for the climactic dash to embrace his wife, which is repeated multiple times here in order to build more dramatically toward his hanging. In both adaptations, of course, cinema has the advantage over the short story in portraying this abrupt ironic twist, so visually astonishing. Essentially, Hitchcock’s version of the Bierce tale prefers a more theatrical strategy, by expanding the dialogue, even to the point of adding scenes with new characters. Also, this version diminishes the subjective, internal experience of Farquhar’s escape, by substituting an action-oriented tussle with the Federal scout, followed by the insertion of a friendly companion to guide Farquhar back home. Enrico’s version is more avant-garde in its intentions, and so exploits the psychological third part of Bierce’s story with an aggressive use of close-ups, camera movement, slow motion, and overlapping edits, not to mention the musical commentary and percussive score. Both versions arrive at the same twist ending, but the former builds objectively toward an intellectual sense of irony, whereas the latter proceeds more subjectively toward a visceral irony. That is, we feel Farquhar’s experience more. And so, perhaps less obviously so in this would-be episode of The Twilight Zone, the narrative mode moves beyond Hitchcock’s realism and

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into the series’ so-called dimension of imagination. Even Serling, in his tacked-on epilogue, would seem to defend the appropriation of Enrico’s film for the program, saying, “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—in two forms, as it was dreamed, and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination—the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.” 26 Even so, the latter anthology series’ privileging of a subjective universe, especially with its pilot episode, would lack the cinematographic artistry and subtlety of this French avant-garde film. As Farquhar approaches his home through the forest, he is depicted as entering his property through a grand iron gate, opening slowly for him. The story describes him as “pushing open” such a gate, but here, there is a hint that something surreal is at stake and what we see is an unreliable account of an otherwise ordinary incident. Such cinematic cues are beyond the visual vocabulary of the television series, and, typically, the twist ending suffices in its purpose. If anything, a delusion of this nature would seem more atypical for the realistic mode of Hitchcock’s series, just as if “Where Is Everybody?” could also be an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. However, it is the larger intention of their twist endings that also differentiates these two anthology series. Eventually running side by side on CBS, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone diverge in their ultimate purpose, inherent to the dispositions of their auteur hosts. As an apparent confluence between the two shows, the adaptation of Bierce’s story is also useful in illustrating this divergence. If the Hitchcock version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” would seem to digress from its own norms by portraying a character’s inner fantasy world, its abrupt twist ending safely returns the narrative to a realistic, plausible mode. And, indeed, Hitchcock’s supervisory role for the program was to select compelling crime stories or otherwise intriguing scenarios with entertainingly surprising outcomes. He was less concerned with guaranteeing any presence of social critique within a larger postwar context. In the episode “Lamb to the Slaughter,” based on a story by Roald Dahl, also known for his twist endings, a rejected housewife (Barbara Bel Geddes) clubs her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, only to serve it to the unknowing policemen later. And in another Dahl-based episode, “Man from the South,” a wealthy gambler (Peter Lorre) bets a young man (Steve McQueen) his Zippo won’t light ten times in a row, with the younger man winning an elegant convertible if it does and forfeiting his little finger if it does not. The gambler’s wife (Katherine Squire) eventually turns up, claiming the convertible the gambler has staked is actually hers, and we finally see she is missing several of her own fingers. And then, in the episode “The Glass Eye,” similarly devoid of any crime element, a woman (Jessica Tandy) follows a handsome ventriloquist (Tom Conway) on his European tour only to learn his dummy is actually a living dwarf and their roles are reversed.

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Absent in these examples is The Twilight Zone’s moral universe and the 1950s postwar consciousness attached to it. Nevertheless, such twist endings remain the most formulaic aspect of the series, all within a consistently realistic mode. By the same token, Enrico’s avant-garde film portrays a subjective universe acceptable enough for The Twilight Zone’s format when its twist ending affirms it was only “imagination.” As in Hitchcock’s series, this embrace of Bierce’s story affirms The Twilight Zone’s reliance on twist endings, but, instead, within a science fiction, fantasy, or otherwise supernatural mode. It doesn’t, however, affirm Serling’s original agenda of maintaining the social critique he had pursued in his Golden Age teleplays. Although Bierce demonstrates social consciousness in some of his Civil War tales, many other narratives, particularly his ghost stories, were superficially based on shock and surprise. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is somewhere in between. It could, for example, be construed as making a comment on the evils of military executions, especially where a condemned man desperately clings to life through his vivid imagination. Beyond such a reading, however, Bierce’s story seeks merely to surprise the reader, more akin to the author’s ghost narratives. In this sense, at least, the source material is nearer to the agenda of Alfred Hitchcock Presents than that of The Twilight Zone. This, in turn, explains Serling’s epilogue, which is closer in its tone to a disclaimer for allowing a film “made by others” to be included in a television series for which he had, at least initially, had much greater ambitions. 27 By the end of the show’s fifth season, Serling’s inspiration had waned considerably, and purchasing Enrico’s film was a convenient way to wrap up production under budget. And so the probable influence of Hitchcock’s massively popular television series on The Twilight Zone should be acknowledged through its emphasis on ironic twists, rather than any agenda for postwar social consciousness. Ultimately, then, their comparison leads me to an important point: even if narrative irony proves to be an effective means toward mobilizing social critique, its presence does not necessarily imply such agendas. If I were less dedicated to irony here and sought to focus, instead, on the cultural legacy of science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural material inspiring Serling to pursue these genres in The Twilight Zone, I could point to a similar prominence of anticipatory and contemporaneous television anthology series, including Lights Out (1949–1952), Trapped (1950), Out There (1951–1952), Tales of Tomorrow (1951–1953), The Unexpected (1952), Fear and Fancy (1953), Science Fiction Theatre (1955–1957), Strange Stories (1956), The Veil (1958), One Step Beyond (1959–1961), Thriller (1960–1962), Great Ghost Tales (1961), and Tales of Mystery (1961–1963), not to mention the continuity of such shows thereafter. And so it would seem these anthology genres, just like twist endings, were already well-established strategies for television by the time The Twilight Zone had its five-year run.

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Accordingly, it is worth questioning how the series achieved its lasting syndication and wider cultural presence, when so many other, similarly formulaic series did not. The answer lies in a combination of factors. The Twilight Zone established a wider umbrella for its content, allowing science fiction and fantasy to consort with Westerns, historical dramas, and other genres, such that the audience could be less certain of what to expect at any given episode’s first airing. Of course, just as Alfred Hitchcock Presents promised realistic contexts in its teleplays, The Twilight Zone promised the unrealistic—or, rather, scenarios showcasing the seemingly unlimited potential of human imagination. Such a vague and relatively open-ended context conferred a more alluring mysteriousness upon the show, unlike those series remaining decidedly within the science fiction genre, such as The Outer Limits and all those listed above. And then, in order to retain sufficient grounds for what the audience could count on for entertainment value, Serling, like Hitchcock, embraced the surprise twist ending as a strategic narrative device. As I have pointed out, Serling also adopted a then-popular literary mode of including prologues and epilogues, and with an erudite manner, akin to the O. Henry, Maugham, and Maupassant anthology films, as well as so many other anthology television series, each with its own “Bookshop Man” host. Although he only dared a voice-over at first, he soon found the confidence to step out in front of the camera as they did to deliver his monologues. And arguably to the show’s advantage, he was able to dispense with the requisite library/study set, and simply incorporate himself into the mise-en-scène of the episode, often appearing just off screen as the camera panned immediately right or left to find him. Serling’s extraordinary charisma, then, was only to be discovered as the series evolved, but this was also a crucial factor to The Twilight Zone’s legacy, and, of course, the reason his fame would, in turn, be exploited by NBC for Night Gallery, whose creative control was refused him. The most important factor of all was the quality of Serling’s teleplay writing, along with that of Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and other frequent contributors. Here, however, is where it becomes a larger task to examine this “quality” more closely and determine if a larger agenda for social critique, beyond mere entertainment value, could actually serve to push any given anthology series’ cultural legacy beyond that of its competitors, even when such a competitor is a more successful show in its prime time, as was Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Examining this question in the context of The Twilight Zone is my purpose across the remaining chapters. NOTES 1. Sander, Serling, xvii. 2. Ibid., 32.

Twilight Zone Harbingers 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Ibid., 79. Ibid., 130. Fletcher, Allegory, 2. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 107. Boddy, “Entering ‘The Twilight Zone,’” 98. The Mike Wallace Interview, CBS, September 22, 1959. Ibid. Sander, Serling, 143. Reprinted in Sander, Serling, 142. Stark, Glued to the Set, 86. Worland, “Sign-Posts Up Ahead,” 104. O. Henry’s Full House, 20th Century Fox, 1952. Ibid. “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” The Twilight Zone. “The Lonely,” The Twilight Zone. O. Henry’s Full House. “The Necklace,” Your Show Time, CBS, 1949. Ibid. Ibid. Grams and Wikstrom, Alfred Hitchcock, 21. Ibid., 46. Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 11–19. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid.

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Chapter Two

Irony’s Philosophical Legacy

SOCRATIC IRONY The previous chapter considers the most immediate film and television harbingers of The Twilight Zone, as well as their respective literary source materials, each in terms of irony. But I also want to consider irony a bit further for its own sake and discover if its larger philosophical legacy could shed any further light on the relationship between Twilight Zone narratives’ ironic circumstances and their larger agenda for social critique. The mobilization of modernist critique through the use of irony, examined thoroughly in Ernst Behler’s study Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, has a rich tradition in occidental culture, dating at least as far back as the fourth- and fifth-century Greeks. In his grand dissertation on the subject, Søren Kierkegaard treats Socrates as the first philosophical “ironist,” affirmed by the latter’s renowned declaration: “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” And, furthermore, Socrates becomes the pivotal point in the etymology of the word. The Greek terms eirôneia and eirôn, from which “irony” is derived, appear to us first in the comedy of Aristophanes, specifically The Clouds, which lampoons both Socrates and an Athenian everyman, Strepsiades, the latter appealing to the philosopher for guidance. Akin to the playwright’s portrayal of Socrates, these terms refer to a decidedly immoral quality of being cunning, wily, or sly. Accordingly, David Wolfsdorf, in his investigation of their classical usage, declares: Precisely, eirôneia is a sly, crafty dissembling by which the eirôn presents himself in a positive aspect, be it as beneficent, amiable, modest or simply innocuous, when in fact he is self-seeking and harmful. The strategy of the eirôn is thereby to disarm another and defeat him. In other words, the eirôn is vulpine. 1 29

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And so, according to Wolfsdorf, eirôneia and eirôn carried a negative connotation of being “foxlike,” and not only within Aristophanes’ comedic contexts, but also in Plato’s laudatory accounts of Socrates. Wolfsdorf’s fundamental argument is that, regardless of Socrates’ true moral disposition, Greek contemporaries of Socrates and Plato commonly understood these terms as derogatory, even if the practice of ironic communication would become less associated with immorality in later epochs. As for Socrates’ actual intentions, Behler clarifies: Plato was the first to present Socrates as an ironic interlocutor who by understating his talents in his famous pose of ignorance, embarrassed his partner and simultaneously led him into the proper train of thought. With the Platonic Socrates, the attitude of the ironist was freed from the burlesque coarseness of classical comedy and appeared with that refined, human, and humorous selfdeprecation that made Socrates the paragon of the teacher. 2

Behler confirms that the “low and vulgar” connotations of eirôneia and eirôn persisted in Plato’s writings, even to affirm how Socrates was popularly distrusted and lumped in with the Sophists. 3 But he assures us that Plato, in his Apology and other works, sought to redeem Socrates from a self-serving disposition to one of magnanimity. Behler then argues it was Aristotle, specifically in his Nicomachean Ethics, who repositioned the intention of ironic communication as deviating from truthfulness “not for the sake of one’s own advantage, but out of a dislike for bombast and to spare others from feelings of inferiority.” Thus, Aristotle concluded, it was to be deemed a “fine and noble form.” 4 Subsequently, according to Behler, Cicero, in his work On the Orator, would introduce the term into Latin as an effective figure of speech, which entailed “saying one thing and meaning another.” 5 Quintilian’s Oratorical Education would further cement the term as merely rhetorical and so freed of its derogatory context, where “the intention of the speaker differs from what he actually says, so that we understand the contrary of what he expresses in his speech.” 6 Irony came, as a result, to be regarded with less suspicion and more as an effective means of raising awareness in its audience of a larger truth or, at least, an intended truth. This consideration of irony’s historical ambivalence is a productive point at which to bring in The Twilight Zone. In his discussion, Wolfsdorf cites Melissa Lane’s differentiation between Socratic eirôneia and Socratic irony, with the former intending to deceive and the latter seeking to enlighten. 7 Of course, such a distinction also serves to perpetually reaffirm the difficulty in reaching any final conclusions about Socrates himself, thus cementing his ironic legacy. For my purposes, at least, this Socratic ambiguity harkens back to my earlier discussion of allegory and, more specifically, Angus Fletcher’s notion of ironic language having a dual purpose of fooling one audience while simultaneously informing another. This is not to suggest Socrates

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might have intended both eirôneia and irony at the same time, rather than decidedly one or the other. It is, rather, to employ Socrates’ case toward a deeper philosophical understanding of The Twilight Zone’s narrative strategy. From the network’s perspective, at least, the television series merely contributed to a popular anthology format for science fiction and mystery genres, having long since established their roots in radio. But The Twilight Zone’s more immediate precursors, while they may reflect any number of postwar concerns, still lack its aggressive critical agenda. By courting expectations of narrative outcomes that turn out to be otherwise, The Twilight Zone, as a series, establishes complicity with its television audience. In other words, the very predictability of its formulaic twist endings becomes the fundamental indicator or cue to its rhetorical purpose. Having acknowledged this cue, the viewer becomes more receptive to an implicit level of meaning, even if that meaning is less provocative or absent in other series relying on twists. So, in effect, Rod Serling played the eirôn toward CBS and its sponsors, while simultaneously mobilizing a systematic means of communicating social critique to a mass audience. This is not to suggest that CBS or its sponsors would have been blind to The Twilight Zone’s allegorical content, but it is probable Serling pitched his new show as a twist-oriented fantasy series—a concept perfectly in keeping with both the times and network censorial parameters. Interviewed by Mike Wallace about his then-forthcoming series, Serling portrayed himself as “hereafter” eschewing all controversial content, as if to reassure his employers he had abandoned his former proclivities. At the same time, he expressed bitterness toward the state of affairs with television—less than a total capitulation to restrictions he referred to as “the facts of life.” 8 The Twilight Zone episode “Shadow Play” (May 1961), adapted by Charles Beaumont from one of his short stories, is of particular relevance here. After a convicted man (Dennis Weaver) in a courtroom is sentenced to the electric chair, he struggles to persuade everyone around him, including the judge, the district attorney, and a fellow inmate on death row, that he is having a nightmare wherein he repeatedly suffers through the same execution and its preceding events. Included here are scenes dreamt about the district attorney (Harry Townes) at home, being pressured by a reporter (Wright King) to reconsider the convict’s story and to intervene on his behalf. By mouthing the remarks of the district attorney as the latter addresses him, the protagonist demonstrates his fluency in his dream cycle’s endlessly repeated events, but he also appears to be in a position to alter certain elements. For example, in an attempt to prove his case and thereby break the cycle of executions, the convict promises the attorney the steak he is expecting for dinner at home will turn out to be something else (a roast). Unfortunately, when the reporter finally persuades the district attorney to call the governor, the stay of execution arrives just as the switch is thrown. The narrative then

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returns to the scene of the courtroom, with the minor twist of the fellow inmate now appearing as the judge. This time-loop scenario would appear again in such feature films as Groundhog Day (1993) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014), but the episode’s questioning of the fundamental nature of reality has classical roots with Plato’s Socrates. Specifically, in his Republic, Plato describes his brother Glaucon in a dialogue with Socrates, who asks the former to imagine a group of humans imprisoned in a cave since birth. Their keepers, unbeknownst to them, use shadow puppets in front of a fire to project representations of the outside world upon a wall in front of them. These dancing shapes become the prisoners’ only reality, since they have never been outside the cave. Socrates goes on to point out that even an escaped prisoner and/or one who becomes savvy to the illusory nature of the cave will inevitably return to the comfort of the existence he and the others have grown accustomed to. This “Allegory of the Cave,” as it is widely referred to, has been variably interpreted among philosophers and scholars over the years, but it is at least agreed this scenario is intended to reflect the human condition and our fundamentally subjective relationship with the surrounding universe. 9 This and the Twilight Zone episode’s scenario are the same—what we perceive as reality is relative to the forces governing our perceptions. Accordingly, Serling’s epilogue challenges us to contemplate the possibility of our own realities being merely another aspect to the “Twilight Zone.” Even the episode’s title, “Shadow Play,” appears to pay lip service to Plato’s allegory. In his Companion’s coverage of this episode, Marc Scott Zicree himself feels inclined to assume Socrates’ role by posing the question, “Are you really reading this page, or is someone dreaming you reading this page?” 10 Zicree, however, misses the larger social critique the episode offers, not necessarily as a function of either Serling’s or Beaumont’s specific intentions, but which corresponds to the series’ formulaic deployment of irony. On a literal level, as Serling’s epilogue suggests, the narrative of “Shadow Play” is merely an amusing speculation about how the reality we experience could also be the stuff of dreams. Within the series’ larger pattern of metaphysical conditions, and its ability to provoke contemplation without addressing the audience as directly as Serling does here, this particular episode would seem to conflate eirôneia and irony to an atypical degree. In other words, the mass audience, along with the sponsors, could easily come away with nothing more than a sense of titillation, as if Zicree were the everyman Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates’ vulpine methods. In this sense, it is more productive to see this episode, and The Twilight Zone in general, as Socrates. And so any ambiguity between eirôneia and irony must still be meted out. Based on a similar premise of dreamed realities, “Shadow Play” could almost be imagined among the copious episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, akin to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,”

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airing only two years prior. Indeed, even Zicree points to the “Hitchcockian” black humor in the episode’s cutting abruptly to a sizzling steak just as the convict reaches the climactic point of describing his recurrent experience of the electric chair. 11 The 1959 Hitchcock episode, however, is far more grounded in realism, since its escape narrative is revealed as fantasy only at the climax of Peyton Farquhar’s not-unsuccessful execution. “Shadow Play,” on the other hand, announces its dream premise in the initial courtroom scene when the convict appeals to both the district attorney and the reporter, shouting, “This isn’t real” and “You kill me—you’ll die!” 12 and also (less obviously) mouths the judge’s own pronouncement of sentence. The episode thus immediately assumes a surreal mode less appropriate for Hitchcock’s series. The surreal aspect becomes particularly cinematic when a tracking shot is superimposed in the frame over the background cell beside the protagonist’s profile as he describes the “long walk” to the electric chair for his fellow inmate. 13 Here, too, the episode’s social consciousness is mobilized. At the start of the episode, Serling appears just after the convict is removed from the courtroom, pontificating, “Like every criminal caught in the wheels of justice, he’s scared,” but in this context, the fear is of “something worse than any punishment this world has to offer, something found only in the Twilight Zone.” 14 In other words, the “Twilight Zone” itself becomes the “wheels of justice,” but in a larger metaphysical context. This would suggest the episode will warn of a much greater consequence in store for anyone not abiding by society’s laws, which, in this case, is an eternity of capital punishment. But rather than pay any attention to the convict’s criminality or even any specifics of the murder, the episode focuses entirely on the psychological experience of the death penalty. Its portrayed recurrence is simply a means to emphasize the internal anguish endured by the protagonist, rather than any “guilt” for his crimes against society. And with the electric chair’s contemporaneity, the 1950s and 1960s audience would have been more attuned to its larger social comment than in the adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War tale, for example. This specific critique of crime and punishment is, of course, more ostensibly pronounced in Serling’s early Twilight Zone episode “The Lonely,” and especially because this convict’s crime was committed “in self-defense,” even though his pardon comes only well after he suffers so palpably. In any case, the former episode behaves as Socratic eirôn, on the one hand, by literalizing The Twilight Zone’s strategically ironic sabotage of “reality” as such. At the same time, this provocation of intellectual activity in the minds of the audience allows the episode’s greater emphasis on the ills of capital punishment to make a more lasting impression. And, indeed, we have only to think of the larger degree of sympathy we feel for this would-be “criminal,” in all his perpetual agony.

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MODERNIST IRONY Eventually, the concept of irony would come to be associated with modernism, especially through the late-eighteenth-century writings of German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. According to Behler, Schlegel recognized in German romantic literature and poetry a certain shift away from the latter classical concept of rhetorical irony toward a more “self-conscious” and “self-reflective” voice, more in keeping with the negative perception of what Socrates was attempting with his counterparts. 15 In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, for example, ironic communication in the modern context is characterized by a moral “depravity” instead of any willfully lucid exchange between speaker and audience. Behler affirms, “In varying formation, Schlegel attempted to rescue the Socratic-Platonic irony of a configurative, indeterminable, self-transcending process of thinking and writing and to integrate it with the modern style of self-reflection and self-consciousness as the decisive mark of literary modernity.” 16 Behler adds, “Schlegel’s most famous formulations for the alternating flow of speech and counter-speech or thought and counter-thought are his manifold paraphrases of a constant alternation of affirmation and negation, of exuberant emergence from oneself and self-critical retreat into oneself, of enthusiasm and skepticism in fragments from before the turn of the century.” 17 So rather than associating irony with any degree of “depravity” or “deficiency” in communication, Schlegel treated it as the perfect point of authorial transcendence, or, in other words, a playful self-deprecation. Here, irony becomes “permanent parabasis,” as if to suggest the disruptive direct address of the Chorus in Aristophanes’ comedy disclaims any apparent conceit of righteousness in the narrative proper. 18 Still, for Schlegel, the ultimate intention of irony in such contexts was to “excite, not destroy” audience engagement. 19 The formulaic use of irony in The Twilight Zone serves this very end, though it might seem more applicable to Hitchcock’s satirical disposition toward the dramatic mode of his own series. Serling also, however, proved capable of disrupting the typical gravity of The Twilight Zone’s plots. Consider, for example, the first season’s closing episode, “A World of His Own,” based on a Richard Matheson story and aired in July of 1960. Here, a successful playwright (Keenan Wynn) proves himself capable of creating reallife characters just by describing them in some detail to his Dictaphone. When his wife (Phyllis Kirk) witnesses him from a window romancing another woman (Mary La Roche) in his study, he is compelled to reveal his secret talent, first re-creating and then “un-creating” the selfsame woman by throwing the used length of audiotape into the fireplace. When his headstrong wife is still unconvinced, he sets about describing even a trumpeting elephant in the hallway to prevent her departure. Ultimately, he reveals a hidden wall safe whose contents include a labeled envelope containing the

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original tape for his wife, “Victoria West.” In her final act of defiance, she rips the envelope out of his hand and flings it into the fire, only to realize too late she is also just as soon doomed to vanish. At this point, Rod Serling appears to deliver his usual epilogue, but, atypically, he condemns the episode’s content as “purely fictional,” and declares that “in real life such ridiculous nonsense could never . . .” 20 In response to this, the protagonist reproaches Serling, retrieves a second envelope bearing Serling’s name from the safe, and places it in the fire. He subsequently re-creates his blonde concubine once again, only this time as his wife: “Mrs. Mary West.” Although this episode assumes a relatively lighthearted tone, especially through the smiling, carefree demeanor of Wynn’s performance as the playwright, it is Serling’s interruption of the narrative fiction and his “punishment” for doing so that makes it comedic. The usual twist ending is accomplished in our shared discovery with West’s wife that she is included among his creations. But then, in a stroke of double irony, the episode overturns the series’ formula by abruptly absorbing Serling himself into its fictional universe. And so Serling returns, but merely as a voice-over, to admit that Gregory West is “apparently in complete control of the Twilight Zone.” 21 The episode would thus be Schlegel’s ideal narrative, whose social comment is seemingly undermined, and yet whose audience, as a result, is surprised even further toward a contemplative mind-set. “A World of His Own,” like “Shadow Play,” calls the nature of reality into question, but in the playful opposite of the earlier episode’s nightmarish context. Instead of a feverish condemned man who is the victim of his dreamed reality, it offers an affable playwright conceiving his universe just as he likes. Accordingly, the target of the latter episode’s social critique is less controversial and more generally applicable to modern culture. Here, the message is personified as a contrast between an “urban” sense of materialism and a “rural” sense of inner fulfillment. “Mary,” described by the protagonist as “plain and unassuming” and yet with “the quality of inner loveliness that makes a woman truly beautiful,” represents the tranquil state of mind achieved through empathy and mutual understanding. 22 On the other hand, “Victoria,” dismissing the garb of the former as “old-fashioned,” is elegantly composed in the latest department store fashions, jewelry, and heavy makeup, and is otherwise, according to her husband, to be deemed as “perfect.” 23 In short, she is portrayed as a trophy wife, or simply another manifestation of wealth and material acquisition. She also appears incapable of any feeling for others amidst her husband’s admissions to feelings of inferiority. But her cold disposition toward him is somewhat warranted, having just witnessed his adulterous inclinations. Regardless, the differences between these two women constitute a critique of modernization, specifically in terms of urban culture’s privileging individual pursuit over traditional family values, as in Paddy Chayefsky’s influential teleplay “Marty.” Although this Twilight Zone

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episode is a Matheson entry, it corresponds to Serling’s thematic nostalgia for a more communal small-town culture, celebrated in both “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby.” In such a world, Mary, not Victoria, assumes the role of the nurturing mother figure, albeit totally confined to the domestic realm. This ideal of womanhood is not merely nostalgic, but is also an affirmation of the 1950s suburban ideal, according to which the woman’s place is in the home. At this point, however, the episode’s would-be indictment of urbanization becomes problematic. At the beginning of the episode, Victoria is out shopping or otherwise pursuing her own agenda, and this allows her husband the opportunity to conjure up a woman who, instead, is totally fixated on catering to his every whim. The latter’s disposition is quaintly signified at two different points in the episode by her preparing him a martini with a doting expression on her face. At one point, the protagonist complains to his wife that he was compelled to create Mary in his state of “loneliness,” as if Victoria is to be held responsible for his adultery. The domestic environment here is much closer to a suburban than urban context, with his handsome study’s window looking out into an expansive yard, even more characteristic of a ranch estate. So, just like the country/city dichotomy in the 1927 silent film Sunrise, this environment is only another “Willoughby” where traditional domestic values are pitted against a similar “woman in black,” arriving from the city to disrupt the harmony of the rural homestead. Instead of the demonic woman in the silent film, however, this one turns out to be the protagonist’s true spouse. So there is already an ironic element at this stage of the narrative and well before the climactic twist of Victoria’s discovering her own reality. As a result of this contest between urban and suburban values, Gregory West realizes the “modern” female is less desirable, in her independence from the domestic sphere, than one remaining at his side in the domicile. Of course, for the 1950s adult male audience, the latter female is ideal, not for being at her husband’s beck and call as much as remaining at home. This protagonist’s atypical ability to work from home, as a playwright, serves merely to underscore the preferable attributes of a domestic wife, perpetually mixing “comfort” in a martini glass for him. Such a gendered fantasy of marital bliss is best contextualized in the suburban culture of the time—something I return to with greater attention in a later chapter. According to the philosophical trajectory of irony, Schlegel’s celebration of the concept would, in turn, come under attack by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who deemed irony a threat to the “unifying substance” of his own dialectical claims to absolute knowledge. 24 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Behler suggests, condemns ironic communication as a so-called avowed evil for its inherent ability to confine language to subjectivity, instead of allowing it to transmit any final truth. 25 In Hegel’s later writings, it becomes clearer he attributes the endorsement of irony to Schlegel. Like Schlegel,

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Kierkegaard also embraced a modern sense of irony by way of Plato’s Socrates, and, at the same time, rebuked Xenophon, for example, for his limiting classical view of irony as merely didactic. In defense of Socrates against Hegel’s interpretation, Kierkegaard maintains: When Socrates declared that he was ignorant, he nevertheless did know something, for he knew about his ignorance; on the other hand, however, this knowledge was not a knowledge of something, that is, did not have any positive content, and to that extent his ignorance was ironic, and since Hegel has tried in vain, in my opinion, to reclaim a positive content for him, I believe the reader must agree with me. If his knowledge had been a knowledge of something, his ignorance would merely have been a conversational technique. His irony, however, was complete in itself. Inasmuch, then, as his ignorance was simultaneously earnest and yet again not earnest, it is on this prong that Socrates must be held. To know that one is ignorant is the beginning of coming to know, but if one does not know more, it is merely a beginning. This knowledge is what kept Socrates ironically afloat. 26

Not altogether successful in condemning irony, then, Hegel could not remain immune to an ironic disposition himself, which Kierkegaard is also quick to point out in his treatise. Behler affirms how Kierkegaard witnessed firsthand Hegel’s acknowledgment of a “world-historical irony,” which, it seemed, was his way of resigning himself to a perpetual reevaluation of accepted wisdom, as if to say the actualization of any idea contains the seed of its own undoing, in future generations. 27 Nevertheless, thereafter, irony would persist in the face of any Hegelian attempt at a unifying system of thought. Even if The Twilight Zone, as a popular television show, was less interested in negating attempts at universal wisdom than in affirming immediate societal ills, irony’s philosophical association with actuality per se implies a fundamental reevaluation of human existence as we understand it. In other words, The Twilight Zone’s irony derives from undermining audience expectations of natural, everyday events, through science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural manipulations. And, again, this irony of events, in turn, provokes a larger contemplation of social assumptions, also begging to be overturned. Furthermore, once Rod Serling allowed himself to assume an ironic pose toward the series’ narrative strategy at the end of the first season, this would also keep him, like Socrates, “ironically afloat” for the remainder of the show’s life, even if “A World of His Own” ended up being the only episode in which he would interact with the characters directly. Actually, this episode suffices as a pivotal point against what had been closer to a Hegelian conceit of the Twilight Zone’s “unifying substance.” Up to this point, Serling had maintained a straightforward disposition as the series’ host, as if to appropriately “bookend” The Twilight Zone’s moral universe with his prologues and epilogues. In mocking his function as such on-screen, and then

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reassuming his straightforward pose in a subsequent voice-over, he becomes “earnest and yet again not earnest” thereafter and perpetually. This is simply another aspect to the series’ aggregate context. Rather than merely being a congregation of narratives adhering to a similar ironic formula, The Twilight Zone functions as an ironic system for social critique. And, within this system, Serling, as officiator of its moral dimension, needed only prove capable of self-consciousness once in order to forever situate it within Schlegel’s characteristically “modernist” alternation of affirmation and negation. With the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, irony would take on its most potentiated form as an implied critique of modernism, especially with respect to the former Hegelian conceits of metaphysics. In these contexts, “irony” was less a topic or idea for discussion than it had been previously, and appeared, rather, to calcify into an inherency of occidental philosophy’s continued project. Just as Hegel eventually admits to a universal irony of the world, Friedrich Nietzsche seems ambiguous toward irony, characterizing it, on the one hand, as a decadent resignation to Socrates’ “unknowing” disposition and, on the other hand, as inevitable. In terms of the latter attitude, Behler discusses how, instead of “irony,” Nietzsche employs the word “masks.” For example, Behler quotes him as saying, in Beyond Good and Evil, “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hide-out, every word also a mask.” 28 And, also in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche declares: Everything profound loves masks. The most profound things of all even have a hatred for images and allegories. Shouldn’t the right disguise in which the shame of a god walks around be something exactly the opposite? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured something like that on his own. There are processes of such a delicate sort that people do well to bury them in something crude and make them unrecognizable. 29

Here, Nietzsche suggests profundity is best served through ironic communication, without actually naming the concept. His notion of “a hatred for images and allegories” anticipates Serling’s own disgust with television and its inability to address social problems openly and directly, amidst the vise grip of sponsors during the 1950s. And The Twilight Zone can be seen as such a “system” for concealing social critique within its exploitation of popular entertainment genres. Even on the surface level of his discussions, Nietzsche operates in an ironic mode of communication consistent enough to appear as his sole organizing principle or modus operandi. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche lists his series of observations by number, without implying any logical sequence beyond a few loose philosophical categories. His writings span a range from single-sentence aphorisms to robust paragraphs. What unifies these sundry postulations is his fundamentally iron-

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ic stance, arguing for the opposite of his contemporary readers’ common presumptions about truth, morality, existence, and all matters philosophical. After making a bold assertion, Nietzsche even occasionally inserts a “What?” or “How’s that?” followed by an interrogative sentence, all to accommodate his readers’ surprise at his irreverent claims. Here is an example, from aphorism 186: “And by the way: a pessimist, a world-denier and God-denier, who comes to a halt before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute, affirms laede neminem (harm no one) morality: What? Is that actually—a pessimist?” 30 This is Nietzsche’s way of mocking the nineteenth-century European intellect, by portraying the quizzical expression he imagines the common reader would have, in pausing to digest what was just read. Ultimately, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche declares that the “total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos.” 31 So, by assuming an ostensibly ambiguous disposition toward his own attempts to achieve life-affirming principles, even within his will to power, Nietzsche sets an ironic precedent for philosophers to come. Martin Heidegger, the next link in this trajectory of ironic thought, focuses on what he sees as an “end of philosophy,” in the rejection of all assumptions about “Being” as a universally applicable concept. 32 Behler explains, “One can safely say that with this thinking of a Being which remains unavailable and totally unknowable, yet determines every structure of thought and poetic diction, Heidegger provided that pattern of a delayed and never fully realizable presence that is operative in post-Hegelian hermeneutics and communication theory.” 33 And eventually Heidegger arrives at an ironic notion of occidental metaphysics Behler describes as “progressive nihilism.” 34 Behler paraphrases from Heidegger’s Nietzsche as follows: Nihilism, properly speaking, is therefore much more than the outcome, the result, the end of the history of metaphysics. Nihilism is not merely a “doctrine or an opinion,” not the simple “dissolution of everything into mere nothingness,” but the process of devaluating those highest values which in the history of metaphysics were declared, one after the other, as the truth of Being and then lost their capacity to shape history. 35

Here, again, the notion of a “process” is mobilized, though, in this case, as it pertains to Nietzsche’s embrace of nihilism as such. I shall quote directly from Heidegger’s analysis of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra where a shepherd is bitten by a black snake: Nihilism will be overcome only from the ground up, only if we grapple with the very head of it; only if the ideals which it posits and from which it derives fall prey to “criticism,” that is, to enclosure and overcoming. Yet such overcoming transpires only in the following way: everyone who is affected—and that means each of us—must bite into the matter for himself or herself; for if

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Here, the black snake is “nihilism,” or the inevitable point of meaninglessness in any philosophical endeavor. The only means to persist as a philosopher is to admit of these conditions—even to laugh at them—and to continue. And so, according to Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche, an ironic disposition or, rather, system toward realizing universal human truths is essential for the perpetual reevaluation of these truths through time. I have suggested, above, that The Twilight Zone is better understood as a system of ironic communication than as a collection of twist-oriented episodes. This is not to say, however, that Rod Serling was necessarily anticipating the aggregate potential of the series, but was simply embarking from a general narrative formula toward an unknown future. And this formula was loose enough for other writers to work within it without diluting Serling’s original intentions. I have also suggested that “A World of His Own” is pivotal within the series’ evolution as an aggregate system, specifically for demonstrating its self-consciousness and the ability to “laugh” at itself. At the same time, I am not arguing that Serling should be treated as a philosopher or the American “Zarathustra” of the postwar years. Rather, I am striving to remove emphasis from an auteurist perspective and, instead, consider the entire Twilight Zone series as a philosophical system, a striving for a certain “truth.” Accordingly, the series’ tendency toward social critique and dependency on irony can be understood as interrelated via the fundamental, philosophical relationship between irony and critique. Allow me then to continue along these lines. As if to complete a philosophical progression, proceeding from Schlegel’s initial embrace of ironic communication to Nietzsche’s “masks,” and then onward to Heidegger’s “progressive nihilism,” Jacques Derrida attempts to undermine the efficacy of communication itself, where even the subjective authorial voice becomes subsumed within the larger cultural dimensions of language. In his essay “Différance,” he argues that linguistic signifiers cannot be recognized independently, but depend on a complex system of what each is not in contrast to everything else. And, by extension, any notion of human identity is also a cultural construct. Behler explains, “Language, looked at from this perspective, is not derived from a speaking subject and is not a determinable function of this subject, but this subject is inscribed in language, is a function of language, conforms to the deployment of difference, and is a part of the game.” And yet, rather ironically, Derrida confesses the implications of his own deconstructive agenda, as quoted by Behler: “We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history,” Derrida says: “we can pronounce not a single deconstructive proposi-

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tion which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” 37

This would seem the ultimate permutation of admitting to the limitations of a philosophical process while, at the same time, arguing for its continuation within this very process. Each of these thinkers, in his way, comes to terms with this fundamental relationship between irony and self-reference. And passing this torch on to the next philosopher so becomes a vicious cycle in the history of occidental thought. POSTMODERNIST IRONY At this point, it is worth considering whether the philosophical legacy of irony within so many proposals of a “shift” from modernity to postmodernity may also shed any light on the function of irony in The Twilight Zone. As it so happens, the persistent perception of irony as inherent to the critique of reason and, ultimately, all claims to truth has often been correlated to the advent of postmodernity. But delineating such a “new” epoch seems, in turn, only to obfuscate the concept of irony as well as to undermine the integrity of “modernity” as an idiosyncratic epochal construct. Based on Derrida’s treatment of St. John’s Apocalypse as the prototype of any “apocalyptic” discourse, indicating neither a specific speaker nor an intended audience, Behler posits: There is no chance for a type of thinking that wants to reveal a final truth in a final discourse of revelation. But what about the “truth” of this truth, the truth about the apocalypse? It is precisely here, at the breaching of the limits of communication, that postmodern thinking and writing began to operate through circumlocution, indirectness, configuration, and ironic communication. 38

And yet even after affirming that Derrida ascribes the advent of a postmodern epoch as far back as Plato’s work, Behler concludes his study with the phrase: “if there were such a thing.” 39 According to Behler: The prefix post seems to suggest—as in postcapitalist, poststructuralist, postfeminist, or postnuclear—a new period, another epoch after a former one, a relief, so to speak, from the past, and because of a lack of a new designation, contents itself with canceling out the previous system without completely deleting it. Yet in the case of postmodern, this does not work, because modern is already the most advanced period designation and cannot be outdone. Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodernity, in a twisted posture, seems to be an

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Chapter 2 awareness of this paradox, and consequently of the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion. 40

Subsequently, Behler suggests that postmodernity is “neither an overcoming of modernity nor a new epoch, but a critical continuation of modernism which is itself both critique and criticism.” 41 Alan Wilde, in his Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination, also explores the evolution of ironic communication, particularly so as to negotiate pre-modernist, modernist, and postmodernist modes of thinking. Accordingly, he delineates three epochal categories of irony as “mediate,” “disjunctive,” and “suspensive,” suggesting a cultural trajectory from humankind’s longing for a redemptive paradise, to working through the inevitable paradox of metaphysics, to a passive acceptance of the absurd. 42 Wilde’s third category is much akin to what other postmodern theorists refer to as “blank irony,” or ironic communication without any apparent objective. Wilde clarifies his distinction between modern and postmodern dispositions as follows: The modernist nostalgia over origins is replaced by a dismissal of them; the frustration of being unable to resolve a dilemma gives way to an acceptance of the impossibility of making any sense whatever of the world as a whole. Acceptance is the key word here. Modernist irony, absolute and equivocal, expresses a resolute consciousness of different and equal possibilities so ranged as to defy solution. Postmodern irony, by contrast, is suspensive: an indecision about the meanings or relations of things is matched by a willingness to live with uncertainty, to tolerate and, in some cases, to welcome a world seen as random and multiple, even, at times, absurd. 43

At the same time, like Behler, Wilde maintains that “no simple temporal divisions are possible or desirable.” 44 Both theorists would concur that “postmodern” notions of irony, on the one hand, are symptomatic of contemporary culture, but, on the other hand, have “always already” (Derrida) been in effect throughout the ages. And so Behler concludes: For Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida a radical type of reflective thinking was not the prerogative of an epoch but an eternal mark of man. If they had to date the postmodern period, and they are great authorities in matters of irony and the postmodern, they would have given an amazingly early date and let it coincide with the origin of man or, if there is no such origin, with the eternal transgression of man. 45

If we must finally eschew epochal distinctions, then it would seem at least productive to proceed in terms of ironic “modes” instead of eras or zeitgeists. I am tempted, in this case, to rather shamelessly reduce the inherent complexity of these two categories by coming full circle back to the Greeks. In other words, I would associate a “postmodernist” mode with self-centered

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eirôneia, and a “modernist” mode with rhetorical irony. The former disposition is comparatively narcissistic. If it is intended to communicate any notion of metaphysical futility, it does so through circumlocution rather than open declaration. Like thinking out loud, then, it is less concerned with its audience. In terms of audience reception, at least, this could also be described as “blank irony.” The latter disposition, on the other hand, is comparatively selfless. It wants to transmit a clear message to an audience through the implied converse of its own discourse. It is purposeful irony, which, for example, engages social critique. Thus, according to this distinction, The Twilight Zone communicates predominantly in a “modernist” mode. But the problem here lies in even allowing the two modes to operate independently, when it often becomes so difficult to establish one over the other, as is the case with the persona of Socrates. To arrive at the opposite of Behler and Wilde’s conclusions, there is the case of M. Keith Booker’s study Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964, ostensibly periodizing “postmodern” tendencies as such. I think it is clear enough that Behler, especially, would question the historicity of such an approach. Nevertheless, Booker’s laundry list of characteristics, closer to a chain of consequences, does serve to corroborate a relationship between irony and social critique, and more immediately within the “social” context of postwar culture. I shall attempt to paraphrase each as follows: 1) Postmodernism, described by Jean-François Lyotard as a symptomatic suspicion toward any/all “totalizing metanarratives,” should be applied to the aftermath of World War II, precisely for its unprecedented, traumatizing impact on occidental culture; 2) Atypically rapid cultural transformations across the specified period Booker refers to as “the long 1950s” destabilized former standards of personal identity, leading to a larger sense of alienation; 3) American atomic bombs’ inconceivable devastation of Japanese cities established an ideological break in occidental discourse with any notion of historical legacy and an even more uncertain future; 4) The pervading debilitation of historical metanarratives also undermined hopes for any/all utopian futures; 5) A radical sense of relativism, based on the poststructuralist work of Derrida, Foucault, and others, supplanted a long-running dependency on Aristotelian logic and systems of polar opposition, so that no position could maintain superiority over any other position hereafter; 6) This collapse of traditional organizing structures also contributed to muddled distinctions between art and reality, further mobilized by the vast infiltration of new media technologies into everyday life; 7) This confusion of ontological levels and boundaries relates to a blurring of distinctions between high and low culture. Accordingly, many critics such as Andreas Huyssen suggest “postmodern” culture gravitates toward a wider, democratic context, versus “modern” culture’s former elitism; 8) A newly increasing wariness toward long-estab-

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lished standards of aesthetic judgment encouraged playfulness and self-parody, all within a rampant multiplicity of styles and genres. 46 As I have suggested, many of these symptoms of a postmodern epoch, or at least its formative years, are interconnected, almost as if they were a hierarchy percolating down from the precise ideological impact of thermonuclear destructiveness. And so the rationale behind this epochal approach is the transformation of culture through technological advancement, which, of course, is a more palpable strategy for pinning down dates and years than a philosophical trajectory for its own sake. In terms of irony, at least, the critique of modernism and/or grand metanarratives would seem more diachronic and was certainly attributable to the previous century, if not well before. Nietzsche, for example, had already gone to great lengths in breaking down polar constructs of “good” versus “evil.” Behler traces an ironic disposition toward metaphysical absolutes at least as far back as Schlegel’s work. In other words, it could be myopic to assume Derrida’s and other poststructuralists’ writings are merely reflective of postwar culture, rather than contributing to a more complex and perpetual evolution of occidental thought, including thinkers like Schlegel, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. At the same time, one cannot really overestimate the ideological impact of an anthropocentric, godless apocalypse, even if it is somewhat convenient to make it coterminous with any discursive “end of philosophy.” Ultimately, it is ironic communication itself that guarantees slippage between modal and epochal deployments of the “postmodern” category. It would then seem a matter of subdividing irony into further categories, as Wilde does, and then periodizing these. But even this proves to be problematic, as I shall now attempt to demonstrate with The Twilight Zone. A number of Booker’s postmodern characteristics apply rather well to the show, particularly the last two. Earlier, I point toward Serling’s former association with television’s Golden Age of live drama and his “angry young man’s” predisposition toward social commentary remaining with him. I also explore so many harbingers of The Twilight Zone’s literary anthology format, stemming from short stories deemed canonical by middle-class consumers. These aspects could be treated as the “high” cultural dimension of Serling’s initial vision for the series. At the same time, The Twilight Zone’s larger embrace of science fiction as a predominant B-film genre of the 1950s represents its decided concession to “low” culture and television’s state of evolution toward striving to capture the attention of the broadest possible advertising demographic. Also, the series’ episodes wouldn’t confine themselves to science fiction, but would reflect a multiplicity of genres, some of them even self-parodying. Accordingly, Booker would argue (and he does) The Twilight Zone is a postmodern show, or at least exhibits the “roots of postmodernism,” though somewhat inappropriately based on his “science fiction series” designation. On the other hand, the formulaic presence of irony in the series

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isn’t simply “blank” or otherwise without any rhetorical agenda attached, and, by extension, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe can hardly be construed as absurd. So, according to Wilde’s categories, the series’ irony cannot be “suspensive,” and so should be understood, rather, as employing “disjunctive” irony, making it closer to operating in a “modernist” mode. As a general rule, categories are supposed to clarify and contain phenomena both human and otherwise. And we see any system of categories as having more “integrity” if they are mutually exclusive or sufficiently immune to slippage between each other. In this case, however, clearly differentiating between “modernism” and “postmodernism” proves to be less productive than taking stock of what phenomena are considered in the process. For my part, I have far less stake in assuming a position in such a complex debate than merely in determining if these categories enlighten the relationship between irony and social critique. But the inherent problem lies in establishing anything definite about the communicative intentionality of irony, and even as far back as Socrates. It could also be misleading to place too much emphasis on the authorial dimension of ironic communication when an ironic “system” such as The Twilight Zone begins to transcend its various authorial voices and becomes a larger cultural entity. Derrida would certainly corroborate this latter point, and, accordingly, Socrates’ persona is better understood as a cultural product. In other words, Socrates sets the classical precedent for any complex iteration of many voices systematized as one, regardless of whether it is, at one extreme, a television anthology series with multiple writers, or, at another, any individual communicating or communicated. RORTY’S IRONIST UTOPIA There are any number of further thinkers to be included within the philosophical legacy of irony. For example, Behler follows his coverage of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida with an implied debate between Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty, the former attempting to recover the Hegelian metaphysical project for universal claims, while the latter embarks from the said trio’s ironic embrace of contingency, toward his own end-of-the-century philosophy. It is less imperative, at this stage, to explore Habermas’ renewed efforts against irony than to recognize the value of Rorty’s views toward informing the function of irony in The Twilight Zone. And, as we shall see, Rorty’s version of utopian society bears some remarkable resemblance to Serling’s expressed impetus for pursuing television writing. So far, discussions of ironic communication have reflected a fundamental notion of “critique,” at least in terms of metaphysical thought, but this is less clearly associated with social critique, that is, in striving after societal betterment. Rorty’s 1989 study Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity builds upon what he sees as a

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critical distinction between private and public spheres of idealization, all too often overlooked in previous philosophical systems. He paraphrases Michael Oakeshott’s similar position as follows: We can keep the notion of “morality” just insofar as we can cease to think of morality as the voice of the divine part of ourselves and instead think of it as the voice of ourselves as members of a community, speakers of a common language. We can keep the morality-prudence distinction if we think of it not as the difference between an appeal to the unconditioned and an appeal to the conditioned but as the difference between an appeal to the interests of our community and the appeal to our own, possibly conflicting, private interests. 47

Rorty finds that the legacy of philosophical inquiry is ultimately incompatible with larger political contexts. And so, by implication, occidental philosophy’s implied critique of self-enlightenment via ironic communication should be distinguished from any evaluation, ironic or otherwise, of a community, society, or culture. Toward this end, he acknowledges the contributions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, particularly toward affirming “contingency,” or the haphazard nature of existence he sees as invoking an ironic disposition toward the world, contrary to that of any metaphysical claims of a universal order. 48 Echoing Kierkegaard, Rorty personifies this disposition as the “ironist,” who lives within an idealized society of ironists. 49 He explains: To sum up, the citizens of my liberal utopia would be people who have a sense of the contingency of their language of moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community. They would be liberal ironists— people who met Schumpeter’s criterion of civilization, people who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment. 50

Such a citizen’s ironic disposition, then, derives from embracing a philosophical system that is admittedly arbitrary and so is perpetually “redescribed” by future ironists in future contexts. 51 Rorty says such ironists are “never quite able to take themselves seriously” because they are “always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves.” 52 He also proposes a cultural shift from “epistemology to politics” as follows: I should like to replace both religious and philosophical accounts of a suprahistorical ground or an end-of-history convergence with a historical narrative about the rise of liberal institutions and customs which were designed to diminish cruelty, make possible government by the consent of the governed, and permit as much domination-free communication as possible to take place. Such a narrative would clarify the conditions in which the idea of truth as

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correspondence to reality might gradually be replaced by the idea of truth as what comes to be believed in the course of free and open encounters. 53

For Rorty, any action amounting to “cruelty” toward others is the sole consideration linking the otherwise incompatible private and public spheres of morality. Accordingly, he argues that what really hold societies together are not all-encompassing metaphysical systems but “common vocabularies and common hopes,” and that these vocabularies serve to substantiate and sustain the hope for a better future. 54 But since these vocabularies should never be deemed universal or permanent, the focus should, instead, be directed toward any potential “humiliation” of others within ever-shifting social contexts. 55 Rorty concludes: The liberal ironist just wants our chances of being kind, of avoiding humiliation of others, to be expanded by redescription. She thinks that recognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only social bond that is needed. 56

So Rorty’s fundamental claim here is that cruel and/or humiliating actions and dispositions are less likely to occur in a society whose citizens do not uphold an absolute code of what constitutes “inhumanity” but, rather, are engaged in both private and perpetual reevaluation of such philosophical systems. At the same time, he admits few people are capable of being real ironists, so his utopia of female “poets and revolutionaries” takes on the semblance of Lost Horizon’s mythical Shangri-La, whose High Lama (Sam Jaffe) also preaches the single pervasive rule: “Be kind.” 57 I am now ready to make my own claim that The Twilight Zone, as an aggregate system of ironic communication, maintains a moral universe much akin to Rorty’s utopia, not necessarily in order to propose such utopias are, indeed, possible, but to mobilize a critique of modern cultural tendencies, especially within the postwar American context. If I wanted to argue Rod Serling was not only predisposed but culturally “preconstituted” toward a similarly liberalist society, I would simply rehearse the biographical details of his upbringing, the influence of radio personalities such as Norman Corwin, and so on. And I would return, once again, to his Mike Wallace interview, wherein Serling decries his inability to make “dramatic note of social evils that exist.” 58 Rather, I want to discourage further celebrations of Serling’s authorial role, even as The Twilight Zone’s motivating visionary, and, instead, inscribe him within the series’ larger functionality as a system of ironic communication. In this latter context, I have already noted Serling’s role as the series’ host, and how it moves beyond that of the conventional “Bookshop Man.” For one, Serling becomes the spokesperson for the moral universe “we call ‘the Twilight Zone,’” which is far more complex as a narrative context than simply an anthology of canonical story adaptations or

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even twist-oriented crime dramas. Also, Serling positions himself as Rorty’s “ironist” in the first season’s final episode, by assuming an ironic pose toward his authoritative function. As I argue earlier, Serling reassumes his earnest tone in this episode, as if to repossess his “final word” on the Twilight Zone universe, since his ironic pose was sufficient to reframe not only the host, but also the entire series as something other than a “final vocabulary.” But Rorty’s work is productive even beyond seeing Serling as an aspect of a larger ironic system. I want to focus more on The Twilight Zone’s moral universe for its own sake, not only because it is, after all, constantly being “redescribed” from episode to episode, but also because it finds a moral responsibility in separating private and public pursuits. In other words, the series judges its characters against Rorty’s utopia of the liberal ironist, where the only links between public and private spheres are cruelty and humiliation. At a cursory glance, a television series whose moral universe restores its sense of equilibrium through ironic events might not appear to reflect contingency per se, since a moral universe cannot, at the same time, be a contingent one. However, it is the consistent or, rather, formulaic presence of these ironic shifts that serves to contradict rational anticipation, or what Rorty would refer to simply as “common sense.” Specifically for Rorty, “the opposite of irony is common sense” and, further, “to be commonsensical is to take for granted that statements formulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions, and lives of those who employ alternative final vocabularies.” 59 According to Rorty, to believe in the possibility of a universal, organizing discourse is to presume anything or everything has an intrinsic nature in the first place. It is this very presumption of an intrinsic nature The Twilight Zone seeks to undermine, though not always by taking liberties with science fiction or the supernatural. Even the occasional case of a plausible outcome implies this critique of common sense, but only within the larger context of unreal ironic outcomes the series makes its rule. I mention such an exception, “The Jeopardy Room” (April 1964), earlier. Zicree chastises the episode for its lack of any “fantasy” element, 60 but, as it turns out, irony supersedes fantasy in the greater context of the show. Let us, then, consider the episode further along these lines. In terms of its basic plot, the protagonist, occupying a simple hotel room, is challenged by his pursuers to locate and defuse a planted bomb without allowing it to destroy him first, all within three hours’ time. Aside from positioning this character as a KGB defector, the episode manipulates our sympathies through its use of dialogue. Major Ivan Kuchenko (Martin Landau) refers rather passionately to the tortures he endured at his adversary’s hand, while Commissar Vassiloff (John van Dreelen) clearly expresses his titillation in pitting his intelligence against his target in this would-be game

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of death. In the course of the episode, Vassiloff “immodestly” refers to himself as an “artist” as well as one of the “last imaginative executioners.” 61 And, in so doing, he distinguishes himself philosophically from both his intended victim Kuchenko and his “bourgeois” assistant hit man Boris (Robert Kelljan). In the end, he underestimates the intelligence of Kuchenko, who just barely realizes the ringing telephone is booby-trapped and dashes out. By the same token, he underestimates the stupidity of his colleague, who, in turn, thoughtlessly answers the hotel room’s phone when Kuchenko calls from a pay phone afterward. And so, ironically, Vassiloff becomes the victim of his own scheme. There is neither a science fiction nor a fantasy element here. Nor is there any subjective, delusional element, as in the episode “Nightmare as a Child.” In his prologue, Serling introduces the protagonist apparently in his usual way, declaring, “An ignorance shared by both himself and his executioner is that both of them have taken the first step into the Twilight Zone.” 62 Normally, such a declaration would anticipate an unreal event only possible within the “dimension of imagination,” and yet these characters are, nonetheless, also to be deemed inhabitants of “the Twilight Zone.” This suggests that such a “zone” doesn’t have as much to do with unreal contexts as with an imagined moral universe always reestablishing its order through ironic shifts. In this case, the ironic shift allows a victim of cruelty, Major Kuchenko, to improbably overcome his situation. At the same time, this shift allows his victimizer, Commissar Vassiloff, to die improbably by his own self-proclaimed finesse, as if to “punish” his hubris thereby. By accomplishing these dual purposes, then, “the Twilight Zone” restores moral equilibrium. And, in terms of its immediate Cold War context, the episode also allows Kuchenko to board his flight for New York City, with Serling’s epilogue confirming his passage to American “freedom,” if not quite Rorty’s liberal ironist utopia. 63 The Twilight Zone’s moral universe persists even in cases where contingency would otherwise prevail, as in the aforementioned popular episode “Time Enough At Last” (November 1959). On its surface, at least, this narrative would seem to make the consummate existential argument for a contingent universe. The protagonist, Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith), seeks any opportunity to read his canonical literature (Dickens, Keats, Shaw, etc.). After a nuclear holocaust, he finds himself totally alone in an empty landscape, with neither a fellow human being in sight nor an available activity to occupy him. He reassures himself God will forgive him for taking his own life in such conditions. Only at the last moment before pulling the trigger does Mr. Bemis happen to spy the words “public library.” At this point, confronted with a lifetime of endless books, he sets out to organize the rest of his life around pillars of selected volumes for each month. In a moment of blissful reflection, Bemis turns his gaze downward toward a solitary book and in reaching for it stumbles, causing his Coke-bottle glasses to fall from

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his face and shatter on the library’s concrete steps. Upon confirming this, he declares, “That’s not fair, that’s not fair at all . . . There was time now,” as if to concede an amoral, godless universe. 64 Here is an abrupt ironic turn from the protagonist’s faith in a moral universe to his witnessing firsthand the ruthlessness of random chance. And so this would seem to be the point of the episode—that we oughtn’t assume we’ll be treated “fairly” within such a contingent universe. But this is only a superficial reading. Rather, the series’ formulaic use of irony, in its accumulation of narrative twists, conditions its audience toward a deeper analytical attentiveness, beyond the typically passive, escapist reception of television content. In other words, any Twilight Zone episode’s ironic twist is not to be read as its final communication, just as “contingency” is not the ultimate point of “Time Enough At Last.” Rather, this episode’s irony of events, especially as perceived by Henry Bemis, spurs a reconsideration of his particular societal context. According to Rorty’s philosophy, Bemis is right to devote himself to so many “vocabularies,” but he recklessly allows his private interests to compete with his professional function as a bank clerk and social function as a married man. This is not to say the episode wants us to scorn Mr. Bemis outright for his inclinations. On the contrary, he is positioned as the victim of the people surrounding him, namely his stoic boss (Vaughn Taylor) and sadistic wife (Jacqueline de Wit). And this is an effective strategy in building toward the surprise outcome of his victimization, where his entire universe reveals itself to be just as capable of crossing out every page of his reading material. However, within the series’ aggregate context, Henry Bemis is less a personification of “victim” than “renegade” or, rather, an individual unwilling to assume social responsibility. His employer, the bank president, has every cause to fire Bemis for reading on the job, having noticeably impaired his competency, for example, with the customer (Lela Bliss) he misaddresses as “Mrs. Murdstone.” His employer allows him to continue nevertheless, with only a warning. And even his wife’s sardonic means of discouraging his further private forays must, in hindsight, be tempered with his own reluctance to engage with their friends and neighbors. Upon further consideration, then, this episode’s ironic outcome isn’t simply to shock us with the cruelty of haphazard chance. Instead, it is The Twilight Zone’s moral universe reestablishing its equilibrium once again, this time by offering a rather poetic form of justice to one whose self-indulgence made for its own degrees of cruelty and humiliation—toward his community. At the same time, there are certain cases wherein restoring the series’ moral universe is less a priority than simply exploring the more disturbing aspects of the “zone” as such. In particular, these episodes focus on the Twilight Zone’s ability to toy with its characters’ assumptions of natural laws, or essentially what Rorty would call these characters’ “common sense.” According to what I suggest earlier, these episodes may appear as exceptions

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to the show’s critical agenda, but they are better understood as supporting the larger aggregate system of ironic communication at stake. If such episodes were not the exception but the rule of The Twilight Zone, I would relegate the series to the level of television programs employing narrative twists for entertainment purposes only, akin to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (And then this study would cease to exist.) Proceeding from my parenthetical note here, I shall consider the firstseason episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” airing on December 11, 1959. In an authorial context, I could try to argue that, since this episode is based on a Richard Matheson short story, it is understandable that Serling’s aggressive social consciousness is missing. I could also try to argue we should associate moral aspects of The Twilight Zone more decidedly with Serling’s teleplays than those written by Beaumont, Matheson, or others, because of his ostensible “angry young man’s” predisposition. As I suggest earlier, however, the fundamental limitation to auteurist approaches lies in overlooking the complexity of creative forces (and hindrances) involved in realizing any studio-oriented motion picture product, not to mention the constitutive forces inherent to its greater cultural context. In the case of this particular episode, for example, Serling actually penned the teleplay himself, but only by adapting the premise of Matheson’s story “Disappearing Act,” in which the defining elements of a man’s universe (wife, best friend, etc.) systematically vanish around him. Serling’s plot, on the other hand, entails the return from outer space of what he describes in his epilogue as an “experimental interceptor,” and so Matheson’s ontological premise is already subsumed within the extraterrestrial speculations of the science fiction genre. 65 One of the spacecraft’s astronauts, Colonel Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor), arrives at his injured copilot’s hospital room in a state of desperation, since no one, not even his bedridden colleague, Major William Gart (James Hutton), recalls the “third” astronaut in their crew. All this would appear to be established by the newspaper in Forbes’ hand with an editorial photo showing only two crewmen. Forbes then recounts the previous events in a flashback, wherein he and this other crewman, Colonel Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman), are at Gart’s bedside, and then visit a local bar to celebrate their return. Harrington experiences pangs of anxiety, as if he somehow “didn’t belong,” and, soon after, he vanishes inside a phone booth after attempting to contact parents who don’t recognize him. 66 No one in the bar remembers Harrington, nor does Forbes’ wife (Maxine Cooper) when he appeals to her. And then, just as we are returned to Gart’s hospital room, Forbes himself announces having the same anxiety and then literally disappears into the hallway. As soon as Gart sees that the newspaper headline only shows one crewman now, he vanishes along with his hospital bed, leaving an empty room where three beds had originally been. Serling’s epilogue, played over a shot of the wrinkled tarpaulin beneath which the spacecraft had been,

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merely confirms, “Someone or something took them somewhere. At least they are no longer part of the memory of man.” 67 And so, somewhat conveniently, Serling makes outer space “the Twilight Zone,” imbuing it with metaphysical properties, which, in turn, undermine physical laws on Earth. Further diluting any notion of authorial intentionality here, Zicree’s investigations into the episode cite its director, Douglas Heyes, as claiming to have had Serling’s permission to alter Forbes’ fear of disappearance to one of “euphoria.” 68 Rather, I would counter that Forbes’ display, according to the loss of his friend, develops from an extremely frenzied state not into one of euphoria but into one of resignation to his own impending doom. Similarly, Don Presnell and Marty McGee cite Serling as saying he felt compelled to provide a “rationale” for these disappearances, which is absent in Matheson’s story. 69 Both parties, in terms of a greater cultural context for Serling’s choice of outer space as a rationale, refer to the status of space travel at the point of this episode. Presnell and McGee point to the Cold War context of the US-Soviet space race, and the Soviets having launched Sputnik I in 1957, to be followed by the US satellite Explorer I in 1958. 70 Zicree simply points out that, since human space travel hadn’t yet been initiated, the realm of outer space and its effects on humans was still open to imagination—and artistic comment. 71 Beyond both authorial and cultural contexts for this and similar episodes, however, their larger function within The Twilight Zone series as an ironic system for social critique should be considered. While it suffices for these episodes to reinforce the Zone’s fearful ability to manipulate human existence, there is still the possibility of detecting some moral attribute to its irony. Unlike many other Twilight Zone episodes, “And When the Sky Was Opened” pursues an ironic premise throughout its duration— that people and their physical carriers can abruptly vanish right out of existence, leaving no physical or mental traces of ever having existed in their wake. And then the episode’s formulaic twist ending comes when the last astronaut, apparently complicit in forgetting the first astronaut, finally awakens to his plight and disappears himself. I intend my use of the word “complicit” to point to the protagonist’s increasing paranoia in this episode, which reaches its apex in the hospital when he confronts his copilot, just after Forbes accuses his wife of conspiring with everyone else against him as “some sort of gag.” 72 This is to say the episode’s pervading irony runs hand in hand with the characters’ paranoia, personified repeatedly through the experience of what Booker would refer to simply as “alienation.” So if this episode’s irony can been seen as calling attention to social alienation, especially as a defining aspect to postwar American culture, then The Twilight Zone’s aggregate moral universe can be seen as restoring its equilibrium accordingly by “eradicating” these paranoid citizens from the community. And to take this episode’s social critique a step further, I would call attention to these particular citizens’ association with

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“experimental” military technology, which is something I take up at greater length in the next chapter. It remains, now, to briefly review the major points I have taken from irony’s philosophical trajectory toward informing the function of irony in The Twilight Zone. To make such an abstract exercise productive, I assume the series’ strategic dependency on twist endings, ironic scenarios, or both amounts to a form of “ironic communication.” In other words, in order to draw from the legacy of irony across the occidental canon of philosophical discourse, I treat The Twilight Zone as a classical orator like Socrates, subject to a complex array of impulses and motivations. We could also construe such a speaker as “always already” predetermined by so many cultural forces at work, and this makes the analogy between an orator and a television series less of a leap. In other words, just as Socrates exists solely through the discourse of several authors, The Twilight Zone becomes an aggregate iteration of voices or, in Rorty’s terms, an “ever-shifting vocabulary.” Fundamentally, then, The Twilight Zone’s ironic communication should be treated as ambiguous. Primarily, it has an outward, objective intention toward reaching its audience as a rhetorical device. Somehow it manages to imply the opposite of what is communicated on a literal level. In a spoken context, this can be accomplished solely through the speaker’s tone of voice. But in a purely verbal or written context, the actual choice of words comes into play, so that in their syntactically correct, though not quite appropriate employment, an opposite meaning is communicated. But here we must make the conceptual leap from words to images, in such a way that portrayed actions and events, taken together, can also imply the opposite of their own immediate, literal level. In the context of a motion picture narrative, then, this “literal level” is simply what the audience sees and hears, or, rather, the ostensible plot of the show. And here we must compare an audience’s expectation of “meaning” to its expectation of “outcome.” The former might appear completely atemporal, in its instantaneous relationship between sign and referent, whereas the latter becomes a temporal evaluation. But, really, any communicated phrase or string of phrases is also a temporal sequence—or process—and so also has its outcome, its conclusion. Once we have established this effective parallel between the process of verbal rhetoric and that of a motion picture narrative’s plot, we are ready to ask: Does The Twilight Zone, in effect, “say one thing and mean another?” As long as we understand that the expectation of “meaning” in any text per se is equivalent to the expectation of “outcome,” then the answer is yes. At the same time, ironic communication may have an inward, subjective thrust, where it is less directed at an audience than at its source. Of course, the audience remains witness to such self-consciousness, which, in turn, becomes communicative for its own sake, as in a “modernist” mode. Or it may appear deceptive, as in eirôneia. Or, again, it may seem simply aloof, as in

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the “postmodern” or “blank” mode. Depending on who’s watching, The Twilight Zone may function in any or all of these modes. Regardless of mode, inward ironic communication, as long as it is noticeable, calls attention to itself by virtue of thwarting audience expectations, and, just as in an outward context, triggers a deeper consideration of what is ultimately at stake in terms of meaning. And this state of raised awareness can be exploited within any ironic process toward mobilizing critique. This is to say irony is not precisely tantamount to critique but is, rather, an available means toward this end. The legacy of philosophical irony serves to substantiate this claim, especially where ironic communication becomes a means toward calling the pursuit of metaphysical finalities into question. But, once again, we must be willing to make a certain conceptual leap, in this case, from a critique of metaphysics to The Twilight Zone’s critique of 1950s cultural tendencies and assumptions. This works as long as we see any philosopher’s mobilization of a “critique,” per se, via ironic communication as a process or system not dissimilar to the television series’ own aggregate effect on its audience, which is less a consideration of specific episodes, unless these episodes inflect the entire process in turn, as does “A World of His Own.” Accordingly, Richard Rorty’s philosophy identifies an ironic inclination toward critique, where the “ironist” undertakes a private, perpetual task of reevaluating predetermined moral systems, but, at the same time, maintains a harmonious relationship with others. And this individual and other ironists exist together within a greater “liberal” democratic community, held together solely by minimizing any/all causes of cruelty or humiliation. Such a society turns out to be productively close to The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, relentlessly restoring its own equilibrium across episodes. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Wolfsdorf, “Eirôneia,” 668. Behler, Irony, 78. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 77. Ibid. Wolfsdorf, “Eirôneia,” 666. The Mike Wallace Interview, CBS, September 22, 1959. Plato, The Republic, 365–401. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 200. Ibid., 199. “Shadow Play,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Behler, Irony, 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Ibid., 84.

Irony’s Philosophical Legacy 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Ibid., 85. “A World of His Own,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Behler, Irony, 86. Ibid. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, 269. Behler, Irony, 90. Ibid., 98. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 46. Ibid., 88. Behler, Irony, 100. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 129. Ibid. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 180. Behler, Irony, 109. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Wilde, Horizons, 9–10. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 11. Behler, Irony, 149. Booker, Monsters, 23–25. Rorty, Contingency, 59. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., xv. Ibid., 61. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., 73–74. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 86. Ibid., xv. Ibid., 91. Lost Horizon, Columbia Pictures, 1937. The Mike Wallace Interview, CBS, September 22, 1959. Rorty, Contingency, 74. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 412. “The Jeopardy Room,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “Time Enough At Last,” The Twilight Zone. “And When the Sky Was Opened,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 62. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History, 43. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 63. “And When the Sky Was Opened,” The Twilight Zone.

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Technological Irony

The previous chapter examines the formulaic presence of irony in The Twilight Zone in order to “redescribe,” in Richard Rorty’s terminology, the series’ cultural significance as a complex system for social critique. 1 Toward this end, I explore the fundamental nature of ironic communication itself, according to its legacy in occidental thought, and ways in which this legacy informs the relationship between irony and social critique in this anthology series. I corroborate what others have already argued about The Twilight Zone’s ironic twist endings—and their ability to stimulate an analytical attention to the episodes’ themes. But I also suggest these twist endings are better understood within the show’s larger narrative tendency toward irony, where more generally ironic scenarios are possible and where surprise outcomes may not be as essential to the intended effect on audiences. And I argue that even the series’ departures from realism, as well as its apparent dedication to science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural, could be misleading, since certain episodes still maintain the show’s ironic system, even within completely plausible circumstances. Closest, perhaps, to the core of my argument, so far, is that the series systematically narrativizes irony as the “Twilight Zone” itself. And, furthermore, the Zone’s ability to thwart audience expectations in so many ways, in most cases, serves to establish and reestablish an implied moral universe, or, if not, simply reinforces its ironic potentiality. I finally posit that The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, akin to Rorty’s liberalist utopia, orients itself around eliminating any/all sources of cruelty, humiliation, and human suffering. And if any such source is human, this moral universe restores its equilibrium by “punishing” these culprits and/or compensating its victims. Yet to be considered, however, is the topical nature of the larger social critique at stake in The Twilight Zone and its cultural significance. In other words, the task of 57

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identifying patterns within the series’ agenda for social consciousness still remains before me. Such patterns reflect the most characteristic concerns of the postwar era in America, while, at the same time, speaking to the larger compass of universal human foibles. In pursuing this task, I also reapply my theoretical approach to further examples in the series. With the remaining chapters, then, I isolate and categorize a number of The Twilight Zone’s targeted cultural phenomena, not necessarily to subdivide the entire breadth of its episodes, but to appreciate the range and nature of the societal issues both available and addressed through its ironic system. The Twilight Zone’s relative diversity of narrative material reflects many aspects of postwar American culture, especially compared to The Outer Limits, which exploited American fears of Soviet invasion through plots oriented around hostile aliens. I am certainly not the first Twilight Zone analyst to approach its thematic content categorically. M. Keith Booker, for example, argues for two predominant postwar themes: “routinization” and “alienation.” In his study Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War, he defines them as follows: The particular form of alienation that was so prevalent in America in the long 1950s can be described as a fear of exclusion, as a fear of not fitting in. Surrounded by a pressure to conform, individuals feared their own inability to do so; they feared being identified as different, as being, in fact, the Other. Conversely, routinization in the long 1950s involves a sense of being forced into conformity, at a loss of individual identity. In short, Americans in the long 1950s suffered from two principal fears: the fear of being different from everyone else and the fear of being the same as everyone else. 2

In his subsequent study, Strange TV, Booker affirms an overall dearth of “genuine resistance” in television, and yet he says, “I do believe that signs of an ongoing modernist strain, with a potential for utopian critique of the status quo, can be detected here and there in a certain anxiety that worries about the current condition of things, even if it does not really suggest systemic alternatives.” 3 He cites The Twilight Zone as his first example within this “modernist strain,” saying: The Twilight Zone often aspired to the condition of serious art, reflecting a strong modernist influence. In addition, the program strained against the routinization and alienation that were such crucial phenomena in American culture in the long 1950s, showing at least the rudiments of a critique of the negative consequences of American corporate culture. 4

Such a schematic would seem to suggest the series takes one of only two fundamental narrative pathways toward its critique of postwar American culture, even within its diversity of genres and contexts. I agree certain

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Twilight Zone episodes treat these themes specifically. Previously, for example, I discuss “And When the Sky Was Opened” in terms of its characters’ severe degree of alienation or, rather, paranoia regarding others’ “complicity” in alienating them. Indeed, there are any number of episodes where characters’ sense of mutual belonging is totally destabilized, such as “The Eye of the Beholder,” “A World of Difference,” and “The After Hours.” And there are a handful of episodes, for example, reflecting a “forced conformity,” such as “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” “Mr. Bevis,” and “Cavender Is Coming.” But in the context of The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, alienation and routinization should be understood as merely the general consequences of more specific evils within American society. I am more inclined to sort through these “evils” and determine if a categorical approach for these could better serve the larger perspective on the series’ cultural context. For example, even “Time Enough At Last” negotiates a sense of forced conformity, where the protagonist struggles against persons such as his wife and boss, both insisting on his assimilation into the “routine” of society. But, as I suggest earlier, I think it is incorrect to decide we are called upon to sympathize with this character to the point of affirming universal contingency and/or a cruel society prohibiting any citizen’s escape into literature. Rather, the episode’s ultimate thrust is to reproach any form of self-indulgence impeding a harmonious society, which is, really, to “humiliate” certain members of that society. So I prefer to pursue a number of specific “causes,” rather than their consequences, within post–World War II society. The first such characteristic “cause” of transformation in postwar American culture I would like to address is the rapid influx of technology into everyday contexts. Behind any manifestation of technological advancement, in either private or public sectors, is the fundamental conceit that technology improves the quality of our existence, mostly by increasing efficiency or convenience. As it so often turns out, however, these technologies tend to complicate our lives by merely raising standards of productivity. In his discussion of routinization, Booker refers to Mark Jancovich’s study Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s, which considers science fiction films within the horror genre, as identifying a similar “process of rationalization” in American society during these years. For Jancovich, this is “the process through which scientific-technical rationality is applied to the management of social, economic, and cultural life, a process in which rational procedures are used to examine and reorganize social, economic, and cultural practices in an attempt to produce order and efficiency.” 5 What he calls “scientific-technical rationality” is the same as what I term the “conceit of technologization.” The only difference here is between the words “rationality” and “conceit,” where the former would connote a merely logical assumption that if science and technology provide a greater degree of control

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over natural phenomena, then they must be worthwhile pursuits. My use of “conceit” goes a bit further in suggesting even this logical claim confers a certain presumptuousness or vanity. In other words, any established conditions of order and efficiency are not necessarily inherent improvements over previous conditions of disorder and inefficiency. It really depends on a larger complexity far more inherent to such conditions, and what precisely is at stake. In the domestic sphere of the postwar years, for example, this conceit becomes the onslaught of household appliances, intended to ease the administration of the suburban family household for the typical housewife. In this context, at stake is an implied relationship or contest between work and leisure time. Any such appliance, then, is intended through its technical automations ultimately to accomplish more leisure time for the domestic administrator. Lynn Spigel, in her Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, describes this newly emerging context against former assumptions of household chores as voluntary: As feminist critics and historians have shown, however, the home is indeed a site of labor. Not only do women do physical chores, but also the basic relations of our economy and society are reproduced at home, including the literal reproduction of workers through childrearing labor. Once the home is considered a workplace, the divisions between public/work and domestic/leisure become less clear. The way in which work and leisure are connected, however, remains a complex question. 6

Just as increased efficiency in an industrial context improves productivity, household appliances also improved productivity within the domestic sphere. Accordingly, the domestic conceit of technologization promises that more objectives accomplished in less time will mean more leisure time for the housewife. But, also just as in industrial contexts, more objectives accomplished in less time means more time for more work. Rather than leisure time, the typical housewife in the 1950s actually found the potential for administrative duties only increased through the added presence of so many appliances. Here is the irony of technologization—that technological advancement may only accomplish the opposite of what it aspires toward. Regardless of public or private, industrial or domestic contexts, our lives only become more compressed with additional tasks we are now able to accomplish in the same amount of time. At this point, I want to propose the notion that any irony of events within The Twilight Zone’s narrative context becomes strategically ideal toward communicating a larger thematic irony. In other words, overturning audience anticipation of plotted scenarios and/or outcomes stimulates a reevaluation of common assumptions—whose conclusion is somehow antithetical. These common assumptions are the very same cultural “conceits” I seek to catego-

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rize across my remaining chapters, with the first category being “technologization.” This particular pattern of Twilight Zone episodes incorporates permutations of “technology” within their plots in ways becoming ironic, and this narrative level of irony communicates a larger thematic irony of technical advancement’s false promise. Within The Twilight Zone’s larger system for social critique, then, these episodes specifically invoke technological irony, which, in turn, communicates a critique of technology’s potential to improve the human condition and moreover reveals its alienating/conditioning effects on the individual. The first among these episodes is, of course, the series’ pilot, “Where Is Everybody?” airing on October 2, 1959. Earlier, I point to the formulaic elements traceable as far back as this episode, if not to Rod Serling’s Desilu Playhouse production “The Time Element,” namely an unreal scenario with a twist ending. In “Where Is Everybody?” the unreal scenario is a man finding himself totally alone within a town that nevertheless seems not quite abandoned, as if people had just been there and then suddenly vanished. In addition to this, the protagonist (Earl Holliman) admits to himself he has forgotten his identity, despite affirming he is an “American.” His search for any living soul in the street, in vehicles, or inside the buildings becomes increasingly desperate and climaxes with a state of frenzied helplessness. Only at this point does a surprise twist reveal he is actually inside an isolation simulator intended to assess the psychological effects of a rocket voyage to the moon. The presence of a moral universe might not seem as apparent in this episode, since the plot twist simply restores the protagonist’s unreal universe to self-awareness and community. But, really, the isolation booth, as plausible as it is, is still imaginary here, just as are its hallucinatory effects on the subject’s mind. And so these imagined conditions are, by definition, a “science fiction,” contextualized, in turn, as “the Twilight Zone.” Such a “zone” nonetheless assumes a moral dimension in warning its audience of a viably possible technology, or, rather, an impending technology. In this context, the societal “cruelty” is what the military is willing to put a man through for the greater cause of space exploration. Even Serling’s relatively brief prologue warns: “The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.” 7 In hindsight, then, his words suggest any American citizen could be subjected to such traumatizing experiments, in the name of technological progress. And Serling’s epilogue suggests outer space promises only similar experiences of “isolation” and is ultimately “the Twilight Zone” itself. In this episode’s anticipation of America’s moon landing, then, it can only treat outer space as a “dimension of imagination.” Thus, it is safe to say that in all subsequent Twilight Zone episodes concerning space travel this is also the case.

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Beyond targeting the Cold War space race, this episode’s specific critique of military technologization also touches on thermonuclear destruction. At one point in his search, the protagonist focuses on a rotating bookrack with copies of a paperback entitled The Last Man on Earth. These serve to underscore his predicament, of course, but could also be lip service to Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, also portraying a character in a postapocalyptic context, though, in this case, brought about by a pandemic. Regardless, the solitary protagonist soon realizes he’s “in the Air Force” and then considers the implication of a “bomb” being dropped. 8 In this very moment, the empty movie theater’s screen shows footage of an aircraft taking flight; this is none other than a B-52 bomber, designed and deployed in the 1950s specifically to carry nuclear weapons for deterrence missions. Accordingly, Serling’s prologue also warns of technology’s ability to beget a nuclear holocaust, and that such “could be our journey.” 9 This latter connotation actually works better than the notion that we could all be doomed to the “isolation” inherent to space travel, and, thus, I would argue that The Twilight Zone’s moral universe here conflates outer space with the Twilight Zone in order to critique thermonuclear technology. In other words, there is less a concern here about the isolating aspects of a moon voyage than that of a post-apocalyptic existence on Earth. This critique contains the most acute form of technological irony—that scientific advancement could readily become the seed of destruction for the entire human race. Especially in the context of 1950s television, such an indictment of military strategy was better made implicitly within this episode’s explicitly stated theme of the human need for companionship. The ironic twist employed here to invoke this larger thematic irony is actually symptomatic itself, if not possibly lifted from previously disseminated source material. Marc Scott Zicree’s, as well as Don Presnell and Marty McGee’s, coverage of this 1959 episode testifies to Serling’s having been inspired by a magazine article about astronaut isolation experiments, in addition to a walk through an empty studio lot. Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, however, also places its protagonist in a simulated 1950s town—specifically so he can, in the novel’s present (the 1990s), reestablish the mental state of his halcyon childhood and so predict nuclear rocket strikes from a moon colony. Booker points out that Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism devotes an entire chapter to this novel, and further notes, “As Jameson points out, the relation between the artificial 1950s town and the external 1990s world of Time Out of Joint can be read as an allegorical duplication of the relation between America (as placid utopia) and the external world (a dangerous dystopia) that prevailed in the American imagination in the 1950s.” 10 Similar to Dick’s novel, the Twilight Zone pilot’s imagined “bomb” and its destruction of a characteristically “American” 1950s town imply both the threat of a Soviet attack and the ability to retaliate, or, in other words, the definitive “cold war” stalemate.

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Even if Serling was totally unaware of the novel’s premise, his teleplay’s ironic narrative mobilizes the selfsame critique of technical advancement, and, by deriving its science fiction from a far more immediate and plausible context, the Cold War itself. ROBOTIC IRONY There are a plentitude of episodes across The Twilight Zone’s five seasons that imagine advanced and/or futuristic technologies. These “science fiction” episodes can be subdivided further into clusters according to their narrativization of space travel, extraterrestrial presence, robots, computers, time machines, and so on. Such technologies are characteristic of the dystopian societies found in both “The Trade-Ins,” where the elderly can purchase fresh new bodies, and “Number 12 Looks Just like You,” where common-looking people can be made to look beautiful. According to this more precise sense of the genre, such episodes only make up about twenty-five percent of the entire anthology, whose majority features metaphysical and/or unnatural circumstances. In any case, not all episodes involving future technologies become critical of technological advancement per se. Many of these exploit the “Twilight Zone” license merely to establish such technologies that, in turn, facilitate other permutations of social critique. This thematic polarity is most apparent among the several episodes featuring robots, automatons, androids, or mechanical avatars. For example, the episode “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (May 1964), airing late in the series’ fifth season, represents the most ostensible condemnation of technology in an industrial context. Wallace V. Whipple (Richard Deacon), having inherited his father’s manufacturing corporation, screens his “1967 year-end report” film intended for the stockholders. 11 In this film, Whipple announces the implementation of computers that will automate their assembly line process and effectively replace sixty-one thousand workers. Subsequently, he and his plant manager (Paul Newlan) engage in a debate over company priorities, namely “efficiency” versus “pride.” The latter extols the virtues of their former chief officer, Whipple’s father, who, the manager says, always strove for “good will and the welfare of the people who worked for him.” 12 Later, the plant foreman (Ted de Corsia) decries his being replaced by the formidable wall-sized machine itself, venting, “I swear we’ve got to hate a thing like this.” 13 Both Zicree’s and Presnell and McGee’s guides affirm the over-scripted nature of this Serling-penned episode, and, indeed, such righteousness in these characters’ spoken lines has its own trajectory, traceable to Serling’s first Emmy-winning teleplay, “Patterns,” airing on Kraft Television Theatre in 1955. This live television drama portrays another merciless corporate

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head, Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloane), systematically hammering away at the self-esteem of an aging executive, Andy Sloane (Ed Begley), whom he intends to replace with the young and ambitious Fred Staples (Richard Kiley). After Sloane collapses from a heart attack, Staples delivers an impassioned speech to his boss: You kept harping about Andy Sloane’s weakness. It wasn’t his weakness that kept digging into you. It was his decency. Andy Sloane was your conscience. He was a constant, nagging reminder that some things are wrong. . . . You used him as a whipping boy to try to make him quit. You made him backtrack and knuckle under and you finally beat him to death. You wanted him out but you wouldn’t fire him. . . . You know it may be a rotten thing to lick a man’s boots, but it’s a lot worse to be the man whose boots have to be licked. . . . You’re not a human being, period, you’re a freak. You’re an organizational marvel with no compassion for human weakness. Well you drive and fight and kick your people into peak efficiency if they can make it or into a grave like Andy if they can’t because they lack the strength. 14

Compare now what Whipple’s chief engineer says, just after striking his boss: That’s for you Mr. Whipple from me. That’s for your lack of sensitivity, your lack of compassion, your heartless manipulation of men and metals. Now you can take my severance pay, my pension, and your goodbye speeches and feed them into your machine. Because when I walk away from you I walk away clean. And that, Mr. Whipple, is one hell of a trick. 15

Although the live drama’s speech is more elaborate, the same sentiments are expressed. Here is Serling’s characteristic social consciousness, whose target, common to both teleplays, is the inherently dehumanizing aspect of corporatization and its relentless pursuit of “efficiency.” Nevertheless, the theatricality appropriate in a live, spoken context becomes overwrought in the pre-filmed, spectacular context of The Twilight Zone. In other words, the evolving medium struggles a bit to retain Serling’s articulate righteousness, at least as expressed through character dialogue. Instead, the visual aspect of the computer itself, as well as the plant foreman’s direct physical confrontation with this so-called opponent, takes over the role of Golden Age television’s stagey dialogue. Eventually, the episode portrays Mr. Whipple himself in an extended version of this visual confrontation. After his technician (Jack Crowder) recommends he “run an equipment check” on himself, Whipple begins flipping switches and pressing buttons on the enormous consoles within his office, in an attempt to silence the cacophony of obsolete employees’ protestations combined with a shrill oscillator sound. There is a certain “Twilight Zone” ambiguity here in what could be either the aural experience of his conscience or the Zone’s moral universe

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acting out through the machines themselves. While even his automatic office door chimes in by opening and closing, the character puts his hands up to his head rather than over his ears, as if to squelch the “noise” of his thoughts rather than the unnatural din of computer-made sounds around him. Still, according to the series’ tendency, I would stress implications of the latter case. Regardless, the visual shift from live television’s emphasis on dialogue is evident in a proportional trimming of the pregnant speeches heard in “Patterns” with inserted physical spectacles like this one. Such spectacles also apply to this episode’s eventual ironic twist. The same machines Whipple ushered in effectively expel him from his own office. And, in the next scene, Whipple complains to his retired engineer of his “unfair” dismissal, echoing the sensibilities of his former employees. 16 The real twist comes, however, in the final visual display of the manlike automaton taking over not only Whipple’s function, but also his persona, even down to the nervous twirling of his watch chain. And so in the same gesture with which this episode critiques the pursuit of technical efficiency at the price of human socialization, it also restores moral equilibrium through the very machines it anticipates arriving only three years into the future. Here, again, is a sense of ambivalence between technology as “enemy” and technology as “corrective” within The Twilight Zone’s liberalist utopia. In its real, impending context, such a future technology is to be deemed a palpable threat to human dignity, and yet, in its imaginary context, it is able to “punish” an individual for humiliating others. So, on its surface, this episode sets up an ostensible critique of technological advancement, which, in the larger context of the series, also serves to maintain The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. In negotiating this complex and rather ironic configuration, we are called upon to celebrate technology only in an abstract context, as something temporarily humanized, which is otherwise apathetic, or, rather, as something moral that is ultimately amoral. In subsequent episodes, the implications of a humanized machine are more fully realized and become cautionary in their own right. In taking a systematic approach to The Twilight Zone’s robot-oriented episodes, I see a convenient link between “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” and “Uncle Simon,” an episode from earlier in the fifth season also incorporating Robby the Robot. Although Robby’s facial design is slightly more humanlike in “Uncle Simon” than elsewhere, it is the selfsame seven-foottall robot that debuted in the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet. As an established cultural icon by this time, this particular robot’s presence in these episodes transcends its immediate imaginary role and becomes more broadly representative of the American science fiction genre in the postwar era. Also significant is that, in its original narrative context, the robot is programmed specifically not to harm humans and so announces a certain

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“humane” moral aspect in these two Twilight Zone episodes, regardless of its recontextualization in their plots. First aired in November of 1963, “Uncle Simon” portrays a handicapped elderly man (Cedric Hardwicke) whose sole caregiver is his niece Barbara (Constance Ford), poised as such to inherit his estate. And this Serling teleplay displays his talents as a wordsmith through Simon’s oft poetic epithets, for example, when the character calls his niece a “passionless vegetable,” an “angular turnip,” a “night-crawling imitation of female gender,” and so on. 17 Such conduct might seem to position the protagonist, Barbara, as this Twilight Zone narrative’s requisite victim of some form of cruelty or humiliation. However, her antagonist defends his twenty-five-year pattern of insults, saying, “You deserve it, kid.” 18 In the next scene, Simon acknowledges it is precisely her intention to acquire his money that drives her willingness to endure his disposition toward her. Here, there is at least an implication of a moral shift in the episode in favor of the antagonist, as his somewhat playfully hostile conduct toward her is merely in response to her greediness. This is finally confirmed when she causes him to fall backward down his cellar stairs and expire soon afterward, though not before she boldly declares her readiness to “reap” instead of “sow.” 19 Simon’s entail requires her to remain in the house and care for his secret invention, which turns out to be another automaton, namely Robby the Robot. Here is the first in a series of ironic turns—that a human should have to cater to the whims of a robot, and not the other way around. The next turn comes thereafter when the robot, in its mechanical voice, communicates a “craving” for hot chocolate, and so clarifies Uncle Simon’s intention that it function as his “replacement,” just as Robby becomes for Whipple in the previous example. 20 Barbara, in turn, defiantly shoves the robot down the stairs, leaving it with a similar handicap and need for the same cane. The final twist arrives when the robot develops her uncle’s voice and so, in effect, becomes Simon reincarnated, finally referring to her as a “bovine crab.” 21 And so The Twilight Zone’s moral universe perpetuates itself, in this case, by “punishing” the protagonist’s greed, specifically with the help of an imagined technology. The robot’s “imaginary” aspect is underscored by the fact that there is no observable need or ability for its mechanical apparatus to consume a hot beverage. Nevertheless, unlike in the previous example, there is very little, if any, negative connotation attached to the robot, that is, as a manifestation of societal overdependence on machines. Rather, Robby becomes an instrument of moral correction, an acceptable extension of Simon’s own eloquent personification of Serling the liberalist. The previous “Robby” episode’s ambivalence toward technologization seems absent here, with this episode’s relatively “humane” robot being restricted to an abstract, metaphorical mode. In other words, Robby is less an impending reality than merely another “custo-

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dian” of the Twilight Zone. At the same time, such a household doesn’t quite exemplify Rorty’s utopia, since one human’s cruelties toward another are tolerated for a greater cause, and technology serves, in turn, to maintain this cause. In this latter sense, Uncle Simon’s premature death adheres to the rules of the series’ moral universe, while, at the same time, ambivalence toward future technology is again apparent, with Robby’s humane and cautionary aspects simultaneously intact. There are a few more Twilight Zone episodes invoking technological irony by way of robot replacements, each with its own degree of ambivalence. Another example involving a basement laboratory like Uncle Simon’s is Charles Beaumont’s teleplay “In His Image” (January 1963). The episode launched the series’ fourth season and its experiment with an expanded hourlong format, arguably to its detriment. (I, for one, never minded the added content in these narratives, but, at the same time, one can easily understand why critics point to their plodding tendencies.) The episode in question, embraced by Zicree as exceptional, concerns a young man (George Grizzard) struggling with sporadic homicidal fits. The 1950s “science fiction” sound effects embellishing these psychoses anticipate his eventual discovery he is a robot. And this irony is compounded by his subsequent reunion with his “Dr. Frankenstein” maker, whose lifelong ambition is to re-create himself to the last human detail, sans his insecurities. Ultimately, the robot protagonist’s mechanical flaw proves advantageous for his inventor, since his final murderous fit embroils the two in a mortal combat, and the human victor is then able to claim the woman his double had so successfully courted. On the surface, this episode finds a pleasant conclusion in the consummation of a young couple’s love, and, accordingly, Serling affirms, “Sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line— through the Twilight Zone.” 22 So, as in “Uncle Simon,” this imagined technology would appear to improve the human condition, by compensating for one man’s lack of confidence. But, really, the irony here, as benevolent as it may seem, nonetheless stimulates a deeper consideration of the automaton’s ability to be human or, more specifically, to love and be loved. And, in the context of being so humanlike, even his mechanical flaw becomes a mental disorder for which he is morally blameless. Thus, it seems such a protagonist deserves some sympathy, and, furthermore, his homicidal compulsions prove to be the result of human error or limitation. In this latter sense, then, technological advancement is not an improvement per se, and, instead, acquires an aspect of cruelty. In other words, a larger theme of “man’s inhumanity to man” emerges through narrative conditions where robot replacements prove to be empathetic beings, and these beings, in turn, are somehow exploited by their human inventors. This is also the case with the early episode “The Lonely,” where the protagonist’s female companion turns out to be a robot, and then is just as

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soon executed by the official announcing his pardoned prison sentence. And these episodes anticipate Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted into the 1982 film Blade Runner, wherein humanlike “replicants” exploited as slaves struggle to overcome their own mechanical “flaw” of a two-year life-span. Of course, the robot’s homicidal compulsion in “In His Image” also implies such dystopias, where machines turn against their makers. In any case, the episode never provides any explanation for the robot’s particular flaw, nor does it account for how the young inventor could have been privy to the exchanges his mechanical double had with the female, namely the automaton’s flirtatious ploy of being a door-todoor salesman. If taken out of their rational context, however, these plot elements become effectively metaphorical, even if I do not quite allow myself to call them strategic as such. A couple of Twilight Zone episodes evaluate a robot’s ability to fill in for missing family members, though their perspectives might seem to diverge markedly. The first of these is Serling’s second-season teleplay “The Lateness of the Hour,” which aired in December of 1960. The protagonist is a young woman, Jana (Inger Stevens), living with her parents in a sumptuous mansion populated by an array of domestic servants. As it turns out, her father (John Hoyt) has invented each of these robots to fulfill a specific domestic function: cooking, cleaning, etc. And, much to her chagrin, her parents are totally complacent within this automated insular “paradise.” On its surface, Jana would seem the voice of the episode’s thematic condemnation of domestic convenience achieved through technical advancement. She rails against her parents, declaring their lives have become all but “atrophied,” and she tries to provoke the domestics, who are relatively apathetic, even “robotic,” compared to humanoid automatons in other episodes. 23 The narrative pursues this trajectory of the young woman’s frustration, culminating with her pronounced ultimatum that either her father dispenses with the servants or she will abandon their household. This particular Twilight Zone episode looks and feels closer to a Golden Age live television drama, with only three interior sets and a few facial closeups to embellish the majority of wider angles, not to mention its having been shot on video to save expense. And there are no special effects, costumes, or props serving to establish any imaginary technology here. Really, Jana’s complaint against her parents’ aristocratic existence could just as well apply if the servants were human. It is only in the episode’s ironic turn, when Jana realizes she, too, is merely one of her father’s mechanical creations, that the would-be critique of technology becomes acute. The plot might appear to falter at this point, where she bangs her arm repeatedly on the banister to test her sensitivity, and exclaims she can feel “no pain” and, by extension, “no love.” 24 Because her histrionics indicate otherwise, however, this scene is

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better understood as Jana disqualifying herself as essentially human, only because she now identifies herself categorically as a “machine.” Similar to the robot doppelganger in the previous example, however, this android protagonist proves to be nearly human in her emotional capacities, and, as such, she becomes incompatible with her parents’ staid existence. So, in a final twist, accentuated by dissonant piano chords, the camera tilts up from hands massaging Jana’s mother (Irene Tedrow) once again, but, this time, it reveals Jana herself—having since been reprogrammed as the former Nelda, in the latter’s uniform and with her vacant, robotic gaze. Based on Serling’s epilogue, then, her parents have exploited robot technology in order to eschew the external “neuroses of the twentieth century,” which it would seem Jana comes to personify through her emotional vicissitudes. 25 Similar to the episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” the series’ moral universe may seem less apparent here, since the conceit of technology is allowed to persist through this elderly couple preferring efficiency even over “human” offspring. However, by making its critique more ostensible through the protagonist’s theatrical protestations, the episode assumes a cautionary stance. Furthermore, in this case, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe suspends any retribution for these advocates of technologization, and allows the voice of protest to be silenced instead. In other words, with the protagonist’s assimilation into a projected future of Booker’s “routinization,” the episode warns its postwar American audience that utopias based on efficiency may come at the expense of humanity. Thus far, Twilight Zone episodes that imagine a future potential for robot replacements point toward a critique of technologization or, in other words, invoke technological irony, even if this irony becomes somehow ambivalent. In the latter of the two scenarios involving robot replacements for family members, however, the ultimate disposition toward technical advancement appears optimistic, even celebratory. Based on a teleplay Ray Bradbury penned for the series’ third season, and aired in 1962 as its one hundredth episode, “I Sing the Body Electric” depicts a widower (David White) with a son (Charles Herbert) and two daughters (Veronica Cartwright and Dana Dillaway) in desperate need of maternal nurturing. Prompted by a science magazine advertisement exclaiming, “I sing the body electric,” the family pays a visit to Facsimile Limited, whose sole purpose is to provide elderly female caregivers for families like theirs, albeit in the form of an “electric data processing system.” 26 In a dark room more akin to a magical sideshow stage, the children are encouraged to choose the eyes, hair, ears, limbs, and even the vocal timbre for their own surrogate mother, and then to deposit these choices down a chute leading to the factory wherein their automaton will come to fruition. This scene also establishes the oldest sibling Anne’s firm resistance to re-creating their deceased mother, despite the enthusiasm of the younger children at the prospect.

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Subsequently, their new “grandmother” (Josephine Hutchinson) arrives at their household, displaying perfectly human features and a warm disposition. To prove herself a robot, she first cups her hands and reproduces the audio of the children’s remarks from the factory visit, and then flies a kite with string extending from her index finger. All this would seem reasonable within “technical” parameters of such an evolved mechanical commodity, and yet this automaton also displays metaphysical abilities by making a pair of marbles suddenly appear in the palm of her hand. This latter talent finds its analog as a “warm” fortune cookie inside her purse, to be found in Bradbury’s eventual short-story version, published first as “The Beautiful One Is Here” in McCall’s Magazine and then in the collection I Sing the Body Electric, both appearing in 1969. 27 In this manner, Bradbury, unlike his science fiction contemporaries, stresses the abstract, metaphorical dimension of the robot presence, rather than the already present and/or impending technologies found, for example, in the Twilight Zone episode “Where Is Everybody?” In other words, Bradbury’s version of “science fiction” allows itself to be far more whimsical toward making its thematic points, and so dispenses with any plausible context of technical advancement. Soon after the robot’s worthiness as a machine is established, it demonstrates its humanity by sacrificing itself to save Anne from an approaching vehicle. But, here, technology also triumphs in allowing the robot to recover where a human would certainly have perished. And so, unlike Anne’s mother, this “grandmother” persists in her nurturing function according to her apparent indestructibility. At this point, the episode strains to provide any narrative twist or climax, as Serling’s voice atypically reappears over a montage sequence wherein the robot exceeds all expectations of motherhood. In the final scene, the three children are all grown up and poised to leave home for college, and so the “grandmother” announces her own imminent departure, with the intention to serve again elsewhere or simply share experiences with the other retired units back at the factory. There is no ironic conclusion here, and Serling’s prologue optimistically affirms the distant possibility of “an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love.” 28 Beyond its familiar robot context, “I Sing the Body Electric” is a peculiar episode for a number of reasons, but it nevertheless functions appropriately within The Twilight Zone’s larger invocation of technological irony. For one, it was the only teleplay produced by a writer initially poised to contribute more substantially to the series. Zicree points out that Bradbury contributed two other scripts, “Here There Be Tygers” and “A Miracle of Rare Device,” based on his short stories. 29 But Cayuga Productions purchased the latter only and did not ultimately produce it. After affirming Bradbury’s decided influence on Serling, especially in his nostalgia for a simpler small-town America, Zicree posits that Bradbury’s prose was often too literary, or his

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imaginary scenarios too grandiose, for the confines of the series’ production values. 30 According to Presnell and McGee, there is one scene from Bradbury’s script, for example, that was removed from the shoot, much to the chagrin of the author. They explain that, for Bradbury, this was “the most important scene” because the robot explains why it is superior to any human mother, but when he protested to Serling, the latter could only apologize, saying “there hadn’t been time to film it.” 31 In the eventual short story, this dinner-table scene’s prose certainly waxes verbose when the robot grandmother righteously defends itself against the “huge outcry at machines,” claiming, “No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than the man that made it. And what’s so wrong with that?” 32 The robot goes on to pontificate: How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into esthetics. Let me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don’t they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we’re in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine more than a machine, doesn’t it? . . . Well, isn’t a motion-picture camera and projector more than a machine? It’s a thing that dreams, isn’t it? Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous. 33

Though Presnell and McGee are right to suggest the teleplay could have worked better in the hour-long format of the series’ fourth season, such monologues would still have been too cumbersome for television, let alone for The Twilight Zone. Subsequently, the robot elaborates: But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power’s sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane . . . and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet. 34

While such a speech wouldn’t work in the cinematic context of the show, the visual portrayal of the robot’s physical act of saving the elder sibling does. And by restoring the young girl’s faith in motherhood—or, rather, an improved, mechanized motherhood—the robot also restores harmony in the surrounding moral universe. So no ironic turn of events is necessary here. Her surviving the accident would be ironic if her mechanical composition

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were revealed in this moment. But since this is the ironic premise of the episode, one ironic aspect is traded for another. In other words, this particular robot, rather atypically, enables Rorty’s liberalist utopia to exist. What is ultimately forfeited in this visual adaptation of Bradbury’s narrative, though, is not the literariness of his prose per se, but its ironic tone. And in this capacity, the episode becomes too easily misunderstood—and its social critique overlooked. Beyond Zicree’s as well as Presnell and McGee’s condemnations, even Booker admonishes Bradbury’s narrative for its “puerile sentimentalism,” as if the author sought merely to extol the potential virtues to be enjoyed in our technologized future. 35 But such a purpose would be rather incongruous with the dystopian vision of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, for example, which Booker explores specifically for its critique of 1950s American culture. In this novel, the future consists of a passive populace, addicted to a three-dimensional version of television, providing emotional stimulation in an otherwise vapid domestic existence. Such a visual technology would hardly seem compatible with the “motion-picture camera and projector” Bradbury’s robot grandmother cites to defend the presence of machines in modern society. Rather, irony in the short story, at least, proceeds even from the context of the title “I Sing the Body Electric!” itself, since its most immediate reference is to Walt Whitman’s poem of the same title, which concerns the relationship of the human soul to its physical body. In the poem, or at least as it was eventually titled, the adjective “electric” pursues its secondary connotation of “that which produces exhilaration,” rather than anything having to do with electricity or technology per se. That is, Whitman celebrates the apparent harmony of the human corpus in all of its working parts, and sees this harmony as proof of a metaphysical self. 36 As a reference to such a theme, Bradbury’s appropriation of Whitman’s title puns “electric,” thus making it a more literal reference to technologization. What had been a notion of celebrating the human body for its own sake, then, becomes “singing” praises of technology’s ability to invest a mechanized humanoid body with a superhuman soul, incapable of cruelty. And, of course, Bradbury cues his ironic tone by adding an exclamation mark in the story’s first sentence: “Grandma!” 37 It is precisely this “puerile sentimentalism” in the tone of the story’s narrator, Tom—none other than one of the three children—that maintains Bradbury’s ironic disposition toward mechanization. Naturally, the former child’s nostalgic enthusiasm for a fantastical portrayal of robot technology and its nurturing capabilities is nothing if not a reflection of pure bias. Here is another example of how the narrator muses at the robot’s wonders: Now, how the Fantoccini people achieved this rare and subtle transformation I shall never know, nor ask, nor wish to find out. Enough that in each quiet motion, turning here, bending there, affixing her gaze, her secret segments,

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sections, the abutment of her nose, the sculptured chinbone, the wax-tallow plastic metal forever warmed and was forever susceptible of loving change. Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones. 38

Especially in this ability to transform itself, the short story’s robot is far more fantastical than the humanlike robot in the Twilight Zone episode. Ultimately, the former becomes the object of subjective childhood fantasy, especially in the imagination of a child bereft of his mother at so young an age. Of course, the Twilight Zone robot’s inability to come anywhere near a semblance of Tom’s description is partly to do with the series’ production parameters, and, as Zicree suggests, this is a probable reason Bradbury’s material was so difficult to adapt for the screen. But, more importantly, the narrator’s wholehearted embrace of this new technology, however fantastical, can hardly be taken as thematically “optimistic.” After all, this is not one among a collection of tales written for children. Rather, it belongs with Fahrenheit 451 and Bradbury’s other science fiction, intended as mature and sober social critique. So, by providing an account of an imagined technology from a child’s point of view, Bradbury implies the opposite of Tom’s enthusiasm—that the reader should consider the implications of any technology poised to replace human beings, especially toward making familial intimacy obsolete. Notwithstanding the limitations of the series’ available special effects, The Twilight Zone’s objective camera was hardly in a position to emulate the ironic tone of the short story, that is, unless we are to deem this episode’s atypical sentimentality ironic. Van Cleave’s musical score, for example, is comparatively maudlin, resembling 1950s soap opera themes, not only in the larger context of the series, but even juxtaposed with the seven other Twilight Zone episodes he composed music for. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” clichéd string-section flourishes enter at every emotional turn, and yet, at the same time, the composer incorporates an unusual “electronic” arpeggio motif, probably played on a theater organ, so as to underscore the robot’s futuristic presence. Such an approach would seem self-conscious, even ironic. Bradbury, too, would appear to have attempted at least a hint of an ironic tone in his script when, after saving Anne and recovering from its collision with the speeding van, the miraculous robot grandmother casually remarks, “Now, let us all go home and finish our lunch.” 39 Even Serling’s epilogue here, which discards any mention of “the Twilight Zone,” touches on the ironic when it concludes, “Fable, sure—but who’s to say?” 40 Such an epilogue bears resemblance to the passive tone Serling takes in his epilogue to “A World of His Own,” as if, again, the host were removing himself from his usual task as the

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grave spokesperson for The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. At the same time, the episode is able to maintain some of the more ostensible aspects of Bradbury’s critique. For example, Andrea Krafft, in her essay “Appliance Reliance: Domestic Technologies and the Depersonalization of Housework in Postwar American Speculative Fiction,” notes that Bradbury’s story “parodies the features of advertising language,” which the Twilight Zone episode includes in the first scene when the children’s father reads aloud from the science magazine’s advertisement. 41 Krafft argues the robot grandmother is pitched in the same “technological jargon” as would have been any typical 1950s appliance, but that this particular “appliance” has even greater implications of a postwar culture seeking to consign women to a technologized domestic sphere. 42 She claims, “As an explicitly feminized embodiment of the personal appliance, this ‘wondrous toy’ reveals how the discourse of domestic devotion in appliance culture threatens to mechanize housewives.” 43 Neither in the story nor in its screen adaptation do I see enough emphasis on the household drudgery 1950s appliances were positioned as alleviating to support this argument, save, perhaps, for references to the robot’s preparation of meals for the family. Rather than these practical dimensions, both narratives focus on the emotional dimensions of child-rearing, as idealized by lovelorn children. And so, while Bradbury certainly pays lip service to the postwar marriage of rampant consumerism and “appliance reliance,” I would say his critique of technologization goes much further in its implications. Nevertheless, Krafft concludes, “The fact that Bradbury published ‘I Sing the Body Electric!’ only three years prior to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives marks the beginning of a resistance to the positive fantasy of domestic technoculture, as both Bradbury and Levin depict appliances as ominous replacements of the housewife, rather than bastions of ease.” 44 Of course, the latter narrative is more ostensibly pessimistic, since the android “wives” are portrayed as apathetic, soulless. Also, Bradbury’s sole Twilight Zone episode takes this “resistance” back a bit further, though it may appear as merely another “positive fantasy,” that is, if one fails to detect its ironic elements. As I argue previously, such elements become more apparent when seemingly exceptional episodes such as this one are considered in the series’ aggregate system of ironic communication. Two more Twilight Zone episodes using robots to critique technologization can be considered as a pair, since they both imagine the possibility of android replacements for athletes in professional sports contexts. The first is Serling’s first-season teleplay “The Mighty Casey” (June 1960), involving an android baseball pitcher (Robert Sorrells). This episode could also be grouped among the series’ comedic episodes, typically panned by Zicree and others. Like the mechanical grandmother in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the robot “Casey” excels in his programmed function well beyond human capabilities, and accordingly redeems his failing team, the “Hoboken Zephyrs,”

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from last place to fourth place in the Major League. After the team physician (Jonathan Hole) discovers he is without a heart, a baseball commissioner (Rusty Lane) insists the robot be given one if it is to be allowed to continue. The surprise twist comes when, by obtaining a heart, Casey acquires a sense of compassion and can no longer bring himself to strike out players on opposing teams (though, by not doing so, he simultaneously “harms” his own teammates). This ironic turn predicates itself upon the fabled notion that human emotions should be associated with what would otherwise be a biological organ serving to pump blood through the body. Such a premise, of course, only contributes further to the lighter context of the narrative, also seeming to force content through playing-field banter. The irony nevertheless serves to suggest, albeit somewhat limply, that technologies intended to replace humans inevitably leave something to be desired—a “human” quality too complex to be mechanized. Adapted for the fifth season from a story by Richard Matheson, the second of this pair of “athletic android” episodes, “Steel” (October 1963), involves a broken-down robot boxer and the two men attempting to squeeze one more fight out of it. Less about the robot itself than its manager (Lee Marvin), the narrative explores the determination of a man to earn the fee for the bout, even if he must pose as a robot boxer himself at the risk of his life. Here, again, the androids are presumed superior, in a “1974” context where they have completely phased out human contenders, and so the manager’s “human courage” in boxing against the most technically evolved model seems, as Zicree asserts, to be suicidal. 45 Predictably, Marvin’s character is knocked down in the first round, and just barely survives to receive a reduced fee. There is no ironic twist here, and so, instead, Serling’s epilogue pontificates on the intended social critique as follows: Portrait of a losing side—proof positive that you can’t outpunch machinery. Proof also of something else: that no matter what the future brings, man’s capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues as always to outfight, outpoint, and outlive any and all changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone. 46

Because this episode functions within the ironic premise of an impending technocracy wherein robots are celebrated as athletes, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe seems merely capable of lionizing those courageous enough to resist it. On the other hand, if the manager had not survived the fight, the cautionary aspect might have been more powerful. In another sense, however, androids replacing men exploited to pummel each other for entertainment purposes would seem a rather humane gesture. All told, these two examples are less effective than the other robot-oriented episodes in mobilizing a cri-

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tique of technologization, and this is at least partly to do with their relatively muddled deployment of irony. OTHER FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES In this exhaustive survey of robot narratives, I do not mean to imply The Twilight Zone’s invocation of technological irony depends on the presence of automatons. Computers, as in “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” or the lighter episode “From Agnes—with Love,” about a computer technician whose “female” supercomputer falls in love with him, behave also as cautionary manifestations of an impending technocracy. And, ultimately, any number of imaginary technologies could accomplish a similar critique of technologization within any variety of narrative contexts. Among several Twilight Zone episodes oriented around time travel, for example, there are two, in particular, imagining a technology to facilitate trips through time, or, in other words, focusing on time machines for their own sake. The latter of these, the slapstick “Once upon a Time,” implies a critical stance toward a technology placing individuals in time periods where they ostensibly “do not belong,” but the point is effective only if the audience accepts the premise that people from the past could not rationally cope with the future—and vice versa. Other Twilight Zone episodes dealing with time travel, however, such as “A Stop at Willoughby” and “No Time Like the Past,” imply that certain individuals, at least, find themselves ready and able to embrace the quaintness of small-town existence in the previous century. On the other hand, similar to the robot-oriented episode “Uncle Simon,” the episode “Execution” (April 1960) establishes the possibility of time machines as merely a means for the Twilight Zone to reestablish its moral harmony. In it, an American frontier outlaw (Albert Salmi) is haphazardly saved from his hanging by a time machine, but is then murdered by a modern-day burglar (Than Wyenn), who, in turn, accidentally sends himself back into the hangman’s noose. So both criminals are brought to the “justice” referred to in Serling’s epilogue, albeit somewhat circuitously (and ironically) via an imagined technology. There is also a pair of episodes oriented around imagined cryogenic technology or, rather, suspended animation chambers enabling individuals to preserve themselves indefinitely for reemergence into some future context. The latter of these, “The Long Morrow,” which I mention in an earlier chapter, depicts the tragically ironic outcome of an astronaut’s forty-year trip into space, after the protagonist (Robert Lansing) removes himself from hibernation unbeknownst to his lover (Mariette Hartley), who, with the same good intention, decides to preserve her youth for his return using the same technology. The episode applauds the astronaut’s extraordinary degree of self-sacrifice, in allowing himself to become elderly for his counterpart.

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However, because their love can no longer be consummated, the “tragedy” is moreover directed at a future technology’s interference with the laws of human mortality, which, in this case, is a “nuclear” analog not to be tolerated within the series’ moral universe. And the second of this pair of entries, “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” merely exploits hibernation chambers so as to allow a gang of bank robbers to preserve themselves inside a cave until a remote future era, where they discover, ironically, that their gold bullion has completely lost its value. So, as in “Execution,” The Twilight Zone’s moral order is restored with the help of an imagined technology, which, in this case, had been intended for selfish gain. These two pairs of episodes, then, serve also to reveal the series’ larger ambivalence toward future technology. Or, in other words, as long as any technology is contained within the moral capacity of the Zone as the final metaphysical arbiter, it is acceptable. This is to say such imagined technologies must not be allowed to become realities. Perhaps the most apparent critique of technology, in its greater implications, is to be found in the Twilight Zone episode “Valley of the Shadow,” first aired in January of 1963. Beaumont’s extended fourth-season teleplay depicts reporter Philip Redfield (Ed Nelson) lost on a road trip to Albuquerque with his dog. He follows a sign to “Peaceful Valley” and discovers a community that is reluctant (despite the sign) to be discovered by outsiders. When a little girl makes his dog disappear with a small handheld mechanism, Redfield witnesses firsthand the townspeople’s “dissimulator” device, which possesses seemingly unlimited powers to manipulate not only physical objects, but also the passage of time itself. Dorn, the town’s mayor (David Opatoshu), explains to Redfield that a “brilliant scientist” arrived roughly a hundred years in the past from some unknown extraterrestrial place, and that he bestowed a series of equations, in turn, making possible the advanced technologies exclusively at the town’s disposal. 47 Arguing for their potential to obliterate suffering all over the world, Redfield protests the community’s predisposition to secrecy. As a rebuttal, Dorn cites Albert Einstein’s monumental formula for mass-energy relativity and implies how it was eventually applied, in turn, to nuclear fission chain reactions and ultimately to the creation of nuclear weapons. The town officials offer Redfield a choice between death and “assimilation,” the latter of which entails providing him with a comfortable home and everything else he might want, but strictly within city limits. The protagonist discovers (in another of the teleplay’s logical missteps) that his new house is surrounded by a force field, which prevents him from even leaving the property, let alone the town. Of course, this only serves to provoke Redfield’s resistance and determination to escape. But, more importantly, such a gesture simply reinforces his contrary philosophical stance toward Dorn’s and, by extension, the entire community’s rationale for refusing their technology to the rest of the world. And so it is understandable when, after the force field subsides, he makes an attempt to abscond from the

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town with the book of equations, accompanied by his love interest (Natalie Trundy). Something less than a surprise twist comes in the end when Dorn and his colleagues employ their technology to erase Redfield’s memory of what had elapsed since his arrival at the town’s service station. Zicree and others have suggested the episode’s conclusion is ambiguous, since the audience can’t be sure the protagonist hasn’t simply dreamed his entire encounter with the town. However, I would point to his momentary look of recognition when the woman reemerges briefly to observe his departure. This exchange is clearly more than arbitrary and so does not quite corroborate any notion that Redfield’s experience was merely dreamed. In any case, Beaumont’s parable of Adam ejected from Paradise posits, on a somewhat biblical scale, that the human pursuit of technological prowess, even with the best of intentions, has already demonstrated its eventual inclination to render annihilation. And the series’ moral universe, in turn, restores any further such advances to the realm of secrecy. Ultimately, this episode depends less on the presence of irony, since its critique of technology is so literalized in the debate between Dorn and Redfield, not to mention the protagonist’s “failure” to exemplify human benevolence—a conclusion based on Dorn’s rather questionable experiment in removing the force field from Redfield’s new domicile. If, indeed, the episode eschews the series’ formulaic irony, it also eschews any attempt to explain how this societal microcosm has managed to remain so “peaceful” with the very same technology that would prove harmful in the hands of others. But since, according to Serling’s prologue, Peaceful Valley is the “capital of the Twilight Zone,” we can at least acknowledge his ironic implication that Rorty’s utopia is actually to be found in American small towns seemingly atrophied by a simpler, premodern culture, yet secretly harboring a greater wisdom toward coexistence. 48 And, ironically, such wisdom can only be safeguarded by an imagined technology, again, acceptable only as long as it remains so. HAUNTED TECHNOLOGIES The Twilight Zone explores other manifestations of “technology” not imagined but, instead, already well established in American culture. Some of these episodes are less cautionary about an impending technocracy than revealing of superstitions carried over from the “pre-modern” nineteenth century. In the domestic context, for example, the most obvious such episode would appear to be “A Thing about Machines” (October 1960), in which a man is literally chased out of his home and murdered through the “conspiracy” of his car, typewriter, electric shaver, and other quotidian mechanical devices. Upon closer examination, however, this episode recruits these common appliances merely in order to restore The Twilight Zone’s moral uni-

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verse, rather than to critique any overdependence on technology. From the outset, the mise-en-scène surrounds the protagonist, Bartlett Finchley (Richard Haydn), with the trappings of old-world affluence, including an elegant old automobile and an estate filled with antiques, highly reminiscent of those found in the film noir classic Sunset Boulevard (1950). His first encounter is with a television repairman (Barney Phillips), whose gracious suggestion that he is mishandling his appliances is answered only with Finchley’s peculiarly articulate condescension. Even his antique clock, as it turns out, is not immune to his rebellion against all things mechanical. Serling’s prologue affirms Finchley is an asocial misfit, describing him as a “bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry.” 49 Later, he takes up the same patronizing tone with his personal secretary, Miss Rogers (Barbara Stuart), whom he scolds not only for her typing speed, but also for the typewriter itself. Eventually, he insults the neighbors for loitering on his property after his automobile rolls down the driveway of its own accord. Finally, all his appliances descend upon him, forcing him out of the house and allowing his car to chase him into the swimming pool, where he meets his demise, also reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard. In this way, the episode associates common domestic appliances with everyday people, and Finchley simply will not allow himself to conform to this “society.” As a result, he is cast out, thanks to the ability of the Twilight Zone to animate inanimate objects so as to restore communal harmony. Even Serling’s presence is atypically complicit with the ironic presence of haunted machinery here, with his prologue “telecast” on the newly repaired television set, instead of appearing present in the actual scene as he usually does. There is less of a surprise turn here, since the machines strike out against the protagonist, or, rather, resist his own attacks from early on in the episode. Unlike the several Twilight Zone episodes with robots, the mechanical devices in this example are less associated with a dystopian future than with an agreeably comingled middle- and working-class present— whose suburban society (and its appliances) rejects intellectual snobbery and any consequent humiliations. Even if this episode is less readily a critique of future technologization than episodes incorporating automatons and/or gargantuan computer consoles, its portrayal of an ironic metaphysical complicity between the Twilight Zone and (mostly) modern technologies characterizes another distinct handful of Twilight Zone episodes, whose social critique targets a greater American legacy of “a thing about machines.” In his study Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Jeffrey Sconce explores this very legacy of distrust of electronic technology, dating as far back as the invention of the telegraph and continuing through the arrival of the telephone, radio, and television. He argues that all such new technologies inadvertently perpetuated old-world superstitions about spiritual presence or,

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rather, encouraged long-held beliefs in the independent reality of the human soul. His analysis eventually brings him to both The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits; he says about the former: Writers for The Twilight Zone often evoked the uncanny aspects of their medium simply by turning to the past and dramatizing the cultural memory of previous haunted technologies. During its five-year network run, the series frequently turned to the haunted telecommunications story as a stock plot taken from television’s occult prehistory. 50

In this list, Sconce includes “Static,” about an old man who discovers his antique radio console broadcasts from its bygone era, “Long Distance Call,” in which a young boy’s grandmother speaks to him from beyond the grave via a toy telephone, “Night Call,” about an elderly woman receiving strange phone calls coincidentally after a fallen telephone pole lands on her deceased fiancé’s grave, and, finally, “What’s in the Box,” wherein a television set proves capable of anticipating, or, rather, predetermining a New York apartment uxoricide. The first three of these certainly exploit “television’s occult prehistory,” where at stake is less a moral universe than the Zone’s simply enabling spirit voices to reemerge and speak through such early-twentiethcentury electronic devices as the telephone and the radio. However, Sconce’s fourth example exploits the television as a presentday household appliance, in the same way as “A Thing about Machines,” specifically in order to restore moral order to a household marred by spousal abuse. While the ironic premise may seem similar, these are really two different forms of social critique, since the former exposes a long-running cultural association between electronic media and the spirit world, and, if anything, such episodes indulge these fantasies rather than admonishing them, since their characters are reconnected with their loved ones and/or their youth, thanks to the Twilight Zone’s ability to invest technology with metaphysical attributes. But in the latter case, the Zone is less focused on technology for its own sake than on the moral transgressions of its inhabitants, who are summarily punished by way of allowing physical objects to become metaphysical. Additional Twilight Zone episodes falling into this latter category include “The Fever,” about a gambler (Everett Sloane) whose obsession finds its fruition in the form of a slot machine following him to his hotel room, and “A Most Unusual Camera,” which I discuss earlier, involving an avaricious trio of criminals whose prescient camera finally gets the best of them. And then there are a couple of automobile-oriented episodes, including “You Drive,” about a man (Edward Andrews) whose car won’t allow him to shirk his crime of hitting a young bicyclist, and “The Whole Truth,” about an old Ford Model A that renders a seedy used-car salesman (Jack Carson) and eventually, by implication, visiting Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev (Lee

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Sabinson) incapable of dishonesty. To emphasize that episodes incorporating mechanical devices are not necessarily intended to critique these technologies, I could also include in this latter group “A Piano in the House,” about an old player piano having the power to expose anyone’s hidden nature and ultimately “punishing” a malicious protagonist (Barry Morse) by revealing his inferiority complex to his humiliated friends. And there are other examples in the series whose premises haunt less immediately “modern” technologies, such as “Ninety Years without Slumbering,” about a grandfather clock whose owner (Ed Wynn) believes will provoke his demise if not wound up perpetually, and “Printer’s Devil,” involving a Linotype that creates whatever events it prints. I could even cite “Ring-a-Ding Girl,” about a self-important Hollywood actress (Maggie McNamara) with a ring whose gemstone forecasts her imminent plane crash and so enables her to “correct” her moral impurities by distracting her hometown’s civilians in time to save their lives. In each of these latter episodes, man-made objects, regardless of their technological aspects, take on metaphysical properties in order to serve and restore The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. In all these narrative contexts, then, it is this selfsame ironic premise of the physical becoming metaphysical that mobilizes a critique of human foibles, rather than any ironic twist ending. In looking back at the Twilight Zone episodes I cover in this chapter, either imagining a future technology or manipulating an established technology (or inanimate object), I want to stress the fundamental, overarching presence of the series’ moral universe—and the precedent it sets for restoring social harmony. In remote and not-so-remote future contexts, robots and computers reflect a postwar overinvestment in technology, especially according to the corporate inclination to replace human functionality, both in domestic and professional capacities, with automation. Really, however, it is not human functionality per se that is at stake as much as human socialization. In other words, the increasing encroachment of automation and other technological manipulations effectively “replaces” social interaction between human individuals with that of human and machine. Thus, in these narratives, human characters portrayed as in any way enabling such technologization are ideally punished or eliminated. If not, then their persistent overdependence on technology communicates the same ultimate critique nonetheless, albeit less immediately. For example, where Whipple’s compliance with his factory’s automation ironically facilitates his own obsolescence, the shy, love-seeking inventor of “He’s Alive” merely demonstrates an overreliance on the protagonist, his robot doppelganger, to do his courting for him. And if this latter narrative seems too forgiving, the series provides an entry with the same paradigm in the subsequent season. In Bernard C. Schoenfeld’s teleplay “From Agnes—with Love” (February 1964), the similarly reclusive computer technician (James Ellwood) is driven to madness as a result of depending

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on his “female” computer for courtship advice. And even in a narrative like “A Thing about Machines,” where mechanical dependencies are already established and irrevocable, they serve to expose the protagonist’s hostile resistance to harmonious assimilation into the community. In other words, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe allows any technology or man-made object, from past, present, or future contexts, to exist only insofar as it serves to mobilize a critique of compromised socialization. Ironically imbued across the series with advanced technical and/or metaphysical abilities, androids especially personify the human consequences of modernization. Beyond the many examples of technological irony here, I consider the series’ recurring theme of socialization more broadly in a subsequent chapter. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Rorty, Contingency, xvi. Booker, Monsters, 19. Booker, Strange TV, 45. Ibid., 46. Booker, Monsters, 18. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 73. “Where Is Everybody?” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Booker, Monsters, 31. “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “Patterns,” Kraft Television Theatre. “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “Uncle Simon,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “In His Image,” The Twilight Zone. “The Lateness of the Hour,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “I Sing the Body Electric,” The Twilight Zone. Bradbury, “I Sing the Body Electric!” “I Sing the Body Electric,” The Twilight Zone. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 274. Ibid. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History, 135. Bradbury, “I Sing the Body Electric!” 210. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 213. Booker, Monsters, 171. Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” 72–77. Bradbury, “I Sing the Body Electric!” 177.

Technological Irony 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., 206. “I Sing the Body Electric,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Krafft, “Appliance Reliance,” 75. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 381. “Steel,” The Twilight Zone. “Valley of the Shadow,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “A Thing about Machines,” The Twilight Zone. Sconce, Haunted Media, 134.

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Invasive Irony

Still contained within the genre of science fiction, many Twilight Zone episodes invoke irony in order to critique yet another characteristic fear in American culture during the Cold War years—that of Soviet invasion. In the same way American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II inspired the kaiju genre of Japanese monster movies like Godzilla (1954) and its many sequels, whose colossal reptilian creatures almost invariably spring from nuclear experiments at sea, an abundance of low-budget Hollywood science fiction films involving attacks by alien invaders emerged across the 1950s and continued into the 1960s. These narratives, typically depicting hostile space invaders eventually repelled by American military prowess, served to assuage immediate anxieties of impending Soviet attack. Films like The Thing from Another World (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) are seminal in this tendency. But, as M. Keith Booker affirms, these films’ thematic reference to the cultural fear of “invasion” per se was not only an allusion to Russians, but to a more ideological “otherness” of any non-Western and/or Third World culture threatening American cultural identity. Booker explains: Of course, the alien from outer space was the classic Other of the 1950s, an object of particular fascination among Americans in the decade both because space flight was rapidly becoming a reality and because Americans felt an unprecedented sense of connection with (or vulnerability to) the alien populations of the rest of the world. The earth, surrounded by a potentially threatening universe, became in 1950s science fiction films a consistent metaphor for the United States, surrounded by a potentially threatening world. Emerging from World War II the most powerful and richest people on earth, Americans suddenly found themselves supplanting the British as the central bearers of the 85

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Booker goes on to point out, accordingly, that science fiction films of the time tend to portray Earth or, rather, the metaphorical “United States” as rich in resources also attractive to space aliens, who have somehow depleted their own. For example, the aliens in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers are less ostensibly malevolent than merely seeking a new home, since their own planet has become uninhabitable. But to American audiences of the 1950s such a prospect, analogous to the encroaching masses of the Third World, was still appropriately repelled by military force. By the same token, human life itself becomes a resource in these narratives, but especially in terms of psychological control, akin to “communist” zombification, as in both Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The latter film, particularly when juxtaposed with its 1978 remake, confirms an optimistic tendency of earlier Cold War narratives to depict invaders eventually being overcome and American society restored. The remake, on the other hand, reflects a more pessimistic, dystopian sensibility through the aliens’ thorough infiltration. In other words, just as no criminal could escape some form of justice according to former Hollywood censorship codes, American “Earth” was not to be defeated by any invading force, within the context of these immediate postwar years, or what Booker calls the “long 1950s.” 2 Ultimately, such science fiction films and television programs functioned to reinforce American morale, and their proliferation only waned when Cold War fears became oriented less around the mass invasion of “beings” than around the threat of a missile-driven nuclear holocaust at the push of a button—a threat resurfacing with even greater intensity during the Reagan years. Other science fiction entries of the time, however, do not depict space aliens as hostile or threatening, and these films moreover point to McCarthyite paranoia or, rather, become a critique of American fears gone awry. Such films include The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Man from Planet X (1951), and It Came from Outer Space (1953). In the last of these films, for example, a flying saucer accidentally crashes in the American desert and is misunderstood as hostile when human subjects are abducted temporarily to allow the aliens to assume their form, while they repair their craft. Eventually, the flying saucer barely escapes the efforts of the community to destroy its alien occupants. The implication here, as in the Twilight Zone episode “Valley of the Shadow,” is that humans, or, rather, Americans, are “not yet ready” for true magnanimity, especially with respect to foreign nations and cultures. Even in terms of any single film’s themes, Booker

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claims, “the science fiction films of the 1950s are particularly multiple and ambivalent in their production of meaning, perhaps due to the fundamental (early postmodern) ambivalence of American society toward so many issues in that decade.” 3 Rather than attempting to categorize this “ambivalence” as a larger “postmodern” phenomenon, I see it as more productive to emphasize the inherent conflict in the two primary cultural fears at stake here. In other words, it is somewhat inevitable that postwar science fiction, in its allegorical capacity, would vacillate between negotiating immediate fears of Soviet invasion on the one hand, and maintaining a greater legacy of social critique on the other. In the former narrative mode, xenophobia has its justification, whereas in the latter, it is irrational, even paranoid. Their capacity to coexist in terms of a thematic ambivalence, both within individual cases and across the science fiction genre, becomes a hotbed for irony. The American 1950s audience, through its embrace of these narratives, proves itself capable of celebrating a fantasy of indomitable military prowess, while, at the same time, confronting its own cultural paranoia. The Twilight Zone, emerging in the middle of this science fiction zeitgeist, would exploit the genre within its aggregate system for social critique—and would accommodate science fiction’s ambivalence rather conveniently, according to the series’ wider spectrum of imaginary, ironic contexts. SPACE INVADERS AS MALEVOLENT First, I want to consider how irony functions in the former narrative scenario, wherein space invaders turn out to be hostile, according to popular fears of Soviet invasion and/or Third World xenophobia. The Twilight Zone episode that readily comes to mind for most readers would be “To Serve Man,” adapted by Rod Serling from Damon Knight’s short story and first airing in March of 1962 during the series’ third season. The protagonist (Lloyd Bochner) appears in a small bedchamber of a spaceship heading out into space; he is obviously anxious about something, since he refuses food and continues smoking cigarettes. The episode then uses a “liquefying” edit to signal a flashback to his experience on Earth, when the invaders first arrive in their saucers. Even in this early scene within the United Nations building, the UN secretary-general (Hardie Albright) calls upon the people not to be “premature” in deciding these so-called Kanamits have any hostile intentions, as if to set a new narrative precedent by contradicting the typically combative disposition of humans toward aliens in so many science fiction films of the 1950s. 4 Really, this is the episode’s ironic premise—that everyone on Earth almost immediately buys into the expressed intentions of these nine-foot tall, 350-pound, egg-headed creatures to obliterate all forms of human suffering.

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It is only a team of specialists from the United States government, including the protagonist, that attempts to translate a book left behind at the UN summit by the Kanamit representative (Richard Kiel). While Marc Scott Zicree applauds Serling’s decision to alter the appearance of the author’s pigfaced beings to create these more intimidating humanoids, he rightfully condemns the teleplay’s rather abrupt changes to the short story’s plot. 5 In the source material, one of the UN translators manages to steal a book from the Kanamits, and, employing a hackneyed Kanamit-English dictionary, is able to discover the malevolent purpose of the book. 6 However, in the Twilight Zone episode, a Kanamit inexplicably leaves the book behind at the United Nations building. And since no form of decoder is ever provided, translating the book, Zicree argues, would be impossible. 7 Also, no rationale is ever offered for why the Twilight Zone episode’s Kanamit, during his consultation with the UN delegates, would be reading from what turns out to be a “cookbook” in the first place, or why the alien would even bring such a guide with him to Earth at all, since his kind must ultimately transport their human livestock back home in order to “serve” them. Of course, what becomes one of the series’ most shocking twist endings depends, one way or the other, on the presence of the mysterious book, with its translated title “To Serve Man.” So once this is established in the first act, the episode’s second act forces its content a bit, inserting stock footage of a UN meeting, an image of an “obsolete” military base, and a failing lie-detector sequence. And then it includes a scene wherein the protagonist extols human “adaptability” in the context of increasing planetary exchanges with the Kanamits, for which he has also enlisted without a second thought. All this filler serves, of course, to increase the impact of the third act, when his colleague (Susan Cummings) finally arrives to the flying saucer’s takeoff point to warn him of the “cookbook” just as he is boarding the craft. And this returns the narrative to its first scene within the spaceship and the protagonist’s cell. As a finale, the episode includes an unprecedented direct address from the protagonist to the audience, usually reserved for Serling only, wherein he declares, “Sooner or later, all of us will be on the menu—all of us.” 8 This would appear to have been lifted directly from the finale of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when Kevin McCarthy’s character, in his attempt to stop traffic and warn the populace of a lethal alien presence, looks straight into the camera and exclaims, “You’re next, you’re next!!!” 9 In 1956, at least, concluding on such a note of futility was assumed to be unpalatable for American audiences, and so the Allied Artists studio insisted on adding an epilogue to the film wherein the protagonist is able to warn authorities in time to initiate a counteroffensive. By 1962, then, it would seem popular audiences were deemed ready for this Twilight Zone episode’s implied degree of pessimism, as a pure concession to Cold War paranoia.

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All told, “To Serve Man” is an atypically contrived teleplay, whose plot becomes completely subservient to the ironic punning of the Kanamits’ implied purpose “to serve man.” Even this effectively startling revelation is shaky upon further consideration, since as Zicree affirms, it is doubtful that an alien language would contain the same double meaning for the verb “to serve.” 10 It is possible, however, that in his attempt to adapt the author’s symptomatic fear of invasion to the screen, Serling took a relatively ironic stance toward his own material. In his epilogue, for example, he maintains the satirical aspect of punning when he says, “Or more simply stated, the evolution of man, the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup. It’s tonight’s bill of fare on The Twilight Zone.” 11 Here, he not only contributes an additional pun by swapping “desert” for “dessert” but describes the “evolution of man” as a case of pure irony. And then, perhaps not insignificantly, Serling refers once more to the episode’s thematic pun as “tonight’s bill of fare” on this television program, rather than as an element of the Twilight Zone itself, as would usually be the case. This is to say Serling would appear to remove himself from his usual role as the spokesperson for the series’ moral universe, almost as if to confirm a lack of any moral “correction” to be accomplished in this case. On the other hand, since the episode expends so much effort in establishing human gullibility regarding invaders, this very quality could be construed as admonished via the protagonist’s fate. In the larger context of science fiction entries involving space travel and/or extraterrestrial circumstances, “outer space” invariably behaves as The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. So the protagonist’s venturing unwillingly into this realm toward his own form of execution becomes the moral “consequence” of his gullibility. If such a reading is pursued, the episode would seem to validate American paranoia toward any such “invaders,” as do 1950s films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With respect to this particular Twilight Zone episode, at least, I should be inclined to reaffirm Booker’s notion of “ambivalence.” In other words, any intended social critique might seem somewhat obscured within the cycle of irony here. It is ironic or, rather, unconvincing that the populations of Earth would greet these invaders so enthusiastically, especially in a Cold War context. And yet this premise becomes crucial to the episode’s eventual ironic twist, where such apparently benevolent aliens prove to be hostile. And then Serling’s epilogue is rather ironic in its tone, as if he found himself less readily in a position to contextualize the series’ moral universe into this particular narrative. The sum of all this, along with the fact that Serling decidedly removed a more plausible context for the Kanamit book, leads me to the conclusion that this episode is an indictment, even a mockery of American paranoia, rather than any form of McCarthyite validation. Such a conclusion is further corroborated by this episode’s abrupt deviation from

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the norm of 1950s “space invader” films, wherein aliens are always overcome in the end. Other Twilight Zone episodes in this group proceed from the premise that alien invaders are unambiguously malicious, using it to mobilize a similar critique of Cold War paranoia in American culture. In these cases, a thematic irony derives from the notion that humans become their own worst enemy, regardless of any degree of impending threat posed by aliens. One such episode is “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” first airing in May 1961 during the series’ second season. Serling’s teleplay involves seven bus passengers at a roadside café during a snowstorm, waylaid by a damaged bridge on the route ahead of them. When two policemen arrive seeking an alien from a just-landed flying saucer nearby, the café becomes an incubator for paranoia, and even the two married couples begin to question the identity of their spouses. An eccentric old man (Jack Elam) among them insists that no one is beyond suspicion, and even makes a giddy reference to Ray Bradbury’s science fiction. A series of inexplicable events then ensues: the jukebox starts and stops, lights turn on and off, sugar dispensers explode, and so on. After the bridge holding them back is declared passable again, the passengers, the bus driver, and the policemen all depart. Almost immediately, however, the disbelieving businessman (John Hoyt) positioned as the least likely suspect returns with the news that the bridge collapsed, killing everyone but him. Revealing the third arm he had kept hidden underneath his coat, he identifies himself to the fry cook as a member of a Martian invasion force sent to colonize Earth. But the real ironic twist comes when the cook (Barney Phillips) confesses, in turn, that he represents a rival fleet from Venus, which has already intercepted and destroyed the Martians. He pushes back his cap to reveal a third eye on his forehead—an unfortunate example among The Twilight Zone’s well-intended special effects, though still sufficing to confirm his own “alien” identity. By 1961, these “third” additions to otherwise human-appearing beings are purely parodic—clichéd tokens of alien “otherness” depicted in so many science fiction films across the 1950s. These sideshow invaders become a means to critique American paranoia, rather than serving to assuage Cold War fears, especially since they are just as poised as the cannibal Kanamits to wipe out humanity. In this sense, then, even the Venusian’s utterly fake-looking third eye is appropriate. And accordingly, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is restored when any/all paranoid humans are, as in the previous example, wiped out of existence. Among invasion-oriented Twilight Zone episodes, the entry most obviously condemning Cold War paranoia is less immediately satirical. The firstseason episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” penned by Serling and aired in March of 1960, is also the first entry in the series to deal with alien invasion. It is less concerned with the particulars of the invaders them-

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selves, however, than with their psychological impact on a typical postwar American suburb. All the trappings of 1950s suburban existence are laid out in the opening scenes, including tree-lined streets, barbecues, children playing outside, and even a dutiful housewife emerging from her home in a black-and-white aproned dress. The narrative invokes a critique of suburban dependence on electric appliances when, after an apparent meteor flash overhead, the neighbors congregate on the sidewalk to complain of power and telephone failures. When one man’s automobile also won’t start, a neighbor boy (Jan Handzlik) volunteers the notion that, based on all the science fiction material he has read about space invaders, “they” intend to shut everyone in as a prelude to their assault. Thus, as in the colloquial reference to Ray Bradbury in the previous example, this episode assumes a self-reflexive stance toward the space invasion narrative, as if taking a critical stance toward it, rather than perpetuating it. This critique of paranoia sets in precisely at the moment the boy explains further that alien invaders “always” send a few of their kind, disguised in humanoid appearance or even as a would-be family, ahead of their larger attack forces. 12 Cinematically, the instantaneous effect of such a notion is clarified with a panning shot of the neighborhood throng, each of their faces dumbstruck with fear. When his car starts and stops inexplicably, one of the nearby neighbors becomes the first target for the others’ scrutiny. Later in the evening, after mutual suspicion escalates among the neighbors, another neighbor is accused of communicating with space invaders via his basement ham radio equipment. Here, a McCarthyite association is made between electronic media technology and invasion, and, in this way, Serling points to the widespread notion at that time of communists among us, or, rather, the Other appearing as everyday “human” Americans. And basement technologies are also to be distrusted, since they may facilitate private communications with Soviet headquarters. After the most vindictive neighbor (Jack Weston) fires on an unidentifiable man down the street, pandemonium ensues with random house lights going on, as if to incriminate each and every family, one at a time. The camera pulls out into an overhead long shot of the neighborhood, and then reveals a pair of humanoid aliens just outside their flying saucer, packing up the equipment responsible for sparking the chaos. One invader (Sheldon Allman) explains there are many more “Maple Streets” and he and his comrades will simply apply the same method of stopping “a few of their machines” so the humans will destroy themselves in turn. 13 As in the other two episodes, the triumph of the alien invaders is implied, although in this case their methods make the ironic point that humans (Americans) defining themselves against “otherness” are their own worst enemy. And, again, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is less concerned with restoring national security in this context than with eradicating anyone

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prone to either paranoia or prejudice, the latter of which, according to Serling’s epilogue, “can kill.” 14 Serling would revisit suburban hysteria in his teleplay “The Shelter” (September 1961); however, its narrative is completely removed from a science fiction context. Instead, neighbors respond violently to an “early ballistics warning” on the radio of “unidentified flying objects” from what is implicitly an earthbound, Soviet origin of attack rather than from outer space. 15 I take up this example more appropriately in the next chapter. Several more Twilight Zone episodes incorporate hostile space invaders in order to set up ironic narrative twists and, in turn, mobilize a critique of inherently “human” failings. However, the moral turpitudes addressed are more generalized, and so are not necessarily prompted by any immediate Cold War anxiety. These narratives also draw upon so many science fiction clichés of the preceding decade, although, in this context, merely as a means to expose varying degrees of human inadequacy or, rather, incompatibility with the series’ moral universe. Examples include “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” (April 1962), “Black Leather Jackets” (January 1964), and “The Fear” (May 1964). The first of these, lighter and more comedic, is simply a “never cry wolf” parable, involving an old country bumpkin (Andy Devine), popular at his general store for spinning outlandish yarns of all sorts. His pathological lying eventually gets the best of him when, after he barely thwarts abduction by space invaders with a simple blow on his harmonica, he is ironically assumed to be telling another of his amusing tall tales. The second entry, written by Earl Hamner Jr., involves a mysterious trio of leather-clad bikers occupying a rental property in a typical American suburb, akin to the neighborhood of Maple Street. As in other episodes, these disguised aliens from outer space possess both telepathic abilities and sophisticated technologies capable of wreaking havoc in the community. The younger “teenager” (Lee Kinsolving) among them discovers through his association with a neighboring teenage girl (Shelley Fabares) that—contrary to the impression the aliens have drawn from the media—humans are “capable of love.” He attempts to reverse the alien plot to poison Earth’s drinking water, but, ironically, even the deputy sheriff is among the invaders and so has the young man taken away. This is perhaps the bleakest of invasionoriented episodes, in that the alien plot remains poised for success, based on the notion that humanity, for its inhumanity, “doesn’t deserve” to survive. In this version of The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, then, harmony is restored when all humans are obliterated. The social critique is overtly spelled out in the episode’s dialogue, and so relies less on a surprise twist. The final example among these three entries depicts a snobbish New Yorker (Hazel Court) having migrated to a solitary cabin in the mountains, where she wrangles at first with a police officer (Mark Richman) responding to her complaint of strange lights in the sky. A series of shocking discoveries,

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including massive fingerprints on the squad car, a giant footprint, and, eventually, the effigy of a colossal space alien, turn out to be the contrivances of tiny humanoid invaders inside their kitchen-table-sized flying saucer. With the pair of humans achieving an affectionate mutual understanding, the invaders’ ironic fear tactics serve ultimately to illustrate Serling’s stated premise that “the worst thing there is to fear is fear itself.” 16 In each of these cases, alien hostility is safely assumed where it might otherwise have been ambiguous or simply false. As a result, narrative irony develops around the circumstances of a “real” threat of invasion, which, in turn, reveal any number of human failings. As is the case with “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” these human characters must either recognize the error in their ways, as in both “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” and “The Fear,” or be subject to obliteration, as in “Black Leather Jackets.” SPACE INVADERS AS BENEVOLENT Where space invaders in the aforementioned Twilight Zone episodes are decidedly malevolent, there are also examples, albeit fewer, in which aliens turn out, ironically, to have peaceful or magnanimous intentions, contrary to assumptions. Such an example is Serling’s third-season teleplay “The Gift” (April 1962), about a very humanlike alien (Geoffrey Horne) recovering from gunshot wounds in a remote Mexican village, as a result of his violent encounter with hostile policemen when first emerging from his spacecraft in the nearby hills. Beyond the alien’s professed benevolence, literal references to Jesus’ crucifixion are made in the ensuing dialogue, portending a similar fate for this “Christlike” character. This episode’s rather forced and atypical religious context probably accounts for Serling’s decision to locate his scenario in a Mexican town “just across the Texas border,” near or, rather, familiar enough to Americans, and yet comparatively traditional enough to encourage Christian allegory, however unusual in the science fiction genre. 17 The scenario is similar to that of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, where a benevolent humanoid, Klaatu (Michael Rennie), arriving in a flying saucer to appeal for world peace, makes reference to the “almighty spirit” before being compelled to escape from Earth’s hostile reception. 18 The Twilight Zone episode’s space alien also suggests all beings answer to the “same god,” and then bestows a certain “gift” upon the sympathetic peasant boy (Edmund Vargas) attending him. 19 But Serling’s teleplay takes the religious association a step further when the alien visitor announces he is “from beyond the stars,” as if he were actually of a metaphysical nature or even a god himself. 20 The boy wonders if such a “god” arriving to Earth would be greeted similarly with fear and hostility. Presumably, the child’s ignorance allows him to be unbiased toward the alien, although the teleplay never quite

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explains why he feels they share a mutual “oddness.” 21 In the episode’s finale, both the alien and his gift to humanity are inevitably associated with “the Devil,” according to the village’s implied cultural naiveté, and so they are, in turn, destroyed. In this matter, Serling attempts to push a familiar critique of American xenophobia to an extreme, by associating alien “visitors” with Christ himself, albeit in a context marred by racial stereotypes. Zicree’s as well as Don Presnell and Marty McGee’s guides point to such flaws as bad acting and a “wavering” teleplay, but it is moreover this episode’s overstated association between aliens and Jesus Christ (and the Devil) that undermines its intended critique. 22 In other words, it was certainly less appropriate in the postwar context for popular television to preach at its audiences. Ultimately, the narrative’s ironic scenario of a philanthropic space invader culminates with a predictable twist, wherein the also-sympathetic town physician reads an improbably intact preface to the otherwise destroyed document, announcing itself as a formula to cure all forms of cancer. And so, even in this example, The Twilight Zone’s moral harmony is restored, at least by implication, since human pestilence is recontextualized as “punitive.” This is to say even if the episode is relatively impotent on its own, it nonetheless contributes to the series’ critical agenda within its aggregate system of ironic communication. Two additional Twilight Zone episodes depict space invaders as benevolent or at least less immediately hostile; however, as before, the presence of these aliens is merely a means to expose human frailty. The first of these is Serling’s “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” (March 1961), depicting the arrival of burlesque alien “observers” from both Mars and Venus, who invest a common vacuum cleaner salesman (Burgess Meredith), initially, with super strength and, subsequently, with super intelligence. The first experiment only proves the human subject tends toward vanity before any nobler purpose, and so, by implication, the second test will have similar results. The ironic scenario in this comedic narrative is that its protagonist characterizes the “antithesis” of either strength or intelligence, but is allowed to enjoy both. If there is any climactic twist, it is simply that another pair of space aliens happens to choose the same subject for their own experiment, which, nevertheless, demonstrates that having superior human attributes does not guarantee superior ethics. Since these transformations are only temporary, The Twilight Zone’s moral equilibrium is never out of balance for long. The second case is Charles Beaumont’s teleplay “The Fugitive” (March 1962), about a loving old man (J. Pat O’Malley) capable of transforming himself into almost anything, whose compassion toward a handicapped little girl (Susan Gordon) is pitted against the shrewish disposition of her aunt Mrs. Gann (Nancy Kulp). It is clear enough from the onset that “Ben” is an alien from outer space, but the ironic twist comes when his two pursuers force him to admit he is the “king” of their people and that he must reassume

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his throne. When he poses as the little girl’s twin, the alien agents are compelled to bring them both along, and then another twist comes when Serling reveals a photograph showing Ben’s true appearance as a handsome young man, poised to couple up with his female companion when she comes of age on his faraway planet. Here, the critique is of any detached, uncompassionate display of child supervision, and so moral order is restored when the unfortunate child is eventually removed from such an environment. In the context of Twilight Zone episodes invoking earthbound irony via space invaders, there is one more episode I should mention: Richard Matheson’s teleplay “The Invaders” (January 1961), wherein diminutive hostile spacemen unfortunately resembling wind-up toy robots beset an old peasant woman (Agnes Moorehead), at home in her rustic wooden farmhouse. Normally, I would include such an example within the earlier group of episodes depicting “ostensibly hostile” invaders. However, this particular episode proves exceptional in its atypically surprising climactic twist, when the woman finally destroys her assailants’ flying saucer with a hatchet, leaving the words “U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1” visible on its exterior. And so this entirely action-based narrative, uniquely devoid of dialogue, communicates the ironic revelation that Americans are also quite capable of assuming the role of hostile invaders, especially in contexts where their presence is immediately feared and their intentions misunderstood, as in “The Gift.” Here, it should be noted the first “alien” to exit the spaceship is merely approaching the comparatively colossal woman in the moment when she kicks him over the ledge of the attic’s entrance. It is the subsequent spaceman who first fires his dual handheld weapons at the woman, who recoils in pain. So these “invaders” are somewhat ambiguously so, or, rather, their offensive actions against their adversary are at least partially provoked. At the same time, since they make no attempt to communicate with the woman amidst their continued assaults, the episode ultimately positions these robotic entities as malevolent. So it is safe to say the episode’s thematic irony derives from the implied potential for American interests to prove just as “invasive” within the immediate context of the Cold War. An episode apparently indulging the familiar 1950s fantasy of American prowess against alien invasion, then, actually restores harmony in The Twilight Zone’s moral universe by revealing these “transgressors” to be themselves American. SPACE INVADERS AS ASTRONAUTS Even if “The Invaders” is a relatively unsophisticated entry in the series, its particularly acute thematic irony makes it a good pivotal point from which to explore another distinct group of Twilight Zone episodes involving human and/or American “invasions” of remote worlds. As if embarking from this

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episode’s climactic twist, such episodes reverse the former premise of alien visitors arriving to Earth. Instead, imagined astronauts arrive to an array of outer space destinations whose humanoid inhabitants similarly serve, through ironic circumstances, to mobilize social critique. As before, the intended critique may reference Cold War concerns explicitly, or these may be alternatively implied through a more generalized scrutiny of human foibles. Assumed in this antithetical science fiction premise is mankind’s goodwill toward the prospect of intelligent life on other planets, along with the presumption that our envoys ought to be received accordingly. On the other hand, it is rarely assumed in these contexts that aliens could have a similar disposition when they show up to our planet. Conversely, aliens could just as well treat Earth astronauts as “invaders,” but, if and when they do, they are similarly deemed enemies to be repelled. This narrative double standard defines the predominant pattern of science fiction material across the 1950s, and only confirms the degree to which any portrayed extraterrestrials are imagined less as they might be than as decidedly personifying earthbound, anthropocentric faults. A celebrated example of this latter narrative inversion in The Twilight Zone is the first-season episode “People Are Alike All Over,” first aired in March of 1960, about two men traveling to Mars in a rocket ship. Both Zicree’s and Presnell and McGee’s guides point out how Serling’s teleplay makes important modifications in its adaptation of Paul Fairman’s 1952 short story “Brothers beyond the Void.” For one, the Twilight Zone episode brings to Mars both characters, Conrad (Roddy McDowall) and Marcusson (Paul Comi), rather than only Conrad. This allows Serling to introduce additional tension in these astronauts’ opposing sensibilities, the former anticipating alien hostility whereas the latter remains optimistic, especially in his notion that “people are alike everywhere.” 23 To make this premise work, Serling also adjusts the diminutive Martians to appear as homo sapiens. After his cohort dies of internal injuries inside their crashed ship, the reluctant Conrad is forced to confront a throng of tunic-clad humanoids. He immediately concludes Marcusson’s theory is accurate and that these “people” have only good intentions, despite the Martian female’s gendered display of sympathetic reservation regarding what’s in store for him. The Martians escort him into a typical 1950s suburban household, complete with television, cocktail bar, and furnishings—all apparently gleaned telepathically from his own mind. Nevertheless, his comfortable accommodations turn against him, when he discovers he is locked in with no windows, save for a retractable wall through which the Martians now observe him behind bars as an “Earth Creature in His Native Habitat.” Although the sympathetic female (Susan Oliver) withdraws in disgust, most of the Martians are fascinated with the new exhibit. And so he at last affirms the irony in Marcusson’s fateful speculation.

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This is, of course, one of the series’ most abrupt twist endings, albeit arrived at rather awkwardly, since Conrad’s “zoo” depended on his tearing down drapes, not to mention that the “hypnosis” allowing him and the Martians to communicate in English would less convincingly enable him to read the language on his exhibit’s plaque. For television audiences, these elements are easily enough overlooked or forgiven within the emotional impact of his shocking discovery. And, in the greater context of the series, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe “executes” Marcusson for his passive ignorance of the distrustful and/or malevolent nature of human beings, while allowing Conrad to serve a “life sentence” for so gullibly abandoning his former suspicions. In other words, this episode uses the imaginary realm of outer space as a means to demonstrate “people everywhere” are more inherently cruel than otherwise. At least implicit here is an attempt to undermine American xenophobia, not only with respect to Russians and communists, but also toward nonWestern populations in general. Ideally, then, such a powerful twist ending’s degree of irony would spur 1960s popular audiences toward a deeper contemplation of human universality, in lieu of reinforcing so many 1950s outer space allegories of “Us versus Them.” Another revisionist allegory of American national identity vis-à-vis other nations is the Twilight Zone episode “The Little People,” airing two seasons later in March of 1962. As in “The Fear,” this Serling teleplay is an essay on relative physical magnitude or, rather, displays thereof, but here, such displays are more than merely intimidation. Again, two Earth astronauts, Commander Fletcher (Claude Akins) and his subordinate Craig (Joe Maross), arrive on a remote planet, this time in order to repair their damaged ship and return home. Already, this is a nonaggressive scenario when compared with the typical space invasion narratives of the 1950s, though, as such, it closely resembles that of It Came from Outer Space, wherein the alien craft lands on Earth also to make repairs. But the similarity ends here. The two men’s dialogue quickly reveals another divergence of sensibility, the former seeking mutual cooperation for survival’s sake, while the latter is a confessed megalomaniac, ridiculously obsessed with the ability to reign over others. Eventually, Craig reveals his private water source, not far from their rocket, to be the site of a tiny humanoid population, having already construed him as a god. To reinforce his newly acquired status, Craig stamps on a portion of their city, and its surviving citizens, in turn, erect a life-sized statue in his image. Fletcher must finally depart in the repaired rocket without him, since Craig remains determined to lord over his “subjects” with continued displays of violence and destruction. Moral order is restored with the ironic arrival of two gargantuan spacemen, one of them accidentally crushing Craig in his hand, and the tiny society pulls down the stone effigy over his dead body. And so even though these astronauts land with no agenda beyond making repairs, the presence of alien beings encourages one man’s megalomania, and

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so repositions him as an “invader.” And then a subsequent alien presence serves to “correct” his evils. On the other hand, his shipmate, behaving as a peaceable “visitor,” is allowed to escape from the planet with his life. The episode’s irony implies that the American disposition, especially within the Cold War context, can also become invasive. In other words, as long as greater “proportions” of military prowess and weaponry foster presuppositions of ideological superiority, campaigns within weaker nations, namely the Korean and Vietnam Wars, will be advocated. One more Twilight Zone episode ironically positioning astronauts as “invaders” is “Elegy,” a Beaumont teleplay first airing in February of 1960 during the first season. As in the previous example, this trio of earthmen arrives somewhat innocently, only after their spacecraft exhausts its fuel supply. There ensues a thorough reconnaissance of the asteroid’s very earthlike surroundings, populated by an array of contented human inhabitants, albeit inexplicably frozen in place within their respective familiar settings. This ironic premise extends itself for a time, until one of the statuesque civilians, who turns out to be an android, comes to life and welcomes them. This “Mr. Wickwire” (Cecil Kellaway) reveals himself to be the caretaker of an extraterrestrial cemetery called Happy Glades, wherein the wealthy fulfill their idealized existences posthumously. His dialogue with the astronauts atypically literalizes this episode’s intended critique, since he mentions Earth’s “atomic war” as having happened in “1985” and makes no less than three references to mankind’s fundamental penchant for violence. 24 When the spacemen discover they have been drugged, the android apologizes, exclaiming, “Where there are men there can be no peace.” 25 The episode’s ironic conclusion finds Wickwire dusting off the astronauts inside their rocket ship, positioned as if they were now heading home “for eternity.” Although these characters arrive peacefully and demonstrate no particular moral shortcoming, they are deemed categorically harmful by their nature and so are treated as “invaders” of this somewhat sedentary utopia, nonetheless another microcosm for the series’ moral universe. This episode’s premise of astronauts “invading” an outer space location already claimed by other earthmen is unique among the extraterrestrial narratives in the series. Accordingly, it bears close resemblance to MGM’s seminal 1956 film Forbidden Planet, which I mention earlier for its introduction of Robby the Robot. As in “The Invaders,” these astronauts arrive in a flying saucer simultaneously connoting a projected future technology and the more familiar notion of “invaders from outer space.” This dichotomy works, however, in a context where these earthmen intrude on the operations of Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), having arrived with an earlier expedition of scientists, all since destroyed by an unknown force. This “force” turns out to be an advanced technology created by the now-extinct alien “Krell” race, which had the ability to transform thoughts into matter. As in the Twilight Zone

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episode “Valley of the Shadow,” Morbius warns of the dangers of these technologies falling into human hands, since, he declares, “Man is unfit as yet to receive such knowledge, such almost limitless power.” Driven by massive thermonuclear reactors, the Krell technology has already gone awry, since Morbius’ id unleashes an invisible monster, his “evil self,” assailing the earthmen and ultimately turning against the doctor himself. The crew is able to escape, however, just before a nuclear chain reaction obliterates the planet. And so, by comingling the Freudian concept of human instinctual drives with nuclear power and technology, this film becomes another Cold War cautionary tale. Like the amiable android’s mantra in “Elegy,” the implication here is that human nature makes violence and ultimate self-destruction inevitable. Of course, in the Twilight Zone episode, the nuclear war on Earth has already occurred, and so it is less forgiving toward its human protagonists, especially according to The Twilight Zone’s far more pervasive moral universe. Nevertheless, Forbidden Planet anticipates a greater number of the series’ science fiction entries than any other 1950s film, which is most likely a testament to its relative quality and breadth of imagination. At this point, I shouldn’t fail to mention the first-season episode “Third from the Sun” (January 1960), since it falls somewhere between the series’ premises of space invaders “as benevolent” and “as astronauts.” Based on a short story by Matheson, Serling’s teleplay portrays a familiar Cold War context, whose society is even more on the verge of nuclear annihilation, anticipated within forty-eight hours. The protagonist, Will Sturka (Fritz Weaver), is a government scientist working on hydrogen bombs, opposite his antagonist, Carling (Edward Andrews), a colleague suspicious of his intentions. Sturka assembles his closest colleague, Jerry Riden (Joe Maross), and their families in his typical suburban home, so as to escape the impending “holocaust” in a spaceship. The only aspect uncharacteristic of 1950s America here is the futuristic sound their common-looking automobile makes en route to the launch site. And then the fact that their spacecraft is a flying saucer at least suggests a more advanced society. After the group overcomes Carling’s attempt to stop them, the narrative takes an ironic turn when they are heading for a not-too-distant star, and Riden claims its third planet is called “Earth.” Of course, the improbability of such a duplicate society here is merely a means to surprise the audience with this finale, though, at the same time, the episode’s premise of a threatening nuclear war was all too familiar across the preceding decade. Booker, for example, cites such seminal 1950s novels as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), about the survivors of a plague that depopulates North America; Judith Merril’s Shadow of the Hearth (1950), about a housewife persisting in her home after a surprise nuclear attack on the United States; and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), which delineates a cyclical history for humankind in the wake of

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nuclear warfare also culminating in nuclear destruction. Not surprisingly, this Twilight Zone episode also resembles Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, about the sole survivor of a global pandemic, adapted into the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth and two subsequent remakes. Booker also mentions a series of often satirical post-apocalyptic narratives by Philip K. Dick, including The World Jones Made (1956), The Man Who Japed (1956), Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), The Penultimate Truth (1964), and Dr. Bloodmoney (1965). And such films as Five (1951), Roger Corman’s Day the World Ended (1955), and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) depict the struggles of survivors in post-holocaust environments. All these narratives find their legacy in the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, since it simply trades the ocean in Daniel Defoe’s classic novel for outer space, thus making Mars the “island” where the protagonist must maintain himself against all odds. Of course, The Twilight Zone’s “Third from the Sun” is less obligated to explore any such outer space environment, since it is implied this band of “survivors” will reach the planet Earth. But here is where a deeper irony is invoked. Based on the tendency of 1950s space invader narratives, these well-meaning humans will arrive in their flying saucer, only to be greeted with fear and hostility. In Matheson’s story, this saucer is merely a “ship.” And the protagonist, rather than a developer of the very H-bombs to be used in the imminent war, is merely a “test-pilot.” 26 Thus, Serling recontextualizes this character within the series’ moral universe as yet another “transgressor,” ultimately to be chastised for his part in nuclear devastation. There are a few more Twilight Zone episodes placing astronauts and other earthlings in outer space contexts; however, any compromise of moral harmony has little to do with “invasion” per se. Even when not leading to alien cultures on remote planets, space travel afforded Serling and The Twilight Zone’s other writers an almost infinite degree of imagination, especially since sending humans deep into outer space was yet to be accomplished in the real world. Accordingly, it is no wonder the series’ introduction segues into narratives as if descending from a starlit sky. Such an episode is Serling’s “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (January 1960), portraying the “first manned aircraft into space.” 27 After supposedly ending up on an asteroid, one (Dewey Martin) among three surviving astronauts murders his comrades to increase his water supply in a harsh desert environment, only to discover too late they had actually crashed back on Earth. This particular twist, of course, anticipates Serling’s incorporation of the selfsame ironic conclusion for his 1968 screen adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel Planet of the Apes. In the latter narrative, the usual alien society is swapped for an intelligent simian culture in order to accomplish a similar critique of human failings when earthmen arrive in their midst. On the other hand, this Twilight Zone episode’s lack of any alien presence or “other” culture with which to juxtapose human characters allows these inhospitable circumstances, akin to

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those in “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” to invoke “Man’s inhumanity to Man” more directly. Another episode exploring social dynamics in a trying environment is Serling’s fourth-season entry “On Thursday We Leave for Home” (May 1963), about a group of colonists struggling to survive on a remote planet. When a ship finally arrives after thirty years to return them to Earth, their leader (James Whitmore) becomes unwilling to relinquish his authority and so defiantly remains behind alone. Without the presence of the antlike society found in “The Little People,” this episode reveals less potential for any ironic twist, save for the protagonist’s change of heart only after his followers depart. Because this megalomaniac is portrayed more sympathetically, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, in this particular case, becomes organic to human nature, making this episode behave more as an extraterrestrial tragedy. While alien encounters are eschewed in these latter two examples, then, the variable circumstances of space travel allow for unusually extreme social situations through which to examine human behaviors both universal and immediately applicable to postwar American culture. Since it seems I am digressing from this chapter’s focus on The Twilight Zone’s critique of xenophobia, I should point out that the aforementioned examples, as well as other outer space narratives in the series, apply moreover to Cold War themes besides the fear of invasion. Matheson’s “Death Ship” (February 1963), for example, wherein three orbiting astronauts repeatedly confront their dead bodies aboard a crashed ship on the planet below, is better understood among a number of Twilight Zone episodes confronting fears of human mortality. These include “The Hitch-Hiker,” “Twenty Two,” “Nothing in the Dark,” “The Hunt,” and, less directly, “Kick the Can” and “Ninety Years without Slumbering,” the latter of which I address previously in the context of “haunted technologies.” I could devote a separate chapter to these, but suffice it to say that such episodes seek to assuage anxieties of death, either by allowing protagonists to resign themselves to their demise, or by establishing means by which to outmaneuver it. Another space narrative, Serling’s “The Parallel” (March 1963), about an astronaut arriving back to Earth to find his home environment has become unfamiliar, more readily refers to the postwar condition of returning American veterans and their estrangement from domestic life. Other such episodes are “A World of Difference” and “Person or Persons Unknown,” both wherein male protagonists struggle to reestablish their former identities at home. I take up this postwar theme in a subsequent chapter. And then there is “Probe 7, Over and Out,” about a “space age” version of Adam and Eve, this time, wherein the couple meet on Earth as ancient aliens arriving separately. Such an implied revision of biblical accounts fits within the larger context of spiritual crisis in the post–World War II era, and, of course, finds its counterpart in the episode “Two,” wherein adversaries confronting each other in post-apocalyptic rub-

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ble start anew as a couple. This close affiliation of certain outer space narratives with a variety of other contexts in the series only affirms the relatively open-ended potential for space to enable The Twilight Zone’s metaphysical, moral universe to act upon its characters in all sorts of ways. Nevertheless, the predominant critique to be found among the series’ roughly two dozen space- and/or alien-oriented episodes is of American cultural identity and its reinforcement through 1950s narrativizations of the Other. At the beginning of this chapter, I was inclined to corroborate Booker’s notion that the science fiction of the “long 1950s” is “ambivalent,” since invasion narratives portray aliens as either malicious or magnanimous. And by extension, they are also thematically ambivalent toward either affirming American military prowess or striving to denounce American hostility toward any/all “un-American” cultures. In the case of the Twilight Zone episodes I look at here, I see a more unilateral condemnation of human failings, xenophobia in particular. In cases where space invaders are malevolent, such as “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “To Serve Man,” selfconsciously satirical elements water down all implications that the aliens are indomitable, and so undermine any potential analog of “Soviet” threat. And then in more sober episodes, like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “Black Leather Jackets,” hostile aliens personify the ultimate retribution for human paranoia and/or cruelty, as confirmed somewhat overtly by their dialogue. Of course, the same critique becomes more obvious in a narrative like “The Gift,” where the “invader” has only peaceful intentions, but is rewarded with violence. Alternatively in other episodes, such as “The Invaders” or “The Little People,” astronauts embarking from Earth assume a malevolent disposition toward extraterrestrial cultures, and so they become the “invaders” instead. Through these episodes’ varying combination of ironic premises and surprise twists, The Twilight Zone achieved an overarching critique according to the notion that humans are the “real” enemy to humankind. And so, in the immediate Cold War context, Americans are also to be deemed harmful, to themselves and the rest of the world. It is as if by the end of the 1950s, the culture revealed through Serling’s, Beaumont’s, and Matheson’s voices had matured beyond the earlier tendency of science fiction to assuage fears of invasion, both real and ideological, so that what remained was a more focused scrutiny of American idiosyncrasies, including irrational fear and paranoia. But included within this critique are immoral temptations more fundamental to human nature, to which Americans of the era were no less immune. And, as I have pointed out in each case, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe invariably eradicates all such “transgressors” in order to reestablish its sense of communal harmony, again, akin to Richard Rorty’s liberalist utopia. In the previous chapter’s coverage of robot- and machine-oriented narratives, I argue the series’ formulaic application of narrative irony ultimately invokes a

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thematic “technological irony,” that is, the notion that future technologies may not accomplish an improved existence. Similarly, in the case of these latter science fiction episodes, their narrative ironies inform the larger thematic irony that American culture inevitably projects its own nature onto any/all permutations of the Other. In this context, then, both aliens and humans become “ironic space invaders.” NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Booker, Monsters, 118. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 120. “To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 236. Knight, “To Serve Man.” Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 237. “To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Walter Wanger Pictures, 1956. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 237. “To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “The Shelter,” The Twilight Zone. “The Fear,” The Twilight Zone. “The Gift,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History, 132. “People Are Alike All Over,” The Twilight Zone. “Elegy,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Matheson, “Third from the Sun,” 5–13. “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” The Twilight Zone.

Chapter Five

Martial Irony

I argue earlier that The Twilight Zone, as an anthology television series, is less productively understood as the work of one “auteur” than as the collaborative effort of several writers, directors, and crewmen, not to mention the larger cultural forces at work in this postwar context. At the same time, certain tendencies of the series are rather particular to Rod Serling’s experience and vision. Such a tendency is the war-oriented narrative, primarily based on Serling’s harrowing time as an infantryman in World War II’s Pacific theater. Gordon Sander’s biography provides ample detail for those specifically interested in Serling’s war years. For my purposes, it suffices to cover only the aspects of Serling’s personal experience that are traceable in his Twilight Zone teleplays. Serling was still too young when Americans joined the war effort in 1942, though, according to Sander, he already envisioned becoming an Army Air Forces tail gunner. He would even have quit high school early if not for the admonitions of a teacher insisting Serling earn his diploma first. But only three weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Serling graduated and left Binghamton to enlist for training as a paratrooper. By April of 1944, Serling and the 11th Airborne Division were headed for New Guinea and the Japanese, despite his initial hope that he would have the chance, being Jewish, to fight the Nazis. After grueling months of inertia, during which Serling tried his hand at writing for radio, the eight thousand men headed in November for the Philippine island of Leyte to “mop up” after American forces had already achieved victory against Japanese General Yamashita’s forces. 1 A five-hundred-mile trek across the steep, muddy Mahonag mountains proved especially difficult, more so because the trail was easily ambushed by Japanese soldiers still on the island. Also traumatizing was the accidental death of a close friend of Serling’s, decapitated by an air-dropped food crate. A month 105

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later, after a few more skirmishes with the Japanese, the bedraggled troops finally linked up with American forces on the west coast of the island. Later, in the early months of 1945, Serling and the 511th regiment advanced on the heavily defended capital of Manila, where they suffered fifty percent casualties before finally overcoming the Japanese soldiers entrenched there. According to Sander, Serling came the closest to death at this point, “seeing numerous of his other friends killed and maimed in what struck him as an increasingly pointless war.” 2 Serling suffered a number of injuries but ultimately survived the war, though he arrived home with what Sander confirms was later referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. 3 Thus, it was inevitable that his wartime experiences would inflect the rest of his creative life as a writer. Only two among the ten Twilight Zone teleplays immediately having to do with past or present wars are not Serling’s. And the six World War II narratives are all his. Four of the five additional examples at least making some reference to past wars in their narratives are also Serling’s. Considering the five seasons’ worth of entries, then, it is far less likely that a similarly eclectic science fiction/fantasy anthology would have as many war stories, if any at all. Principal contributors, including Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and Earl Hamner Jr., naturally gravitated toward scenarios more conducive to bizarre circumstances. On the other hand, Serling set a precedent for wartime contexts, combined with metaphysical phenomena, as far back as his prototypical teleplay “The Time Element.” Not only would this narrative’s portrayed attack on Pearl Harbor encourage so many World War II contexts, but its protagonist’s trip to the past anticipates the series’ recurrent motif of time travel, in such varying episodes as “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” “Walking Distance,” “Judgment Night,” “The Last Flight,” “Execution,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “King Nine Will Not Return,” “The Man in the Bottle,” “The Trouble with Templeton,” “Back There,” “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” “Static,” “A Hundred Years over the Rim,” “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” “Once upon a Time,” “Showdown with Rance McGrew,” “Kick the Can,” “Young Man’s Fancy,” “No Time Like the Past,” “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville,” “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” “In Praise of Pip,” “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms,” “Ringa-Ding Girl,” and “Spur of the Moment.” With the relatively broad range of narrative contexts here, it should be understood that “time travel” doesn’t function as a categorical theme alongside “technology,” “invasion,” and so forth, since it is not in and of itself a target for social critique. Rather, it is simply a narrative device for invoking irony. “War,” on the other hand, belongs among the principle concerns of American culture during the Cold War years, especially in the wake of World War II. And so, by combining war with time travel, ironic circumstances arise, which, in turn, mobilize a larger critique of “war” as such. In “The

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Time Element,” for example, present-day protagonist Peter Jenson (William Bendix) recurrently dreams he is back in time, just before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. But his attempts to warn everyone are naturally greeted with skepticism, and then, ironically, he himself is killed in the morning air raid. Consequently, his body vanishes from the spot where he had been asleep on his analyst’s couch. Because this well-intending citizen dies in the fray, the characteristic “Twilight Zone” morality might seem absent. In the case of war-oriented episodes, at least, I think it is crucial to proceed from Serling’s particular impression as a combat soldier. For him, what I shall call “martial irony” confers a pervading notion of futility in any/ all war-oriented contexts, although any number of moral weaknesses may also be exposed, as in the previous invocations of irony. As it turns out, then, this character personifies Serling’s experience of helplessness, as if being drawn into a cyclone of violence and death on a scale too vast to impede as a mere individual. By considering more examples, I hope to discover how the series’ moral order orients itself within such a unilaterally pessimistic context. In this chapter, I commence with the Twilight Zone episodes most resembling Serling’s wartime experience and continue outward from there. Accordingly, I shall examine the World War II narratives first, and then consider the remaining war-oriented narratives. In terms of American popular culture’s embrace of World War II narratives, The Twilight Zone’s emergence on prime-time television couldn’t have occurred in a better span of years, and so it is a wonder the burgeoning postwar genre wasn’t pursued more often within the series’ diversity. Indeed, if not for so much expressed enthusiasm for “The Time Element” on Desilu Playhouse, CBS would probably not have pursued Serling’s pitch for a series. But, clearly, Serling was less specifically interested in exploring war themes than in pursuing an “anthology” for social critique—in all relevant contexts. Nevertheless, throughout the later 1940s and the 1950s, Hollywood narrativizations of heroic American involvement in the recent war proliferated, many starring John Wayne, such as They Were Expendable (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Operation Pacific (1951), Flying Leathernecks (1951), and The Wings of Eagles (1957). Featuring a variety of dramatic modes, other major entries include Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry (1955), David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and the 20th Century Fox Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1958), the latter two of which were the highestgrossing films of their years. The most apparent cinematic antecedent to “The Time Element,” of course, would be the popularly received and lavishly awarded Columbia Pictures film From Here to Eternity (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann. Akin to the ensign from the USS Arizona whom Jenson encounters in Serling’s teleplay, this narrative focuses on soldiers’ lives in Honolulu just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The film also sets a prece-

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dent for martial irony when principal character Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), attempting to rejoin his company during the Japanese onslaught, ends up shot down by a patrolman at his own army base. Similar to that of Serling as a young paratrooper, this character’s reckless dedication to the war effort sets up an even more pronounced experience of “futility,” in this case costing him his life. Between this film’s success and the general popularity of the genre during these years, Serling certainly faced no lack of encouragement to assimilate his personal war traumas into the metaphysical context of his proposed science fiction and fantasy series. Of course, even before the 1958 appearance of “The Time Element” on Desilu Playhouse, Rod Serling had written war, or, rather, antiwar, narratives for live television, among them “24 Men in a Plane,” “The Strike,” “The Rack,” and “Bomber’s Moon.” Airing in December of 1953 on Medallion Theatre, “24 Men in a Plane” derived from Serling’s first misbegotten jump as a paratrooper in the war, when the first jumpmaster dropped his soldiers over Manila prematurely, which caused all subsequent jumpmasters to do the same. Though no one was killed in the incident, its potentially tragic outcome inspired Serling to portray a guilt-ridden jumpmaster, about to dispatch a fresh batch of paratroopers in the psychological aftermath of a similar error. “The Strike,” first airing in June of 1954 on Studio One, depicts the internal trials of Major Gaylord (James Daly), whose ailing regiment is trapped in the Korean jungle with scant food and supplies. His conscience is plagued after he gives the command for an air strike liable to destroy the platoon he sent out earlier and with which he has since lost radio contact. According to Sander, this was Serling’s most realized work to date, and would prompt network producer Felix Jackson to request a similar play about the business world, which would be realized as Serling’s breakthrough teleplay “Patterns.” 4 “The Rack,” first airing in April of 1955 on The United States Steel Hour, is a courtroom drama about an ex-prisoner of war (Mitchell Agruss), accused of treason for conspiring with the enemy during the Korean War. Because the American officer was compelled to cooperate with his North Korean captors in order to survive, Serling again establishes a complex moral dilemma that has ambiguous implications. Although the court-martial finds the officer guilty, his father finally forgives him. Based on this teleplay, Sander claims: As in the best of his writing, the true forces of evil were completely unseen (a device he would use to startling effect several times in The Twilight Zone). Rather than confronting a physical enemy, what these characters must battle is the regimentation and structure of the faceless organization that determines the course of their lives. This was where Serling was his most “angry”—in his frustrated attempt to understand how militarism and militaristic power structures—like big business, the sporting world, and network TV—are intolerant of change, weakness, and any notion of exceptions to the rule. 5

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As with “Patterns,” “The Rack” was also adapted into a feature film in 1956, the latter produced by MGM and starring Paul Newman, though most critics prefer the live television version. Finally, “Bomber’s Moon,” directed by John Frankenheimer and first airing in May of 1958 on Playhouse 90, portrays American pilots poised for the next bombing mission over Germany toward the end of World War II. Colonel Culver (Robert Cummings) reproaches Lieutenant Harrison (Rip Torn) for his recent cowardice and sends off Captain Rierden (Martin Balsam) in his place. After Rierden is killed, Culver “punitively” compels Harrison to undertake a dangerous one-man mission, which proves successful but kills him as well. Culver finally confesses his futile attempt to assuage his own guilt through Harrison’s fatal mission. All four of these teleplays focus on the extremely difficult moral decisions forced upon individuals (especially commanders) within the particular circumstances of war. Although Serling employs no surprise twist endings here, martial irony is nevertheless communicated through these protagonists’ emerging guilt within a context presumed fundamentally to be a “noble cause.” Unfortunately, any accumulated momentum with these social-consciousness dramas would be checked when CBS censored Serling’s next Playhouse 90 entry, “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” concerning racial prejudice against Mexicans in the American frontier West. Hereafter, the dejected television auteur would have to restrict his firsthand war experiences to the unreal, metaphysical parameters of The Twilight Zone. IRONY IN WORLD WAR II In the context of The Twilight Zone, the realism unilaterally sought in Hollywood’s postwar depictions of World War II, especially in terms of American heroism, would be replaced by imaginary circumstances capable of invoking irony—conversely toward mobilizing Serling’s antiwar agenda. Because these are specific historical contexts, however, it might be more accurate to describe such episodes as an encroachment of metaphysical phenomena upon the hyperphysical conditions of modern combat. In these narratives, then, authenticity is just as obligatory, but is allowed to accommodate slight embellishments sufficient to establish and/or reestablish the series’ overarching moral universe. Accordingly, there are episodes rather immediate to Serling’s impressions of jungle warfare in the war’s Pacific theater. The first of these is “The Purple Testament,” airing in February of 1960 during the first season. As if striving for maximum historical accuracy, Serling’s prologue sets the scene as the “Philippine Islands” in “1945,” and then a sergeant mentions having captured a bridge on the “road to Manila.” 6 Invited into the captain’s tent for a conciliatory drink, Lieutenant Fitzgerald (William Reynolds) confesses the ability to see a “light” in certain soldiers’ faces, which

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anticipates their demise. After reportedly predicting four soldiers’ deaths this way, the lieutenant sees the same light in the visage of his hospitalized friend, who dies shortly thereafter. He then attempts to dissuade Captain Riker (Dick York) from their next operation, warning the latter he won’t return, but Riker is only moved to leave his wedding ring and family photos behind. Later, Fitzgerald is ordered back to division headquarters, and does a double take as he recognizes the same light in his own reflection, soon before his jeep runs over a landmine and explodes en route. Even if this outcome is to be construed as the episode’s formulaic twist, it is additionally ironic that the lieutenant, like the captain, made no attempt to resist his fate. Taken together, these portrayed events would suffice to underscore a simple notion of futility in the everyday reality of combat. And, accordingly, the scene inside the tent just after Fitzgerald drops Riker’s dog tags on top of his personal effects becomes the most thematic in the narrative, when, after learning the captain was shot down by a Japanese sniper, another soldier examines his family photos and exclaims: “War stinks.” 7 But if considered in the larger context of the series, the teleplay takes on a more complex dimension. Ultimately, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe cannot allow Fitzgerald’s clairvoyance to alter the circumstances of the war or save any lives, since this would undermine the intended critique. Instead, the protagonist must answer for his previous attempt to warn the doomed captain by following his example, not only by dying as well, but also by similarly resigning himself to his inevitable slaughter. And so when Serling’s prologue confirms, “Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone,” this, in moralistic terms, is tantamount to saying this character personifies martial irony, or, rather, war’s all-pervading futility. 8 Another Twilight Zone episode attempting to authenticate Serling’s combat experiences in World War II’s Pacific theater, while at the same time introducing a metaphysical dimension, is “A Quality of Mercy,” which aired in December of 1961 during the third season. Again, Serling’s prologue defines the setting as “the Philippine Islands” in “1945,” although, this time, much of the scenario is explained previously via Sergeant Causarano (Albert Salmi), a member of what he describes as “the queen of battle, the everloving infantry.” 9 Bombarding the mouth of a large cave in the jungle, the sergeant bemoans the fact that he and his fellow infantrymen have been ordered to assail the Japanese soldiers still holding out inside, with “no one in there to tell them the war is over for them.” 10 This familiarly “pointless” wartime situation echoes circumstances on the island of Leyte, when Serling’s division arrived, as Sander says, to “mop up” the aftermath of American victory, at the cost of additional human lives on both sides. The inexperienced Lieutenant Katell (Dean Stockwell) soon appears, also determined to “mop up” by advancing upon the cave despite the fatigue of the platoon. In the ensuing dialogue between Katell and the sergeant, an

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ideological debate develops between perceiving the enemy as “Japs” and as “men.” 11 Despite the sergeant’s arguments for a point where killing more men becomes unnecessary, the lieutenant concludes, “As long as they are the enemy, they get it.” 12 At this instant, as if the Zone’s proverbial gavel had fallen, Katell finds himself facing a platoon of Japanese soldiers where his men had formerly stood. And then, running toward the cave, he soon realizes he has also transformed—into a Japanese lieutenant, but three years earlier, in 1942, when the Japanese had the upper hand. We are expected to forgive the inconsistency of his trapped American consciousness communicating in an “implied” Japanese (English with a quasi-Japanese accent), since otherwise, the scenario wouldn’t hold up. Nevertheless, a superior officer (Jerry Fujikawa) arrives to berate the lieutenant for his hesitance, the latter having become sympathetic toward the wounded American soldiers in the cave. A similar debate takes place between them, with the lieutenant, in the place of his former sergeant, proposing the platoon simply bypass the cave. And then, ironically, his Japanese superior delivers an almost identical string of phrases amounting to the same point—the enemy must be destroyed regardless. Katell is suddenly returned to his former self, and before his men are to receive his attack signal, word of the atom bomb and the Japanese surrender comes through the radio. The critique might have been more effective if the lieutenant had been given the chance to recall his attack. Rather, the teleplay allows him merely to express a “hope” he won’t have to kill anyone in the future—a sufficiently ironic change of heart, nevertheless, considering his former disposition. The process of restoring moral equilibrium is more obvious in this episode, compared with the previous example. Especially when juxtaposed with the empathetic sergeant, the protagonist here is an ostensible “transgressor,” readily inclined toward inhumanity. In the previous case, the protagonist is less a personification of cruelty than of futility in altering the pattern of death in combat circumstances. The pattern of death is altered in the latter episode, but only because a radio communication comes through at the last critical moment. Thus, when these episodes are considered together, it makes more sense why the lieutenant’s newfound humanity isn’t allowed to become a factor in the war’s progression of events. In terms of martial irony, then, the Twilight Zone’s function isn’t really to save lives as much as to correct moral imbalances on an individual, case-by-case basis. Within the series’ war narratives so far, then, this would seem the Zone’s metaphysical prerogative in otherwise authentic combat circumstances. In the Twilight Zone series, there are three particular World War II–oriented narratives productively to be treated together, since each episode focuses on the midcentury machinery involved in long-distance operations and so allowing for the war’s unprecedented global scale. Even the previous “world war” was closer to the previous century’s massive European battle-

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field campaigns, save for the addition of heavier artillery, tanks, and biplanes. The later war was less confined to terrestrial advances, since its air and seacraft had developed exponentially in the less than two decades since the previous conflict. Accordingly, these Serling teleplays have less to do with man-to-man entanglements in the context of the infantry and ground warfare than with the technological dimension of these new war machines, which provide fresh opportunities for martial irony to thrive. A “warcraft trilogy” of such episodes can be further subdivided into a pair of “submarine-oriented” teleplays. The first of these, “Judgment Night,” is also the first Twilight Zone episode to address World War II, airing in December of 1959 as only the tenth entry of the first season. Serling’s prologue, played over stock footage of a steamship at sea, describes the British Queen of Glasgow as “stalked by unseen periscopes of steel killers.” 13 A stranger on board (Nehemiah Persoff) joins a group of passengers for dinner and, apparently having some authority on submarine war tactics, reassures them in his German accent that the “wolf packs” are more inclined to attack an entire convoy than a stray ship such as theirs. After the captain (Ben Wright) suggests Lanser sounds more like a U-boat commander, a series of scenes ensues in which he attempts to recollect his identity while, at the same time, having a premonition of an imminent submarine attack. An atypically graphic portrayal of the ship’s destruction follows, with the familiar passengers suffering violent deaths aboard the vessel, while Lanser ironically recognizes his own person launching the attack from the deck of the now surfaced Uboat, just before he falls from the burning ship himself and drowns. Later, aboard the submarine, a German crewman (James Franciscus) complains to the commander of a guilty conscience, suggesting they may be “damned” for killing men and women without warning, and that their “special hell” would be to suffer and die as they did aboard the sinking ship night after night for eternity. 14 As the commander reappears aboard the Queen of Glasgow, where he had begun, Serling’s epilogue underscores a notion of “comeuppance” and that “this is judgment night in the Twilight Zone.” 15 Essentially, then, “Judgment Night” employs the same scenario as “A Quality of Mercy,” wherein a protagonist is allowed to sample an opposite perspective in order to come to terms with his own malevolence. Of course, the perspectives differ slightly. In the previous example, the lieutenant’s sympathies are reoriented when he must lead an attack against American soldiers, whereas in this episode, a German U-boat commander must actually experience the violent deaths of his victims, just after enjoying their kindnesses. In both cases, the ironic shift of identity is closer to a predictable cycle than an abrupt twist, according to the maintenance of the series’ moral equilibrium. And the previous example, it would seem, eschews this latter’s implied cultural compunction to situate any metaphysical form of “justice” within a religious context. But, in a larger thematic context, the submarine

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itself, as a characteristic technology of modern warfare, is an “obscenity” in The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. As it turns out, then, the British ship containing civilian passengers is the real protagonist in the narrative, pitted against a “merciless” antagonist, designed, it would seem, solely for taking innocent lives. The implied social critique here would associate U-boat technology with inhumanity, as if both stemmed from the same mind—a mind such as the German commander’s. Such an irrational implication is best understood as a manifestation of Serling’s own personal bias, or, rather, bitterness toward World War II’s American (and Jewish) enemy. Needless to say, Americans also employed submarine technology during the war, as another Twilight Zone episode would explore. The second submarine-oriented narrative is “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” airing in January of 1963 among the fourth season’s hour-long episodes. Demonstrating this season’s tendency for chattiness, the teleplay depicts a present-day United States Navy destroyer on a routine mission with the stern Captain Beecham (Simon Oakland) and his crewmen in the South Pacific. Early on, the ship pauses to investigate an unknown entity underwater. A sunken submarine is discovered emitting a mysterious metallic clanking noise. At the same time, the boatswain’s mate Chief Bell (Mike Kellin) struggles with visions of dead sailors beckoning him to join them. This scenario persists across the episode’s duration with only gradual development, or, as Marc Scott Zicree puts it, “with all the urgency of sap dripping from a tree.” 16 One pivotal moment comes, however, when Bell recoils from the ghostly sailors in the corridor, and then the ship’s doctor (David Sheiner), seeing no one, notices a pile of fresh seaweed just outside the door. This latter discovery serves to affirm metaphysical forces at work in what would otherwise have been deemed a mere hallucination. Nevertheless, the incident goes unreported, and the crew resumes its investigation of the sunken sub. After it is learned that the submarine is, indeed, American and was sunk during World War II, Bell confesses his history with the vessel, and that he had failed to place an infrared filter over the signaling light, which, in turn, fatally revealed the sub’s presence to Japanese destroyers. Having lived with his guilt as the sole survivor for twenty years, Bell finally exclaims, “They’re calling muster on me!” and leaps overboard. 17 Later, the diver returns from the interior search of the sub and reports both a swinging section of the periscope and one of the crewmen’s corpses with a hammer in his hand. This ironic ambiguity echoes the earlier scene in which apparitions appear for Bell and leave seaweed in their wake for the doctor. The captain dismisses any suggestions here, however, and, instead, points out: “That’s the worse thing there is about war—not just what it does to the bodies; what it does to the minds.” 18 Although both Zicree’s and Don Presnell and Marty McGee’s guides rightfully scorn this teleplay for extending awkwardly beyond the former

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half-hour format, it nonetheless takes on greater significance in the series’ aggregate system of ironic communication. Here, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, more so with the seaweed than the hammer-wielding cadaver, affirms the objective presence of the submarine’s dead crewmen beyond the subjective dimension of one man’s delusion. In other words, these apparitions must be treated less as a manifestation of “guilt” than of “justice,” as perceived correctly by Bell in the first place. And so the presence of martial irony in this case would imply his survival was an “immoral” fluke and that he was indeed responsible for his crewmen’s deaths. If not for the otherwise implausibly present seaweed in the ship’s corridor, this episode’s ambiguous twist ending wouldn’t quite guarantee the presence of the series’ moral universe. But stemming from this earlier scene, the conclusion now allows for a metaphysical association between the submarine and the dead crewmen, as if its noisemaking and their “calling muster” were equivalent. As in the previous example, then, Serling confers a psychological dimension to the warship itself, facilitating the deaths of those both within and without. Whereas the German commander bears the guilt of his U-boat’s ability to destroy so many lives aboard an enemy vessel, the American boatswain’s mate must assume responsibility for allowing all those within his own submarine to perish along with it. In this way, martial irony accommodates a vestige of technological irony by mobilizing a specific critique of the augmented scale of death and destruction enabled by these war machines. A less developed version of “The Thirty-Fathom Grave” is the third in this Twilight Zone trilogy of World War II–oriented narratives concerning warcraft. “King Nine Will Not Return,” aired in September of 1960 as the premiere episode of the second season, pursues a similar scenario of a protagonist (Robert Cummings) returned to his B-25 bomber in the African desert, where the ghosts of his crewmen haunt him. After an extended dramatization of his nightmarish encounter with an empty plane, it turns out he is in a present-day hospital bed, apparently traumatized by guilt for being too ill to join his crew on their final mission. The episode’s surprise twist comes, however, when a nurse bringing his clothes causes sand to spill out of his shoes. Like the previous example’s seaweed in the corridor, the sand establishes the same metaphysical forces at work. In this case, however, this soldier bears no responsibility for his crewmen’s deaths, and yet is nonetheless haunted by his former camaraderie with them. So while this episode anticipates Serling’s submarine narrative, the latter is more thematically complex, since the seaman’s guilt derives from specific circumstances of war. In other words, this teleplay, in its relative simplicity, feels like a preparation or sketch for “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” and, as such, its critique would seem comparatively impotent. Nevertheless, this episode compels the Twilight Zone to return this air force captain to his “rightful” place, as if he still somehow deserved his guilt for not perishing along with his men. Such

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an implication might seem unreasonable within parameters of an isolated narrative, but within the larger context of the series, the reason for making an example of this character, especially in all his theatrical anguish, becomes much clearer. Through his grueling experience in the Philippine islands, Serling discovered firsthand that camaraderie is the only available means to assuage the daily agonies of survival in severe combat conditions. Especially for those in commanding roles, a form of psychological conditioning ensues, culminating with an irrational degree of obligation to one’s fellow servicemen. But this particular psychosis does not only apply to one’s fellow human beings. This and the two Twilight Zone episodes concerning submarines include dedication to one’s warcraft among the psychological effects of war. Where such a dedication reinforces courage in the face of violent confrontation, it may also prove to “haunt” a survivor’s psyche in the aftermath of battle, just as the submarines and airplane haunt the protagonists of these narratives. And so if The Twilight Zone’s moral universe would appear relatively sadistic in this particular episode, it should be understood that the Zone’s equilibrium depends on maintaining martial irony or, rather, its notion of futility. In this trilogy of World War II episodes, at least, the “futility” lies in surviving a war, if not physically then psychologically. While King Nine’s captain may not be required to join his crewmen in death, he mustn’t be allowed to overcome the traumas of his wartime experience either. In this way, a metaphysical, moral harmony is, again, restored. Serling penned one more World War II–inspired teleplay for The Twilight Zone, also in the context of a protagonist’s retrospective. “Deaths-Head Revisited,” airing in November of 1961 during the third season, portrays a former Nazi captain of the SS (Oscar Beregi) in a present-day context, returning to Dachau and the concentration camp where he once presided over scores of suffering inmates. Serling’s atypically long prologue concludes, “By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Twilight Zone,” and so already positions the camp as a locus of “transgressors” within the series’ moral universe. 19 In one of the few episodes Zicree actually praises, there are notable cinematic embellishments to be found in reinforcing Captain Lutze’s subjective experience of the camp. When he arrives, for example, hanged victims dissolve in and then out of their nooses. And, subsequently, prisoners appear in their wooden bunks, opposite an image of Lutze commanding them in his uniform, juxtaposed with a close-up shot of the protagonist’s bemused expression. Soon, an inmate (Joseph Schildkraut) appears in the flesh, wearing prison rags, and, as if to affirm metaphysical forces, the front gate swings shut, the bolt sliding behind it. Recognizing “Alfred Becker,” Lutze mistakes him for a surviving “caretaker” for the former prison grounds and even attempts to embrace him nostalgically as a face from his past. Becker is quick to reorient him, exclaiming,

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“You never were a soldier. The uniform you wore cannot be stripped off—it is a part of you—part of your flesh, part of your body. It was a piece of your mind.” 20 This explicitly thematic dialogue also informs the previous trilogy of World War II episodes, in terms of Serling’s psychological association between soldiers and their warcraft. Becker’s disapprobation continues, and Lutze eventually finds himself standing trial inside one of the ramshackle buildings for “crimes against humanity,” surrounded by the ghosts of his victims. 21 Becker, also a former victim, pronounces Lutze guilty and sentences him to be “rendered insane.” 22 And so, after suffering through a series of concentration camp agonies in his mind, the protagonist is discovered by townspeople and taken away in an ambulance. Beyond the ironic premise of a man physically confronting his past, there is less of a surprise twist in the narrative. Nevertheless, the arriving doctor’s concern regarding how a man could go insane inside of two hours suffices to corroborate the metaphysical forces compelling Lutze to stand trial, as it were, for his crimes. Indeed, the intended social comment is atypically literalized in this episode, mostly through Becker’s poetic articulations, since this was, for “television’s last angry man,” a particularly sensitive bone to pick. Accordingly, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe also finds its most literalized permutation—as a courtroom. Here, there is no plausible explanation of a guilt-induced trauma as in other episodes, since the smug Lutze is quite literally driven to madness through auspices of the Twilight Zone. And if the doctor’s pointing to the ironic circumstances of Lutze’s condition doesn’t quite constitute a surprise twist, it nonetheless affirms the Zone’s reestablishment of moral harmony. IRONY IN OLDER WARS In addition to Serling’s teleplays about World War II, there are a few Twilight Zone narratives proceeding deeper into America’s military record. These episodes are less oriented around modern war technologies such as submarines and B-25 bombers, though they still allow for any variety of metaphysical forces to invoke martial irony. One teleplay not having to do with World War II, though still focusing on military aircraft, is “The Last Flight,” airing in February of 1960 and written by Richard Matheson. The narrative involves a British World War I pilot landing at a present-day American air base in France. Serling would himself apply this basic premise of an aircraft’s unintentional leap through time to the second season’s “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” about a commercial airliner traveling as far back as the age of the dinosaurs. However, the latter case expends its duration exploring this premise for its own sake, by “surveying” romanticized and/or exoticized pasts, rather than generating any deeper character studies there-

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from. Matheson’s teleplay, on the other hand, proceeds from this protagonist’s accidental arrival into the future in order to render a more complex manifestation of The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. Upon landing his “antique” biplane, Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker (Kenneth Haigh) looks around the airstrip and observes, “We had no idea you were so advanced!” 23 Although serving to corroborate his historical identity, this exclamation would also imply a critique of American technological advancement, especially in a Cold War context. Such a critique is to be found, moreover, in an antiwar context, such as in Serling’s material. Instead, the bulk of this teleplay focuses on Decker’s temporary detention in the American base’s interior offices, where he wrangles with General Harper (Alexander Scourby) and Major Wilson (Simon Scott). He eventually explains to the latter the particular circumstances of his aircraft’s passage into the future. By taking his plane straight up into the cloud seemingly responsible for transporting him, Decker had, in fact, compelled another British fighter plane to face an enemy squadron alone. When Wilson explains that his friend Mackaye has become a hero in the subsequent world war, Decker realizes he has a predestined role in saving the other pilot’s life, and so barely escapes in his airplane to reenter the time portal. Arriving afterward, Mackaye (Robert Warwick) confirms his friend’s reemergence from the cloud and how Decker accomplished his daring, though fatal, rescue. The irony here is less a surprise turn of events than a transformation in the protagonist from cowardice to courageous self-sacrifice, akin to the example set by Captain Riker in “The Purple Testament.” It is the Twilight Zone, of course, that provides this “second chance” by allowing this “transgressor” to repair his ethical flaw. But in doing so, the pilot must also pay with his life, as if the series’ moral universe demanded he display not only courage, but also a willingness to forfeit his life so his friend would be able to save so many lives in turn. This is not the same notion of futility deriving from the outcome of “The Purple Testament” when Lieutenant Fitzgerald resigns himself to his imminent doom. Unlike Decker, this latter protagonist isn’t poised to save anyone. He simply knows he will die on a jeep ride from his camp to the division headquarters. In this way, Matheson’s teleplay is less a critique of war, per se, than a parable of self-sacrifice within the context of war. Of course, real combat situations rarely provide any such guarantees when a soldier attempts to barter his life for another’s. So this episode behaves as a fantasy of heroism, more suitable for recruits than returning veterans. In a case where authorship would seem a reflection of firsthand experience versus a lack thereof, then, Matheson’s vision of the war narrative diverges from Serling’s critical agenda, and so becomes somewhat anomalous within this genre of Twilight Zone episodes, if not in the series as a whole. Nevertheless, the episode is consistent in maintaining The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, whose function is to isolate and correct human fail-

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ings, no matter how fundamentally responsible the larger circumstances may be for exposing such failings. And because the antiwar critique is absent here, the World War I biplane is less an outward manifestation of an immoral psychology. Rather, it serves merely as the mechanical determinant of the choice between cowardice and courage, and so anticipates the “technically advanced” such determinants in World War II and beyond. If Serling was ever conscious of Matheson’s thematic divergences here, he could certainly have taken consolation from the predominance of his own vision—and its tendency toward martial irony. Although Serling’s war entries never treat on World War I, he would find opportunities to mobilize his critique of military conflict in America’s more distant, though still culturally relevant, Civil War. As Presnell and McGee point out, Serling would appear to have become particularly interested in this historical context during the series’ third season, with his two almost consecutive teleplays “The Passersby” and “Still Valley,” intended perhaps as a “centennial” tribute. And he had already covered Lincoln’s assassination in the previous season’s time-travel study “Back There.” The first of the pair, airing in October of 1961, concerns a road with passing war-weary soldiers in the aftermath of battle. Among the entourage, a Confederate sergeant (James Gregory) with a wooden crutch pauses at a woman’s smashed antebellum manor for refreshment. The two lament the death and the destruction the war has amounted to, and, soon, the woman (Joanne Linville) recognizes a soldier (Rex Holman) who was allegedly shot in the head at Gettysburg. Behaving more like a zombie, he presses on, but not before she notices blood on his cap. Here, the narrative decidedly implies these “passersby” are already dead. This suggestion is confirmed progressively with the passing of further personages, including a Union cavalryman (David Garcia) immune to the woman’s shotgun blast and already blinded by shrapnel, and subsequently the woman’s fallen husband (Warren Kemmerling). The latter informs her she also perished of fever; but only after being consoled by the passing Lincoln (Austin Green), who declares himself “the last casualty of the Civil War,” does she catch up with her husband en route to the road’s end. 24 There is less of a surprise twist here, since the episode steadily builds its ironic premise of deceased itinerants from early on. Also missing is anything particular to Serling’s combat circumstances, beyond a greater affirmation of war’s mass casualties. All that remains for The Twilight Zone’s moral universe to “correct” in this case is a bit of fear and resistance toward one’s mortality, affirmed in Lincoln’s citation of Shakespeare. And so these two characters stray only momentarily from a route Serling’s succinct epilogue confirms as proceeding “in and out of the Twilight Zone.” 25 The second of this pair of episodes, “Still Valley,” airing in November of 1961 and faithfully based on a story by Manly Wade Wellman, also focuses on Confederate soldiers, this time still within the final stages of the bloody

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conflict. The first act personifies two fundamentally opposite dispositions of soldiers, that of “duty,” in Joseph Paradine (Gary Merril), and “survival,” in his subordinate Dauger (Ben Cooper). Leaving his “yellow” counterpart behind, the former rides into a nearby Virginia town to survey arriving Union troops, only to discover them frozen in suspended animation along the main street. 26 Paradine eventually discovers an old man (Vaughn Taylor) who, in turn, demonstrates the power of the book of witchcraft he wielded against these enemy soldiers. Returning with the book to encourage its use to his superior (Mark Tapscott), Paradine finally resists “the Devil” only at the brink of having to renounce God, and so casts the volume into the fire. Less ironically and somewhat understandably, then, he concedes it is better to be defeated in battle than to triumph through dishonorable means. And, for these men, Serling’s epilogue confirms, this “battle” shall be “Gettysburg.” 27 Compared with the previous example, this episode engages a more complex, albeit improbable, moral dilemma—whether or not to use unnatural means to turn the tide of a major conflict. In the narrative’s historical context, such metaphysical forces are inevitably ascribed to “the Devil.” However, in the context of Serling’s adaptation for television, these forces are, rather, an extension of The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, testing a soldier’s ethical vulnerability on the losing side of the conflict. And, ultimately, in a Cold War context, this episode’s particular moral dilemma becomes less improbable, since it would most immediately point toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the similarly instantaneous “magic” applied to annihilate them. By way of the Twilight Zone, then, Serling is able to hint at the most immoral aspects of modern warfare, even in the context of a nineteenth-century ground war. Although both episodes convey a pervading notion of futility, the latter example becomes more immediately relevant in its invocation of martial irony. The Twilight Zone includes a third Civil War episode, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which I cover earlier with respect to the adaptation of the same Ambrose Bierce tale for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Suffice it to say here that the Confederate spy’s abruptly ironic “return” from his imagined escape to his place in the hangman’s noose conforms at least to the notion of futility within Serling’s earlier war-oriented teleplays, whose moral universe had already rendered so many similar “returns.” One more such Serling entry would treat a nineteenth-century conflict, dating not quite as far back as the Civil War. “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms,” airing in December of 1963 also during the series’ final season, incorporates events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand. In the opening scene, when two 7th Cavalry soldiers searching a teepee respond to an unseen Sioux’s arrow in their scout’s back, a three-man tank crew of National Guardsmen on maneuver hears their shots from a nearby distance. Such an ironic premise would seem an attempted reverse of Matheson’s in “The Last Flight,” since, instead of its

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historical fighter pilot finding a modern air base, these present-day American soldiers find themselves in a historical war context. Of course, in this case, the protagonists are less immediately compelled to accept their temporal displacement, even as they investigate the wigwam and discover a “7th Cavalry” canteen outside it, while one of them, Sergeant Connors (Ron Foster), recites the specific details of Custer’s advance in the relatively unchanged vicinity. Later, when Connors resists his captain’s orders to continue along what he confirms is “Custer’s route,” the latter reassures him any “Indians” they encounter will be “college graduates testing the soil.” 28 Instead of Native Americans’ forced assimilation, Connors and Private McCluskey (Randy Boone) continue to witness the recorded events of the imminent battle, despite protestations from Corporal Langsford (Warren Oates). When the sergeant declares they will either “stop” the massacre or “join it,” the episode sets up a common quandary of time-travel narratives, that is, the potential for traveling into the past to change history. 29 After they ignore their captain’s orders to return with the tank, the three soldiers continue on foot, “chasing history” straight over a ridge and into the fray. 30 As an ironic twist, the appearance of their names on Custer’s battle monument finally affirms an inability to change history, akin to the protagonist’s failed attempt to thwart Lincoln’s assassination in Serling’s second-season teleplay “Back There.” In the greater context of Serling’s war narratives, this example maintains the thematic notion of futility. And as in the previous cases, these soldiers display a characteristic resignation to sacrifice themselves, even when any degree of cowardice wouldn’t apply, since their responsibility is to the present rather than the past. Indeed, even Langsford eventually succumbs to his companions’ obsession, moreover by partaking in an official history (as regular infantry) rather than altering it (with the help of their tank), as if The Twilight Zone’s moral universe had already claimed them for its greater purposes. In other words, these present-day National Guardsmen’s absorption into Custer’s Last Stand suggests a “continuity” of resistance toward what the Sioux and other Native Americans would endure in turn, especially in the aftermath of their own massacre. In this way, Serling’s version of martial time travel contributes to the cultural shift toward sympathetic narrativizations of American frontier genocide, in such Hollywood productions as Broken Arrow (1950), Little Big Man (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990). Zicree, however, points to the unfortunate implications of this episode’s captain lamenting that his perished subordinates weren’t “able” to bring along their tank into battle. 31 Though it is easily enough assumed the tank would be unarmed in a training context, the narrative remains vague as to precisely why they do leave it behind. In any case, according to the series’ tendency toward satire, not to mention Serling’s persistent critique of commanding officers, I interpret the captain (Robert Bray) ironically—as a cari-

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cature of intolerance or, better still, as a personification of this particular form of American cultural legacy. And, indeed, this would seem to be underscored by his immediate subordinate, Lieutenant Woodard (Greg Morris), being African American. MARTIAL IRONY IN CIVILIAN CONTEXTS Serling also contributed a few Twilight Zone episodes that make reference to past and present wars, but within other narrative contexts. In these cases, martial irony emerges nonetheless, though moreover as a component in the moral reconditioning of a civilian protagonist. Such an episode, also about retrograde time travel, is “No Time Like the Past,” airing in March of 1963 during the fourth season. Although its protagonist travels back to the brink of World War II at one point, this hour-format teleplay focuses less on circumstances of war than on time travel’s potential to change the past in general— and moreover toward correcting the “ills” of modernity. Serling’s agenda for Cold War critique finds its most literalized manifestation in the protagonist’s early monologue, in which he “classifies” the twentieth century as follows: We live in a cesspool, a septic tank, a gigantic sewage complex in which runs the dregs, the filth, the misery laden slop of the race of men: his hatreds, his prejudices, his passions, and his violence. And the keeper of this sewer? Man. He is a scientifically advanced monkey who walks upright and with eyes wide open into an abyss of his own making. His bombs, his fallout, his poisons, his radioactivity—everything he designs as an art for dying is his excuse for living. No, Harvey, we live in an exquisite bedlam, an insanity maybe all the more grotesque by the fact that we don’t recognize it as insanity. 32

And when his colleague (Robert F. Simon) defends the need for nuclear defenses against other such “monkeys,” Paul Driscoll (Dana Andrews) replies: So the freedom-loving monkeys make bombs while the aggressors make bombs, and ultimately somebody pushes a button and just as ultimately this Earth disappears. If all of this, I suppose, is right and practical and expedient, a few germs will rise up out of the rubble and wave microscopic flags of victory and shed a few microscopic tears for the race of men. Harvey, are you content with this kind of status quo? Are you satisfied with this kind of twentieth century? 33

With the Cold War as his incentive, then, Driscoll commits himself to the attendant risks of a futuristic space/time transporter, carrying him, first, to Hiroshima in 1945, just prior to its obliteration. After a Japanese official rebuffs his attempt to initiate evacuations, though not without the “compas-

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sion” to let him live, the protagonist travels further back in history to a Nazi political rally in Berlin. His intention to assassinate Hitler from a hotel room window is similarly foiled, however, when a suspicious maid summons authorities before he can get off a shot. Zicree condemns both these scenes, the former for having the atomic bomb land just after Driscoll is removed, and the latter for his firing merely a “test” shot at his target. 34 Indeed, the Hiroshima sequence needs to suggest a minute passage of time, rather than depicting the explosion just after the protagonist leaves the policeman’s office. On the other hand, Zicree misinterprets the Hitler sequence, since it is clear enough from Driscoll’s facial reaction he hadn’t realized his rifle was empty. And since he really isn’t an experienced “assassin,” as Zicree describes him, such an error is plausible enough. 35 His third attempt, for which he ventures as far back as the onset of World War I, similarly fails to persuade the Lusitania’s captain (Tudor Owen) to change course so as to evade its imminent torpedo attack, akin to circumstances with the Queen of Glasgow in “Judgment Night.” At the same time, this protagonist has no hand in these wars, so rather than carrying out a perpetual “sentence,” The Twilight Zone’s moral universe merely resists his efforts to undo the atrocities of others or, more specifically, to diminish the terrible consequences of immoral choices to which warring factions have already committed themselves. So as in the previous example where any attempt by the National Guardsmen to affect the Battle of the Little Bighorn fails by implication, Driscoll is compelled to return from his experiment with the same findings. But where “Back There” culminates in its time traveler’s failure to prevent a similar wartime atrocity, the extended narrative of “No Time Like the Past” proceeds from this invocation of martial irony toward a more complex depiction of time travel in its second half. And so Driscoll’s resolve is to relocate himself even further back, to the simpler place and time of “Homeville,” Indiana, in 1881. Of course, the protagonist’s mention of “band concerts and summer nights on front porches” also takes the viewer back in the series’ own history, to the first-season entries “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby,” both swapping modern society for the idealized Binghamton of Serling’s youth. 36 His colleague’s new concern is that Driscoll may inadvertently change events for the worse simply through his presence in the past—the opposite of the latter’s original intention to improve society in the present. Upon his arrival, he finds himself tempted to interfere once again, after noticing a newspaper announcement of President Garfield’s public appearance on the approaching day of his historical assassination. Instead, he makes an attempt to assimilate by taking up residence in a boarding house. And then he encounters the characteristic sensibility of the times, when another tenant, Mr. Hanford (Robert Cornthwaithe), preaches an imperialist cause for the nation, even saying of the Indian Wars, “Why, we should have had twenty George Custers and a hundred thousand men, and we should just

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have swept across the plains destroying every redskin who faced us, and then we should have planted the American flag deep, high, and proud.” 37 The protagonist’s provoked response would seem to be Serling’s own poetic testament to combat experience in the Philippines: And I take offense at armchair warriors who don’t know what a shrapnel wound feels like, or what death smells like after three days in the sun, or the look in a man’s eyes when he realizes he’s minus a leg and his blood is seeping out. Mr. Hanford you have a great enthusiasm for planting the flag deep, but you don’t have a nodding acquaintance with what it’s like to bury men in the same soil. 38

After he forecasts the international wars to come, spanning the SpanishAmerican War (“San Juan”) to the Korean War (“Inchon”), the schoolteacher (Patricia Breslin) later corroborates Driscoll’s “pacifist” position, saying, “Patriotism doesn’t have to come with pain.” 39 At least in terms of war, these scenes constitute the closest to soapboxing Serling’s writing would ever come. Eventually, Driscoll confirms in his improbably detailed book of the town’s history the specific circumstances of an imminent schoolhouse fire. Unable to suppress his compulsion to prevent suffering of any kind, he inadvertently starts the sort of “chain reaction” his colleague warned him of, in which a runaway wagon’s kerosene lantern implausibly careens toward the school’s front door. 40 Although verisimilitude laughingly fails here, it can be forgiven, even applauded as an appropriately cinematic indication of the series’ moral universe at work. As a result, Driscoll concludes, “The past is inviolate,” and that, accordingly, he must return to his own era in order to impact “the tomorrows” instead. 41 Serling’s epilogue attempts to underscore Driscoll’s lesson by quoting the first stanza of fin-de-siècle American poet Mary A. Lathbury’s “Life in the Loom,” a poem more to do with assuaging hard labor through religious faith. 42 In any case, the stanza completes the pattern of this teleplay’s atypically poeticized dialogue, serving moreover to showcase its author’s righteousness. Unfortunately, Driscoll’s pronouncements also literalize the ironic implications of his experiments in time travel, and so make the social critique less contemplative for the viewer. What remains to be discovered, however, is this episode’s function in the series’ aggregate system of ironic communication. Within the body of war narratives, the moral “restoration” of this protagonist to his proper epoch is simply an extension of war’s futility—and the notion that, especially on international scales, mass suffering is inevitable. And so, despite his characteristic fourth-season chattiness, this civilian protagonist invokes martial irony through his ironic experience with the past and its irreversible history. Two additional Twilight Zone episodes make reference to major wars through civilian narratives. The first of these Serling teleplays, “The Chang-

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ing of the Guard,” airing in June of 1962 as the third season’s final entry, portrays the elderly Professor Fowler (Donald Pleasance) at a school for boys, whose trustees request his retirement in order to make room for a younger replacement. Dejected, the professor recounts the many young faces who passed through his classroom over the years, including one killed at Iwo Jima. Concluding he has “left no imprint on anybody,” Fowler returns to campus after dark with his pistol but is prevented from firing it at his head by the sound of a school bell. 43 Later, inside his classroom, the ghosts of former students appear in their seats, and, among them, the remembered Iwo Jima victim (Tom Lowell) comes forward to present his posthumously awarded congressional Medal of Honor. Each of these students, in turn, affirms virtues imparted by the professor during their time with him, before eventually losing their lives. More than one boy mentions having learned about “courage,” with one (Russell Horton), in particular, having perished while rescuing several men from the boiler room aboard the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. After they sufficiently leave their ironic “mark” on him, Fowler professes a willingness to retire and affirms he has also “won some victory for humanity.” 44 Less a surprise twist, then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe encroaches only briefly on the narrative to furnish its protagonist with an attitude adjustment. And although these ghostly “representatives” of the Twilight Zone cite major combat settings in both world wars, none of Serling’s usual antiwar sentiment appears in their testaments to bravery and self-sacrifice. Any hint of irony within the episode’s metaphysical time frame, however, would establish a more bittersweet subtext to these young men’s martyrdom. Such a hint emerges cinematically from the students’ collective movement of their heads while seated at their desks. When the boys first dissolve into their empty chairs, their heads are facing downward with stern expressions, and each boy has his hands folded on the table. They all look up in unison, turn their gaze toward the professor, and grin at him. This seems merely to corroborate their common origin, the Zone itself. Eventually, after the Iwo Jima boy announces, “We have to go back now, Professor,” they return to their seats with their purpose accomplished, again in unison. 45 This time, however, the earlier school bell resounds outside, while the boys’ smiles diminish into stone-cold miens, their faces turn downward, and they clasp their hands once again, as if in mourning. More specifically, this latter sequence refers back to the Arizona ensign’s recitation of John Donne’s reference to funeral bells in his meditations on “for whom the bell tolls,” not to mention Ernest Hemingway’s embrace of its thematic implications in his Spanish Civil War novel’s indictment of modern warfare. 46 In the larger context of this narrative’s outside references, then, even the dead boy’s appreciative grin, just after reciting “It tolls for thee,” becomes tragically ironic. 47 And so while this episode’s moral equilibrium is restored in the name of

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a courage bestowed through the English canon of poetry, this selfsame poetry also accommodates sufficient martial irony to preserve the pervading notion of doom in the series’ other war entries. The second of the two civilian-oriented narratives, “In Praise of Pip,” launching The Twilight Zone’s fifth season in September of 1963, almost has the sole distinction in the series of making reference to the Vietnam War, though a later episode, “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” includes it in a list of regions currently “darkened” by hate. 48 In the former’s opening scene, after the location “Vietnam” is announced on the screen, orderlies convey the mortally wounded American soldier Private Pip Phillips (Robert Diamond) into a medical tent on a gurney. The scene cuts abruptly to the narrative’s true protagonist, Max Phillips (Jack Klugman), awaking from a nightmare about his son in the war. Later, by way of a call from his landlady, Phillips confirms his son is, indeed, dying “in a place called South Vietnam.” 49 Bitterly frustrated, he declares, “There isn’t even supposed to be a war there.” 50 Echoed by the latter two Twilight Zone guides, Zicree’s Companion affirms that this episode “marks the first mention of an American casualty in Vietnam in any dramatic TV show,” although Zicree also points out Serling originally placed the conflict in Laos, that is, until corrected by de Forest Research’s review of his script. 51 Regardless, the protagonist’s resulting disapproval of American involvement in what was then deemed a civil war anticipates the American counterculture’s mass protestation of the Vietnam conflict by several years, and this episode first aired almost a year prior to the passing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August of 1964, which allowed President Johnson to launch a full-scale war without officially declaring one. This Twilight Zone entry also predates John Wayne’s Vietnam War film The Green Berets (1968) by a few years, even seemingly beating out the most ostensible permutation of pro-war propaganda in popular culture. Nevertheless, the episode’s narrative, as Zicree observes, concerns itself less with the particulars of the conflict overseas. Instead, it focuses on a drunken bookie regretting his moral depravity and the neglect of his son. In an attempt to remedy his past, Phillips returns forfeited money to a young bettor (Russell Horton), though he takes a bullet from his boss’s goon (Kreg Martin) in the process. Wounded outside a closed amusement park, he appeals to God for the opportunity to make amends with his son. The Twilight Zone answers his prayer, instead, by returning his boy to him as an enthusiastic ten-year-old (Billy Mumy). The two of them enjoy a brief period in the park together, but despite his father’s promises to better himself, the boy vanishes again, as if obligated to his war wounds. In his last “con job,” Phillips appeals to God once more—to take his life in exchange for Pip’s. As an ironic twist, the Zone grants his wish, and, after Phillips collapses, his son reappears as a returning veteran, fondly nostalgic for his father. In this sentimental tale, then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe allows the “innocent”

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soldier to survive, so the “real” culprit may answer for his transgressions. In this case, at least, alcoholism, crime, and child neglect would seem to take precedence over any notions of war’s futility. Still, the episode maintains a vestige of Serling’s antiwar critique in young veteran Pip’s newly acquired limp and cane. The Twilight Zone, during its prime-time run, at least, would present one more civilian-oriented war narrative for American television audiences. While breaking the pattern of Serling’s contributions, this entry nonetheless invokes important aspects of martial irony. Another fifth-season episode, Martin M. Goldsmith’s controversial teleplay “The Encounter,” airing in May of 1964 and never syndicated thereafter, embroils a World War II veteran and a young Japanese American man, mysteriously locked inside a present-day suburban attic. Unlike most other entries in the series, this example behaves more as a one-act play, with all the action or, rather, dialogue occurring between two characters in the same interior space, sans any dramatic breaks. The space of the cluttered attic itself in this instance becomes metaphysical in its ability to extract not only the two characters’ suppressed emotions, but also suppressed facts from their previous wartime circumstances. As a result, they are progressively positioned as opponents in mortal combat, even as postwar American civilians. Unfortunately, for authenticity’s sake, this particular form of dramatic escalation would seem to have necessitated a number of racial slurs in the dialogue. What is poised as a harmless exchange between a middle-aged homeowner, Fenton (Neville Brand), and his would-be young gardener, Arthur (George Takei), abruptly recontextualizes itself as a “duel” between an embittered, war-weary marine and merely the offspring of a Japanese American civilian, who, the latter admits, signaled Japanese bombers during Pearl Harbor. According to the teleplay’s “Jekyll and Hyde” pattern, in one moment, the homeowner insists on the young man’s remaining “for a beer,” and then, in the next, launches into hurling spiteful epithets (“dirty little Jap” etc.), only to resume his former shows of hospitality. 52 Similarly, the gardener’s initial meekness changes to defiance toward the former’s condescending quips, but he just as abruptly reverts to an apologetic passivity. Although these actors perform their roles laudably, this particular narrativization of the Twilight Zone feels relatively vague, as if its metaphysical forces waxed and waned, rather than asserting themselves decidedly, as in other episodes. What is clear enough, however, is that the majority of the Zone’s energies are concentrated into a single samurai sword, one of Fenton’s many war relics from World War II’s Pacific theater. Especially in Arthur’s hands, the weapon inspires what would seem a “Japanese” vendetta against the American soldier, and would even seem capable of “informing” him that Fenton murdered a Japanese soldier after he had surrendered. Really, this object becomes the lynchpin of an otherwise uneven succession of events. Presiding in the foreground

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of the very first scene, the sword appears beside a table in the center of the attic, just before Fenton in the background suddenly notices it, examines it, and fearfully discards it like a live grenade. Later, it possesses Arthur to wield it against him, though only momentarily, again, as if its ironic properties turned on and off like a switch. Amidst their interim confessions, Fenton reveals his former function as a “war machine,” and that his military training was, in fact, responsible for his residual bigotry. 53 And Arthur, amidst recalling the violence of the Japanese attack, admits his father was a “traitor.” 54 Aside from its racist dialogue, the teleplay’s suggestion of Japanese American complicity with the enemy is completely inaccurate, since, as Zicree affirms, no such activity was ever recorded during the war. In any case, after casually picking up the sword again, the young man finds himself initiating a second round, but only manages to drop the weapon during the scuffle. It nevertheless finds its target as Fenton falls upon it, confirming its engraved words he had previously translated: “The sword will avenge me.” 55 And in Arthur’s hands once more, the sword compels him to crash through a second-story window yelling, “Banzai!” 56 As improbable as such an engraving would be, its fulfillment moreover redefines the weapon as yet another aspect of The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, seeking to punish both these men. Finally, as the Zone’s forces find it fit to reopen the attic door, Serling’s epilogue defines the “common enemy” of these two unfortunates as “guilt.” 57 But, really, the ironic shifts between their peaceable and murderous dispositions, not so much in their actions but in their words, mobilize a larger critique—that of the psychological aftermath of war, in terms of both a soldier’s mental conditioning and a civilian child’s firsthand experience of a bombing raid. Of course, these would eventually be subsumed into what has since been categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder, though, in the greater context of the series’ war-oriented narratives, at least, they are subsumed within martial irony. IRONY IN FUTURE WARS So far in this chapter, I have considered The Twilight Zone’s larger critique of war in the cultural wake of World War II, especially in terms of Rod Serling’s personal experience as a paratrooper in the Philippines. Beyond its own gravity, the World War II provoked a wider cultural reflection on earlier conflicts, even as far back as the American Civil War. Invariably, these episodes’ ironic premises, circumstances, and/or twist endings point to a thematic notion of futility, what I have termed “martial irony,” comprising such moral dichotomies as courage and cowardice, survival and self-sacrifice, obedience and humanity, and so on. In any such wartime crucible, that is, even a protagonist’s noble resolution cannot reverse an overriding sense

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of inevitable suffering and death. This applies not only to these narratives’ soldiers, but also to civilian characters in any way connected to a major conflict, both in its breadth and in its physical and psychological aftermath. Among these teleplays, I could also include the series’ “future war” narratives, especially according to the Pacific theater’s atomic climax and its effects on popular culture during the Cold War. I previously explore, for example, the series’ premiere, “Where Is Everybody?” in terms of “technological irony,” referring to, among other things, pervasive fears of nuclear advancement and the implied repercussions of another grand-scale war. Characters in “Time Enough At Last” and “Two” negotiate post-apocalyptic wastelands, and, in the latter case, survivors even continue the conflict. Such entries would also include “One More Pallbearer” (January 1962), about a man compelled to hallucinate a nuclear holocaust after feigning its occurrence within a bomb shelter so as to repudiate those he sees as responsible for his past failures, as well as “The Old Man in the Cave” (November 1963), about a post-apocalyptic community unknowingly dependent on a computer for survival tips. Then there are cases implying the experience of post-nuclear devastation, wherein protagonists find themselves in abandoned cities, as in the aforementioned “Where Is Everybody?” and the fifth season’s “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (April 1964), with the latter’s inebriated couple waking up in an uninhabited neighborhood, only to find they are pets of extraterrestrial giants. An even more indirect, metaphorical reference to death by radiation is the third season’s “The Midnight Sun” (November 1961), in which civilization is threatened by a shift in Earth’s orbit. And “Third from the Sun” merely anticipates nuclear obliteration, in its depiction of families escaping just in the nick of time from their own planet’s “cold war” circumstances. Suffice it to say that each of these “future war” narratives embarks from a premise of martial irony—that any global conflict involving nuclear weapons, instead of determining any victor, would devastate all participating nations and, ultimately, civilization as a whole. Most of these examples go a step further in suggesting if there were any survivors, they, too, would eventually have to face the futility of survival in post-apocalyptic contexts. Accordingly, as manifestations of the Twilight Zone, these wastelands consign their moral transgressors to abject solitude, as a particularly effective form of “correction.” Exceptions could be “Third from the Sun” and “Two,” since these episodes’ protagonists are granted the opportunity to begin again, or so it would seem. In the former entry, the two government scientists anticipate the apocalyptic implications of their H-bomb development in time to engineer their escape. However, as I argue in an earlier chapter, this episode’s embellishments to Matheson’s tale foreshadow these characters’ “comeuppance,” since their flying saucer is implicitly destined for a hostile reception on Earth, that is, as long as we assume they will arrive amidst our Cold War era. Another implication could be that these aliens shall land peacefully, but

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will, in turn, facilitate nuclear destruction through their scientific influence on our own civilization. But I prefer not to corroborate any imagined complicity between Einstein and extraterrestrials, since the latter were so decidedly allegorical in the series’ space invader narratives, if not in 1950s science fiction in general. In the latter third-season entry (September 1961), written by Montgomery Pittman, the “two” post-apocalyptic survivors (Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson), eventually suppressing soldier instincts to kill each other, unite as a couple toward an uncertain future. Even with their newfound companionship as a reward, however, their inhospitable environment will certainly prove only slightly less punitive. Like The Twilight Zone’s other future war narratives, both these episodes function nonetheless as Cold War cautionary tales, even as their narrative particulars may differ. Unlike the wartime and post-wartime contexts of the previous war-oriented narratives, these entries’ imagined aftermaths are to be learned from in advance, as opposed to the example set by soldiers demonstrating interpersonal virtues of courage, mercy, and so on. According to the acclaimed 1970 biopic Patton’s portrayal of General Patton after the end of World War II, when strategic confrontation between armed forces is made obsolete, “war” is no longer a viable option. Nevertheless, the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union in the post–World War II era scarcely prevented their indirect confrontation via the continuum of so many Third World involvements. A similar persistence of martial irony across such a broad range of past, present, and future contexts in The Twilight Zone speaks amply to the futility of either eventuality of war, hypothetical or historical. In their varied invocations of martial irony, this particular group of apocalyptic episodes also demonstrates the series’ greater potential for thematic complexity. Less obligated to impose metaphysical forces on the palpable circumstances of battle, these latter entries are in a better position to engage a multivalent critique within their imaginary contexts. Here, the Twilight Zone is not an encroachment of any metaphysical dimension whatsoever, and is, instead, a physical universe unto itself. Moreover, these realistic, uninhabited settings become psychological “wastelands,” both reflecting and punishing protagonists’ moral turpitudes. In this way, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe takes on its most plausible manifestation within Cold War culture. Accordingly, certain of these future war narratives embark from the implicit martial irony of nuclear conflict, in order to perform additional critiques. A good example is Serling’s third-season teleplay “One More Pallbearer,” narrativizing the most realized symbol of cultural fear in the 1950s, the fallout shelter. Within this episode’s subterranean setting, a tycoon’s audiovisual equipment portrays the destruction of New York City, as if there were a bona fide nuclear holocaust happening above. Already, then, the narrative sets up a more sophisticated critique, where a perfected bomb shelter and its

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simulated apocalypse are accomplished only with corporate wealth and according to the protagonist’s sadistic agenda. Regardless, this particular episode remains more elusive than most in its own ultimate agenda. Both Zicree’s and Presnell and McGee’s guides, for example, claim that the narrative fails to move its audience because Radin’s intended three victims seem so unsympathetic to his past humiliations at their hands. Rather, I would say the cold disposition of these characters, juxtaposed with their alleged experiences of Radin (Joseph Wiseman), makes the episode, not “unintentionally,” but decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand, the schoolteacher (Katherine Squire) who flunked him does elaborate on the particulars of the protagonist’s academic dishonesty and notes that he didn’t deserve compassion. On the other hand, we never learn the circumstances of what caused Radin not to lead an attack during World War II, according to the colonel (Trevor Bardette) who court-martialed him, or how his actions caused a woman to commit suicide, according to the preacher (Gage Clark) who slandered him. And Radin offers no real explanation either. Thus, it isn’t precisely clear just what the protagonist “deserved” in terms of his moral history. Nevertheless, Radin’s attempt to extort apologies from these individuals fails, and, after they are allowed to escape, he ironically succumbs instead to his self-made illusion of nuclear devastation. Ultimately, then, it isn’t a question of Radin’s culpability or even if his intended victims were unnecessarily cruel to him in the past, as it would seem they were. In this case, the protagonist’s only immediate transgression was taking matters of justice into his own hands, rather than allowing The Twilight Zone’s moral universe to run its course. Consequently, the others’ return to society is less his decision than the result of the relatively subtle metaphysical forces responsible for so abruptly transforming his shelter’s simulation into his own psychological experience or, rather, illusion into delusion. Redemption of this episode’s ambivalence, then, lies in a potential to recognize the fallout shelter and its interior events as an ironic psychological allegory of the vindictive conscience. Of course, Serling had already addressed the cultural presence of bomb shelters in his earlier third-season teleplay “The Shelter” (September 1961), also embarking from the premise of nuclear holocaust in order to critique human failings. In the previous chapter, I mention this episode within my discussion of Serling’s first-season teleplay “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” since the later entry depicts a similar hysteria among suburban neighbors, this time over an impending “enemy missile” attack. Less to do with either space invaders or paranoia, however, this narrative would seem an even more direct response to political circumstances, namely Khrushchev’s threat of thermonuclear attack during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. More properly associated with symptomatic fears of nuclear bombardment, rather than communist infiltration, that is, this entry oughtn’t be misunderstood as

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simply another critique of McCarthyism. According to Rick Perlstein’s 2001 study Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, John F. Kennedy’s televised address on July 25 included a presidential mandate for the construction of bomb shelters, which, in turn, prompted Serling to “rush into production” a narrative wherein common citizens turn against each other for survival’s sake. 58 Martin Grams’ guide, on the other hand, states that this episode had already been filmed in May, and that Kennedy’s mandate came a week after it was finally telecast. Regardless, within this political crisis, the episode would certainly have come as a warning to suburban Americans of the mutual hostility they were capable of. Also, based on the narrative’s initial radio alert of sightings turning out to be “satellites,” the episode would seem to reproach all popular media voices, politically motivated or otherwise, for encouraging hysteria through irresponsible broadcasts. 59 Since such hysteria had already proven possible, as a result of Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, this example’s imagined circumstances are far less improbable than is typical for the series. Emerging from a similar false alarm, the shelter’s owner, Dr. Stockton (Larry Gates), observes, “We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder . . . I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.” 60 And so The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is merely implied in this exceptional case, through the ironic consequences of mass hysteria. In other words, its immediate Cold War circumstances made this prime-time permutation of the Twilight Zone a palpable eventuality, preventable only if, as Serling’s epilogue confirms, the human race remains “civilized.” 61 I make no mention of Richard Rorty’s utopia in this chapter, since, really, martial contexts are so antithetical to it. However, Serling’s and Rorty’s ideals, both in political and communal contexts, are pitted against dystopian systems of governance as well as against portrayals of social deviance in a number of Twilight Zone episodes, which I consider in the next chapter. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Sander, Serling, 43. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 109–110. “The Purple Testament,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “A Quality of Mercy,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “Judgment Night,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid.

132 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Chapter 5 Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 305. “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “Deaths-Head Revisited,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Last Flight,” The Twilight Zone. “The Passersby,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “Still Valley,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 370. “No Time Like the Past,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 333. Ibid. “No Time Like the Past,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Lathbury, “Life in the Loom.” “The Changing of the Guard,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “The Changing of the Guard,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” The Twilight Zone. “In Praise of Pip,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 364. “The Encounter,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 143–144. “The Shelter,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter Six

Sociopolitical Irony

Unlike in other chapters, it is appropriate enough in the previous chapter to probe The Twilight Zone’s social critique in terms of auteurism, since Rod Serling penned the vast majority of war-oriented narratives, which ostensibly narrativized his firsthand experience as a paratrooper in World War II’s Pacific theater. Even in other historical war contexts, Serling’s particularly immediate antiwar agenda emerges through a persistent notion of futility, whose inherent irony situates these entries comfortably within the series’ aggregate system of ironic communication. But Serling also had a personal bone to pick with politics, although he had no comparable stints serving officially in federal or state government. Inevitably, rather, his wartime traumas inspired a larger concern with the political systems responsible for declarations of war, and such a trained attention expands even further to the very social phenomena legitimizing these systems in the first place. Again, the vast majority of the twenty or so episodes I am inclined to collate accordingly are either his own or his adapted teleplays. But the ease of categorization with narratives involving armed forces and/or global-scale conflict is less available here. So, in preserving the integrity of these cultural subdivisions, I want to clarify the parameters of this chapter’s focus, especially since I recognize such a counterproductive potential for slippage. Embarking from the term “sociopolitical,” this chapter considers a specific tendency in the series’ critical agenda toward two fundamental categories: “politics” and “socialization.” The former term is particularly vulnerable in this context. For example, in my survey of previous Twilight Zone studies, I mention Leslie Dale Feldman’s 2010 book Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling. Its title alone anticipates some of the potentially misleading aspects to her approach. In other words, we don’t know if her study focuses specifically on space-oriented narratives or if “spaceships” 133

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is an umbrella term for a much broader pool. Next, we’re not sure if the association with “politics” refers to the Cold War or a more general context. Then, her subtitle’s mention of “theory” connotes a rather formal self-consciousness of its modifier “politics,” as if Serling set out to define a “political” ideal. In any case, “political theory” would usually refer to the relationship between the individual and the state, explored perpetually in the academic division of political science. And, lastly, we can’t be sure if “Rod Serling” designates a specific range of work or his entire oeuvre. As it turns out, Feldman’s study is a comprehensive look at the Twilight Zone series only, according to what appears to be a more generalized notion of “politics” as denoting fundamental patterns of human social behavior. She embarks from Thomas Hobbes’ examination of human nature as a premise for understanding any governmental context. But Hobbes’ focus on such universal human traits as belligerence, acquisitiveness, and self-interest is clearly a means to an end, in his larger purpose to expose an inevitable “social contract” obligating forfeiture of personal freedoms in the interest of human rights. To position Serling not only as the auteur for the entire series but as a “political theorist” would seem to suggest a specific dedication to matters of state, rather than a more encompassing agenda for social critique. In this way, Feldman could simply be treating Serling’s social consciousness as an aspect of governance, similar to my argument that the series’ moral universe strives toward Richard Rorty’s liberalist utopia—again, an idealized state where individualism persists within a larger process of socialization disallowing any form of cruelty or humiliation toward others. By locating such universal themes as “fear,” “greed,” and “glory” in the series, albeit through slipshod reference to so many episodes, Feldman argues, “Hobbes, an empirical social scientist, accepted human nature as it was. But Serling, a fantasist, didn’t, preferring instead to keep an idealized or romanticized view of what it could be.” 1 Accordingly, she refers to Serling as an “apologetic Hobbesian,” as if The Twilight Zone attempted to redeem its underlying pessimism toward human nature through escapist fantasy. 2 Here, Feldman’s understanding of Serling’s vision, and its expression in the series, diverges from what others recognize as an agenda for social critique. Rather than any form of indulgent fantasy, Serling’s “political theory,” or what I would prefer to call his and his authorial peers’ “cultural impetus,” was to raise awareness of societal ills wherever they were to be found in postwar America. According to its metaphysical, science fiction, or otherwise ironic nature, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is inherently idealized, but its invariably “punitive” ideals point, in turn, to more immediate societal problems, less universal or inevitable as “fear” and so on. Where Feldman notices Serling’s inclination to repudiate “greed” in both “Uncle Simon” and “The Masks,” for example, she overlooks the larger critique of modern family dynamics at stake in both episodes. 3 In other words, ap-

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proaching the series as inherently “political” because of its attention to human nature obscures the subtler cultural targets more immediate to the 1950s. If Serling is to be treated as a political theorist, his own “politics” of postwar social consciousness ought to be acknowledged first. I find it more productive, instead, to include “politics” among several dimensions of social critique Serling and other writers pursue in The Twilight Zone. And I prefer not to reduce the entire series to one that is inherently “political” just because its entries expose so many moral turpitudes also affecting systems of governance. Rather, I locate episodes directly evaluating these latter systems, and then subdivide these according to a standard breakdown of governmental functions. The most immediate critique of Cold War politics, of course, focuses on notions of collective paranoia, based on increasing postwar fears of communist subversion within American society, exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anticommunist “witch hunt” in the early 1950s. Edward R. Murrow’s damning response to the McCarthy trials, airing in 1954 on the CBS news documentary series See It Now, confirmed, “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’” As early as 1956, popular science fiction took up the cause against McCarthyism, namely in James Blish’s Cold War novel They Shall Have Stars, involving an FBI head, Francis Xavier MacHinery, whose similar inquisitions obstruct scientific advancement and so allow the Soviets to gain the upper hand. Another leftist critique of Cold War paranoia is Ben Barzman’s 1960 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Its narrative portrays a more advanced, peaceful civilization existing on a parallel Earth, a delegation from which ultimately decides that our Earth is not ready for its superior technologies, anticipating the plot of Charles Beaumont’s 1963 Twilight Zone teleplay “Valley of the Shadow.” This latter novel, M. Keith Booker argues, is “a good example of the attempt of many leftist writers in the post–World War II period to reach a larger audience by writing in popular genres. It also demonstrates the way in which such writers sought to convey their political messages with a light touch, given the climate of anticommunist hysteria in which they were forced to work.” 4 Even as science fiction films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) critiqued Cold War fears, however, Hollywood also catered to McCarthyite “hysteria” with, for example, Warner Brothers’ 1951 film I Was a Communist for the FBI, portraying communists as maliciously bent on facilitating Soviet domination. Released in the same year as Blish’s novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which I discuss earlier in the context of invasion-oriented narratives, reinforces anticommunist paranoia by portraying the infiltration of mind-numbing alien organisms into a typical American town. (At the same time, this latter film’s disposition

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toward 1950s American culture would have seemed cynical—that is, prior to the studio’s insistence on its having an optimistic ending.) Booker’s survey of science fiction indicates that both left-wing and right-wing strains of Cold War narrativization competed across the 1950s, which resulted in a characteristic ambivalence between critique and propaganda. 5 IRONY IN AMERICAN POLITICS Serling’s political stance in The Twilight Zone was, of course, unambiguously leftist. What had been his quasi-right-wing, pro-military disposition at the outset of World War II transformed, in its aftermath, into jaded, antiwar convictions that inspired his several war-oriented teleplays for live television, as well as for his anthology series thereafter. In particular, as Gordon F. Sander affirms, Serling became bitterly disposed toward “militarism and militaristic power structures—like big business, the sporting world, and network TV,” and how they are “intolerant of change, weakness, and any notion of exceptions to the rule.” 6 Such power structures, of course, find their ultimate fruition in systems of governance. Booker mentions, for example, a specific critique of the “power elite” to be found in Alfred Bester’s 1956 proto-cyberpunk novel The Stars My Destination, whose dystopian protagonist eventually distributes his acquired thermonuclear weaponry among the common folk instead of turning it over to state officials. 7 Booker claims, “Among other things, this motif provides a telling commentary on the American political system, which makes so much of democracy, but which isolates the general population from life-and-death decisions through an elaborate security apparatus that gives ordinary individuals essentially no role in the decision-making process.” 8 Serling, having been victimized in his own way by militaristic power structures during the war, would arrive at a similar frustration with America’s power elite. And though McCarthyism was only one among so many aspects to Serling’s Cold War grievances, it nevertheless introduces what I call the “political irony” of internal guilt, according to Murrow’s citation of Shakespeare. In other words, Serling’s penchant for political critique in The Twilight Zone proceeds from a fundamental reassignment of responsibility away from any encroaching Soviet/communist, Nazi/ fascist, or otherwise “foreign” ideology and to American culture itself. The targeted hypocrisy also occurs within established systems of governance, especially where individual scapegoats are made an example of accordingly. In these episodes, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is less inclined to “rescue” the victims of any form of political discrimination, since their victimization should be deemed less the consequence of human nature than a revocable policy of state. At the same time, any perpetrators of ideological cruelty within these narratives are summarily punished. Ultimately, in these

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examples, ironic circumstances mobilize a critique of state-officiated ideologies, even in nondomestic contexts, toward a raised awareness of American cultural hypocrisy in the 1950s and beyond. In a previous chapter on invasion-oriented narratives, I discuss Twilight Zone episodes exploring McCarthyite paranoia. The first of these is Serling’s first-season teleplay “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (March 1960), about a typical American suburb whose inhabitants become suspicious of each other, after a teenage boy (Jan Handzlik) reports a tendency of science fiction to portray hostile space aliens as assuming human identities. After a series of electrical and mechanical flukes ensues, violence erupts among neighbors, while observing aliens muse over the success of their manipulations. If we were to decide these aliens embody a notion of governmental control, this would correspond to the conspiratorial form of cultural paranoia gaining momentum after The Twilight Zone’s prime-time years, namely in the wake of the Kennedys’ assassinations, Watergate, and so on. Instead, this episode points to an ideological paranoia or, rather, the Cold War fear of subversive political ideas spreading through the community, exploited by McCarthy for his own political advantage. And, accordingly, its invaders are simply “agents” of the series’ moral universe, which “chastises” all those susceptible to such paranoia and capable of harming their neighbors in turn. The second of these narratives, Serling’s second-season teleplay “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (May 1961), incorporates a similar show of paranoia concerning invaders disguised as humans, whose actual appearance, in turn, parodies popular media’s clichéd depictions of space aliens. Again, in the aggregate context of the series, these characters are positioned as moral “agents” arriving to punish American “transgressors.” Where these examples address communist paranoia, a more specific indictment of McCarthyism, per se, is Serling’s third-season teleplay “Four O’Clock” (April 1962), based on a short story by Price Day. This relatively contrived narrative portrays a caricature of political prejudice, Oliver Crangle (Theodore Bikel), cold-calling employers in his community about their allegedly undesirable employees. Particularly transparent in its McCarthyite reference is this fanatic’s first phone call, wherein he declares a particular employee to be a “communist.” 9 He continues making calls according to his personal “black list,” checking off names as he goes, and then vows to “destroy all evil” at four o’clock. 10 When visited by his landlady (Moyna MacGill), Crangle defends his function as compiling, investigating, etc., names in order to identify subversives. Afterward, a woman (Phyllis Love) arrives to protest the letters he sent to her husband’s hospital accusing her husband of murdering a patient. Eventually, he even includes a summoned FBI agent (Linden Chiles) among the “conspiracy” of “evil” people he promises to make “two feet tall.” 11 Thus, this protagonist’s momentum vaguely resembles Senator McCarthy’s pattern of accusations making their way to the

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State Department and beyond. The Twilight Zone’s moral universe finally encroaches at the given hour, predictably shrinking Crangle instead. Serling’s teaser from the previous week declares this episode to be “far-out, but considering the nature of the times it happens to be very close-in.” 12 In this way, he corroborates not only this entry’s recent political relevance, but the series’ critical agenda as a whole. Of course, McCarthy’s censure in 1954 and death in 1957 would have made this slightly less than controversial narrative seem like a moot point, although, as such, it was also a means for Serling to underscore his leftist sympathies rather unambiguously and without risking any censorship. Among the larger group of politically oriented episodes, there are a few Twilight Zone entries, mostly Serling teleplays, that assail current or recent totalitarian societies, in terms of fascism, communism, or simply dictatorship. These can be further subdivided into “present” and “future” contexts. Particularly in the latter cautionary cases, the implication is that American society, according to current trends, could potentially find itself within similarly repressive systems of governance in the not-too-distant future. Regardless, these examples invoke a notion of political irony, that is, suggesting that even the most exotic and/or farfetched politics are already rooted within American postwar culture. First, I single out a pair of narratives occurring in the present, at home and abroad respectively. Serling’s fourth-season teleplay “He’s Alive” (January 1963), about a “misguided” American youth pursuing fascist causes, might appear to correspond to the series’ war-oriented narratives in civilian contexts, discussed in the previous chapter. The war has long since ended here, however, and the episode’s domestic scenario has more to do with political ideologies than any particulars of warfare. The episode begins on a typical urban street corner, where the young Peter Vollmer (Dennis Hopper) pontificates from a makeshift podium about an encroaching “conspiracy” of “yellow” and “black” people and other “foreigners.” 13 Flanked by two other young men, all wearing Nazi-esque uniforms, he soon provokes the small throng of onlookers into disapproving violence. Beaten up when the police arrive, Vollmer declares, “All of them were communists,” as if to echo Crangle’s McCarthyite fanaticism in the previous example. 14 Later, in the apartment of his friend and father figure Ernst (Ludwig Donath), the Dachau survivor warns Vollmer that his “philosophy” was responsible for the mass genocide carried out in the World War II concentration camps. 15 The young man refers to his troubled, loveless childhood with an abusive alcoholic father and deranged mother. The narrative thus contextualizes Vollmer’s hateful disposition, hereby making the argument that a fascist ideology, rather than being exclusive to Nazi or other foreign regimes, can take root in any community where violence and cruelty exists.

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Hitler’s spirit (Curt Conway) arrives, in turn, to coach the protagonist toward more effective rabble-rousing. Vollmer’s next public address, about a “free white America,” takes place inside a meeting hall with background posters of Hitler and other Nazi leaders. 16 After suggesting Americans were “sold out” when Russians acquired nuclear weaponry and sent a man into space first, Vollmer accomplishes his first applause from the community. 17 Afterward, Hitler’s ghost advises Vollmer to sacrifice one of his own as a would-be “martyr,” compelling the new leader to make a scapegoat of his friend Nick (Howard Caine), whose body is found in an alley with a note saying “A good Nazi” pinned on it. 18 At a subsequent political rally, Vollmer decries the influx of “vermin from foreign shores” in front of a supportive audience. 19 Determined to prevent the ascension of “another” führer, Ernst interrupts the rally, exposing the young man as merely a “problem child.” 20 Emerging from his obscurity and providing Vollmer with a luger, Hitler commands his protégé to murder Ernst in his home. After doing so, the protagonist encounters the police once again and is gunned down, and so Hitler’s shadow moves onward toward his “next” recruit. Serling’s epilogue affirms Hitler’s continued presence in America, wherever “hate,” “prejudice,” or “bigotry” exists. 21 In this example, the fascist dictator’s appearance transcends hallucination, since he not only advises Vollmer, but also pays his rent to the town hall’s owner and furnishes him with a murder weapon. Typically in the series’ moral universe, metaphysical forces “correct” moral transgressors, rather than facilitating hostility and murder. Instead, in this case, the legal system restores only a “temporary” equilibrium. Accordingly, Hitler’s intervention must be taken as “punitive” toward American society itself, specifically for maintaining fascist politics through misguided youth. In other words, the metaphysical forces in this example nonetheless conform to their primary function of mobilizing social critique, even if moral responsibility is less attributable to the narrative’s protagonist than his surrounding society. The second entry from this pair of present-day contexts involving wouldbe dictators is Serling’s third-season teleplay “The Mirror” (October 1961), about a Central American revolutionary leader and the tenuous nature of his regime. According to its title, the narrative “mirrors” the ascension of Fidel Castro, sworn in as prime minister of Cuba in 1959. Compared to Crangle’s resemblance to McCarthy in “Four O’Clock,” the reference is even more immediate here, with the “new” dictator, General Ramos Clemente (Peter Falk), replicating Castro’s dark beard, cigar, army cap, and guerilla uniform. A beret-wearing soldier (Arthur Batanides) among his four comrades likewise evokes Castro’s right-hand officer Che Guevara. After Serling’s prologue describes a field worker’s improbable rise to power, he promises the episode will explore the “aftermath of a rebellion.” 22 Brought in for his imminent execution, the former leader, De Cruz (Will Kuluva)—referencing

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Cuba’s ousted former president and dictator Fulgencio Batista—declares Clemente simply another “De Cruz,” “Batista,” “Trujillo,” and “Castro.” 23 He then confides that the spoils of victory include a “legacy of fear” to be passed on to Clemente, who may, in turn, observe his assassins in a “magic mirror” hanging on the palace wall. 24 After ordering the execution of all political prisoners, Clemente sees one of his confidants (Richard Karlan) in the glass with a machine gun pointed at him. Impulsively, Clemente pushes the innocent man out the window and over the high balcony. Each of his remaining comrades subsequently appears in the mirror with similarly murderous intentions, and so he eventually eliminates them all. After a concerned priest (Vladimir Sokoloff) explains away the fate of all such paranoid “tyrants,” Clemente finally shoots himself. 25 Admitting of the episode’s ample references, Serling’s epilogue affirms, “Any resemblance to tyrants living or dead is hardly coincidental, whether it be here or in the Twilight Zone.” In digressing from Castro’s history by portraying this dictator as a former peasant, Serling’s teleplay disqualifies any attempt to legitimize a leader’s assuming power by force. And so The Twilight Zone’s moral universe dutifully punishes this entry’s militant protagonist by facilitating the “inevitable” paranoia associated with his vulnerable sovereignty. While the narrative may accurately reflect Castro’s usurpation of power as well as his relentless elimination of counterrevolutionaries, it is scarcely prescient about his complex, extended career as a political leader. Instead, airing in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and in the advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this episode behaves somewhat atypically as propaganda. Marc Scott Zicree, for example, opines, “The chill wind of the Cold War blows through this one-sided episode and it does Castro a disservice, merely reinforcing the prejudices of the audience for whom it was intended.” 26 Ironically, then, this particular example among his several political teleplays merely confirms Serling’s own vulnerability to cultural biases of the era. Another pair of Serling teleplays imagines totalitarian societies in dystopian future contexts, toward critiquing current American politics. The first of these would become the much-beloved second-season episode “The Eye of the Beholder” (November 1960), about a hospitalized woman awaiting the results of facial reconstructive surgery. For the majority of its duration, this example exploits the suspense as to what will be revealed behind the coil of bandages around the protagonist’s face and head. Amidst the doctor and nurse’s futile attempts to console her, the patient (Maxine Stuart) bemoans her condition and the prospect of being “segregated” to a “ghetto for freaks.” 27 Defiantly, she exclaims, “The State is not God!” and “It hasn’t the right to make ugliness a crime!” 28 Even before the bandages are removed, however, the narrative exposes the politics of this particular state when the nurse (Joanna Heyes) informs the

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doctor (William D. Gordon) their “leader” is to give a speech. 29 A large screen drops from the ceiling of the doctor’s office, revealing a man (George Keymas) behind a grand podium with a row of flags behind him. He declares, “Tonight, I shall talk to you about glorious conformity, about the delight and the ultimate pleasure of our unified society.” 30 Juxtaposed with the patient’s preceding rant, this telecast cements the narrative’s agenda as political critique, specifically with respect to any government’s role in maintaining cultural standards of normality. The ailing woman’s bandages are finally unraveled and, in one of the series’ most celebrated ironic twists, her normal-looking female visage appears opposite the porcine faces of the medical staff. As she flees down the hall, the protagonist (Donna Douglas) encounters several video screens showing the leader’s persistent tirade on conformity. Arriving to take her away, a normal-looking gentleman (Edson Stroll) reassures her she shall live hereafter among her own “kind.” 31 Less deliberate than casting Caucasian norms of feminine beauty and male handsomeness here is this episode’s conformity to fleeting fashions of the 1950s. In other words, the protagonist emerges from her bandages improbably with a then-popular bleached-blonde, Italian-cut hairstyle, as if fresh from a Beverly Hills salon, not to mention her having on fresh mascara and lipstick. And despite the perseverance of his golf shirt, the male’s glistening short hair showcases the heavy application of an oil-and-wax-based pomade like that used by Cary Grant and so many others at the time. Ironically, then, these popular portrayals of “beauty” amplify the episode’s intended critique and, somewhat less consciously, become the target of it. A similarly dated portrayal of a future conformist society can be found in John Tomerlin’s fifth-season teleplay “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (January 1964), based on an unscripted story by Charles Beaumont. This narrative would seem the inversion of Serling’s teleplay, with the female protagonist’s (Collin Wilcox) “plain” features positioning her as socially undesirable against a population of “beautiful” clones. These latter “transformed” characters also reflect 1950s styles, with the female clone’s (Suzy Parker) elaborately blow-dried, wavy long hair, the male clone’s (Richard Long) pomade-combed haircut, and the teen female’s (Pam Austin) bobbed bouffant. In addition to these immediate cultural references, the episode’s projections of the future emulate the dystopia of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, wherein book burning and the widespread consumption of antidepressants are the norm. Once adapted to the screen, of course, such cautionary narratives hardly withstand the trappings of their immediate culture, just as François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel reflects mid1960s fashions and aesthetics. Nevertheless, this latter Twilight Zone entry lacks a crucial element in Serling’s dystopian critique, namely the particular power of televisual media to propagate conformist ideology. If anything, the latter dystopia inverts this aspect as well, by banning books in any way

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celebrating the “dignity of the individual human spirit.” 32 And Serling’s epilogue here affirms, “In an age of plastic surgery, bodybuilding, and an infinity of cosmetics. . . . These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which, after all, is the Twilight Zone.” 33 In other words, in both episodes, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe becomes a dystopian exaggeration of the present, in terms of both totalitarian governments and the conformist politics associated with them. The second example in Serling’s pair of future totalitarian critiques is his second-season entry “The Obsolete Man” (June 1961), about a common citizen, Romney Wordsworth (Burgess Meredith), standing trial for “obsolescence.” Serling’s prologue leaves little to interpretation in declaring this courtroom to be a possible future, since it has “patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time.” 34 Such “super states,” he continues, have one iron rule: “Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace.” 35 Also after Fahrenheit 451 is the accused’s stated profession as a “librarian,” since, according to the presiding “chancellor,” this dystopian state has long ago eradicated its books. 36 Also according to the chancellor (Fritz Weaver), the state has “proven” there is no God, contrary to Wordsworth’s protestations. Despite the latter’s claims of having individual intellect, the tribunal deems him “obsolete” and sentences him to death. 37 He manages to win their approval, however, for a televised execution, and so, again, Serling incorporates a critique of media complicity in political manipulation. Because only Wordsworth and his “assassin” are to know the manner of death, the summoned chancellor arrives to the condemned man’s quarters ignorant of what is to come. Wordsworth confirms himself a burden to the state, simply for being a “deviation from the norm,” as if to echo the dictator’s speech in “The Eye of the Beholder.” 38 The chancellor agrees with the condemned man that their form of government has “predecessors,” namely “Hitler and Stalin,” but says that the “mistake” these leaders made was “not going far enough” by eliminating any and all undesirables. 39 In a mid-episode twist, Wordsworth reveals to the chancellor that a bomb is set to go off at the designated time of his liquidation, and that the latter is locked in with him. Reading aloud from his forbidden copy of the Bible, Wordsworth prepares himself for what he calls “the great equalizer,” while the latter sweats nervously in his chair. 40 Eventually, the chancellor begs to be released “in the name of God,” and so the protagonist readily complies. 41 Ironically condemning their superior official as “obsolete” for his cowardice, the tribunal finally descends upon him in an over-choreographed climax. 42 As if in keeping with the protagonist’s religiosity, Serling’s epilogue literally preaches the episode’s intended political critique: “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete.” 43 Similar to the first in this pair of Serling teleplays, as

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well as to “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” no metaphysical forces restore moral harmony. Nor is there any bold new technology here, apart from an installed television camera. And nor, for that matter, is there any permutation of science fiction in this example. Instead, the series’ moral universe is atypically associated with the will of God, and, although an innocent man perishes in this projected future society, the responsible representative of the state is “brought to justice” in due course. As an implied successor to “The Eye of the Beholder,” this episode’s excessive righteousness would seem to have left no opportunity for Serling to imagine any further dystopian governments. And so left to Beaumont and Tomerlin, this particular form of cautionary tale seemed already trite by the time it was rehashed in the fifth season. “The Obsolete Man,” with its portrayal of a dystopian tribunal, is a good point from which to proceed to a number of political critiques in The Twilight Zone focusing specifically on crime and punishment. Although the previous example also portrays a sentence carried out per se, its theme is really more to do with the totalitarian state’s reliance on absolute cultural conformity. These examples, rather, point to a sense of irony in any legal system allowing inhumanity to exist in its correctional methods. The first of these, Serling’s early first-season teleplay “The Lonely” (November 1959), conflates both technological and domestic irony in its depiction of a courtship between a man (Jack Warden) and a female android (Jean Marsh), with implications I discuss in their respective chapters. But, ultimately, these thematic ironies are subsumed within a larger critique of the protagonist’s future society, whose criminal code condemns him to life imprisonment on a remote asteroid. And regardless of correctional method, the condemned man affirms, as I mention earlier, that his crime of killing another man was “in self-defense.” 44 He is eventually pardoned, but the psychological damage he endures when his loving companion is just as soon revoked only compounds the greater injustice done to him. Providing similar insight into the cruelty of solitary confinement is Serling’s second-season teleplay “The Silence” (April 1961), inspired by Anton Chekhov’s story “The Bet,” which I discuss at length in an earlier chapter. Although Serling’s adaptation removes the source material’s initial debate over the morality of capital punishment versus solitary confinement, a critique of the latter is maintained nevertheless. In the Twilight Zone episode, that is, the protagonist (Liam Sullivan) resorts to secretly severing his vocal cords, in order to fulfill his wagered duration of silence and solitude. Within this group of Twilight Zone narratives concerning legal systems, capital punishment is also targeted as inhumane in a couple of second-season episodes, namely Serling’s teleplay “Dust” (January 1961) and Beaumont’s “Shadow Play” (May 1961), the latter of which I take up in an earlier chapter, along with the fifth-season entry “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

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(February 1964). In “Dust,” as in “The Lonely,” extenuating circumstances suggest the soon-to-be-hanged protagonist, Luis (John Alonzo), is less than deserving of such extreme punishment. To appeal his son’s crime of running over a little girl while drunk in a wagon, his father (Vladimir Sokoloff) relates how his son’s poverty and unemployment compelled him to drink. When a citizen (Duane Grey) arrives with his children to show them “what happens to drunks who kill kids,” the town sheriff (John Larch) responds, “How do you teach them pain, Rogers, by shooting one of them in the arm?” 45 In this way, Serling expresses his fundamental stance against inflicting pain as a form of justice, especially when it is sanctioned by the state. Exploiting the father’s determination to save his son’s life, a local shyster (Thomas Gomez) peddles him a pouch of dirt as “magic dust,” which, he promises, will restore compassion to the town folk if sprinkled over them. 46 Instead, metaphysical forces cause the gallows’ “brand new” rope ironically to break, in spite of the so-called magic dust, which inspires the deceased’s parents to concur the criminal has “suffered enough.” 47 And rather than castigating the sadistic con man, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe allows him also to take inspiration, and so he returns the money to the condemned man’s family. As I discuss at length earlier, both “Shadow Play” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” also expose the cruelty of capital punishment, particularly in terms of its devastating psychological effects. In these examples, protagonists are caught up in desperate fantasies of survival, the former by trying to stop the recurring nightmare of his trial and its electric-chair sentence, and the latter by escaping down a river from a similarly miscarried hanging. Taken together, these five episodes’ ironic circumstances encourage a reevaluation of the American legal system’s reliance on both solitary confinement and capital punishment. According to the psychological cruelty inherent to either, as well as the sadistic example they set for the populace, such correctional methods are incompatible with the series’ moral universe or, better yet, Rorty’s utopia. Of the several politically oriented Twilight Zone episodes calling attention to social prejudices in the postwar era, only two dare to focus on the dearth of African American civil rights, namely Serling’s first-season teleplay “The Big Tall Wish” (April 1960) and his fifth-season entry “I Am the Night— Color Me Black” (March 1964). As a prolific writer for live television, Serling had already wrangled with sponsors over a range of controversial political issues, inclining him, in turn, toward a fictional context that would better accommodate his agenda for social consciousness without compromising his artistic integrity. As I mention early on, two of his most compromised projects during the 1950s were “The Arena” and “Noon at Doomsday,” the former intended to critique the inner workings of the United States Senate, and the latter responding to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. And he would

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attempt another such response to racial prejudice with his 1958 teleplay “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” for Playhouse 90. These latter teleplays were virtually unrecognizable after the sponsors insisted on changes such as making the black victim in the former vaguely “foreign” instead. As if to maintain his compliance with sponsors and CBS alike, Serling would retain prejudicial references to “foreigners” in his Twilight Zone teleplays, without naming ethnic backgrounds specifically. Among the episodes I consider earlier in this chapter, for example, both “The Shelter” and “Dust” involve Latin American characters ostracized as “foreigners.” And because of their sensitive nature, the pair of Twilight Zone narratives involving black characters is relatively subdued in its critique, especially compared to the provocative material Serling endeavored before The Twilight Zone. Twentyseven episodes into the first season, Serling would appear to have amassed the necessary confidence to produce a television narrative with black principal characters. Zicree’s guide affirms: In 1960, casting blacks in a dramatic show not dealing with racial issues was something practically unheard of, but this was a deliberate move on Serling’s part. “Television, like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of a sin of omission,” he said at the time. “Hungry for talent, desperate for the socalled ‘new face,’ constantly searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose. This is the Negro actor.” 48

But I don’t think Serling sought merely to advance the acting careers of talented African Americans—that is, not with the censorship of his Emmett Till response still bombarding his conscience. If anything, the acclaim for his 1956 teleplay “Requiem for a Heavyweight” serves to validate the context for a black protagonist amidst his black familiars. In other words, the paradigm of a has-been professional boxer, rehashed with a black character instead, could hardly seem intended to address any social injustice. Under closer scrutiny, however, “The Big Tall Wish” reveals a deeper critique. Really, it is an examination of disenfranchisement and the lack of opportunity for social advancement, evident in the opening shot of a homeless man in a run-down city neighborhood, whose newspaper blanket serves as exposition for the “boxing” narrative to come. In his squalid one-room apartment, Bolie Jackson (Ivan Dixon) laments the violent history of a “tired old man trying to catch that bus to glory.” 49 Toward preventing further boxing injuries, his young friend Henry (Steven Perry) from downstairs promises to make “the big tall wish.” 50 Subsequently, the boy’s mother reveals a similar wish had been effective in correcting her rent deficit. Through this ironic premise, the narrative establishes a fundamental correlation between “boxing” and “poverty,” specifically making the former a metaphor for the latter. And according to this allegorical framework, the boy’s “magic”

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represents social advancement. The actual boxing scenes echo “Requiem” even more closely, with Bolie’s corrupt bookie betting against him, as Maish (Keenan Wynn) does with the “has-been” McClintock (Jack Palance). After fracturing his knuckles against a wall in his dressing room, Bolie loses the fight. However, Henry’s wish reverses this outcome, causing Bolie’s opponent to take his place on the mat. In an urban rooftop setting, strung with the clotheslines of those unable to afford an automatic dryer, the victorious Bolie discounts the boy’s interventions, and so the original outcome in the boxing ring is restored. Returning home defeated this time, the black protagonist concedes, “Maybe there is magic, and maybe there’s wishes too . . . I guess the trouble is there’s not enough people around to believe.” 51 Reading “magic” as “social advancement,” then, his statement characterizes the condition of African Americans in the postwar era—prevented by the majority and its politics from transcending poverty. Thus, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe is atypically unsuccessful in restoring equilibrium or, in this case, racial “equality.” And so the “persistence” of these immoral conditions becomes this episode’s critique of its surrounding political climate. The second of these two civil-rights-oriented episodes, “I Am the Night— Color Me Black,” takes after Serling’s teleplay “Dust,” with another condemned man awaiting his turn at the gallows, although, this time, in a present-day American small town engulfed in perpetual darkness. According to the former Twilight Zone entry’s narrative paradigm, a “conscientious” sheriff (Michael Constantine) is pitted against a “sadistic” character, Deputy Pierce (George Lindsey), eager to administer executions. And, again, extenuating circumstances call the convicted man’s guilt into question, with the victim described as a “psychopathic bully” whom he killed in self-defense. 52 More importantly, the culprit (Terry Becker) declares his victim “the white knight” responsible for “the whipping of some poor scared colored guy.” 53 Deliberately portrayed as black, the attending reverend (Ivan Dixon again) acknowledges the condemned man’s actions on behalf of African Americans. However, based on the latter’s hateful disposition, Reverend Anderson confirms his guilt, and then suggests as does Dixon’s character in the previous episode that the “majority” in any society is responsible for officiating racial intolerance. 54 According to The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, then, the condemned man cannot be saved, as in “Dust,” since even his noble motivations are insufficient to justify his willful act of violence. After the criminal hangs, the reverend declares the increasing blackness all around to be a palpable manifestation of the community’s collective hatred, and then, as other such zones of darkness are identified around the world, this encroaching metaphysical phenomenon becomes Serling’s closest attempt in the series at a response to Emmett’s Till’s murder. Two years prior to the airing of this episode, Roger Corman produced The Intruder, a film based on a 1958 novel by Charles Beaumont, about a bigot

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(William Shatner) attempting to incite violence in a fictitious Southern town against the black minority and its court-mandated school integration. However, after Corman struggled to secure its distribution, it became the sole money-loser among his many releases. In the same year, however, the Universal film adaptation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, involving the rape trial of a falsely accused black man (Brock Peters), was well received. Although scholars have speculated Lee’s character of Tom Robinson was also inspired by Emmett Till’s murder, the latter film is less over-the-top in its depiction of bigotry and mob aggression. Nevertheless, what could be construed as Serling’s “lynch mob” paradigm was initiated with his two teleplays prior to Lee’s and Beaumont’s narratives, that is, immediately after the September 1955 acquittal of Till’s murderers. And prior to “Dust,” for example, “A Town Has Turned to Dust” had already featured a Mexican pursued by the racist citizens of a frontier town, with a ringleader character played by William Shatner, opposite a sympathetic sheriff (played by Rod Steiger). Christopher Metress, in his extensive research on this and “The Arena,” explains that executives and sponsors rejected even the original teleplay’s reference to a black man lynched some years before for whistling at a white woman, since they wanted “no white-and-black racial dynamics, no lurid whistle, and no suggestions of interracial sex: that is, no Emmett Till.” 55 Thus, even after films had portrayed white mobs assaulting African Americans in present-day contexts, this 1964 television episode references the Ku Klux Klan and their black victims only in passing. The same year’s murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi wouldn’t be narrativized until 1975 in the CBS television movie Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan and again in 1988 with Alan Parker’s acclaimed film Mississippi Burning. According to the still-sensitive climate of popular television in the later 1950s and 1960s, then, it wasn’t for Serling or The Twilight Zone to portray any ostensible compromise of African American civil rights onscreen, especially as sanctioned by the legal system. But with the latter Twilight Zone permutations of this narrative paradigm, at least, ironic circumstances allowed the socially conscious teleplay writer to come as close as he possibly could. IRONY IN SOCIALIZATION Politically oriented Twilight Zone episodes exploring fascist and/or totalitarian systems of governance, whether in past, present, or future contexts, invariably critique conformism in postwar American culture. Mostly through character dialogue, though also with the help of Serling’s tendency toward soapboxing in these cases, a fundamental notion that social conformity stifles individual imagination and free thinking is communicated. This also corre-

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sponds to Rorty’s ironist utopia, wherein the individual is encouraged to pursue private philosophical interests, as long as any personal code of morality arrived at is never, in turn, imposed on the community at the risk of humiliating or harming other individuals. Thus, again, such an individual must maintain an ironic pose toward any/all forms of ethical inquiry. At the same time, this so-called liberal ironist must commit himself/herself to the shared vocabulary and mutual hopes of the necessarily democratic community as a whole. 56 Where these previous indictments of state-enforced conformism in the series coincide with the individualist component of Rorty’s utopia, another group of Twilight Zone entries focuses on this latter notion of socialization. This is the second fundamental category I refer to in completing this chapter’s thematic focus on “sociopolitical irony.” These episodes, rather than exposing the dystopian nature of any conformist society, point toward excesses of individualism, that is, idiosyncratic behaviors specifically harmful to others in a given community. According to this latter narrative paradigm, portrayed communities are less imagined and tend to reflect familiar public contexts of everyday American society. Also, these examples are more oriented toward social dynamics between common citizens, rather than surrounding political systems or matters of the state, as in this chapter’s previous group. In these narratives, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe employs metaphysical forces to castigate protagonists, not necessarily for their individualism per se, but because their individual disposition toward the larger community is in some way deleterious to others. Within the series’ aggregate system for social critique, then, ironic circumstances serve to identify “antisocial” behaviors in these episodes’ protagonists, that is, according to the semblance of Serling’s (or Rorty’s) utopian ideal. When juxtaposed with (mostly) Serling’s anticonformist political narratives in the series, these latter entries’ notion of imperative socialization invokes a greater thematic irony. Before considering these socialization-oriented narratives, however, I want to mention a pair of Serling teleplays falling somewhere in between the two sociopolitical groups or, rather, serving to inform one another. These are the first season’s “Mr. Bevis” (June 1960) and the third season’s “Cavender Is Coming” (May 1962), both involving eccentric protagonists resistant to the norms of their surrounding communities. In the former entry, Bevis (Orson Bean) is portrayed as the neighborhood misfit, having an eclectic array of peculiar interests, hobbies, and possessions, such as his 1924 Rickenbacker jalopy. As if in consequence of his reckless magnanimity, his old car is ticketed, he is evicted, and he loses his job, all in the same day. In the interest of helping him clean up his act, his “guardian angel,” J. Hardy Hempstead (Henry Jones), allows him to relive the day anew, sans any of the earlier mishaps. Ironically, when Bevis discovers he must forfeit the very idiosyncrasies that make him so uniquely likable, including his antiquated automo-

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bile, he asks Hempstead to restore his former circumstances. And as a token of “reward” for his individualist convictions, his guardian angel metaphysically relocates the hydrant beside his jalopy to the curb alongside the ticketing policeman’s vehicle. In this way, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe restores what had been an acceptable harmony and even communicates its own special form of approval. The latter entry from this pair of episodes depicts Agnes Grep (Carol Burnett), the “female” version of the former eccentric, along with a similar guardian angel (Howard Smith) coming to her rescue. Unlike the previous episode, however, the protagonist’s incompetence corresponds to that of her protecting angel, expected to “earn his wings” by improving the workingclass conditions of her everyday existence. In bestowing upon her so many trappings of wealth, including a chauffeured convertible, high-society parties, and a sumptuous apartment, her angel’s efforts are similarly unsuccessful, since the young woman, just like Bevis, prefers her original circumstances, despite their attendant struggles. No token of reward is offered to the protagonist this time, but because her happiness is confirmed, her guardian angel receives commendation from his superior. Although these two are relatively lighthearted entries in the series, they demonstrate an important aspect to The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, precisely in its conditional tolerance of individualism. In other words, these protagonists’ eccentricities are encouraged just as long as they maintain a harmonious relationship with their communities, particularly as represented by the “vulnerable” children present in both. And both episodes suggest such social harmony confers not only peaceable relations, but also inner fulfillment, regardless of economic status. Like the series’ critiques of totalitarian politics, these entries convey an anticonformist agenda, although in a context of socialization more akin to Rorty’s utopia. Nevertheless, it remains for other episodes to delineate the point at which individualism becomes harmful to the larger community. Toward anticipating the horror of thermonuclear aftermath, Serling’s pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” portrays a familiar American townscape with all the trappings of modern urbanity: cars, restaurants, shops, movie theaters, and so on. But all these places and things become useless without the presence of people to inject life and culture into them. So while this narrative behaves most immediately as a cautionary tale in its Cold War context, it also makes a more fundamental claim—that the human race maintains itself through socialization, and even the most self-serving individual must inevitably answer to the forces of the surrounding community. More ostensibly than The Twilight Zone’s other contributors, Serling would persist with this theme in a number of his teleplays across the series. Only a few episodes later, for example, “Time Enough At Last” portrays a seemingly harmless bookworm whose familiars only impede his private inclinations. However, as I argue earlier, this individual is actually “culpable” of neglect-

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ing an invisible social contract with his community, in terms of both his employment and his marriage. And, thus, because he, in effect, renounces socialization, he must pay a metaphysical form of retribution, through the “accidental” deprivation of his reading glasses. Although popular celebration of this episode tends to sympathize with this character’s ironic circumstances, thereby ignoring the intended critique, the series’ narrative paradigm of social deviance is nonetheless established here, if not already in its first few entries. According to the later permutations of this paradigm, it would seem Serling realized in hindsight that his Henry Bemis, at least in Burgess Meredith’s endearing performance, is just too likable to take a moral lesson from. And so his subsequent such protagonists become increasingly repugnant in their idiosyncratic deviance. Along with “Time Enough At Last,” three subsequent Twilight Zone narratives constitute a tetralogy concerned with a paradigm of social deviance. In each case, protagonists wrangle with socialization, either reassimilating into the community or suffering some metaphysical form of moral retribution. The first of these is Serling’s first-season teleplay “The After Hours” (June 1960), about a young woman’s retransformation into a department store mannequin. Less obviously self-indulgent than Henry Bemis at first, Marsha White (Anne Francis) seeks merely to obtain a gold thimble as a gift for her mother. But strange encounters ensue with both an elevator man (John Conwell) and a saleswoman (Elizabeth Allen), the latter of whom appears to know her somehow. The first half of this entry’s duration is expended on the protagonist’s attempts to understand how she managed to find the very thimble she sought, albeit damaged, and on a “nonexistent” ninth floor. Eventually, after being accidentally locked in the building, Marsha hears the voices of men and women calling her name from what appear to be the various display mannequins. In a state of hysteria, she retreats into the elevator and is taken back up to the elusive ninth floor. There, she is reintroduced into a “micro-community” of mannequins, each waiting to spend a month as a human being among the greater community. What is important to take from this scene is an ethic of mutual interest and cooperation, which the saleswoman reinforces by saying to Marsha, “All of us will help you.” 57 Then the woman reminds her, “You left us for a month and you lived with the outsiders. But you were due back yesterday and you didn’t show up. You know, Marsha, that’s very selfish, my dear. All of us wait our turn and we simply do not overstay it.” 58 And here is communicated an additional ethic of social responsibility, also forgotten by the self-engrossed protagonist, whose interests just exceed the point at which they aren’t at the expense of others. Finally, this character’s professed pleasure in being among “the real people” points to the human necessity of socialization. 59 With “no serious harm done,” as her wooden cohort affirms, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe

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simply restores her to her own community. 60 Serling’s epilogue, asking, “Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?” pays mocking lip service to McCarthyite paranoia. 61 But, ultimately, this latter theme is subsumed within the narrative proper’s portrayal of reassimilation. The next example embracing this paradigm of social deviance involves a protagonist whose reluctance to reassimilate is less obscured in metaphysical circumstances. Serling’s second-season teleplay “The Mind and the Matter” (May 1961) portrays a misanthropic office worker, Archibald Beechcroft (Shelley Berman), immersed in a “cacophonous din” of human beings around him. 62 He confesses his disposition toward society to his conformist coworker (Chet Stratton), saying that, if he could, he’d simply “eliminate the people” from the universe. 63 After receiving a book entitled The Mind and the Matter as a token of apology from his clumsy coworker Henry (Jack Grinnage), Beechcroft acquires the ability to “concentrate” his pesky landlady and everyone else right out of existence. However, once this protagonist arrives again at his depopulated work site, and without Henry Bemis’ insatiable lust for literature to absorb him, he finds himself at a loss for something to do. His facial “reflection,” appearing in various glass surfaces around him, confirms, “Solitude is one thing but loneliness . . . loneliness is quite another.” 64 Craving any form of “diversion,” Beechcroft brings on an earthquake and then an electrical storm, to no avail. 65 He wanders around in an empty subway station, and, akin to the solitary protagonist of “Where Is Everybody?” begins to miss the experience of community around him. He resolves to repopulate the world, though merely with male and female duplicates of himself. Accordingly, he is exposed to his own repulsive misanthropy, with, for example, a “female” Beechcroft exclaiming in the elevator, “Will you please get off my foot, you ugly little man?” 66 Finally, he admits to his “reflection” that things were better as they were, and even shrugs off the coffee his coworker spills on him, as before. Serling’s epilogue affirms this “child of the twentieth century” has discovered “this is the best of all possible worlds,” echoing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s optimism. 67 As in “A World of His Own,” then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe atypically confers unlimited metaphysical power upon the protagonist, although, in this case, merely as a means for him to reassimilate willingly. Juxtaposed with either Henry Bemis or Marsha White, Beechcroft’s character illustrates the difference between a potentially harmful degree of self-indulgence and outright hostility toward others in a given community. Of course, if Serling’s disposition were really closer to that of Leibniz than Voltaire, no social critique would be necessary at all, and his teleplays would tend more toward Pollyannaism. Thus, his lip service to Leibniz must be taken in context as a rhetorical strategy for socialization, specifically targeting a misanthrope.

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The final entry within this Twilight Zone tetralogy of social deviance is Serling’s fifth-season teleplay “A Kind of Stopwatch,” airing in October of 1963. Just as the previous cases portray particular caricatures of deviance, namely “bookishness,” “selfishness,” and “misanthropy” respectively, so this episode focuses on “garrulousness,” much in keeping with Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus’ delineation of “The Garrulous.” The wonderfully illustrated Valpy edition translates the opening sentence as follows: Garrulity is an effusion of prolix and unpremeditated discourse. The garrulous man happening to sit beside one with whom he has no acquaintance begins by recounting the various excellences of his wife: then he says that last night he dreamed a dream, which he narrates at length; this leads him to mention, one by one, the dishes that were placed within his reach at supper. 68

The portrait continues from here, exemplifying the sort of inane drivel particular to this personality type. Serling’s version of this caricature is Patrick Thomas McNulty (Richard Erdman), a prattling business executive, described in the prologue as a “dull argumentative bigmouth.” 69 For inundating his employer’s suggestion box with ideas irrelevant to “ladies’ foundation garments,” the protagonist is summarily fired. 70 At his local bar, he chases everyone out with his insufferable chatter, with the exception of an elderly gentleman (Leon Belasco), who, in appreciation for a cold beer, bestows an heirloom upon McNulty in the form of a stopwatch. Also, just before leaving, the gentleman declares, “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”), seemingly in deference to the Great Seal of the United States, but actually as a means to celebrate a larger ideal of socialization. 71 McNulty soon discovers this ordinary stopwatch has the metaphysical power to “stop the world” while still allowing him to move freely within it. 72 A montage of freeze-framed archival footage ensues, with all sorts of mass activity halted with the clicking sound of the protagonist’s new toy. Failing to impress his former boss (Roy Roberts) or his secretary (Doris Singleton) with the idea of marketing such a device, McNulty eventually realizes he can readily earn people’s adulation via affluence, and so stops the world once more, to empty a bank vault. However, the stopwatch accidentally falls from the pile of currency and shatters, just like the spectacles of Henry Bemis, and the protagonist is thus consigned to solitude within an immobilized society. In this way, the Twilight Zone “reprimands” both his garrulousness and his exploitation of the stopwatch. This is to say, in the context of the series’ moral universe, neither the watch nor Bemis’ glasses can be understood as cascading to the hard ground accidentally. Rather, such an ironic turn mobilizes a critique of social deviance in both narratives, making them essentially equivalent. Of course, McNulty’s character is more ostensibly obnoxious, as if this paradigm had evolved to the point of parody, since audiences could

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very well miss the point otherwise (and do). In other words, juxtaposing the same narrative of failed socialization in these two episodes illustrates a hard distinction between sympathetic and unsympathetic protagonists, both nevertheless answerable for their “transgressive” behavior. Just as I include Twilight Zone episodes oriented around the legal system among a larger number of “political” entries, I should also consider narratives focusing on criminality, per se, within this latter collection of “socialization” entries. And such examples are really a mere extension of the antisocial behavior examined in the previous tetralogy. In other words, criminals, as such, are merely to be understood as extreme permutations of any given individual’s fundamental reluctance to assimilate into the community. Of course, the protagonists in such episodes are much easier to spot, and, by the same token, their metaphysical “comeuppance” is utterly predictable, as if to perpetuate the classical Hollywood legacy of censorship codes where no depicted lawbreaker goes unpunished. But, really, these criminals should be seen as more ideally incompatible with Serling’s/Rorty’s liberalist utopia. Their interests, like Bemis’, Marsha’s, Beechcroft’s, and McNulty’s, are similarly self-indulgent; however, they are simply more conscious and willing to advance at the expense of others, or, rather, to cause them harm. And so because McNulty is the only character among these four resorting to crime so as to legitimize his particular deviance, “A Kind of Stopwatch” is the better example from which to arrive at the handful of episodes whose protagonists are outright criminals. I am less inclined to investigate these latter entries in detail, since their moral dimension is relatively unsubtle, but I cover them briefly here. If Serling would seem less inclined to pursue such narratives, he certainly introduced the option with his early first-season teleplay “What You Need” (December 1959), about a protagonist the prologue describes as “a sour man, a friendless man, a lonely man, a grasping, compulsive, nervous man.” 73 After witnessing an old man’s ability to provide petty objects nonetheless pivotal in bettering a few individuals’ lives, Renard (Steve Cochran) exploits the man’s wares for personal profit. Finally, to escape Renard’s murderous wrath, the old man (Ernest Truex) bestows “slippery shoes” that cause the protagonist to slip in front of oncoming traffic and perish. 74 As another personification of the Twilight Zone, then, this latter character just as soon “punishes” deviants as “rewards” model citizens. Another would-be murderer is the protagonist of Serling’s second-season teleplay “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” (October 1960), about a hit man (Joe Mantell) compelled by a gangster (William D. Gordon) to kill a bar owner. This entry is a parable of redemption, however, since, akin to Archibald Beechcroft’s experience, the protagonist’s “reflection” in the mirror guides him toward the proper disposition of fortitude, and so, overcoming his adversary and escaping, he is allowed to rejoin the community. More deter-

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mined murderer-protagonists are all, of course, brought to a metaphysical form of “justice” in entries not written by Serling, such as Beaumont’s “A Nice Place to Visit” (April 1960), about a thug (Larry Blyden) believing himself to be in “heaven” instead of what is actually “hell”; and Montgomery Pittman’s Western teleplay “The Grave” (October 1961), about a bounty hunter (Lee Marvin) eventually answering for this violent trade. As long as a crime is committed, even the reluctant protagonist is duly punished, as in Adele T. Strassfield’s teleplay “Caesar and Me” (April 1964), about a ventriloquist (Jackie Cooper) whose dummy essentially railroads him into burglary. Of all these and similar murder-oriented entries, including “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” “Execution,” and “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” I see Serling’s “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” standing out in terms of socialization, since it allows a past killer to redeem himself and begin anew. This particular example is more in keeping with Rorty’s utopia, since it disallows violent exchanges of an “eye for an eye.” Clearly, socialization is among the more pervasive themes within The Twilight Zone’s aggregate critical agenda. For example, I discuss it earlier in terms of technological irony, namely episodes incorporating past, present, and future technologies (including synthetic objects) either responsible for compromising socialization or serving as a means to expose a given protagonist’s particular form of social deviance. Also, I discuss socialization in the subsequent chapter’s focus on domestic critique, especially in terms of deviations from appropriate child-rearing. In all these narrative contexts, a harmonious community akin to Rorty’s utopia is the implicit ideal. And although it is not possible for all individuals, the series’ moral universe accommodates those demonstrating a willingness to reassimilate into postwar American society, even if it falls short of utopian. Where any portrayed community falls short, a utopian system of governance is also implied—capable of reinforcing socialization, ultimately so as to protect its citizens from any/all forms of humiliation and cruelty. And just as so many Twilight Zone entries trace individual deviances from an idealized community of mutual tolerance and cooperation, many others examine political deviances from facilitating such a community in the first place. Any conformist, totalitarian state, for example, while appearing to congregate a populace toward a unified culture, only stifles individuality and free expression, not to mention ethnic and cultural diversity. And even the ideal legal system must temper justice with humanity, as a number of the series’ episodes seek to show. Through its ironic manipulations, The Twilight Zone corrects so many sociopolitical deviations from its utopian ideal, thereby encouraging an embrace of the latter alternative to postwar American society and politics. Of course, the moral dynamics between individual and community, as well as between community

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and state, also apply to the domestic context, and with ironic implications. I consider the series’ attention to these dynamics in the next chapter. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Feldman, Spaceships and Politics, 45. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 27. Booker, Monsters, 48. Ibid., 48–49. Sander, Serling, 110. Booker, Monsters, 63. Ibid. “Four O’Clock,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. “The Little People,” The Twilight Zone. “He’s Alive,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Mirror,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 258. “The Eye of the Beholder,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “The Obsolete Man,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Lonely,” The Twilight Zone. “Dust,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 112. “The Big Tall Wish,” The Twilight Zone.

156 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Chapter 6 Ibid. Ibid. “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Metress, “Submitted for Their Approval,” 167. Rorty, Contingency, xv. “The After Hours,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Mind and the Matter,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Theophrastus, The Characters of Theophrastus, 13. “A Kind of Stopwatch,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “What You Need,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid.

Chapter Seven

Domestic Irony

In the post–World War II cultural climate, with its many perceived external dangers, the American single-family home bore an unprecedented amount of pressure to provide sanctuary. As these domiciles became affordable for returning GIs, the rise of suburbia appeared to signal a new era of peace and stability—the most probable “reward” for halting the armies of fascism abroad, along with their imperialist ambitions, and also for liberating their subjugated masses, all in the name of “American” democracy. These new environments, both spacious and technically efficient, encouraged marriage and child-rearing as never before, and so the era’s “baby boom” also seemed to affirm prosperity and a collective fulfillment of the pursuit of happiness. Accordingly, all the trappings of complacency associated with suburban neighborhoods proliferated: broad treelined streets, manicured sidewalks and front lawns, trimmed hedgerows and flowers, and station wagons in driveways. On the inside, however, the suburban home became a locus of instability. Embattled couples divorcing more readily in previous eras felt obligated to stick together, and so forced their offspring to endure their acrimonies, according to the cultural expectations of postwar America as the bastion of capitalism and democratic life. And, of course, much of the tension upwelling within the home environment originated from so many cultural anxieties of the postwar years, which ranged from returning veterans’ post-traumatic stress disorder to fears of nuclear Armageddon, with corporate politics and consumerism in between. Women were no less under pressure to perform in their new function as custodians of the efficiently run household, equipped with so many modern appliances and products for optimal maintenance. But, as I argue in an earlier chapter, this promise of technologization only facilitated more tasks in less time rather than increasing any daytime leisure. The 157

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accumulation of all these forces within the home amounts to what I refer to as “domestic irony.” In other words, the presumption of suburban bliss encouraging the pursuit of the nuclear family leads, instead, to personal anguish. Jeffrey Sconce, whose understanding of “haunted media” informs my earlier chapter on technological irony, describes this American postwar zeitgeist in his own way as follows: As many historians have noted, the nuclear family emerged as the primary unit in American postwar society. In a coordinated effort to encourage commodity consumption, stimulate housing starts, and repopulate the nation, a variety of forces in postwar America coalesced to renew faith in family life and to reinvent its meanings in new mass-produced consumer suburbs. But this reorientation of American life was not without its consequences. In flight from the nation’s urban centers and severed from a whole nexus of earlier community relations, the nuclear families of white suburbia suddenly stood in self-imposed isolation as their own primary network of personal identity and social support. Within the increasingly isolated family, the middle-class mother became the abandoned keeper of the household. This shift in social identity from the community to the family restructured many Americans’ engagement with both the social world and the family circle, and provided each member of the family with a new social role to internalize and obey. 1

The “variety of forces” Sconce refers to is certainly deserving of its own book-length cultural study, beyond any focus on the media of the time. One such book is Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, first published in 1988, though since updated and still relevant. In her efforts to unpack the 1950s illusion of suburban bliss, May springboards from a 1959 Life magazine photograph of young newlyweds posing in front of their new home’s fallout shelter. According to May, “This is a powerful image of the nuclear family in the nuclear age: isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology.” 2 She goes on to characterize her approach as recognizing an “ideological duality,” along with its “fundamental irony,” in the underappreciated correspondence between suburban culture and Cold War politics. 3 May points out, for example, that “McCarthyism was directed at perceived internal dangers, not external enemies.” 4 Furthermore, she argues suburban culture was actually a response to the ideological conflation of urban culture and communism, in the pervading anticommunist rhetoric of the time. She concludes: Yet domesticity ultimately fostered the very tendencies it was intended to diffuse: materialism, consumerism, and bureaucratic conformity. This inherent tension defined the symbiotic connection between the culture of the cold war and the domestic revival. Rootless Americans struggled against what they perceived as internal decay. The family seemed to offer a psychological for-

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tress that would protect them against themselves. Bolstered by scientific expertise and wholesome abundance, it might ward off the hazards of the age. 5

May’s position also establishes a correspondence between “domestic irony” and my previous chapter’s discussion of “sociopolitical irony,” or the notion that the most threatening aspects of any foreign nation’s “opposite” political system can be found within our own society. She goes on to consider the implications of Vice President Richard Nixon’s 1959 visit to the Soviet Union, and his ensuing “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, affirming, “American superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home, complete with modern appliances and distinct gender roles for family members.” 6 And such an ideal could also be described, according to May, as “successful breadwinners supporting attractive homemakers in affluent suburban homes.” 7 Nevertheless, in developing my own notion of “domestic irony,” I would add to her claim that, rather than “warding off” any internal hazards, the would-be “psychological fortress” of suburban culture ultimately succumbed to its own forms of “internal decay.” In the next phase of coming to terms with suburbia’s false promise, both May and Sconce investigate the surrounding popular media, especially according to its role in manufacturing and/or reinforcing the illusions of domestic, marital, and filial contentment. May, for example, considers how the Academy Awards’ Best Picture of 1955, Marty, ratifies the wave of American migration from cities to suburbs. “By the film’s end,” according to May, “the audience has made the transition, along with the main character, from loyalty to the community of ethnic kinship to the suburban ideal of the emancipated nuclear family.” 8 Of course, this film’s production was motivated by the success of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1953 teleplay for Philco Television Playhouse, and, accordingly, I think it is more important to stress the influence of the new medium, especially since it effectively replaced the movie theater within the suburban context. Moreover, through its indefatigable accessibility, the television perpetuated illusions of domestic serenity within the domicile, and so could be watched or simply left on in the background, like its radio predecessor, while pursuing other activities. In his discussion of The Outer Limits, Sconce thus proceeds from the claim that, “throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, television developed a highly codified series of narrative conventions to represent this emerging suburban ideal, constructing a middle-class utopia of labor-saving appliances, manicured lawns, and spacious architecture, all designed to showcase the white suburban housewife as the ultimate symbol of material success and domestic bliss.” 9 Along these lines, M. Keith Booker emphasizes the particular impact of I Love Lucy, insisting it “became the model for the TV sitcom for years to come, though the genre already had a long history on radio. It was also of

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crucial importance to the direction of the television industry—in an era dominated by live programming, it was the first successful network series to be entirely filmed (in a fringe Hollywood studio), thus paving the way for such developments as reruns and syndication.” 10 Although I Love Lucy retains the former domestic context of the typical urban apartment building, its narrative “model” consists of a young newlywed couple perpetually overcoming the daily struggles of married life en route to eventual parenthood. The series’ tone is nothing if not optimistic, always promoting “forgiveness” in the oftridiculous consequences of Lucy’s foibles as a housewife, not to mention her merely whimsical attempts at transcending her domestic containment. According to the illusion of domestic bliss, moral order is inevitably restored as Lucy capitulates to her husband’s role as the breadwinner and her own as the homemaker and eventual mother. By the early 1960s, however, such a paradigm was ill-equipped to narrativize the increasing cultural disillusion with suburban domesticity. According to Sconce: Glorifying the virtues of the privatized family and bound more to narrative than social conventions, television’s domestic sitcom had no language with which to engage the potential mental disintegration of Mayfield, Springfield, and other well-scrubbed communities of televisionland. And though the fantastic sitcom often played on the temporary illusion of suburban schizophrenia (talking horses, Martian uncles, maternal automobiles, etc.), it was The Outer Limits that presented the most expansive textual space in which to expose and explore this suburban psychopathology. Often presented in tandem with the vacuum of space and the vast “electronic nowhere” of television was The Outer Limits’ equally terrifying portrait of a more claustrophobic “emotional nowhere.” In these domestic visions of oblivion, husbands and wives found themselves trapped, either metaphorically or quite literally, within the suffocating confines of the American home, often to the point of madness. 11

But before The Outer Limits, there was The Twilight Zone. The former’s twoseason run on ABC began in 1963, after the latter had already accumulated four seasons on CBS. And The Outer Limits’ restriction to science fiction narratives would hardly seem to offer “the most expansive textual space,” compared to its eclectic predecessor, whose metaphysical forces were less confined to rational contexts. I could propose Sconce’s observations apply equally well to The Twilight Zone, also treating this “suburban psychopathology” in a reasonable proportion of its episodes’ relative abundance. And it would certainly be productive to trace the earlier television anthology’s obvious influence on The Outer Limits, not to mention The Twilight Zone’s 1985 and 2002 series revivals— and countless other science fiction and fantasy productions appearing up to the present time. But this isn’t my purpose here. Instead, this chapter focuses

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on the series’ array of narrative contexts invoking domestic irony, or, in other words, mobilizing a critique of suburban domesticity, in terms of such general aspects as courtship, marriage, and child-rearing. Even in the most generalized context of destabilizing the nature of the home space itself, as in the Richard Matheson episode “Little Girl Lost,” wherein parents struggle to reclaim their daughter through her bedroom’s portal into an unfamiliar dimension, The Twilight Zone speaks amply to the symptomatic reevaluation of suburban ideologies promulgated by 1950s sitcoms and their advertisements. Similar to how the series’ space invader narratives systematically parodied the fear-inspired clichés of the flying-saucer 1950s, a number of its episodes overturn the illusion of domestic bliss, also as if to affirm American culture had since “matured” beyond its former naiveté. Some examples even appear, rather ironically, to celebrate the culture’s failure to achieve contentment in suburbia. In this sense, at least, these domestic narratives are unique in the series, that is, in their capacity to mock the television audience from within their homes. And especially when such cases incorporate television within the narrative itself, The Twilight Zone accomplishes its most immediate indictment of its own domestic audience. In this chapter, I consider this supreme permutation of domestic irony, along with its lesser invocations in the series. IRONY IN COURTSHIP According to the typical classical Hollywood narrative, a male protagonist finds himself courting a woman in the process of overcoming obstacles and achieving a goal. By the end of the film, their union underscores a notion of satisfaction in having completed the goal. If the courtship of a woman is itself the primary goal of the film, such a plot distinguishes “romance” from other genres. And, of course, there are endless variations and exceptions to this paradigm, swapping the male protagonist for a female and/or not allowing the courtship or the goal to find fruition. Less invariably, however, a moral universe strives to restore the best of all possible worlds, “rewarding” benevolence and “punishing” cruelty. In a television sitcom like I Love Lucy, it usually makes more sense to forego courtship and proceed from the premise of established marriage, however recent. After all, a series anticipating courtship is apt to become tedious if it forestalls consummation for too long. Instead, episodes of a 1950s sitcom temporarily obstruct marital harmony each week, and then restore it again by the end of each episode. In a featurelength film of the time, on the other hand, courtship is an ideal narrative trajectory toward whatever greater purpose is at stake. By the same token, the anthology series, with its perpetually independent contexts, would tend toward courtship as promising a more dramatic climax

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than simply reaffirming marital bonds. Or, as is the case with The Twilight Zone, if an established couple is pitted against each other, their separation or divorce is the more dramatic conclusion. And, according to the series’ agenda for social critique, the latter context is better suited to communicate a cautionary theme, that is, unless any depicted process of courtship culminates, instead, with a similarly opposite notion of failure. This is the central ironic theme to be gleaned from the several episodes involving courtship. Overturning the mythology of happy fruition so thoroughly cultivated and reinforced by the classical Hollywood narrative, The Twilight Zone exposes the exchange of illusions inherent in achieving a less-than-stable togetherness. Accordingly, its own moral universe restores itself through the identification and punishment of all those manufacturing and/or pursuing such illusions toward the false promise of postwar suburban matrimony. According to the evolution of The Twilight Zone, and its strategic use of irony, I shall proceed from what could seem a negative example, before I furnish the reader with a positive one. As it turns out, however, this particular courtship narrative conflates its critique of suburban domesticity with that of technologization, anticipating two more such cases in subsequent seasons. The first episode in the series examining courtship rituals is Serling’s seventh entry, “The Lonely” (November 1959), which I discuss earlier in terms of its technological irony. The second act of the narrative portrays a steady courtship between the exiled male protagonist, James A. Corry (Jack Warden), and his female robot companion, Alicia (Jean Marsh). Smiling at each other over a checkers game at one point, the couple eventually develop an affectionate bond. Their love is abruptly defused, however, when officials arrive to free Corry from his asteroid prison, “murdering” his new partner in the same stroke with a gun blast to the face. This scenario would be a more ostensible critique of courtship if the robot’s identity were revealed only after its destruction, and not beforehand. But, as it is, the narrative assumes a more romantic mode, with Corry’s ability to overcome his prejudices against the female android, after it has demonstrated its own ability to think, feel, and suffer as he does. Nevertheless, in its protagonist’s eventual denial of Alicia’s synthetic nature, the episode introduces into the series a general notion of courtship’s capacity for illusion, that is, the object of one’s affection in any courtship turning out to be something other than what was perceived. But, ultimately, I would say the momentum of technological irony accumulating through the series’ robot-oriented narratives overshadows this early entry’s domestic irony, even as we take Corry’s metal shack for a “love nest.” In other words, as long as the audience gravitates toward the larger implication of automatons’ presence in the series, the false promise of “technology” is more pronounced than that of “domesticity.” On its own, though, this episode is effectively polyvalent, amalgamating technological, sociopolitical, and domestic ironies within its critical agenda.

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A similar polyvalence, at least according to robot courtship, can be found in Charles Beaumont’s fourth-season episode “In His Image” (January 1963). Here, the scenario is reversed, since a male android has unknowingly assumed his timorous human inventor’s purpose in attracting a young woman. Atypically for the series, this episode’s human courtship is finally consummated, but only after the robot fulfills its function and is destroyed. And so a critique of technical overdependence eventually supersedes the narrative’s previous invocation of domestic irony. This is also the case with Bernard C. Schoenfeld’s “From Agnes—with Love” (February 1964), in which a socially awkward technician (Wally Cox) attempts to attract a woman (Sue Randall) according to the guidance of his “female” computer, which undermines his efforts, in turn, through its own affection for him. And beyond these two “mechanical Cyrano” narratives, one more example invoking technological irony proceeds from a fundamental pessimism toward courtship. Serling’s fifth-season teleplay “The Long Morrow” (January 1964), as I discuss earlier, portrays a passionate courtship between a young male astronaut (Robert Lansing) and a female colleague (Mariette Hartley). For her sake, he disconnects himself from the cryogenic technology designed to maintain his youthfulness, and so returns from his many years in space as an elderly man. Meanwhile, his love interest pursues the same technology in order to preserve her youth for him. Reuniting with decades between them, they are compelled to part ways. This tragically ironic outcome suggests the same notion of ultimate incompatibility, with a courtship facilitated, once again, through a future technology. In each of these cases, such technologies are the manifestations of The Twilight Zone’s cautionary moral universe. Instead of robots, computers, and other future technologies, The Twilight Zone’s many remaining false courtship narratives use metaphysical forces to mobilize their critique of suburban domesticity. And there are further subdivisions to be found within this latter group. Among these, for example, is a straightforward paradigm oriented around courtship, in which a male protagonist willfully pursues a metaphysical transformation in order to win the affections of a woman otherwise unavailable to him. Of course, such a transformation, or, rather, the ethical disposition behind it, is a “capital offense” within the series’ moral universe, and so by facilitating the metamorphosis, the Twilight Zone also condemns the character to eventual death. This ironic turn of events encourages a deeper recognition of courtship’s illusory nature, and, accordingly, “death” signifies the opposite of domestic bliss: the marital anguish of disillusion. Here, then, is one among several narrative paradigms for domestic irony. And each recurrent paradigm informs its specific cases, in turn, so that the critique reveals itself moreover in the accumulation of these narratives, within The Twilight Zone’s aggregate system. The first such episode is “The Four of Us Are Dying” (January 1960), a Serling adaptation of an unpublished story by George Clayton Johnson. On

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its surface, the narrative’s purpose is to depict the immoral caricature of “opportunism,” a man capable of changing his face into another’s at will, for selfish gain. However, nearly the first half of the episode is spent inside a nightclub, where the protagonist is able to “reclaim” a dead musician’s beautiful girlfriend by assuming the dead man’s facial features. Her promise to leave town with him motivates a need for hard cash, which, in turn, encourages him to assume the identity of a murdered gangster. Absconding with more than “his share” of the loot through his improbable knowledge of the caper, the protagonist barely escapes an intended hit by next claiming a visage from a boxing poster in a dark alley. Subsequently, the boxer’s father recognizes his “son” and guns him down for long since abandoning his family. And so, essentially, his false courtship initiates a chain of events culminating with his death. Nevertheless, this episode’s critique of domesticity, specifically in terms of courtship, becomes more apparent in the context of this paradigm’s reappearance later in the series. Coincidentally, Don Gordon, having played the doomed boxer, also reappears as the protagonist in a fifth-season narrative of false courtship, “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross” (January 1964). Focusing more decidedly on rituals of courtship, Jerry McNeely’s adaptation of a short story by Henry Slesar involves another opportunist possessing a similar talent for self-transformation. After making a futile attempt to impress Leah (Gail Kobe) with a brand-new convertible, the young Ross (Don Gorgon) discovers he can “swap” just about any human attribute, physical or moral. He then exploits simple economics in order to make himself prosperous, first selling his youth to an aging millionaire (Douglass Dumbrille) and then purchasing back his youth from various individuals, one year at a time. But even his acquisition of college-level diction proves insufficient, when he eventually learns his love interest has sought only “compassion” all along. Despite the almost immediate impact this final acquisition has on the enamored female, her formerly warmhearted father (Vaughn Taylor) guns down Ross in cold blood. In both these episodes, then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe facilitates a process of self-transformation leading eventually to execution. And because their dialogue reveals these protagonists are seeking female companionship for selfish reasons, it is more accurate to say the Twilight Zone “disapproves” of illegitimate courtship, precisely in terms of its projecting illusions toward illusory gains. Almost as if these were “bookend” episodes at their opposite points in the series, the narrative paradigm of false courtship appears in several more instances, with only slight variations. Anticipating Salvadore Ross’s metaphysical ability to recapture his youthfulness, the early Beaumont teleplay “Long Live Walter Jameson” (March 1960) depicts another opportunistic male, in this case unwillingly immortal. Currently a history professor, Jameson (Kevin McCarthy) pursues a young doctoral student, Susanna (Dody

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Heath), the daughter of his elder colleague and suburban neighbor, Samuel Kittridge (Edgar Stehli). Also anticipatory of Ross’ experience is the incorporation of a perspicacious father as an additional obstacle within the courtship process. In this case, however, the father’s disapproval becomes the sole obstacle, since Kittridge forces Jameson to confide his two-thousand-year history and the alchemical circumstances allowing him or, rather, forcing him to court an endless succession of women over the centuries. In his attempt to circumvent Kittridge and marry the eager Susanna, the protagonist hastens back to his own suburban home across the street, where a waiting exwife (Estelle Winwood) uses his desk revolver against him. Citing his pattern of “hurting people,” this elderly woman’s pronouncement of sentence implies a more general notion of false courtship, and so restores the series’ moral equilibrium just as pistol-wielding characters do in the previous cases. This particular form of deceit would find its counterpart in the fifthseason episode “Queen of the Nile” (March 1964), written by Jerry Sohl and Charles Beaumont (again). Embarking from a slightly greater degree of suburban affluence, the narrative reverses roles in its depiction of a female immortal, Pamela Morris (Ann Blyth), courted, instead, by a series of male suitors. Even what appears to be another disapproving parent (Celia Lovesky) makes an attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to spare the newly arriving victim, reporter Jordan Herrick (Lee Philips). The first half of this example’s duration portrays the movie star’s systematic living room, poolside, and dinner date seduction of the protagonist, despite the old woman’s inserted confession that she is actually the young woman’s “daughter.” Drugging Herrick, the alluring female eventually applies the secret of her agelessness, an Egyptian scarab, to his bare chest, a process culminating with a similar cinematic acceleration of age—into a pile of dust. And another young man’s arrival reaffirms the ironic cycle of male victimization here. Courtship takes on a more sinister aspect in this example, since the metaphysical forces behind eternal youth are dependent on maintaining a constant stream of murder victims. And since the gender roles are reversed here, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe negotiates false courtship, instead, by cautioning the “well-intending” male, rather than the “vulnerable” female. This latter “femme fatale” variation of the false courtship paradigm can also be found in Earl Hamner Jr.’s “Jess-Belle” (February 1963), in which a country girl (Anne Francis) employs witchcraft to seduce a local yokel (James Best), only to be shot down, in turn, after her midnight transformation into a predatory cat. Unlike the previous example’s portrayal of a reigning succubus, this narrative cautions the courting female instead, since this protagonist perishes as a result of her metaphysical aggressiveness. Another “femme fatale” episode, atypically swapping the Zone’s metaphysical forces for a purely psychological premise and outcome, is Beaumont’s “Perchance to Dream” (November 1959). Anticipating Jess-Belle’s witchery by three

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seasons, this early entry portrays a man (Richard Conte) haunted by nightmares of “Maya the Cat Girl” (Suzanne Lord), seemingly bent on provoking his heart condition. As in the previous two examples, Maya is a sexually charged, catlike female with pitch-black hair, all decidedly hyperbolic of the postwar independent woman, preferably to be “tamed” by housework within the suburban domicile. I could also include among this group of episodes Robert Presnell Jr.’s adaptation of John Collier’s “The Chaser” (May 1960), about a courting man, Roger Schackleforth (George Grizzard again), whose desperate use of a potion on his love interest, Leila (Patricia Barry), makes her insufferably sycophantic in turn; as well as Montgomery Pittman’s “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” (February 1962), about a country bumpkin (James Best again) returning from the dead to apply newfound powers to the dubious courtship of his sweetheart, Comfort (Sherry Jackson). These narratives also involve male protagonists employing metaphysical means to attract a female, in order to expose the immoral aspects of heterosexual courtship and its unstable consequences in 1950s suburban culture. Instead, I want to consider in detail one more example of The Twilight Zone’s false courtship paradigm, Matheson’s fifth-season entry “Spur of the Moment” (February 1964). The episode’s title refers to the female protagonist’s ability to comingle her younger and older selves, on horseback, in their respective time periods. This metaphysical dichotomy is reinforced through “opposite” visual characteristics, with the teenage woman (Diana Hyland) wearing white clothes, atop a white horse, while the middle-aged woman (also Diana Hyland) dons a black shawl, atop a black horse. Managing to outrun her pursuer, the younger Anne Henderson arrives back at her parents’ sumptuous country estate in a panic. Robert Blake (Robert Hogan), a young investment broker, tries to lighten the mood by suggesting the dark-clad woman was “fate” attempting to dissuade her from marrying him. 12 Instead of her “screaming” pursuer, however, another male suitor, David Mitchell (Roger Davis), barges in and demands conference with Anne. At this point, the narrative’s focus on courtship situates itself within the more specific cultural context of “parental influence,” similarly probed in “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross.” Instead of encouraging his daughter to speak for herself, Anne’s father (Philip Ober) insists on the rival’s immediate departure. Pointing out that Anne’s father forced her into the new engagement, the young man begs her to reconsider, based on their having loved each other as kids. Almost as if to echo Ross’ destiny, Mr. Henderson forces David to leave at gunpoint. The episode’s second half, in turn, reveals the domestic environment of the older Anne arriving back into a disheveled interior, after she fails to stop her younger self. The now-weathered Anne complains to her ailing mother of having been “squeezed to death with a velvet glove” as a child or, rather,

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never acquiring any “judgment” or “discrimination” of her own. 13 Also, she has taken to drinking hard liquor as a coping mechanism for her domestic existence. The bedraggled Anne admits her fiancé’s joke about “fate” was true, and that she has since found herself chasing her younger self in an attempt to warn her against marrying the wrong man. In a bold ironic twist, the “wrong man” turns out to be David, her childhood sweetheart, having since become a wasted alcoholic. Riding out with a refreshed sense of bitterness about her pivotal misjudgment, the macabre character encounters her younger self on horseback once again. Perpetually, then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe consigns this disillusioned protagonist to an equestrian hindsight. A similar vicious cycle of fatalistic courtship can be found in Anthony Wilson’s subsequent fifth-season entry, “Come Wander with Me” (May 1964), about a hit-craving rockabilly artist (Gary Crosby) having to reexperience his own opportunistic seduction of a singing country girl (Bonnie Beecher) and his encounter with her avenging brothers again and again. The implied critique of the former entry’s courtship circumstances, however, is far more complex than a mere indictment of selfish opportunism. First, overturning the clichéd Hollywood myth of marrying for true love instead of money and security, “Spur of the Moment” revises popularly accepted wisdom, that is, pragmatism ought to legitimize matrimony instead of emotion. Accordingly, rather than an exchange of affectionate intentions, courtship ought to resemble a business negotiation for domestic longevity. The narrative also suggests parents are in a better position to make pragmatic choices for their debutantes, but, at the same time, they mustn’t force such choices on their children, lest they risk incurring their impulsive defiance. And, according to Anne’s embittered reflections, parents should cultivate independence in their children instead of sheltering and/or spoiling them, especially in the case of their vulnerable daughters. In other words, if Anne had been able to make sound judgments about her future, she would have readily supported her father’s “professionally responsible” choice of the investment broker for her husband, just as she would have respected her father’s firm resistance toward David. Finally, this particular example shamelessly exposes the greatest manifestation of marital futility in postwar culture: alcoholism. Where prescription and recreational drugs were far less available to Americans, alcohol was the tranquilizer of choice, and so was characteristic of the suburban “cocktail generation” of the 1950s. Of course, since no one in the narrative would be in a position to anticipate David’s alcoholism, the implication is merely that a young couple’s passion, its profundity notwithstanding, cannot guarantee their future stability. Even if the broker could just as soon have become an alcoholic, his implied income would have maintained financial security, and then Anne’s materialistic mother, at least, would less likely have to endure losing their ranch estate.

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All told, Matheson’s teleplay pushes The Twilight Zone’s ironic narrative strategy toward its greatest potential for social critique, by turning the sitcom-promulgated myth of domestic bliss on its head. Instead, the episode implies there may be no real means of ensuring extended harmony within the marital contract. If such a bitterly ironic pill was too hard for television audiences of the time to swallow, a more palatable theme remains available nonetheless—that courtship must temper physical attraction with a discrimination of character. Rather than exposing the illusory nature of courtship, the next group of narratives embarks from its consequences: the questionable status of matrimony. IRONY IN MARRIAGE There are a number of Twilight Zone narratives invoking irony specifically through marital dynamics; however, it makes more sense to commence with a slightly more fundamental paradigm of male alienation in domestic contexts. Such episodes focus less on spousal relationships and their attendant struggles, and, instead, devote themselves to an exclusively male existential crisis in postwar suburbia. Their masculine bias is inevitably a concession to the vast psychological reorientation of returning World War II veterans into everyday life. Of course, the series’ more pervasive treatment of individual alienation in postwar American society, as Booker argues, also informs these cases. But what Booker describes as “an ontological confusion between dreams and reality,” along with his theme of “routinization,” applies vaguely enough to so many episodes that, in my estimation, these descriptions tend to smear the polyvalent aspect of The Twilight Zone’s critical agenda. 14 For example, the experience of alienation is explored ostensibly in Serling’s teleplay “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” about a ballerina, a soldier, a clown, a tramp, and a bagpipe player, all struggling to escape from their giant cylindrical chamber toward an imagined purpose. But their revealed identity as “dolls” remains too thematically abstract to apply to any specific context beyond a rather generalized notion of human “society.” On the other hand, when a sense of alienation derives specifically from a domestic context, the implied correspondence cannot be overlooked, especially when such cases reappear in the series, thus becoming paradigmatic. Typically, then, a male protagonist abruptly discovers himself estranged from the home environment. This psychological experience can work both ways, as those within this environment may also feel estranged from him. This would suggest that some form of transformation, most akin to posttraumatic stress disorder, has occurred from which the male must somehow recuperate. As such a predicament conforms to the experience of the returning GI, the character is portrayed as innocent of any moral transgression

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normally punishable within The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. Instead, this narrative paradigm restores moral equilibrium by simply reorienting this individual, one way or the other. Or, if not, then such a variation is less optimistic of the chances for psychological recovery. According to this domestic narrative paradigm, I identify a primary trilogy of Twilight Zone episodes, with an additional number of variations to be found. The first of these, Matheson’s first-season episode “A World of Difference” (March 1960), portrays a male protagonist, Arthur Curtis (Howard Duff), struggling to reclaim his comparatively harmonious identity as a movie character. In the opening scene, Curtis arrives to his office, mentioning plans to his secretary (Gail Kobe) for both his daughter’s birthday party and a vacation with his wife to San Francisco. Furnishing this rather halcyon impression of the protagonist’s domestic life, the narrative suddenly reveals all this is just a studio film set, with the director and crew standing by. In this latter “real” world, he discovers he is “Gerry,” an alcoholic actor with a malicious wife bent on divorce. He attempts to return to his former suburban domicile, but his would-be daughter recoils from his embrace. Driving him to another home in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the “harpy” (Eileen Ryan) continues to hound him for money. In an attempt to persuade him of his delusion, his agent (David White) reads from the shooting script of his fictional universe that describes Curtis’ wife, Marion, as “a charming young woman, typical of that efficient breed which can manage a house and family and still have ample . . .” 15 Such a description characterizes the 1950s ideal for the American housewife, implying before the agent is cut off that such a female is able to enjoy the “time-saving” promise of domestic appliances and products. Making another attempt to recapture this fantasy world of domestic bliss, the protagonist races back to the studio lot, and is finally able to rejoin his ever-affectionate wife (Susan Dorn). Because the narrative then returns once again to the world of the film set from which Curtis has since vanished, the episode moreover implies an “escape” from reality, rather than a return to it. And, really, this would appear to be an escape from the cultural disillusion of a new decade, back into the media-manufactured mythology of the previous one. By juxtaposing these two worlds, then, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe exposes the false promise of 1950s suburbia. Although the narrative would appear to maintain its male protagonist’s former self, his fictional film-set universe is ultimately “shut down.” Only the episode’s closing shot of a departing passenger plane would retain some ambiguity here. The second of this trilogy of episodes is Beaumont’s third-season entry “Person or Persons Unknown” (March 1962), involving another unfortunate male protagonist, this time thoroughly unrecognized in his suburban environment. Already complaining of his wife’s failure to remove his clothes and shoes, David Gurney (Richard Long) awakes with a hangover in the aftermath of a cocktail party, akin to the married couple in the fifth-season epi-

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sode “Stopover in a Quiet Town.” A stranger to his wife, Wilma (Shirley Ballard), Gurney storms out of the house, though not before citing her failure to make his breakfast, according to her domestic function. The narrative builds its dramatic momentum with Gurney’s failure to persuade his familiars or anyone else of his identity, until he finds himself awaking in bed again from what had been a nightmare. In a clever ironic twist, the protagonist’s wife (Julie van Zandt), reproaching him for having mixed “scotch and martinis” the night before, is now a stranger to him. 16 As in the previous example, alcohol is positioned as the “rational” culprit for male delusional behavior, affirming its familiar presence in both private and social suburban contexts of the time. However, in this case, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe continues to punish this protagonist so as to imply some form of guilt apparently less applicable to the previous character. As long as we take postwar male alienation as the paradigmatic premise for these episodes, this latter case more readily condemns the abuse of hard liquor as the preferred coping mechanism of the 1950s, especially according to an implied “recklessness” in mixing two of its most coveted permutations. Appearing to have taken an example from Matheson and Beaumont, rather than the other way around, Serling’s fourth-season teleplay “The Parallel” (March 1963) portrays another male protagonist estranged from his suburban environment. This third example from the aforesaid trilogy, however, swaps metaphysical forces for a science fiction context, with the experience of alienation explained through projected consequences of space travel. After experiencing a blackout in his Earth-orbiting space capsule, Major Robert Gaines (Steve Forrest) reawakens to find himself in what he eventually concludes is a “parallel” world, with people, places, and circumstances altered only slightly. Most of this episode devotes its hour format to speculations about the astronaut’s probable delusion, eventually contradicted by his reappearance in the orbiting space capsule and a confirmed space transmission from his parallel identity, a “Colonel Gaines.” Like Serling’s premiere episode, “Where Is Everybody?” a rational explanation for an astronaut’s traumatic experience becomes cautionary for the imminent future of technology, especially with respect to the space race and its potential to do more harm than good. But within its invocation of technological irony, the narrative also spends much of its duration within this astronaut’s suburban home, where his wife and daughter find themselves inexplicably estranged from him. So, according to its incorporated paradigm of domestic alienation, the critique of postwar suburbia is subsumed within a surrounding critique of Cold War technologization. And since there is no reckless behavior, per se, to punish here, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe restores domestic serenity to this protagonist. More than the previous examples, this episode also implies its male character’s post-traumatic “return” from the war overseas, by way of returning its military personnel, instead, from outer space.

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Instead of the previous trilogy’s connotation of post-traumatic stress disorder, another trilogy of Twilight Zone episodes concerning male alienation exposes another hindrance to marital harmony—that of arrested development. The latter psychological condition in these male protagonists is less an implied consequence of wartime experiences than of inappropriate childrearing, namely as a result of doting maternal influence. And according to this particular “momma’s boy” narrative, the absence of any father figure would seem to encourage the mother character’s excessively coddling behavior toward her son. Invariably in these examples, the protagonist retreats from marriage and its attendant responsibilities toward his own boyhood “Twilight Zone,” though with variable results. Again, Matheson sets the pattern for these entries, with his third-season teleplay “Young Man’s Fancy” (May 1962), about a newlywed husband returning with his bride to his childhood home one last time and, in turn, finding himself unable to grow up and out of his past. Inside the narrative’s suburban domicile, Serling introduces the protagonist, Alex Walker (Alex Nicol), as “the perennial bachelor,” thus already affirming the latter’s resistance toward matrimony. 17 After the couple enters the house, Alex becomes immediately nostalgic, reminiscing about his mother’s proclivities, despite his new bride’s eagerness to sell the house and commence with their honeymoon. Still, no reference whatsoever is made to the protagonist’s father, suggesting his absence during Alex’s upbringing. Nevertheless, upon expressing her convictions to a framed photograph of his mother, Alex’s wife, Virginia (Phyllis Thaxter), initiates a series of hallucinations. At one point, for example, she sees an antiquated telephone in lieu of the regular phone the real estate agent uses to call his office. According to his new resolve to keep the house, Alex reveals that his father left when he was only an infant, obligating him, in turn, to preserve his mother’s memory. When his wife finally encounters Alex’s mother reincarnated at the top of the stairs, she insists her “love will make him strong, not weak, not dependent.” 18 But this is to no avail, as Alex begs his mother (Helen Brown) to return to him. As a little boy again, the protagonist (Ricky Kelman) orders his former wife to leave, and she hastens frantically out the front door. Because the antique household objects remain in her wake, the narrative ironically affirms a metaphysical transformation beyond what had seemed merely the woman’s neurosis. In this way, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe indulges its male protagonist’s arrested development, as if it were compensation for his neurotic bride. Although Virginia’s condemnation of the mother literalizes a critique of maternal coddling, Alex’s successful reversion into boyhood would appear punitive toward his wife’s disposition. And so this episode, at least, allows both parties to assume responsibility toward a larger notion of marital futility.

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Because the second and third examples conforming to this “arrested development” paradigm are hour-long episodes from the fourth season, they can afford to devote more attention to the family dynamics involved in this particular process of male alienation. The first of these is Beaumont’s teleplay “Miniature” (February 1963), about a young man, Charley Parkes (Robert Duvall), apparently incapable of socialization, though having the ability nonetheless to observe the lonely existence of a beautiful woman (Claire Griswold) inside a local museum’s Victorian-era dollhouse. Letting him go from this office job for being “a square peg,” his employer (Barney Phillips) questions his continued cohabitation with his mother. 19 As in Matheson’s narrative, the protagonist defends his dedication to his mother, saying “she needs me” and that his father “died some time ago.” 20 At home, his exasperated mother (Pert Kelton) second-guesses her child-rearing methods, wondering if she ought to have let Charley’s father punish him “the way he wanted to.” 21 When she insists on his taking a nap and attempts to remove his shoes for him, however, it becomes clear she has coddled her son to death. And in a subsequent breakfast-table scene, his mother even insists, “I’m not one of those mothers who try to keep their children with them all the time,” although her daughter’s avoidance confirms otherwise. 22 Despite his sister’s efforts to facilitate his marital and professional future, the protagonist persists in his repeated visits to the museum, even after he is forced to endure psychotherapy for his apparent delusions. Compared to the woman (Joan Chambers) Charley is set up on a date with, displaying an aggressiveness similar to Walker’s short-lived bride in the previous episode, his childlike impression of the dollhouse woman is much to be preferred. And so, conceding his innocence in the maternal influence at work upon him, the series’ moral universe allows him finally to enter the dollhouse and pursue a much gentler courtship, witnessed, in turn, by the museum guard (John McLiam). Completing this trilogy, although diverging slightly, Reginald Rose’s teleplay “The Incredible World of Horace Ford” (April 1963) portrays the most arrested of these male protagonists, an immature toy designer incorrigibly nostalgic for his boyhood neighborhood on Randolph Street. After being pressed by his boss for a more sensible robot-toy design, Horace (Pat Hingle) arrives home with his wife, Laura (Nan Martin), to a similarly doting mother (Ruth White). And, again, it is obvious enough his father has long since vanished from the household. Unlike the previous cases, a marriage is preestablished and seems stable enough, although it is also apparent that Horace’s wife, a nurse, merely echoes his mother’s coddling inclinations. This adjustment to the narrative paradigm relieves the mother character of some responsibility, and makes the male protagonist more culpable in turn. Not to be dissuaded by either of them, Horace returns repeatedly to Randolph Street and encounters the same pack of boys he had remembered so fondly. His defiant behavior at the office eventually gets him fired, and his mother,

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as in the previous example, wonders where she “went wrong,” wiping her tears with her requisite apron. 23 Nevertheless, with each visit to his old neighborhood, Horace advances further along a given sequence of events, finally becoming his childhood self again. After being beaten up by the hooligans he had remembered otherwise, Horace recovers from his obsession with the past. In this latter case, then, instead of compensating the protagonist for his arrested development, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, as the Randolph Street “zone,” guides this character back to his functional, adult existence as a married man with responsibilities. Nevertheless, in each of these three cases, the ironic encroachment of metaphysical forces chastises responsible parties for the alienation characteristic of the adult momma’s boy, whose absent father was, by connotation, killed in World War II, compelling his mother to coddle and depend on him. As with the previous alienation trilogy, Serling would seem inclined to make his own contribution to the “momma’s boy” paradigm, especially in terms of its third example’s punitive aspect, with his fifth-season teleplay “Sounds and Silences” (April 1964). Adding a touch of parody to the same premise of a dependent mother figure, this episode portrays a model-ship maker, Roswell G. Flemington (John McGiver), described by his divorcing wife (Penny Singleton) as “an overgrown sailor boy.” 24 Because he obliges his wife and other familiars to suffer the everyday cacophony of his selfmade nautical universe, the Twilight Zone responds in kind by varying the sensitivity of his hearing in both directions, toward his eventual insanity. Atypically, then, this example’s “poetic justice,” as Serling’s epilogue describes it, remains purely psychological. 25 Nevertheless, if I allow this episode to complete a tetralogy instead, I would position the tetralogy’s latter pair of narratives as obligating a married man to answer for his narcissism, regardless of maternal influence. In this latter sense, at least, the series’ moral universe makes the individual responsible for his raucous or otherwise inappropriate behavior toward others, more in accordance with the expectations of Richard Rorty’s utopian society. According to this notion of marital transgression, I could then pivot back to the previous season’s “The New Exhibit” (April 1963). Another Beaumont entry, this episode depicts one more male protagonist, Martin Senescu (Martin Balsam), whose obsessions also prove capable of disrupting domestic harmony. After this museum curator insists on tending a closing wax museum’s figures from “Murderers’ Row,” he is forced to defend his actions, claiming to his wife, Emma (Maggie Mahoney), “I’m not the only husband in the world who brings his work home.” 26 This statement is the key to the episode’s intended critique, since his obsession with the wax figures determines his professional competence as curator, at least at the work site. At home, however, he confines himself to the basement with his murderers, each, in turn, killing Senescu’s familiars and eventually the protagonist him-

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self. Absent here is the maternal influence or, for that matter, any preestablished motivation for the protagonist’s obsessive behavior, save for a hint of “murderous” complicity in his sealing over the victims with cement in his basement. In accordance with The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, the wax figures tell him he is the real murderer, just before they close in on him. This is to affirm his responsibility in disrupting marital harmony, a crime for which these Twilight Zone “agents” execute him faithfully. And so, even if the critique of arrested development is missing here, this narrative’s ironic circumstances expose a fundamental tension in attempting to conflate professional and domestic environments. Emerging from the series’ greater ironic system, yet another thematic trilogy of Twilight Zone episodes oriented around marriage condemns another inappropriate behavior—spousal infidelity. According to the suburban delegation of gender roles in the 1950s, these examples, again, position their adulterers as male. Within the series’ moral universe, however, a husband’s guilt may be tempered with due consideration of any potential enablement on the part of his wife. This is certainly the case in Matheson’s first-season teleplay “A World of His Own” (July 1960), which I discuss at length earlier in this study. Because this married man (Keenan Wynn) atypically works from home, he is in a better position to enjoy the presence of the ideal suburban housewife (Mary La Roche), whose quotidian duties would, in this case, include bestowing affection on her husband. With her blonde hair, informal garb, and warm smile, this invented female is pitted against her “urban” antithesis (Phyllis Kirk), another black-haired femme fatale coupling her high-fashion regalia with a haughty demeanor. The latter caricature is admittedly “perfect,” but only toward an abstract notion of self-sufficiency, incompatible with the domestic ecosystem. As a living experiment, then, she would seem to have been conjured merely to affirm the myth of domestic marital bliss, against its opposite myth of the unmarried, professional female. Because the husband conjures the former woman while the undesirable latter, his wife, is out, he is technically adulterous. However, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe exculpates this particular transgressor, according to his ability to simply “un-create” his spouse and replace her with the appropriate ideal. The thematic implication, of course, is that the righteous independence of his former spousal ideal drove him to cheat. And so, in this example at least, marital infidelity goes unpunished, specifically in order to reaffirm the sexist fantasy of 1950s domesticity and female subservience. But such an extreme degree of cultural naiveté is ultimately to be understood as an aspect of the episode’s underlying ironic tone, corroborated at last with Serling’s uniquely satirical epilogue. Nevertheless, the remaining two cases in the series’ critique of marital infidelity are decidedly more scornful of the male adulterer, even if he isn’t the principal character. The first of these is less a study of adultery, per se,

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than a more generalized exposition of people’s hidden agendas, both actual and whimsical. George Clayton Johnson’s second-season entry “A Penny for Your Thoughts” (February 1961) portrays a shy bank employee (Dick York) suddenly acquiring the ability to hear the inner thoughts of anyone in his immediate proximity. Unwillingly imbued with this new intuition, he eventually learns of his married employer’s plans for an adulterous getaway with a certain “Felicia.” The protagonist, in turn, uses this knowledge in order to reclaim his job, after falsely implicating an elderly accountant (Cyril Delevanti), whose intention to rob the vault is merely fantasy. Ultimately, the offending party (Dan Tobin) in the narrative is not the protagonist himself. Rather, the latter’s somewhat “guided” courtship of a sympathetic coworker (June Dayton) associates the narrative more readily with the previous paradigm. Thus, I see this episode’s implied disapproval of adultery as ancillary to its overall agenda. Still, in the series’ greater avoidance of this sensitive topic, Johnson’s teleplay shouldn’t be overlooked. In its closer depiction of marital dynamics gone afoul, this would-be trilogy’s third case is more darkly satirical than the others, and so its irony mobilizes the most pronounced critique of the three. This is Martin Goldsmith’s fifth-season teleplay “What’s in the Box” (March 1964), about a New York cab driver, Joe Britt (William Demarest), whose infidelities are exposed on his “haunted” television set, also seemingly capable of “premeditating” spousal abuse and eventual uxoricide. I mention this episode previously in the context of “haunted technologies,” since its moral universe imbues a television set with the metaphysical ability to portray the male protagonist’s guilty conscience for him on-screen. Such an ironic premise confers a general critique of technological overdependence, especially in the domestic context, as yet another manifestation of “appliance reliance.” But because the television set, unlike a refrigerator, oven, or stove, is an appliance invented moreover for the transmission of information, its metaphysical embellishment implies a more specific critique of its manipulative function, namely in provoking consumerism. And because this Twilight Zone episode is a televised narrative incorporating a critique of television as a medium, the entry becomes atypically self-reflexive or, in other words, fundamentally ironic in its tone. As such, this example is also noteworthy for its thematic polyvalence, combining its critique of marital instability with that of television culture, or, rather, domestic irony with technological irony. Just after an opening shot of a repairman (Sterling Holloway) working behind a dysfunctional television set, an argument ensues between the cantankerous protagonist and his defiant, apron-clad wife, Phyllis (Joan Blondell). The latter protests her husband’s abject disapproval of her cooking, pointing out his chronic lateness. Britt, in turn, inadvertently exposes his infidelity by stuttering his alibi of having to drive “all the way up to, to . . . to Yonkers.” 27 And so his wife

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responds, “Who’s the chick?” 28 Next is a rehash of the first scene from Serling’s second-season episode “A Thing about Machines” (October 1960), wherein the protagonist accuses the repairman of corruption. As before, this sort of inappropriate behavior positions this character as a larger “enemy” to the community. Anticipating his own agency in the metaphysical forces to come, the latter “good citizen” responds by declaring the television set “fixed” and then departs. As he exits, however, the breezy repairman addresses the audience with the proverbial phrase: “You can’t win ’em all.” 29 In the context of the series’ moral universe, his statement becomes a simple affirmation of human imperfection, not in terms of his own limitations as a technician but, rather, in terms of his client’s character flaws. Both his revealed infidelity and his redirected aggressions toward an innocent repairman, then, constitute grounds for the protagonist’s punishment, as his television set commences with images of his mistress inside his taxicab. Then, in his prologue, Serling’s relatively bemused demeanor corroborates the episode’s inclination toward black comedy, already indicated by the repairman’s noticeably burlesque characterization. On television again with his mistress, Britt denounces matrimony as “a floor mop and two pounds of hamburger.” 30 Forcing his wife back into the kitchen, the protagonist then attempts to find his tag-team wrestling match, which, instead, is a satirical bout between “The Wild Panther” and “The Russian Duke.” Disappointed and reluctantly piqued, Britt returns to channel ten, where he now witnesses the narrative’s earlier kitchen scene for himself. His fainting prompts his wife’s reappearance in the den, simultaneous with the television’s static in the background. Without the repairman’s implied agency, this would suggest, as in other “psychological” examples, that his television appearances are merely his private hallucinations. In any case, the haunted broadcast shifts from recent and past events to actions that have not occurred yet. Britt now observes a portrayal of domestic violence in which he and his wife wield household objects against each other, and the former finally sends the latter crashing through their high-rise apartment’s window to her death. A subsequent doctor’s visit literalizes the critique of technology when the doctor claims: I feel that your husband’s condition could be relatively simple. I read an interesting paper on research that might apply to your husband’s condition. . . . According to this article, it’s possible for anyone to have delusions directly attributable to our over-mechanized culture. Now, you say he’s a TV addict. . . . Perhaps he’s been staring at this electronic blessing the television set for so long that its life has become his. And he’s reached such a state of confusion that he no longer knows whether he’s watching the action or is participating in it. Now, mind you, this is not an illness affecting only the juvenile or moronic. I, on occasion, have found myself asking for sutures and sponges during operations performed by television surgeons. 31

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According to this example’s self-reflexive context, this “professional” opinion is equally directed at television audiences of the time, as if to sabotage the medium itself hereby. This is precisely the sort of ironic stance Booker attributes to postmodernism, although I prefer to place this episode’s “Menippean” mode among a more complex palette of narrative options, including circumstances becoming ironic outside of metaphysical means. Nevertheless, this example persists with its parody of television content, portraying a characteristic advertisement with “Old Country Boy” the used-car salesman. Now bedridden, Britt admits guilt and professes his love for his wife, who, in turn, is provoked into anger again, promising to take him and his “floozy” to court. Hearing his murder trial on television, he is beckoned back into the living room, where his wife mocks him for what she only perceives as static. Seeing himself strapped into the electric chair, combined with his wife taunting, “Yonkers, Yonkers, Yonkers,” finally spurs him into a murderous frenzy, and the television’s former death match becomes the couples’ present reality. 32 When the police arrive, with them somewhat improbably is the television repairman, checking up on his services and smirking into the camera once again. As a brutally satirical black comedy, then, this episode cautions its television audience of its own addictions, while simultaneously warning of spousal disillusionment, especially after an accumulation of domestic decades. In order to cope with his disillusionment, this entry’s male protagonist seeks out television while at home in the evening, and an extramarital affair while at work during the day. And so by combining both into a unified “experience” for him and prime-time viewers alike, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, in this case, is able to transcend “what’s in the box” and radiate outward into our own living rooms. Focusing on male alienation, arrested development, and infidelity, these marriage-oriented Twilight Zone “trilogies” and/or episodes are less to do with women and children. Two cases in the first group include a daughter in the domestic setting, but this is a supporting character whose inability to recognize her father serves merely to emphasize his own alienation. Within the latter two groups of entries, however, the depicted couples are completely childless. And if any female character in these cases is at all to blame for her husband’s misconduct, he is positioned as the protagonist nonetheless, responsible for driving the narrative toward its moral resolution. One more such example is Serling’s fifth-season teleplay “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain” (December 1963), about an elderly male, Harmon Gordon (Patrick O’Neal), enduring an insensitive trophy wife, Flora (Ruta Lee), forty years his younger, who insatiably craves stimulation far beyond his withered status. Compelling his brother Raymond (Walter Brooke) to administer a youth serum, Gordon dazzles his wife with his recaptured youth. Ironically, however, the protagonist’s metamorphosis only subsides at the point of his babyhood, forcing Flora to suppress her selfish inclinations and assume the

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role of a single mother instead. Although this episode would appear to make the narcissistic female more culpable for the couple’s incompatibility, her doting husband confesses his disposition to his brother, making him complicit in their fate. Accordingly, the series’ moral universe punishes both parties, since neither is ultimately able to take any gratification from their marital contract. This case would be the closest to an exception among these narratives of domesticity waxing unharmonious, but, really, it retains the essential paradigm of an adult American male negotiating the false promise of domestic and/or suburban bliss in the postwar era. In the next group of episodes, however, narrative emphasis shifts decidedly to children, according to either their experience or their parents’ experience of them. IRONY IN THE FAMILY As I attempt to show in identifying the aforementioned narrative patterns in the series, The Twilight Zone devotes much attention to the 1950s suburban myth of domestic bliss. According to this cultural myth, the marriage contract confers a process of existential fulfillment through heterosexual coupling. And so, in the previous section, I consider the many Twilight Zone episodes specifically calling these media-driven expectations into question and/or exposing this myth’s illusory nature. But the myth of suburbia also portrays the nuclear family as the next stage in the process of fulfillment, and so the marriage contract also confers an officially sanctioned inducement toward child-rearing. And, again, with the abrupt affordability of suburban homes in the immediate postwar years, this ideal seemed closer to reality than ever before in America. And so matrimony, suburbia, and the “baby boom” proliferated across the 1950s, and continued into the 1960s. However, the culmination of the series’ aggregate ironic system for social critique in the new decade affirms a degenerative cultural turn away from mythmaking. Of course, the continued presence of domestic sitcoms, such as Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons, perpetuated illusions of the everchallenged though inevitably harmonious nuclear family. But opposed to these everyday suburban scenarios, The Twilight Zone’s science fiction and supernatural contexts encourage a far more realistic examination of the nuclear family and its attendant problems, since its critique is couched within mostly farfetched narrative parameters. Ironically, then, the realistic quotidian contexts of these and other postwar American sitcoms maintain the former illusions of familial harmony, whereas The Twilight Zone’s unreal narrative contexts more readily communicate the uncomfortable realities of familial strife. And the latter television series’ invocation of domestic irony includes a more realistic account of children and their embroilment in the increasing dissolution of the nuclear family ideal. Such episodes offer sym-

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pathetic portrayals of children as the moral “victims” of less than appropriate, but sufficiently probable, circumstances of child-rearing. However, there are a couple of notable exceptions, positioning parents as the victims of their own children instead. I look at both scenarios. A single Twilight Zone episode among this group of child-centered narratives deals directly with the greatest concession of domestic failure—divorce. Divorce encroaches often enough in previous cases where no children are present, but the prospect of a married couple parting ways takes on a much greater complexity when the proper upbringing of young offspring is also at stake. Earl Hamner Jr.’s fifth-season teleplay “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” airing in June of 1964 as the final entry in the series, dares a depiction of a mutually disillusioned, divorcing couple, whose two dejected children find sanctuary through a portal at the bottom of the family’s characteristically suburban swimming pool. According to Marc Scott Zicree’s research, Hamner took his inspiration from the abundance of swimming pools in the San Fernando Valley, combined with California’s “startling” divorce rate. 33 And the sanctuary is a nineteenth-century “Tom Sawyer” universe, where the backyard pool is replaced by the backwoods swimming hole, allegedly in keeping with Hamner’s provincial roots. In the episode’s very first scene, the jaded couple announces their intentions for their divorce, insisting their daughter, Sport (Mary Badham), and younger son, Jeb (Tim Stafford), remain with their favored parent. When the children promise to better their behavior, the unsympathetic mother (Dee Hartford) claims she and their father (Tod Andrews) wouldn’t have stayed together as long if not for their presence. Sport’s assuming responsibility in this exchange effectively points toward young children’s characteristic inability to comprehend the potential failure of their parents’ marriage. Reentering briefly over an opposite scene of domestic tranquility with the same nuclear foursome, Serling’s voice warns us not to look behind this ideal’s “facade.” 34 In so doing, we witness an argument between husband and wife, the latter desperate to find a purpose beyond raising children, against her husband’s professed conformity to suburban gender roles. After redirecting her anger toward her kids, she refuses her husband’s request for supper, another of her gendered “duties” as housewife. To block out their parents’ continued bickering, Sport imagines a quaint paradise just for children, with a porch swing and a gentle old woman serving chocolate cake. Consequently, such a world takes shape when the youngsters are beckoned to follow a surfacing country boy (Kim Hector) back down toward the bottom of their pool’s deep end. On the “other side” of the portal, they are acquainted with its hostess, Aunt T (Georgia Simmons), explaining that her would-be foster home is intended for children of “unworthy parents.” 35 Later, after Jeb returns to be with Aunt T, she explains that the purpose of her assigning chores to children is to teach them the “dignity of

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work and the joy of labor.” 36 Her statement serves moreover to redeem the series’ moral universe from a naive “chocolate cake” ideal to one of responsible child-rearing. And, accordingly, she refuses to admit any child whose parents offer sufficient affection. Nevertheless, this affection proves impossible back at their suburban poolside, as the episode’s first scene repeats, and so the two children swim back through their portal and rejoin Aunt T once and for all. By allowing the imagined sanctuary of two innocents to become reality, then, the Zone finally revokes their caustic parents’ privilege of raising them. In its ironic juxtaposition of childhood fantasy with a more probable reality of familial tensions, this entry debunks the myth of suburban fulfillment, specifically according to its prescribed gender roles. Less associated with divorce is a tetralogy of Twilight Zone episodes focusing nevertheless on children in fractured families and/or in the care of foster parents. These latter “surrogate” figures already confer a notion of presumed inadequacy, since the actual parents would normally have a predisposition to love and protect their offspring. But from such a premise, the narrative can proceed in two directions. Either the foster parent can prove to be motivated by the ideals of child-rearing, or he/she can be positioned as somehow deficient and, in turn, punishable. In the former narrative, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe restores harmony by providing the appropriate care for the child in question. In the latter narrative, equilibrium is restored when the culprit is removed from the domestic environment and/or its child-rearing demands. Actually, both paradigms apply simultaneously to Beaumont’s third-season teleplay “The Fugitive” (March 1962), which I also locate among episodes involving alien invaders. In this example, two separate individuals take part in looking after the handicapped child protagonist Jenny (Susan Gordon). The first of these, having arrived from outer space with seemingly limitless metaphysical powers at his disposal, is a grandfatherly character named “Ben” (J. Pat O’Malley). Competing with his influence on the impressionable child is Jenny’s aunt Mrs. Gann (Nancy Kulp), with whom Jenny lives. Juxtaposed with Ben’s loving dedication is the latter’s hostility and dismissiveness. Ben also encourages Jenny to be forgiving toward her aunt, according to circumstances beyond the latter’s control. Repairing her leg with his powers, Ben finally absconds with the child into space. In this way, the series’ moral universe swaps out an inadequate foster parent for a more ideal choice, based on the latter’s nurturing disposition, even if this gentle soul is also, ironically, a space alien. Serling appears again to explain that Ben will turn out to be a handsome young man, making Jenny his queen, as if to suggest the next best thing to a real father is a loving husband. The next example of this narrative paradigm is another case I take up at length in an earlier chapter, Ray Bradbury’s third-season teleplay “I Sing the Body Electric” (May 1962). Suffice it to say that in this Twilight Zone epi-

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sode, a robot grandmother (Josephine Hutchinson) fills in for a deceased mother, against the wishes of a child (Veronica Cartwright) still bitter about her mother’s “departure.” Similarly ironic, though moreover toward a critique of technologization, is the android’s ability to exemplify loving dedication to these children. But despite the intended critique here, the example of ideal parenting is again made available to suburban audiences, many of whose families were in some way fractured. Another example in this Twilight Zone paradigm of inadequate childrearing is Matheson’s fourth-season teleplay “Mute” (January 1963), about a telepathic child, Ilse (Ann Jillian), struggling to adapt to normal American society, after her German parents are killed in a fire. Zicree dismisses this episode reductively as encouraging the obstruction of individual talent in the name of social conformity. 37 But I see this narrative as far more complex in its thematic implications. Early on, it is suggested that parents forcibly conditioning their children in any direction is immoral. At the same time, however, the characters that prove most influential in reversing the little girl’s inability to speak, namely her doting, would-be foster mother (Barbara Baxley), having lost her own daughter, and a bitter schoolteacher (Irene Dailey), having also endured forced conditioning as a child, are also ostensibly motivated by selfish interests. The only unbiased agent in the narrative is the foster mother’s husband (Frank Overton), also the town sheriff, attempting dutifully to return the girl to her relatives overseas. Eventually, Ilse acquires the power of speech, though only at the expense of her telepathic talent, forcibly squelched by the vindictive schoolmarm’s systematic methods of deconditioning her. After her foster mother refuses to return the girl to the couple arriving from abroad as her legal guardians, the sympathetic German female (Éva Szörényi) affirms Ilse is better off, since her real mother and father had privileged her conditioning over sufficient parental nurturing. Ultimately, then, the episode suggests that any methodical form of child-rearing hindering tender exchanges of love and affection is immoral. Beyond Zicree’s misunderstanding of the narrative’s theme as conformist, the episode also attempts to show that, regardless of love, any parental conditioning that obstructs socialization is harmful, even if human society inevitably comprises selfishly driven individuals. And again, according to this paradigm of foster parenting, the ironically preferable surrogate mother, however imperfect, mobilizes the narrative’s critique of domesticity. According to The Twilight Zone’s moral universe, then, the “guilty” parental figures are consumed in a fire, so as to facilitate their replacement within a society promoting goodwill and mutual cooperation. The fourth example of episodes embarking from the premise of surrogate parenting focuses more on the plight of the single mother in finding a sympathetic replacement for her child’s absent father. This narrative also eschews any potentially coddling circumstances ascribed to mother-son relationships,

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or their converse. Instead, the domestic scenario involves a mother and her daughter struggling to reconstruct the nuclear family ideal by way of a new marriage. Unfortunately, however, this would-be stepfather’s predisposition toward cruelty only exacerbates the lack of paternal influence here. Originally conceived by Charles Beaumont, Jerry Sohl’s fifth-season teleplay “Living Doll” (November 1963) portrays a little girl, Christie (Tracy Stratford), whose new doll “Talky Tina” immediately assumes a protective disposition, especially against Christie’s stepfather, Erich Streator (Telly Savalas). In the episode’s very first exchange of dialogue, Christie’s mother, Annabelle (Mary La Roche), warns her daughter not to show her new toy to her father. Immediately noticing the large box in Christie’s arms, Streator protests its purchase, gnashing his teeth in anger. When he alludes to the “Freudian” advice of Christie’s doctor, Annabelle qualifies that the child “feels rejected.” 38 Instead of any kindness or sympathy, however, Streator only maintains his hostility. After compelling Christie to dash upstairs in tears with her mother behind her, Streator examines the doll for himself, only to discover it seems capable of addressing him directly, saying, “I don’t think I like you,” then, “I think I could even hate you,” and, after he throws it against the wall, “You’ll be sorry.” 39 The subsequent exchange between Streator and Annabelle reveals he is actually Christie’s stepfather. Nevertheless, she appeals to him for a paternal show of love, promising she and her daughter are committed to his happiness. Here, and at the dinner table afterward, Streator insinuates that the cause for his bitterness is his inability to father children. But his cruel disposition overwhelms Annabelle and Christie’s attempts to reassure him, and so the doll persists in taunting him. Eventually exclaiming “I’m not your daddy” to his forlorn stepdaughter, Streator enlists a vise, blowtorch, and radial arm saw to silence the doll forever, but to no avail. 40 To persuade his packing wife not to leave him, he returns Tina to Christie, but according to its promise, the doll trips him down the staircase to his death. Finally, Talky Tina reveals its protective function to Christie’s mother as well, warning, “You’d better be nice to me.” 41 Such a threatening portrayal of a doll could just as soon be satirical, if not for the interpolation of Bernard Herrmann’s atypically somber music throughout the episode. Rather, this example maintains a ruthless intolerance toward its foster parent character’s hostility, regardless of extenuating circumstances. In The Twilight Zone’s moral universe of child-rearing, then, even a child’s toy becomes, not precisely a murderer, as Serling’s epilogue affirms, but an agent of justice—and a nightmarish deterrent to any further parental transgressions. So far, these Twilight Zone examples focus on the experience of children within the destabilized nuclear family. In its systematic investigation of nuclear family dynamics, however, the series also considers familial turbulence from the parents’ point of view. According to this latter scenario, children are

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not as passive or vulnerable, and so their parents are positioned alternatively as the victims in the narrative. But if the parents are not immediately to blame for their children’s immorality in these cases, then, by implication, larger and more complex cultural forces are at work. And so the series’ moral universe may be less inclined to discipline these wretches, allowing them, instead, to punish the culture in turn. Really, such a paradigm applies to a single episode, Serling’s third-season adaptation of Jerome Bixby’s short story “It’s a Good Life,” airing in November of 1961. Atypically, this example is less formulaically dedicated to setting up a surprise twist ending, as is the case with so many other entries, particularly Matheson’s “The Invaders” and Serling’s “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” Instead, this episode’s pervasive irony derives from the inversion of presumed childhood innocence, replaced with a metaphysical malevolence uncharacteristic of any other youngster characters in the series. Such a premise is predated by the 1960 British film Village of the Damned and even before that, at least in terms of a murderous child, by the 1956 American film The Bad Seed. But Bixby’s acclaimed 1953 story predates the source material for both of these. Being only three years of age, its youngster character, Anthony, is less obviously diabolical. If anything, his naiveté makes his manipulations of people and things in the world around him closer to amoral than immoral. This aspect contributes to the short story’s decided ambiguity. Unlike the children in the British film, whose metaphysical powers are more implicitly extraterrestrial, no explanation is offered for the boy’s otherworldliness. And even the boy’s environment becomes ambiguous, according to the story’s conclusion, which declares, “He had taken the village someplace. Or had destroyed the world and left only the village, nobody knew which.” 42 Of course, such a thorough decontextualization of familiar characters and trappings of everyday life made the source material ideal for The Twilight Zone’s allegorical tendencies. Nonetheless, for its adaptation into the series’ aggregate system for social critique, Serling makes key adjustments. Primarily, he depicts Anthony (Billy Mumy) as a six-year-old, more attuned to the parameters of right and wrong behavior, even if these parameters are still selfishly oriented. Less impulsive, then, the boy’s motivations appear moreover to correspond to The Twilight Zone’s moral universe. Unlike the story, that is, wherein some of his transformations are beneficial to the village and/ or its citizens, Anthony’s metaphysical actions are more clearly positioned as “punitive” toward everyone around him. In this way, the narrative’s intended social critique, at least according to Serling’s agenda, is more pronounced. In other words, rather than an ambiguously manipulative presence, the little boy becomes a rather formidable “agent” of the Twilight Zone. Clarified in its television adaptation, this narrative specifically decontextualizes postwar domesticity—and the roles of the nuclear family within its context. And, by doing so, it exposes the darker realities of 1950s suburbia.

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Declaring the narrative “unique” and so calling for “a different kind of introduction,” Serling’s extended prologue embarks from the story’s ambiguity concerning the inhabitants of the isolated village of “Peaksville.” 43 He explains how an arriving “monster” has removed the village’s automobiles, electricity, and machines, “just because they displeased him.” 44 In other words, pre-modern conditions are construed as “the dark ages” to these otherwise suburban Americans. Serling then points out how Peaksville’s unfortunate citizens must “think happy thoughts” nevertheless, according to the said telepathic monster’s ability to transform or “wish into the cornfield” anyone who similarly displeases him. 45 But only after these explanations does Serling “recollect” his duty to show what the monster looks like, and so images of a rustic farmhouse setting culminate with that of a harmlesslooking boy swinging on a wooden gate. Thus, instead of Bixby’s ambiguous introduction of the omnipotent three-year-old, Serling’s adaptation places Anthony firmly in a negative light. As the episode’s narrative commences, a deliveryman (Don Keefer) arrives on a bicycle with groceries, affirming and reaffirming that it’s “a good day,” contrary even to Aunt Amy’s complaints of hot weather. 46 After Anthony casually demonstrates his power over life and death with a recently created three-headed gopher, the fear-stricken adult exclaims his and everyone’s love for the boy. Lamenting a dearth of laundry and bar soap to the boy’s mother, the deliveryman’s conveyance of domestic goods underscores a notion of punishable commodification in suburbia. Mrs. Fremont (Cloris Leachman) sympathizes with the man’s fears, hinting at her regret that her son wasn’t killed the day before by one of his other vicious creations. She also announces it’s “television night,” thanks to Anthony, as would otherwise be impossible sans electricity. 47 Visiting afterward with his son, Mr. Fremont (John Larch) reminds Anthony of a neighbor who voiced his disapproval of the boy’s demodernizing transformations, for which the man was burned alive. Also a significant departure from the story, Anthony’s subsequent “television night” in the episode replaces the “twisting, writhing shapes on the screen” with recognizable images of dinosaurs in mortal combat. 48 Employing similar stop-motion model animation, this self-reflexive television content bears particular resemblance to the work of Ray Harryhausen, especially in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. Nonetheless transcending the original story’s abstract content, this “juvenile” entertainment, combined with Anthony’s epilogue “That’s all the television there is,” becomes Serling’s rather pronounced indictment of television’s cultural degeneration in the wake of its Golden Age. 49 In this way, Anthony tortures his parents and the other aggrieved adults through the very medium responsible for disseminating the myth of suburban domesticity. The remainder of the episode, set within what appears increasingly closer to a typical suburban living room than the interior of a village farmhouse,

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focuses more on adult domestic culture in the 1950s—and its excesses. A neighbor, Dan Hollis (Don Keefer), receives two gifts for his ensuing birthday celebration, a Perry Como record and a bottle of peach brandy. In the short story, the adults prevent Hollis from playing the record, according to Anthony’s distaste for singing. But, more thematically, the record refers to the popular taste of adults in the postwar era, particularly in the domestic context, since Como successfully pioneered a weekly musical variety show on television. Essentially, then, this “forbidden” record album merely echoes Anthony’s removal of the adult’s former staple of prime-time television. Less able to contain his frustrations with the tyrannical boy, Hollis guzzles down his brandy, moreover as a token portrayal of suburban alcoholic indulgence. He then bemoans the impending shortage of whiskey in the village, based on Anthony’s halting the distribution of liquor, similarly undesirable in the latter’s estimation. Hollis’ drunkenness unblocks his inhibitions sufficiently to provoke an honest assessment of the little boy’s impact, and so he condemns the boy’s parents for having him, and then calls him a “monster.” 50 His attempted distraction of Anthony fails to mobilize the petrified adults against him, however, and the boy transforms him into a jack-in-thebox. As a final reinforcement of the episode’s modernist critique, Aunt Amy (Alice Frost) unthinkingly expresses nostalgia for “cities outside” and “real television.” 51 Nevertheless, admitting responsibility for a snowfall that his father protests will destroy their crops, Anthony persists with his series of daily “corrections.” Removing all suburban dependencies, then, this metaphysically endowed prodigy, as an inversion of childhood vulnerability, makes his parents and the other adults aware of their own vulnerabilities instead. In this way, the boy and his impact on the community becomes an extreme form of retribution for the conceits of modern domesticity. And if we disregard the “punitive” implications of the boy’s metaphysical prowess, what remains nevertheless is a caricature of the spoiled only child expecting to be catered to at every whim. In this sense, Anthony’s character is cautionary of another form of inappropriate child-rearing, particularly within the wealthier extremes of suburban complacency. Serling would take up the theme of spoiled children again in his own fifth-season teleplay “The Masks” (March 1964), although, by implication, their adulthood makes this entire nuclear family answerable for their respective character flaws. Before allowing his only child (Virginia Gregg), her husband (Milton Selzer), and their son (Alan Sues) and daughter (Brooke Hayward) to inherit his fortune, the expiring Jason Foster (Robert Keith) forces each to wear Mardi Gras representations of avarice, hypochondria, narcissism, and sadism, that is, until midnight. In a somewhat standard ironic twist, each individual ends up with his/her “true” visage, according to the metaphysical properties of the masks’ characteristic contours. The protagonist’s general orneriness would also confer a notion of moral retribution, as if

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he were consigned to answer for the psychological impact of his affluence on his children. Nevertheless, with his death and his relatives “exposed” to the world hereafter, The Twilight Zone’s moral equilibrium is restored. This latter example of a would-be spoiled-children paradigm in the series also points to another unfortunate consequence of suburban domesticity, the exclusion of the elderly from the nuclear family ideal. With the rise of suburbia in the postwar era, young American families were less inclined to accommodate their retired parents. Or, rather, as the Golden Age television drama “Marty” reflects, a mass exodus from the pre-modern multigenerational household into either the urban apartment building or the smaller suburban domicile redefined the elder generation as a nuisance. This is also evident in the fifth-season episodes “Uncle Simon” and “Ninety Years without Slumbering,” each depicting elderly male characters as burdensome to their younger relatives. And according to this increasing shift of disposition, a parallel rise of the American retirement facility provided a new alternative to looking after elderly family members, alienated, in turn, from their loved ones. George Clayton Johnson’s third-season episode “Kick the Can” (February 1962) explores the psychological impact of the rest home on its discarded inhabitants. Instead of being able to enjoy their retired years in the presence of their children and grandchildren, an elderly male protagonist (Ernest Truex) and his cohabitants are cornered into longing for their childhood camaraderie. And so in the context of the series’ moral universe, where these gentle folks are to be understood as casualties of postwar domesticity, they are ironically returned to their former years of youth and play. Thus, as an aggregate system for social critique, The Twilight Zone is rather thorough in its indictment of the nuclear family ideal, along with so many other aspects of suburban mythmaking in the postwar era. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Sconce, “The ‘Outer Limits,’” 32–33. May, Homeward Bound, ix. Ibid., xxi. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 20. Sconce, “The ‘Outer Limits,’” 33. Booker, Strange TV, 49. Sconce, “The ‘Outer Limits,’” 34. “Spur of the Moment,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Booker, Strange TV, 66. “A World of Difference,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid.

Domestic Irony 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

“Young Man’s Fancy,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “Miniature,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” The Twilight Zone. “Sounds and Silences,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. “The New Exhibit,” The Twilight Zone. “What’s in the Box,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 398. “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 307–308. “Living Doll,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 448. “It’s a Good Life,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 448. “It’s a Good Life,” The Twilight Zone. Ibid. Ibid.

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Analyzing any television anthology series entails a process of subdivision and nomenclature, just as the consideration of a single film, novel, short story, or other work typically embarks from assigning it to a narrative genre, according to cultural tendencies. This is how we come to embrace artistic expression, not to mention the surrounding universe itself, as it so happens. But, often enough, our collective impulse toward categorization—rather than achieving enlightenment or, more specifically, any deeper insight into the thematic dimension of a given narrative—culminates instead with certain forms or degrees of misunderstanding. In other words, we all tend to acquaint ourselves with any artwork only after taking comfort from an initial “handshake” of familiarity. We then proceed with sudden confidence from this very point of reference toward what we believe we are certain to find—the intention behind it all—and just “who” this artwork really is. Said succinctly, to appreciate art, we reduce it to categories, and the world along with it. In appreciating the Twilight Zone, too many scholars, fans, and passive viewers alike have allowed the series to ease into the genre of science fiction. Even my work, ironically, perpetuates this habit, since it appears in a series of studies on “science fiction” television. But I resist such habits wherever possible, and not because I want to conclude that our categorizing impulses are fruitless. Rather, I simply want our nomenclature to hold up—for our assignments of words, that is, to mean what they say. And so I set off in this study from a fundamental point: The Twilight Zone series is hardly dedicated to matters of science—real, whimsical, or otherwise. And science fiction ought not be so easily conflated with fantasy or, rather, be so readily allowed to subsume fantasy into itself. Of course, I am willing to treat a “space fantasy” film like Star Wars, or, for that matter, any Twilight Zone episode imagining an extraterrestrial culture totally unaffiliated with Earth, as part of 189

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“science fiction,” since these narratives incorporate technologies and scientific prowess beyond our means. But where supernatural forces come into play, outside of any manufactured device or applied science, an alternative orientation is called for. Rather than being associated with any particular culture or society, a metaphysical premise serves, instead, to establish a moral universe, or, in other words, a grand design, where any mere science cannot. Furthermore, a moral universe announces itself not only through so many ironic inversions of natural causation, but also through the mere ironic inversion of contingency, coincidence, and accident. And within such a universe any/all projections of science and technology are subsumed. This is to say we oughtn’t allow science fiction to subsume fantasy, when it could be more productive for irony to subsume them both. Looking at The Twilight Zone in terms of irony, rather than science fiction and/or even fantasy, not only recontextualizes the many Western and waroriented episodes appropriately, but also accommodates sporadic cases of the merely psychological premise and even contexts only circumstantial. A psychological context, for example, in keeping with the series’ metaphysical tendencies, is Rod Serling’s second-season premiere “King Nine Will Not Return,” which I address earlier in the context of martial irony. Here, a bedridden air force soldier’s delusion of being returned to his World War II bomber in the African desert would seem corroborated by the sand discovered later in his shoes. And a similar example is Montgomery Pittman’s Western teleplay “The Grave.” Here, the townspeople’s rational explanation of “fear” causing the bounty hunter’s death proves untenable, since he could not have pinned his own duster to the grave site, according to the direction of the wind. On the other hand, Serling’s teleplay “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room,” which I mention earlier in terms of social deviance, visualizes a former criminal literally arguing with his own divided conscience, as his mirror reflection. Ultimately, his internal disposition of confident resolve overcomes and replaces that of external weakness and pliability. And this narrative finds its feminized counterpart in Serling’s previous entry “Nightmare as a Child,” about a young woman whose childhood self helps her to recall a returning murderer’s identity before it is too late. These latter two encounters are strictly psychological, just as in Charles Beaumont’s teleplay “Perchance to Dream,” depicting a protagonist whose vivid nightmare provokes his heart condition and finally kills him. And an episode devoid of any metaphysical interference, again, is Serling’s fifth-season teleplay “The Jeopardy Room,” in which the best intentions of an imaginative assassin are turned against him, when his own accomplice thoughtlessly answers his booby-trapped telephone and so annihilates them both. Common to all these disparate narratives, however metaphysical or not, are simply ironic circumstances.

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In lieu of such categories as science fiction, fantasy, or the supernatural, then, I prefer to reorient The Twilight Zone according to its persistent invocation of irony. And beyond situations inverting our logical expectations of cause and effect, this latter category, as such, includes the potential for an “ironic” mode of communication, in terms of self-reflexivity and parody. But where scholars such as M. Keith Booker would ascribe this sense of irony to the series more unilaterally, especially according to notions of an encroaching postmodernism, I perceive the majority of episodes as straightforward narratives, in terms of intending just what they say and show. And, again, what they show are ironic circumstances, intended moreover to stimulate further consideration—a notion I would hardly claim to have posited first. And while I see most entries as straightforward portrayals of irony, rather than Menippean satires, for example, there are a number of important exceptions. First, I should clarify how I differentiate between a “straight” and “satirical” Twilight Zone narrative. The former distinction, covering the majority of entries across five seasons, is, indeed, “Menippean,” in that so many flaws of character are exposed in due course of the narrative. But these flaws are, in turn, invariably “corrected” rather than celebrated, according to the series’ pervasive moral universe. If, on the other hand, personification of negative traits is rendered in a positive, celebratory light, this is an ironic mode of communication or, categorically, “satire.” Such an exception to the typical Twilight Zone narrative, then, is, or rather, would be Ray Bradbury’s teleplay “I Sing the Body Electric.” His prose version, at least, is ostensibly celebratory in its tone, since, as I discuss at length earlier, the narrator is speaking nostalgically as a former child in indefatigable awe of his new, apparently omnipotent android “grandmother.” This cannot be overlooked in the larger context of Bradbury’s dystopian work, especially wherein narrators are objective. So the author’s particular use of this celebratory tone serves, in turn, to establish a satirical mode. However, as I have argued, the camera lens is less in a position to communicate subjectively, and so cinematic irony must discover other means of invocation. As a result, the Bradbury episode’s objective camera struggles to suggest that its celebration of the “perfect” grandmother is intended otherwise, save, as I mention, for capturing the robot’s dialogue—itself somewhat satirical. Again, where most Twilight Zone entries are condemnatory toward their protagonists, another atypically “celebratory” episode, if this can accordingly be deemed an indication of satire, is Serling’s “A World of His Own.” Compared to “I Sing the Body Electric,” this narrative’s ironic mode is firmly corroborated when the playwright-protagonist uses his metaphysical Dictaphone to “un-create” Serling himself, as if to prevent the latter from affirming his attendant character flaw, according to the series’ weekly pattern. This example sets a clear precedent for what should be taken instead as

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merely an optional ironic mode for the series, rather than any inherency. Thus, Serling’s epilogue to Bradbury’s teleplay need only hint at its irony, by assuming a relatively passive disposition toward the narrative. As I suggest, these are exceptional cases in the series, although not the only ones. I also discuss episodes mocking their postwar audience’s cultural disposition, by way of parodying former science fiction paradigms of Cold War fear. In such cases, alien invaders triumph, as in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” “To Serve Man,” and “Black Leather Jackets.” And then there is the unusual case of black comedy in the series, namely “It’s a Good Life,” about a boy murdering his victims by wishing them away into the cornfield or simply turning them into toys; and “What’s in the Box,” in which a repairman’s frivolous demeanor decidedly mediates the episode’s otherwise sober and disturbing violence. Both these latter examples also feature contextualized parodies of television content, which, of course, is the most surefire means for a television program such as this to assume an ironic mode of communication. If I make a convincing enough case that episodes of The Twilight Zone achieve aggregation through their use of irony, rather than any narrative genre, I must then demystify another misleading category—the popularly celebrated surprise twist ending. I readily corroborate that the series’ formulaic dependency on this narrative device guarantees a certain degree of irony in so many of its entries, especially according to its legacy in classic short stories and their film and television adaptations. But I also argue that the series doesn’t quite adhere to such a formula, and, instead, establishes ironic circumstances in other ways as well. An alternative to the twist ending, for example, is merely an ironic narrative premise, as in “Walking Distance,” allowing a jaded businessman to revisit his childhood across the duration of the episode; or “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” establishing at the very start of the episode a metaphysical portal at the bottom of a suburban swimming pool for two traumatized children to escape their divorcing parents. Such entries do not rely on a surprise twist in their conclusions. They simply restore their protagonists to their appropriate realm, according to the series’ moral parameters. And juxtaposed, this pair of examples suggests the “appropriate” realm can just as soon be fantastical as real. In the former case, that is, the protagonist must learn to cope with the grueling realities of adult life and so refrain from indulgent nostalgia for his tranquil past. But in the latter case, moral equilibrium restores itself precisely by allowing the youngsters to remain permanently in their gingerbread sanctuary while, at the same time, depriving their hostile divorcing parents of their presence. No climactic surprise occurs in either narrative. Thus, any Twilight Zone episode’s narrative resolution is less necessarily oriented around shock and surprise than correcting moral imbalances. This becomes much clearer if one embraces the series as an

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aggregate system rather than merely a haphazard anthology of twist-oriented tales. In this study, I bring up The Twilight Zone’s moral universe as if it were my own discursive mantra. Beyond its tendency, at least, toward ironic twist endings, the series moreover invokes irony through future-technological, metaphysical, or simply coincidental circumstances specifically in order to mobilize a social critique of American postwar culture. As I confirm earlier, I am not the first to argue that any twist ending’s irony, per se, stimulates a deeper contemplative disposition in the viewer toward the portrayed narrative content. However, it may be novel for me to point out, as I do, that it is more productive to attribute such stimulation to ironic communication in general, rather than exclusively to abrupt turns in narrative linearity and/or predictability. I make this claim in order to ultimately suggest that this fundamental presence of irony in the series serves, in turn, to establish and maintain an overarching moral universe. Protagonists having impulses, desires, and goals within this depicted universe are either helped or hindered, according to the scrutinized moral aspect of their dispositions. Because ironic circumstances negotiate this very pivotal point between “help” and “hindrance,” irony itself must be deemed the catalyst toward the intended scrutiny per se. In other words, in the context of The Twilight Zone, at least, irony becomes social critique. This is also to say that ironic communication, or, more specifically, the strategic use of ironic circumstances, doesn’t necessarily imply that a form of critique is at stake. Especially with twist endings in a narrative, audiences may come away with simply a sense of titillation, even if authors intend a deeper consideration. Unfortunately, I must even admit this is the case with The Twilight Zone, whose intended social critique in many cases could well have been lost on postwar television audiences, at least on a conscious level. But I really don’t believe all writers seeking to surprise their readers or viewing audience necessarily have a larger cultural target in mind. Such a presumption would be nothing more than an academic, analytical conceit. Nevertheless, we are safely within parameters of modernist intentionality with Serling’s, Beaumont’s, Matheson’s, and others’ contributions to the series. My ultimate claim with this study is that ironic circumstances, an overarching moral universe, and the so-called Twilight Zone are all the same thing in the series’ aggregate context. And by way of considering the philosophical legacy of irony, I arrive at the work of Richard Rorty, whose proposed liberalist utopia bears particular resemblance to the series’ persistent Twilight Zone. Rorty sees a fundamental incompatibility between private and public dimensions of human existence, particularly in terms of any encompassing philosophical system seeking to conflate them. Instead, he envisions an ideal “society” of individuals less inclined to impose any complexity of ethical standards on others, beyond simply a fundamental avoidance of

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cruel or humiliating behavior. Rorty calls these individuals “ironists,” according to the notion that each assumes an ironic pose toward his/her philosophical outlook or world view, as a concession to its inherently fleeting nature. In other words, Rorty perceives a cultural trajectory of occidental thought from Socrates to Derrida as a larger reflection of moral systems applicable to their own epoch, though less so to future epochs. Because such “manifestos” for life are ever changing, the ironist must also be willing to concede the impermanence, even the illegitimacy in his/her own manifesto. Just as this individual’s sociopolitical point of view may not apply as well to future societies, it may also not apply to other individuals within his/her own society. And so Rorty attempts to delineate a simplified democratic state, congregated merely through shared language and aspirations, wherein individual pursuits are encouraged as long as no form of harmful behavior among its citizens results. Anticipating Rorty’s proposals by a couple of decades, The Twilight Zone’s moral universe invariably strives toward such a utopia, mostly by way of exposing postwar American culture’s many deviances from it. And, furthermore, the Twilight Zone, as such, confers upon itself the privilege of metaphysically reinforcing this utopian society as necessary, according to the latter’s idealized, imaginary nature. Such reinforcement comprises rather broad parameters of manipulating time and space, from merely orchestrating characters’ thoughts and circumstances to immersing them in thoroughly alternate universes. Whichever the case, the series’ aggregate system communicates a fundamental intolerance of cruelty and/or humiliation. And so its many depicted culprits are “punished” accordingly. Embracing the series in this way allows us to reorient certain episodes, such as “Time Enough At Last,” toward their larger agenda for social critique. Many of us have seen this entry, for example, as an essay on existential contingency, that is, how “life isn’t fair.” We sympathize with the protagonist because his dream of perpetual solitude and the reading time it would afford him is so agonizingly thwarted in the instant of his shattering spectacles. But, as I point out, when aligned with so many episodes focused on social responsibility and its attendant forms of deviance, this narrative more ostensibly reveals its own scrutiny of a particular such deviance. And this example, at least, would conform to Booker’s notion of Menippean satire, since the episode celebrates this social deviant by making him a likable “victim” among his demonic familiars. Based on the social contract Henry Bemis has taken as a bank clerk and husband, however, the latter citizens are the true victims, and so, according to the Twilight Zone, at least, his selfindulgence is punishable. Such a satirical narrative is really an exception to the rule of thumb in the series, with most episodes positioning their protagonists as moral transgressors rather transparently. If I repeat myself here, I only do so to reinforce my interest in recategorizing The Twilight Zone, so that we may appreciate its symptomatic intentions more readily.

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Even though I cite and/or discuss so many of the series’ entries in this study, there are still quite a few I overlook (and, as strange as it may seem, I dare to skip “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”). Some readers may be disappointed (or relieved) by this lack of thoroughness. If I had made a point of covering every episode, however, I think such a project would take on the semblance of another Twilight Zone “companion,” which is not what I set out to accomplish. I have no interest in one-upping such past guides, and, together, they certainly suffice in providing ready reference, production information, and narrative criticism. But even with the academic studies already available, including Booker’s laudably researched books, I see a real void in coming to terms with the richness and complexity of The Twilight Zone. In other words, it has been all too often reduced to something too conveniently misunderstood. As for seeing the series’ pervading irony as tantamount to a critique of postwar American culture, I want to conclude with a passage from Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1952 treatise The Irony of American History. He claims: Whether, as in the case of the New England theocrats, our forefathers thought of our “experiment” as primarily the creation of a new and purer church, or, as in the case of Jefferson and his coterie, they thought primarily of a new political community, they believed in either case that we had been called out by God to create a new humanity. We were God’s “American Israel.” Our pretensions of innocency therefore heightened the whole concept of virtuous humanity which characterizes the culture of our era; and involve us in the ironic incongruity between our illusions and the realities which we experience. We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe that anyone could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as they that our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions. 1

As I suggest earlier, the presence of irony in The Twilight Zone actually speaks, in turn, to these larger “ironic incongruities” in American postwar culture, which I attempt to categorize accordingly in this study. In other words, the series demonstrates that its formulaic portrayal of ironic circumstances has the potential not only to stimulate a contemplative frame of mind in its audience, but also to guide this audience’s thought process toward a reevaluation or, rather, a perfect inversion of its cultural presumptions. And so while we may find it difficult, it would seem we must believe that, only a few years after Niebuhr’s claims were published, Serling and his series’ contributors did dare to think ill of us. NOTES 1. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 24–25.

Videography

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, NBC, 1955–1965 “The Glass Eye,” Season 3, Episode 1; written by Stirling Silliphant; directed by Robert Stevens; first telecast October 6, 1957. “Lamb to the Slaughter,” Season 3, Episode 28; written by Roald Dahl; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; first telecast April 3, 1958. “Man from the South,” Season 5, Episode 15; written by Roald Dahl; directed by Norman Lloyd; first telecast January 3, 1960. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Season 5, Episode 13; written by Harold Swanton; directed by Robert Stevenson; December 20, 1959. “Revenge,” Season 1, Episode 1; written by Frances M. Cockrell; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; first telecast October 2, 1955.

FORD TELEVISION THEATRE, NBC, 1952–1956 “The Bet,” Season 1, Episode 25; written by Anton Chekhov; adapted by Theodore St. John; first telecast March 19, 1953.

KRAFT TELEVISION THEATRE, NBC, 1947–1958 “Patterns,” Season 8, Episode 16; written by Rod Serling; directed by Fielder Cook; first telecast January 12, 1955.

MEDALLION THEATRE, CBS, 1953–1954 “24 Men in a Plane,” Season 1, Episode 15; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Medford; first telecast December 9, 1953.

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Videography

THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW, ABC/CBS, 1957–1960 “Rod Serling,” first telecast September 22, 1959.

PHILCO TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE, NBC, 1948–1956 “Marty,” Season 5, Episode 23; written by Paddy Chayefsky; directed by Delbert Mann; first telecast May 24, 1953.

PLAYHOUSE 90, CBS, 1956–1960 “Bomber’s Moon,” Season 2, Episode 36; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Frankenheimer; first telecast May 22, 1958. “The Rank and File,” Season 3, Episode 34; written by Rod Serling; directed by Franklin Schaffner; first telecast May 28, 1959. “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” Season 1, Episode 2; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ralph Nelson; first telecast October 11, 1956. “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” Season 2, Episode 39; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Frankenheimer; first telecast June 19, 1958. “The Velvet Alley,” Season 3, Episode 16; written by Rod Serling; directed by Franklin Schaffner; first telecast January 22, 1959.

ROBERT MONTGOMERY PRESENTS, NBC, 1950–1957 “The Outer Limit,” Season 4, Episode 22; written by Graham Doar; directed by Norman Felton; first telecast January 26, 1953.

SEE IT NOW, CBS, 1951–1958 “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” Season 3, Episode 25; first telecast March 9, 1954.

STUDIO ONE, CBS, 1948–1958 “The Arena,” Season 8, Episode 30; written by Rod Serling; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; first telecast April 9, 1956. “The Strike,” Season 6, Episode 38; written by Rod Serling; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; first telecast June 7, 1954. “Twelve Angry Men,” Season 7, Episode 1; written by Reginald Rose; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; first telecast September 20, 1954.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE, CBS, 1959–1964 “The After Hours,” Season 1, Episode 34; written by Rod Serling; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast June 10, 1960. “And When the Sky Was Opened,” Season 1, Episode 11; written by Rod Serling; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast December 11, 1959.

Videography

199

“Back There,” Season 2, Episode 13; written by Rod Serling; directed by David Orrick McDearmon; first telecast January 13, 1961. “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” Season 5, Episode 36; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Joseph M. Newman; first telecast June 19, 1964. “The Big Tall Wish,” Season 1, Episode 27; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ronald Winston; first telecast April 8, 1960. “Black Leather Jackets,” Season 5, Episode 18; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Joseph M. Newman; first telecast January 31, 1964. “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” Season 5, Episode 33; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard Donner; first telecast May 15, 1964. “Caesar and Me,” Season 5, Episode 27; written by Adele T. Strassfield; directed by Robert Butler; first telecast April 10, 1964. “Cavender Is Coming,” Season 3, Episode 36; written by Rod Serling; directed by Christian Nyby; first telecast May 25, 1962. “The Changing of the Guard,” Season 3, Episode 37; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Ellis Miller; first telecast June 1, 1962. “The Chaser,” Season 1, Episode 31; written by Robert Presnell Jr.; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast May 13, 1960. “Come Wander with Me,” Season 5, Episode 34; written by Anthony Wilson; directed by Richard Donner; first telecast May 22, 1964. “Deaths-Head Revisited,” Season 3, Episode 9; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Medford; first telecast November 10, 1961. “Death Ship,” Season 4, Episode 6; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Don Medford; first telecast February 7, 1963. “Dust,” Season 2, Episode 12; written by Rod Serling; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast January 6, 1961. “Elegy,” Season 1, Episode 20; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast February 19, 1960. “The Encounter,” Season 5, Episode 31; written by Martin M. Goldsmith; directed by Robert Butler; first telecast May 1, 1964. “Escape Clause,” Season 1, Episode 6; written by Rod Serling; directed by Mitchell Leisen; first telecast November 6, 1959. “The Eye of the Beholder,” Season 2, Episode 6; written by Rod Serling; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast November 11, 1960. “Execution,” Season 1, Episode 26; written by Rod Serling; directed by David Orrick McDearmon; first telecast April 1, 1960. “The Fear,” Season 5, Episode 35; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ted Post; first telecast May 29, 1964. “The Fever,” Season 1, Episode 17; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Florey; first telecast January 29, 1960. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” Season 3, Episode 14; written by Rod Serling; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast December 22, 1961. “Four O’Clock,” Season 3, Episode 29; written by Rod Serling; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast April 6, 1962. “The Four of Us Are Dying,” Season 1, Episode 13; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Brahm; first telecast January 1, 1960. “From Agnes—with Love,” Season 5, Episode 20; written by Bernard C. Schoenfeld; directed by Richard Donner; first telecast February 14, 1964. “The Fugitive,” Season 3, Episode 25; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Richard L. Bare; first telecast March 9, 1962. “The Gift,” Season 3, Episode 32; written by Rod Serling; directed by Allen H. Miner; first telecast April 27, 1962. “The Grave,” Season 3, Episode 7; written and directed by Montgomery Pittman; first telecast October 27, 1961. “He’s Alive,” Season 4, Episode 4; written by Rod Serling; directed by Stuart Rosenberg; first telecast January 24, 1963.

200

Videography

“The Hitch-Hiker,” Season 1, Episode 16; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alvin Ganzer; first telecast January 22, 1960. “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby,” Season 3, Episode 30; written by Rod Serling; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast April 13, 1962. “A Hundred Years over the Rim,” Season 2, Episode 23; written by Rod Serling; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast April 7, 1961. “The Hunt,” Season 3, Episode 19; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Harold Schuster; first telecast January 26, 1962. “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” Season 5, Episode 26; written by Rod Serling; directed by Abner Biberman; first telecast March 27, 1964. “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” Season 4, Episode 15; written by Reginald Rose; directed by Abner Biberman; first telecast April 18, 1963. “In His Image,” Season 4, Episode 1; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Perry Lafferty; first telecast January 3, 1963. “In Praise of Pip,” Season 5, Episode 1; written by Rod Serling; directed by Joseph M. Newman; first telecast September 27, 1963. “The Invaders,” Season 2, Episode 15; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Douglas Heyes; first telecast January 27, 1961. “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” Season 1, Episode 15; written by Rod Serling; directed by Stuart Rosenberg; first telecast January 15, 1960. “I Sing the Body Electric,” Season 3, Episode 35; written by Ray Bradbury; directed by William Claxton and James Sheldon; first telecast May 18, 1962. “It’s a Good Life,” Season 3, Episode 8; written by Rod Serling; directed by James Sheldon; first telecast November 3, 1961. “The Jeopardy Room,” Season 5, Episode 29; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard Donner; first telecast April 17, 1964. “Jess-Belle,” Season 4, Episode 5; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast February 14, 1963. “Judgment Night,” Season 1, Episode 10; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Brahm; first telecast December 4, 1959. “The Jungle,” Season 3, Episode 12; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by William Claxton; first telecast December 1, 1961. “Kick the Can,” Season 3, Episode 21; written by George Clayton Johnson; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast February 9, 1962. “A Kind of Stopwatch,” Season 5, Episode 4; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Rich; first telecast October 18, 1963. “King Nine Will Not Return,” Season 2, Episode 1; written by Rod Serling; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast September 30, 1960. “The Last Flight,” Season 1, Episode 18; written by Richard Matheson; directed by William Caxton; first telecast February 5, 1960. “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” Season 3, Episode 23; written and directed by Montgomery Pittman; first telecast February 23, 1962. “The Lateness of the Hour,” Season 2, Episode 8; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jack Smight; first telecast December 2, 1960. “Little Girl Lost,” Season 3, Episode 26; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Paul Stewart; first telecast March 16, 1962. “The Little People,” Season 3, Episode 28; written by Rod Serling; directed by William Claxton; first telecast March 30, 1962. “Living Doll,” Season 5, Episode 6; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Richard C. Sarafian; first telecast November 1, 1963. “The Lonely,” Season 1, Episode 7; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jack Smight; first telecast November 13, 1959. “Long Distance Call,” Season 2, Episode 22; written by Charles Beaumont and William Idelson; directed by James Sheldon; first telecast March 31, 1961. “Long Live Walter Jameson,” Season 1, Episode 24; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Anton Leader; first telecast March 18, 1960.

Videography

201

“The Long Morrow,” Season 5, Episode 15; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Florey; first telecast January 10, 1964. “The Man in the Bottle,” Season 2, Episode 2; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Medford; first telecast October 7, 1960. “The Masks,” Season 5, Episode 25; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ida Lupino; first telecast March 20, 1964. “The Midnight Sun,” Season 3, Episode 10; written by Rod Serling; directed by Anton Leader; first telecast November 17, 1961. “The Mighty Casey,” Season 1, Episode 35; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alvin Ganzer and Robert Parrish; first telecast June 17, 1960. “The Mind and the Matter,” Season 2, Episode 27; written by Rod Serling; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast May 12, 1961. “Miniature,” Season 4, Episode 8; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Walter Grauman; first telecast February 21, 1963. “The Mirror,” Season 3, Episode 6; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Medford; first telecast October 20, 1961. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Season 1, Episode 22; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ronald Winston; first telecast March 4, 1960. “A Most Unusual Camera,” Season 2, Episode 10; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Rich; first telecast December 16, 1960. “Mr. Bevis,” Season 1, Episode 33; written by Rod Serling; directed by William Asher; first telecast June 3, 1960. “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” Season 1, Episode 3; written by Rod Serling; directed by Allen Reisner; first telecast October 16, 1959. “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” Season 2, Episode 19; written by Rod Serling; directed by John Brahm; first telecast March 3, 1961. “Mute,” Season 4, Episode 5; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Stuart Rosenberg; first telecast January 31, 1963. “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room,” Season 2, Episode 3; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Medford; first telecast October 14, 1960. “The New Exhibit,” Season 4, Episode 13; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by John Brahm; first telecast April 4, 1963. “A Nice Place to Visit,” Season 1, Episode 28; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by John Brahm; first telecast April 15, 1960. “Night Call,” Season 5, Episode 19; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Jacques Tourneur; first telecast February 7, 1964. “Nightmare as a Child,” Season 1, Episode 29; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alvin Ganzer; first telecast April 29, 1960. “Ninety Years without Slumbering,” Season 5, Episode 12; written by Richard De Roy; directed by Roger Kay; first telecast December 20, 1963. “Nothing in the Dark,” Season 3, Episode 16; written by George Clayton Johnson; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast January 5, 1962. “No Time Like the Past,” Season 4, Episode 10; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jus Addiss; first telecast March 7, 1963. “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” Season 5, Episode 17; written by Charles Beaumont and John Tomerlin; directed by Abner Biberman; first telecast January 24, 1964. “The Obsolete Man,” Season 2, Episode 29; written by Rod Serling; directed by Elliot Silverstein; first telecast June 2, 1961. “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge,” Season 5, Episode 124; based on a story by Ambrose Bierce; directed by Robert Enrico; first telecast February 28, 1964. “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” Season 2, Episode 18; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jus Addiss; first telecast February 24, 1961. “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville,” Season 4, Episode 14; written by Rod Serling; directed by David Lowell Rich; first telecast April 11, 1963. “The Old Man in the Cave,” Season 5, Episode 7; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alan Crosland Jr.; first telecast November 8, 1963.

202

Videography

“Once upon a Time,” Season 3, Episode 13; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Norman Z. McLeod; first telecast December 15, 1961. “One for the Angels,” Season 1, Episode 2; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Parrish; first telecast October 9, 1959. “One More Pallbearer,” Season 3, Episode 17; written by Rod Serling; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast January 12, 1962. “On Thursday We Leave for Home,” Season 4, Episode 16; written by Rod Serling; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast May 2, 1963. “The Parallel,” Season 4, Episode 11; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alan Crosland Jr.; first telecast March 14, 1963. “The Passersby,” Season 3, Episode 4; written by Rod Serling; directed by Elliot Silverstein; first telecast October 6, 1961. “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” Season 2, Episode 16; written by George Clayton Johnson; directed by James Sheldon; first telecast February 3, 1961. “People Are Alike All Over,” Season 1, Episode 25; written by Rod Serling; directed by Mitchell Leisen; first telecast March 25, 1960. “Perchance to Dream,” Season 1, Episode 9; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Robert Florey; first telecast November 27, 1959. “Person or Persons Unknown,” Season 3, Episode 27; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by John Brahm; first telecast March 23, 1962. “A Piano in the House,” Season 3, Episode 22; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by David Greene; first telecast February 16, 1962. “Printer’s Devil,” Season 4, Episode 9; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Ralph Senesky; first telecast February 28, 1963. “Probe 7, Over and Out,” Season 5, Episode 9; written by Rod Serling; directed by Ted Post; first telecast November 29, 1963. “The Purple Testament,” Season 1, Episode 19; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard L. Bare; first telecast February 12, 1960. “A Quality of Mercy,” Season 3, Episode 15; written by Rod Serling; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast December 29, 1961. “Queen of the Nile,” Season 5, Episode 23; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by John Brahm; first telecast March 6, 1964. “Ring-a-Ding Girl,” Season 5, Episode 13; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Alan Crosland Jr.; first telecast December 27, 1963. “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” Season 2, Episode 24; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jus Addiss; first telecast April 21, 1961. “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross,” Season 5, Episode 16; written by Jerry McNeely; directed by Don Siegel; first telecast January 17, 1964. “The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms,” Season 5, Episode 10; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alan Crosland Jr.; first telecast December 6, 1963. “Shadow Play,” Season 2, Episode 26; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by John Brahm; first telecast May 5, 1961. “The Shelter,” Season 3, Episode 3; written by Rod Serling; directed by Lamont Johnson; first telecast September 29, 1961. “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain,” Season 5, Episode 11; written by Rod Serling; first telecast December 13, 1963. “Showdown with Rance McGrew,” Season 3, Episode 20; written by Rod Serling; directed by Christian Nyby; first telecast February 2, 1962. “The Silence,” Season 2, Episode 25; written by Rod Serling; directed by Boris Sagal; first telecast April 28, 1961. “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” Season 1, Episode 4; written by Rod Serling; directed by Mitchell Leisen; first telecast October 23, 1959. “Sounds and Silences,” Season 5, Episode 27; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard Donner; first telecast April 3, 1964. “Spur of the Moment,” Season 5, Episode 141; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Elliot Silverstein; first telecast February 21, 1964.

Videography

203

“Static,” Season 2, Episode 20; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast March 10, 1961. “Steel,” Season 5, Episode 2; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Don Weis; first telecast October 4, 1963. “Still Valley,” Season 3, Episode 11; written by Rod Serling; directed by James Sheldon; first telecast November 24, 1961. “A Stop at Willoughby,” Season 1, Episode 30; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Parrish; first telecast May 6, 1960. “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” Season 5, Episode 30; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by Ron Winston; first telecast April 24, 1964. “A Thing about Machines,” Season 2, Episode 4; written by Rod Serling; directed by David Orrick McDearmon; first telecast October 28, 1960. “Third from the Sun,” Season 1, Episode 14; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard L. Bare; first telecast January 8, 1960. “The Thirty-Fathom Grave,” Season 4, Episode 2; written by Rod Serling; directed by Perry Lafferty; first telecast January 10, 1963. “Time Enough At Last,” Season 1, Episode 8; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jack Smight; first telecast November 20, 1959. “To Serve Man,” Season 3, Episode 24; written by Rod Serling; directed by Richard L. Bare; first telecast March 2, 1962. “The Trade-Ins,” Season 3, Episode 31; written by Rod Serling; directed by Elliot Silverstein; first telecast April 20, 1962. “The Trouble with Templeton,” Season 2, Episode 9; written by E. Jack Neuman; directed by Buzz Kulik; first telecast December 9, 1960. “Twenty Two,” Season 2, Episode 17; written by Rod Serling; directed by Jack Smight; first telecast February 10, 1961. “Two,” Season 3, Episode 1; written and directed by Montgomery Pittman; first telecast September 15, 1961. “Uncle Simon,” Season 5, Episode 8; written by Rod Serling; directed by Don Siegel; first telecast November 15, 1963. “Valley of the Shadow,” Season 4, Episode 3; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Perry Lafferty; first telecast January 17, 1963. “Walking Distance,” Season 1, Episode 5; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Stevens; first telecast October 30, 1959. “What’s in the Box,” Season 5, Episode 24; written by Martin M. Goldsmith; directed by Richard L. Bare; first telecast March 13, 1964. “What You Need,” Season 1, Episode 12; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alvin Ganzer; first telecast December 25, 1959. “Where Is Everybody?” Season 1, Episode 1; written by Rod Serling; directed by Robert Stevens; first telecast October 2, 1959. “The Whole Truth,” Season 2, Episode 14; written by Rod Serling; directed by James Sheldon; first telecast January 20, 1961. “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” Season 2, Episode 28; written by Rod Serling; directed by Montgomery Pittman; first telecast May 26, 1961. “A World of Difference,” Season 1, Episode 23; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Ted Post; first telecast March 11, 1960. “A World of His Own,” Season 1, Episode 36; written by Richard Matheson; directed by Ralph Nelson; first telecast July 1, 1960. “You Drive,” Season 5, Episode 14; written by Earl Hamner Jr.; directed by John Brahm; first telecast January 3, 1964. “Young Man’s Fancy,” Season 3, Episode 34; written by Richard Matheson; directed by John Brahm; first telecast May 11, 1962.

204

Videography

THE UNITED STATES STEEL HOUR, ABC/CBS, 1953–1963 “Noon at Doomsday,” Season 3, Episode 22; written by Rod Serling; directed by Daniel Petrie; first telecast April 25, 1956. “The Rack,” Season 2, Episode 16; written by Rod Serling; directed by Alex Segal; first telecast April 12, 1955.

WESTINGHOUSE DESILU PLAYHOUSE, CBS, 1958–1960 “The Time Element,” Season 1, Episode 6; written by Rod Serling; directed by Allen Reisner; first telecast November 24, 1958.

YOUR SHOW TIME, CBS, 1949 “The Necklace,” Season 1, Episode 1; adapted by Walter Doniger; directed by Sobey Martin; first telecast January 21, 1949.

Filmography

Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan; directed by Martin J. Chomsky; CBS; 1975. The Bad Seed; directed by Mervyn LeRoy; Warner Bros.; 1956. Battle Cry; directed by Raoul Walsh; Warner Bros.; 1955. Bicycle Thieves; directed by Vittorio De Sica; Produzione De Sica; 1948. Blade Runner; directed by Ridley Scott; Warner Bros.; 1982. The Bridge on the River Kwai; directed by David Lean; Columbia Pictures; 1957. Broken Arrow; directed by Delmer Daves; 20th Century Fox; 1950. Dances with Wolves; directed by Kevin Costner; Orion Pictures; 1990. The Day the Earth Stood Still; directed by Robert Wise; 20th Century Fox; 1951. Day the World Ended; directed by Roger Corman; Golden State Productions; 1955. Dead Man’s Shoes; directed by Shane Meadows; Warp Films; 2004. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; directed by Fred F. Sears; Columbia Pictures; 1956. Encore; directed by Pat Jackson, Anthony Pelissier, and Harold French; Two Cities Pictures; 1951. Fahrenheit 451; directed by François Truffaut; Universal Pictures; 1966. Fight Club; directed by David Fincher; Fox 2000 Pictures; 1999. Five; directed by Arch Oboler; Columbia Pictures; 1951. Flying Leathernecks; directed by Nicolas Ray; RKO Radio Pictures; 1951. Forbidden Planet; directed by Fred M. Wilcox; MGM; 1956. From Here to Eternity; directed by Fred Zinnemann; Columbia Pictures; 1953. Godzilla; directed by Ishiro Honda; Toho; 1954. Gravity; directed by Alfonso Cuarón; Warner Bros.; 2013. The Green Berets; directed by John Wayne, Ray Kellogg, and Mervyn LeRoy; Warner Bros.; 1968. Groundhog Day; directed by Harold Ramis; Columbia Pictures; 1993. The Intruder; written by Charles Beaumont; directed by Roger Corman; Pathé-America; 1962. Invaders from Mars; directed by William Cameron Menzies; 20th Century Fox; 1953. Invasion of the Body Snatchers; directed by Don Siegel; Walter Wanger Pictures; 1956. Invasion of the Body Snatchers; directed by Philip Kaufman; United Artists; 1978. It Came from Outer Space; directed by Jack Arnold; Universal International; 1953. I Was a Communist for the FBI; directed by Gordon Douglas; Warner Bros.; 1951. La Rivi è re du Hibou; directed by Robert Enrico; Filmartic; 1962. The Last Man on Earth; directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow; American International Pictures; 1964. Little Big Man; directed by Arthur Penn; National General Pictures; 1970. Lost Horizon; directed by Frank Capra; Columbia Pictures; 1937.

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206

Filmography

The Man from Planet X; directed by Edgar G. Ulmer; United Artists; 1951. Marty; directed by Delbert Mann; United Artists; 1955. Mississippi Burning; directed by Alan Parker; Orion Pictures; 1988. O. Henry’s Full House; directed by Henry Koster, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Howard Hawks, and Henry King; 20th Century Fox; 1952. One Million Years B.C.; directed by Don Chaffey; Hammer Film Productions; 1966. On the Beach; directed by Stanley Kramer; United Artists; 1959. Operation Pacific; directed by George Waggner; Warner Bros.; 1951. The Others; directed by Alejandro Amenábar; Dimension Films; 2001. Out of the Past; directed by Jacques Tourneur; RKO Radio Pictures; 1947. Patton; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; 20th Century Fox; 1970. Planet of the Apes; screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; 20th Century Fox; 1968. Quartet; directed by Ken Annakin, Arthur Crabtree, Harold French, and Ralph Smart; Gainsborough Pictures; 1948. The Rack; screenplay by Rod Serling; directed by Arnold Laven; MGM; 1956. Robinson Crusoe on Mars; directed by Byron Haskin; Paramount Pictures; 1964. Sands of Iwo Jima; directed by Allan Dwan; Republic Pictures; 1949. Shutter Island; directed by Martin Scorsese; Paramount; 2010. The Sixth Sense; directed by M. Night Shyamalan; The Kennedy/Marshall Company; 1999. South Pacific; directed by Joshua Logan; 20th Century Fox; 1958. Stalag 17; directed by Billy Wilder; Paramount Pictures; 1953. Star Wars; directed by George Lucas; 20th Century Fox; 1977. Sunrise; directed by F. W. Murnau; Fox Film Corporation; 1927. Sunset Boulevard; directed by Billy Wilder; Paramount Pictures; 1950. They Were Expendable; directed by John Ford; MGM; 1945. The Thing from Another World; directed by Christian Nyby; MGM; 1951. To Kill a Mockingbird; directed by Robert Mulligan; Universal Pictures; 1962. Trio; directed by Ken Annakin and Harold French; Gainsborough Pictures; 1950. 12:01; directed by Jack Sholder; New Line Cinema; 1993. Village of the Damned; directed by Wolf Rilla; MGM; 1960. The Wings of Eagles; directed by John Ford; MGM; 1957.

Bibliography

Behler, Ernst. Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Edited by Tom Quirk, 11–19. New York: Penguin Group, 2000. Bixby, Jerome. “It’s a Good Life.” In The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1, 1929–1964. Edited by Robert Silverberg, 433–448. New York: Orb, 1998. Boddy, William. “Entering ‘The Twilight Zone.’” In Screen 25:4/5 (July–October 1984): 98–108. Booker, M. Keith. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. ———. Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Bradbury, Ray. “I Sing the Body Electric!” In I Sing the Body Electric! and Other Stories, 177–224. New York: HarperCollins, 1976. Carroll, Noel, and Lester H. Hunt (eds.). Philosophy in The Twilight Zone. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” In Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison and Newton Garver, 129–160. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. D’un ton apocalyptic adopté naguè re en philosophie. Paris: Éditions Galileé, 1983. DeVoe, Bill. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2004. Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel. Colorado Springs, CO: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Feldman, Leslie Dale. Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964. Grams, Martin R., Jr. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville: OTR Publishing, 2008. Grams, Martin R., Jr., and Patrik Wikstrom. Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville: OTR Publishing, 2001. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke in 20 Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbusch Wissenschaft, 1986. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Volumes I and II. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1979. Hunt, Lester H. Introduction. In Philosophy in The Twilight Zone. Edited by Noel Carroll and Lester H. Hunt, 1–4. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

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Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Knight, Damon. “To Serve Man.” In The Best of Damon Knight. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1978. Krafft, Andrea. “Appliance Reliance: Domestic Technologies and the Depersonalization of Housework in Postwar American Speculative Fiction.” In Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships. Edited by Elizabeth Patton and Mimi Choi, 69–88. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Lathbury, Mary A. “Life in the Loom.” In Out of the Darkness into Light: Poems and Drawings. Berkeley: Ulan Press, 2012. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Matheson, Richard. “Third from the Sun.” In Third from the Sun, 5–13. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Metress, Christopher. “Submitted for Their Approval: Rod Serling and the Lynching of Emmett Till.” In Mississippi Quarterly 62:1/2 (Winter 2008/Spring 2009): 143. Minow, Newton N. “Television and the Public Interest,” address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2009. Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Nation Books, 2009. Plantinga, Carl. “Frame Shifters: Surprise Endings and Spectator Imagination in The Twilight Zone.” In Philosophy in The Twilight Zone. Edited by Noel Carroll and Lester H. Hunt, 39–57. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Plato. The Republic. Book 7. Edited by W. H. D. Rouse, 365–401. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. Presnell, Don, and Marty McGee. A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Sander, Gordon F. Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man. New York: Plume, 1992. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke. Edited by Ernst Behler. Munich: Schöningh, 1958. ———. Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. “The ‘Outer Limits’ of Oblivion.” In The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Revolution and Social Conflict. Edited by Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, 20–45. New York: Routledge, 1997. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Stark, Steven D. Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today. New York: Free Press, 1997.

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Theophrastus. The Characters of Theophrastus; Illustrated by Physiognomical Sketches to Which Are Subjoined Hints on the Individual Varieties of Human Nature and General Remarks. London: A. J. Valpy, MA, 1836. Whitman, Walt. “I Sing the Body Electric.” In The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman, 72–77. London: Bibliophile Books, 1996. Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Wolfe, Peter. In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Wolfsdorf, David. “Eirôneia in Aristophanes and Plato.” Classical Quarterly 58 (2008): 666–672. Worland, Rick. “Sign-Posts Up Ahead: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and TV Political Fantasy 1959–1965.” In Science Fiction Studies 8:23, part 1 (1996): 103–122. Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. 2nd edition. Los Angeles: Silman James Press, 1992.

LITERARY WORKS CITED Aesop’s Fables; written by Aesop; 620–560 BCE. “The Alien Corn”; written by W. Somerset Maugham; 1931. Animal Farm; written by George Orwell; 1945. Apology; written by Plato; 399 BCE. “The Bet”; written by Anton Chekhov; 1889. Beyond Good and Evil; written by Friedrich Nietzsche; 1886. “Brothers beyond the Void”; written by Paul Fairman; 1952. A Canticle for Leibowitz; written by Walter Miller; 1959. The Clouds; written by Aristophanes; 423 BCE. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; written by John Donne; 1624. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? written by Philip K. Dick; 1968. Dr. Bloodmoney; written by Philip K. Dick; 1965. Earth Abides; written by George R. Stewart; 1949. “The Facts of Life”; written by W. Somerset Maugham; 1939. Fahrenheit 451; written by Ray Bradbury; 1953. For Whom the Bell Tolls; written by Ernest Hemingway; 1940. The Gay Science; written by Friedrich Nietzsche; 1882. “Here There Be Tygers”; written by Ray Bradbury; 1951. I Am Legend; written by Richard Matheson; 1954. “I Sing the Body Electric”; written by Walt Whitman; 1855. “I Sing the Body Electric!” written by Ray Bradbury; 1969. “It’s a Good Life”; written by Jerome Bixby; 1953. Leviathan; written by Thomas Hobbes; 1651. “Life in the Loom”; written by Mary A. Lathbury; 1902. The Magic Mountain; written by Thomas Mann; 1924. The Man Who Japed; written by Philip K. Dick; 1956. “A Miracle of Rare Device”; written by Ray Bradbury; 1961. “The Necklace”; written by Guy de Maupassant; 1884. The Nicomachean Ethics; written by Aristotle; 350 BCE. 1984; written by George Orwell; 1949. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”; written by Ambrose Bierce; 1890. On the Orator; written by Cicero; 55 BCE. Oratorical Education; written by Quintilian; 95 CE. The Penultimate Truth; written by Philip K. Dick; 1964. Phenomenology of Spirit; written by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; 1807. Planet of the Apes; written by Pierre Boulle; 1963. The Republic; written by Plato; 380 BCE.

210

Bibliography

Robinson Crusoe; written by Daniel Defoe; 1719. Roman de la Rose; written by Guillaume de Lorris; 1230. Shadow of the Hearth; written by Judith Merril; 1950. The Stars My Destination; written by Alfred Bester; 1956. The Stepford Wives; written by Ira Levin; 1972. They Shall Have Stars; written by James Blish; 1956. “Third from the Sun”; written by Richard Matheson; 1950. Thus Spoke Zarathustra; written by Friedrich Nietzsche; 1883. Time Out of Joint; written by Philip K. Dick; 1959. To Kill a Mockingbird; written by Harper Lee; 1960. “To Serve Man”; written by Damon Knight; 1950. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star; written by Ben Barzman; 1960. Vulcan’s Hammer; written by Philip K. Dick; 1960. The World Jones Made; written by Philip K. Dick; 1956.

Index

Aaker, Lee, 13 “The After Hours”, 59, 150–151 Agruss, Mitchell, 108 Aidman, Charles, 51 Akins, Claude, 97 Albright, Hardie, 87 The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 21 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, xii, xiii, xxvi, 20–22, 24, 32–33, 34, 51; influence on Twilight Zone, 22, 25, 26; “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” adaptation, 22, 23–24, 25, 32–33, 119 Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion (Grams and Wikstrom), 21 “The Alien Corn” (Maugham), 15, 17, 18 alien invasion, 58, 85–86; space invaders as astronauts, 95–103; space invaders as benevolent, 93–95, 102; space invaders as malevolent, 87–93, 102 allegory, 7 “Allegory of the Cave” (Plato), 32 Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Fletcher), 7 Allen, Elizabeth, 150 Allen, Fred, 13 Allman, Sheldon, 91 American politics, 135–146 American postwar culture, 58–60, 85, 86–87, 101, 154, 157, 183, 193, 195 “And When the Sky Was Opened”, 51–52, 59, 69

Andrews, Dana, 121 Andrews, Edward, 80, 99 Andrews, Tod, 179 Animal Farm (Orwell), 7 anthology films, 9–17 anthology television series, 17–26 anthropocentrism, 44, 96 “Appliance Reliance: Domestic Technologies and the Depersonalization of Housework in Postwar American Speculative Fiction” (Krafft), 74 “The Arena”, 6, 144, 146 Aristophanes, 29, 30, 32, 34 Aristotle, 30, 43 Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan (television movie), 146 Atterbury, Malcolm, xiii, xxiii Austin, Pam, 141 “Back There”, 106, 118, 122 The Bad Seed (film), 183 Badham, Mary, 179 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxv Ballard, Shirley, 170 Balsam, Martin, xxiii, 109, 173 Bardette, Trevor, 129 Barry, Patricia, 166 Barzman, Ben, 135 Batanides, Arthur, 139 Batista, Fulgencio, 140

211

212

Index

Battle Cry (film), 107 Baxley, Barbara, 181 Baxter, Anne, 13 Bean, Orson, 148 Beaumont, Charles, xii, xxii, 26, 31–32, 77–78, 94, 97, 106, 135, 141, 143, 146, 154, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 172, 173, 181, 190, 193 “The Beautiful One is Here” (Bradbury), 70 Becker, Terry, 146 Beecher, Bonnie, 167 Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus (Perlstein), 131 Begley, Ed, 64 Behler, Ernest, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41–42, 43, 44, 45 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 24 Belasco, Leon, 152 Bendix, William, 107 Beregi, Oscar, 115 Berman, Shelley, 151 Best, James, 165 Bester, Alfred, 136 “The Bet” (Chekhov), 19–20, 143 “The Bewitchin’ Pool”, 179–180, 192 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 38–39 Bicycle Thieves (film), 4 Bierce, Ambrose, 2, 22, 25, 119 “The Big Tall Wish”, 144, 145 Bikel, Theodore, 137 Bixby, Jerome, 182–183 black comedy, xxv “Black Leather Jackets”, 92, 93, 102 Blackman, Honor, 16 Blade Runner (film), 68 Blake, John, xvi Blas, Samuel, 21 Blish, James, 135 Bliss, Lela, xxv, 50 Blondell, Joan, 174 Blyden, Larry, 154 Blyth, Ann, 165 Bochner, Lloyd, 87 Boddy, William, 8 Bogarde, Dirk, 15 “Bomber’s Moon”, 8, 108, 109

Booker, M. Keith, xxii–xxvi, 7, 43, 44, 58, 59, 62, 69, 77, 85, 86–87, 89, 99, 100, 102, 136, 159, 168, 177, 191, 194, 195 “Bookshop Man” host, 18, 21, 26, 47 Boulle, Pierre, 100 Bradbury, Ray, 1, 69–74, 90, 91, 141, 180, 191 “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”, 63–65, 76, 81 Brand, Neville, 126 Bray, Robert, 121 Breslin, Patricia, 123 Bridge on the River Kwai (film), 107 Broken Arrow (film), 120 Bronson, Charles, 129 Brooke, Walter, 178 “Brothers Beyond the Void” (Fairman), 96 Brown, Helen, 171 Burnett, Carol, 149 “Caesar and Me”, 154 Caine, Howard, 139 A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), 99 Carroll, Noel, xviii–xxi Carson, Jack, 80 Cartwright, Veronica, 69, 180 Castro, Fidel, 139, 140 “Cavender is Coming”, 59, 148–149 Cayuga Productions, 70 Chambers, Joan, 172 “The Changing of the Guard”, 123–125 “The Chaser”, 166 Chayefsky, Paddy, 4–5, 9, 35, 159 Chekhov, Anton, 19, 143 Chiles, Linden, 137 Cicero, 30 Ciolli, Augusta, 5 Civil War, 22, 25, 33, 118, 119, 127 ‘The Clarion Call” (O. Henry), 10, 13 Clark, Gage, 129 Clift, Montgomery, 108 The Clock , 17 The Clouds (Aristophanes), 29 Cochran, Steve, 153 Cold War : context of, xvi, 3, 49, 52, 85, 86, 89, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 117, 119, 121, 128–129, 134, 149, 158; critique of, 62–63, 135–136, 140, 170; paranoia, 86, 88, 90, 92, 137, 192;

Index space race, 52, 62, 170; themes, 101–103, 135–136 Collier, John, 166 “Come Wander With Me”, 167 Comi, Paul, 96 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 18 Constantine, Michael, 146 Conte, Richard, 166 Conway, Curt, 139 Conway, Tom, 25 Conwell, John, 150 Cook, Fielder, 5 Cooper, Ben, 118 Cooper, Jackie, 154 Cooper, Maxine, 51 “The Cop and the Anthem” (O. Henry), 10, 11, 13, 17 Corman, Roger, 100, 146 Cornthwaithe, Robert, 123 Corwin, Norman, xviii, 2–3, 4 Court, Hazel, 92 Cox, Wally, 163 Crane, Jeanne, 13 A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone (Presnell and McGee), xv–xvi, xxv, 62, 63, 71, 72, 96, 113 Crosby, Gary, 167 Crowder, Jack, 64 cryogenics, 76–77, 163 Cummings, Robert, 109, 114 Cummings, Susan, 88 Dahl, Roald, 24 Dailey, Irene, 181 Daly, James, 108 Dances With Wolves, 120 Davis, Roger, 166 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (film), 86, 93, 135 Day the World Ended (film), 100 Day, Price, 137 Dayton, June, 174 de Corsia, Ted, 63 de Wit, Jacqueline, 50 Deacon, Richard, 63 Dead Man’s Shoes (film), xv “Dead Man’s Shoes”, 13 “Deaths-Head Revisited”, 115–116 “Death Ship”, 101

213

Defoe, Daniel, 100 Delevanti, Cyril, 174 Demarest, William, 175 Derrida, Jacques, 38, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 194 Desilu Playhouse, xviii, 61, 107, 108 Devine, Andy, 92 DeVoe, Billy, xvi Diamond, Robert, 125 Dick, Philip K., 62, 68, 100 Dickens, Charles, 18 “Différance” (Derrida), 40 Dillaway, Dana, 69 “Disappearing Act”, 51 divorce, 179 Dixon, Ivan, 145, 146 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 68 Doar, Graham, xvi Donath, Ludwig, 138 Donne, John, 124 Dorn, Susan, 169 Douglas, Donna, xxvi, 140 Dr. Bloodmoney (Dick), 100 Duff, Howard, 169 Dumbrille, Douglas, 164 Duryea, Dan, xiii, xxiii “Dust”, 143, 145, 146 Duvall, Robert, 172 dystopias: in other literature and film, 7, 62, 68, 72, 136, 141, 191; in the Twilight Zone , xii, 63, 68, 79, 86, 131, 136, 141–143, 148. See also utopias Earth Abides (Stewart), 99 Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (film), 85, 86 Edge of Tomorrow (film), 32 Einstein, Albert, 77 Elam, Jack, 90 “Elegy”, 98, 99 Ellwood, James, 81 Encore (Maugham), 14, 17 “The Encounter”, 126–127 Enrico, Robert, 23–24, 25 Erdman, Richard, 152 “Escape Clause”, xxvi, 13 “Execution”, 76, 77, 106, 154 “The Eye of the Beholder”, xxvi, 59, 140, 142, 143

214

Index

Fabares, Shelley, 92 “The Facts of Life” (Maugham), 14–15, 17 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 72, 73, 141, 142 Fahrenheit 451 (film), 141 Fairman, Paul, 96 Falk, Peter, 139 Fear and Fancy, 25 “The Fear”, 92–93, 97 Federal Communications Commission, 3 Feldman, Leslie Dale, xviii, xxi–xxii, 133–134 “The Fever”, 80 Fight Club (film), xv Five (film), 100 “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”, 168, 183 Fletcher, Angus, 7, 30 Flying Leathernecks (film), 107 Forbidden Planet (film), 65, 98–99 Ford Television Theatre, 19–20 Ford, Constance, 66 Forrest, Steve, 170 Foucault, Michel, 43 “Four O’Clock”, 137, 139 “The Four of Us Are Dying”, 163–164 “Frame Shifters: Surprise Endings and Spectator Imagination in The Twilight Zone” (Plantinga), xix–xxi, 7 Francis, Anne, 150, 165 Franciscus, James, 112 Frankenheimer, John, 109 “From Agnes—with Love”, 76, 81–82, 163 From Here to Eternity (film), 107–108 Frost, Alice, 185 “The Fugitive”, 94, 180 Fujikawa, Jerry, 111 Garcia, David, 118 Gates, Larry, 131 gender roles, 174. See also women “The Gift”, 93–94, 95, 102 “The Gift of the Magi” (O. Henry), 10, 13, 17 “The Glass Eye”, 25 Godzilla (film), 85 Goldsmith, Martin M., 126, 174 Gordon, Don, 164

Gordon, Jenny, 180 Gordon, Susan, 94 Gordon, William D., 140, 153 Grams, Martin, Jr., xvi–xvii, 21 Granger, Farley, 13 Grant, Cary, 141 “The Grave”, 154, 190 Gravity (film), xv Great Ghost Tales, 25 The Green Berets (film), 125 Green, Austin, 118 Gregg, Virginia, 185 Gregory, James, 118 Grinnage, Jack, 151 Griswold, Claire, 172 Grizzard, George, 67, 166 Groundhog Day (film), 32 Guevara, Che, 139 Habermas, Jürgen, 45 Haigh, Kenneth, 117 Hamilton, Murray, xiii, xxii Hammerstein, Oscar H. II, 107 Hamner, Earl, Jr., 92, 106, 165, 179 Handzlik, Jan, 91, 137 Hardwicke, Cedric, 66 Harryhausen, Ray, 184 Hartford, Dee, 179 Hartley, Mariette, 76, 163 Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Sconce), 79 Haydn, Richard, 79 Hayward, Brooke, 185–186 Heath, Dody, 164–165 Hector, Kim, 179 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 36, 37, 38, 45 Heidegger, Martin, 38, 39–40, 44, 46 Hemingway, Ernest, 124 Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter), 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 26 Herbert, Charles, 69 “Here There Be Tygers” (Bradbury), 70 Herrmann, Bernard, 182 “He’s Alive”, xxi, 81, 138–139 Heyes, Douglas, 52 Heyes, Joanna, 140 Hillaire, Marcel, xxv Hingle, Pat, 172

Index Hitchcock, Alfred, 21, 24, 34 “The Hitch-Hiker”, 101 Hitler, Adolf, 139 Hobbes, xxi, 134 “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby”, 92, 93 Hogan, Robert, 166 Hole, Jonathan, 75 Holliman, Earl, xii, xxii, 61 Holloway, Sterling, 174 Holman, Rex, 118 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (May), 158 Hopper, Dennis, 138 Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Wilde), 42 Horne, Geoffrey, 93 horror genre, 59 Horton, Russell, 123, 125 Howard, Ronald, 22 Hoyt, John, 68, 90 Hugo, Victor, 18 “A Hundred Years over the Rim”, 106 Hunt, Lester H., xviii–xxi “The Hunt”, 101 Hutchinson, Josephine, 70, 180 Hutton, James, 51 Huyssen, Andreas, 43 Hyland, Diana, 166 I Am Legend (Matheson), 62, 100 “I Am the Night—Color Me Black”, 125, 144, 146 I Love Lucy, xi, 159–160, 161 “The Incredible World of Horace Ford” (Rose), 106, 172–173 “In His Image”, 67–68, 163 “In Praise of Pip”, 106, 125 In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling (Wolfe), xvii The Intruder (film), 146 “The Invaders”, xxiv, 95, 98, 102, 183 Invaders from Mars (film), 85, 86 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Blish), 135 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film), 85, 86, 88, 89 ironic twist endings, xii, xx, xxiii, 9–10, 17, 26, 50, 53, 57, 102

215

irony: in American politics, 136–146; blank, 42, 43, 45; as central theme, xiii, xiv, xxiii–xxiv, 189–190; in courtship, 161–168; derivation of, 29–30; disjunctive, 42, 45; domestic, 157–158, 159, 163, 168–178; in future wars, 127–131; in the family, 178–186; history of, 29–30; intended effect of, 7; ludic, xxiv–xxv; martial, 107–109, 115, 116, 118, 119, 123, 129, 190; martial, in civilian contexts, 121–127; mediate, 42; modernist, 34–41; narrative, 93, 102; in older wars, 116–121; in other shows, xiii; postmodernist, 41–45; robotic, 63–76, 162; and Rorty’s ironist utopia, 45–50; in socialization, 147–155; sociopolitical, 133, 146, 148, 159; Socratic, 29–33; surrealistic, 7; suspensive, 42, 45; technological, 60–62, 103, 128, 158, 162, 170; in Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast, 3; in World War II, 109–116 Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Behler), 29 The Irony of American History (Niebuhr), 195 “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”, 100, 154 I Sing the Body Electric (story collection; Bradbury), 70 “I Sing the Body Electric!” (short story, Bradbury), 69–74; adapted for Twilight Zone, 180, 191–192 “I Sing the Body Electric” (Whitman), 72 It Came From Outer Space (film), 86, 97, 135 “It’s a Good Life”, 182–185, 192 I Was a Communist for the FBI (film), 135 Jackson, Felix, 108 Jackson, Sherry, 166 Jacquet, Roger, 23 Jaffe, Sam, 47 Jameson, Frederic, 62 Jancovich, Mark, 59 “The Jeopardy Room”, xv, 48–49, 190 “Jess-Belle”, 165 Jillian, Ann, 181 Johnson, George Clayton, xvi, 106, 163, 174, 186

216 Johnson, Lyndon B., 125 Jones, Henry, 148 “Judgment Night”, 106, 112, 121 kaiju film genre, 85 Karlan, Richard, 140 Keefer, Don, 184 Keith, Robert, 186 Kellaway, Cecil, 98 Kelljan, Robert, xv, 49 Kelman, Ricky, 171 Kelton, Pert, 172 Kemmerling, Warren, 118 Kennedy, John F., 131, 137 Keymas, George, 140 Khrushchev, Nikita, 159 “Kick the Can”, 101, 106, 186 Kiel, Richard, 88 Kierkegaard, Søren, 29, 37, 46 Kiley, Richard, 64 “A Kind of Stopwatch”, 152–153 King, Wright, 31 “King Nine Will Not Return”, 106, 114, 115, 190 Kinsolving, Lee, 92 Kirk, Phyllis, 34, 174 Klugman, Jack, 125 Knight, Damon, 87 Kobe, Gail, 164, 169 Krafft, Andrea, 74 Kraft Television Theatre, xviii, 4, 21, 63 Kramer, Stanley, 100 Kulp, Nancy, 94, 180 Kuluva, Will, 140 “Lamb to the Slaughter” (Dahl), 24 Landau, Martin, xiii, 48 Lane, Melissa, 30 Lane, Rusty, 75 Lansing, Robert, xxvi, 76, 163 Larch, John, 184 La Roche, Mary, 34, 174, 181 “The Last Flight”, 106, 116–118, 120 “The Last Leaf” (O. Henry), 10, 13 The Last Man on Earth (film), 100 “The Last Rites of Jef Myrtlebank”, 166 “The Lateness of the Hour”, 68–69 Lathbury, Mary A., 123

Index Laughton, Charles, 10, 11 Leachman, Cloris, 184 Lean, David, 107 Leave It to Beaver, 178 Lee, Harper, 146 Lee, Ruta, 177 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 151–152 Levant, Oscar, 13 Levin, Ira, 74 “Life in the Loom” (Lathbury), 123 Lights Out, 25 Lincoln, Abraham, 118 Lindsey, George, 146 Linville, Joanne, 118 Little Big Man (film), 120 “Little Girl Lost”, 161 “The Little People”, xxiv, 97, 101, 102 “Living Doll”, 181–182 Locke, John, xxi “The Lonely”, 11, 33, 67–68, 143, 144, 162 The Loner (Serling), xiv “Long Distance Call”, 80 “Long Live Walter Jameson”, 164–165, 166 “The Long Morrow”, xxvi, 76–77, 163 Long, David, 169 Long, Richard, 141 Lord, Suzanne, 166 Lorre, Peter, 24 Love, Phyllis, 137 Lovesky, Celia, 165 Lowell, Tom, 123 Lupino, Ida, xiii, xxiii Lyotard, Jean-François, 43 MacGill, Moyna, 137 The Magic Mountain (Mann), 34 Mahoney, Maggie, 173 Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Spigel), 60 The Man from Planet X (film), 86 “Man from the South” (Dahl), 24 “The Man in the Bottle”, 106 The Man Who Japed (Dick), 100 Mann, Thomas, 34 Mantell, Joe, 5, 153 March, Jean, 143

Index Maross, Joe, 97, 99 Marsh, Jean, 162 Martin, Dewey, 100 Martin, Kreg, 125 Martin, Nan, 172 Marty (teleplay and film), 159 “Marty” (Chayefsky), 4–5, 35, 186 Marvin, Lee, 75, 154 “The Masks”, 134, 185 Matheson, Richard, xii, xv, xviii, xxii, 26, 34, 36, 62, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 116–117, 120, 129, 161, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 181, 185, 193 Maugham, W. Somerset, 14, 16, 17, 26 Maupassant, Guy de, 17–18, 26 May, Elaine Tyler, 158–159 “Maya the Cat Girl”, 166 McCale, Brian, xxiv McCarthy, Joseph, 135, 137, 138, 139 McCarthy, Kevin, 164 McCarthyism, 86, 131, 135, 136–137, 138, 158 McDowall, Roddy, xii, 96 McGee, Marty, xv, xxv, 52, 62, 63, 71, 72, 94, 96, 113, 118, 129 McGiver, John, 173 McLiam, John, 172 McNamara, Maggie, 81 McNeely, Jerry, 164 McQueen, Steve, 24 Medallion Theatre, 108 Meeker, Ralph, 21 Meredith, Burgess, xxv, 49, 94, 142 Merril, Gary, 118 Merril, Judith, 99 Metress, Christopher, 146 “The Midnight Sun”, 128 “The Mighty Casey”, 74–75 Miles, Vera, 21 military themes, 105–109, 116–121; in civilian contexts, 121–127; experimental technology, 53, 61; futility of war, 88, 107–108, 110, 115, 117, 119, 120–121, 123, 126, 128, 129, 167, 171; future wars, 127–131; Vietnam War, 125; World War II, 109–116 Miller, J.P., 9 Miller, Walter, 99

217

Minciotti, Esther, 5 “The Mind and the Matter”, 151–152 “Miniature”, 172 Minow, Newton, xiii “A Miracle of Rare Device” (Bradbury), 70 “The Mirror”, xxi, 139 Mississippi Burning (film), 146 modernism, xxii, xxiv, 4, 6, 29, 30, 38, 44, 45, 53, 58, 193; and irony, 34–41, 42 modernity, 41–42, 121 “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, 90–91, 93, 102, 130–131, 137, 192 Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (Booker), 43, 58 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 129 Montgomery, Michael, xxiii Moorehead, Agnes, 95 Morris, Greg, 121 Morse, Barry, 81 “A Most Unusual Camera”, xxv, 80 “Mr. Bevis”, 59, 148 “Mr. Denton on Doomsday”, xiii, xxiii, 11 “Mr. Dingle, the Strong”, 94 “Mr. Know-All” (Maugham), 16–17, 18 Mumy, Billy, 125, 183 Murrow, Edward R., 135, 136 musical scores, 73, 182 “Mute”, 181 My Three Sons, 158 “The Necklace” (Maupassant), 17–19 Nelson, Ed, 77 “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room”, 153, 154, 190 “The New Exhibit”, 173–174 Newlan, Paul, 63 Newman, Paul, 109 “A Nice Place to Visit”, 154 Nicol, Alex, 171 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 30 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 195 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38–40, 42, 44, 46 Nietzsche (Heidegger), 39–40 “Night Call”, 80 Night Gallery, 26 “Nightmare as a Child”, xiv, 49, 190

218

Index

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, 195 nihilism, 39–40 1984 (Orwell), 7 “Ninety Years without Slumbering”, 81, 101, 186 Nixon, Richard, 159 “Noon at Doomsday”, 6, 144 Norman Corwin’s Words without Music, 2 “Nothing in the Dark”, 101 “No Time Like the Past”, 76, 106, 121–123 “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, 59, 63, 141–142, 143 Oakeshott, Michael, 46 Oakland, Simon, 113 Ober, Philip, 166 Oboler, Arch, 2 “The Obsolete Man”, xxi, 142–143 “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Bierce), 22, 25, 119; adaptation for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 22, 23–24, 25, 32–33, 119; adaptation for Twilight Zone, 2, 22, 23–24, 25, 119, 144 Odets, Clifford, 2 “The Odyssey of Flight 33”, 106, 116 “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”, 106 O. Henry’s Full House (anthology film), 10, 11–12, 13–14, 17, 18 “The Old Man in the Cave”, 128 Oliver, Susan, 96 O’Malley, J. Pat, 94, 180 “Once upon a Time”, 76, 106 O’Neal, Patrick, 177 “One for the Angels”, xii, xxii, 13 One Million Years B.C. (film), 184 “One More Pallbearer”, 128, 129–131 One Step Beyond, 25 On the Beach (film), 100 On the Orator (Cicero), 30 “On Thursday We Leave for Home”, 101 Opatoshu, David, 77 Operation Pacific (film), 107 Oratorical Education (Quintilian), 30 Orwell, George, 7 The Others (film), xv “The Outer Limit” (teleplay), xvi The Outer Limits, xii, xiii, 26, 80, 159, 160 Out There, 25 Overton, Frank, xxiii, 181

Owen, Tudor, 121 Palance, Jack, 146 “The Parallel”, 101, 170 Parker, Alan, 146 Parker, Suzy, 141 “The Passersby”, 118 Patrick, Nigel, 17 “Patterns”, xviii, xxiv, 8, 63–64, 65, 108, 109 Patton, George, 129 Patton (film), 129 “A Penny for Your Thoughts”, 174 The Penultimate Truth (Dick), 100 “People Are Alike All Over”, xii, 96–97 “Perchance to Dream”, 165–166, 190 Perlstein, Rick, 131 Perry, Steven, 145 Persoff, Nehemiah, 112 “Person or Persons Unknown”, 101, 169 Peters, Brock, 146 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 36 Philco Television Playhouse, 4, 159 Philips, Lee, 165 Phillips, Barney, 79, 90, 172 Philosophy in The Twilight Zone (Carroll and Hunt), xviii–xxi “A Piano in the House”, 81 Pidgeon, Walter, 98 Pittmen, Montgomery, 129, 154, 166, 190 Planet of the Apes (novel and film), 100 Plantinga, Carl, xix–xxi, 7 Plato, 30, 32, 37, 41 Playhouse 90, xiii, xiv, xviii, 109 Pleasance, Donald, 123 Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry), 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 16 post-apocalyptic settings, 62, 128 Postmodernism (Jameson), 62 postmodernism, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 54, 87, 177, 191; and irony, 41–45 postmodernity, 41–42 post-traumatic stress disorder, 106, 127, 157, 170, 171 prejudice: racial, 109, 144–145, 146; social, 144–145 Presnell, Don, xv, xxv, 52, 62, 63, 71, 72, 94, 96, 113, 118, 129 Presnell, Robert, Jr., 166

Index “Printer’s Devil”, 81 “Probe 7, Over and Out”, 101 “The Purple Testament”, 109, 117 “A Quality of Mercy”, 110–111 Quartet (Maugham), 14, 15, 17, 18 “Queen of the Nile”, 165 Quintilian, 30 The Rack (film), 109 “The Rack”, 108, 109 Radford, Basil, 14 Randall, Sue, 163 “The Rank and File”, 8 “The Ransom of Red Chief” (O. Henry), 10, 13 Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Jancovich), 59 Ratoff, Gregory, 13 Rebound, 17 Rennie, Michael, 93 Republic (Plato), 32 “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, xiii, xviii, 8, 145, 146 “Revenge”, 21 Reynolds, William, 109 Richman, Mark, 92 “Ring-a-Ding Girl”, 81, 106 “The Rip Van Winkle Caper”, 77, 101, 106, 154 Robby the Robot, 65, 66, 98 Robert Montgomery Presents, xvi Roberts, Roy, 152 Robertson, Dale, 13 Robinson Crusoe on Mars (film), 100 robots, 63–76 Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, xiv, xviii Rodgers, Richard, 107 Rorty, Richard, on the ironist utopia, 45–50, 54, 57, 67, 72, 78, 102, 131, 134, 144, 148, 149, 153, 154, 173, 193–194 Rosay, Françoise, 16 Rose, Reginald, 5, 9, 172 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xxi Ryan, Eileen, 169 Sabinson, Lee, 80–81 Salmi, Albert, 76, 110

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“Sanatorium” (Maugham), 17 Sander, Gordon F., xvii–xviii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 105, 108 Sands of Iwo Jima (film), 107 Sanger, 17 satire, Menippean, xxv, 177, 191, 194 Savalas, Telly, 181 Schildkraut, Joseph, 115 Schlegel, Friedrich, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44 Schoenfeld, Bernard C., 81, 163 science fiction, 59, 189–190; on The Outer Limits, 160 Science Fiction Theatre, 25 Sci-Fi (SyFy) Channel, xi–xii Sconce, Jeffrey, 79, 80, 158, 159, 160 Scott, Simon, 117 Scourby, Alexander, 117 See It Now, 135 “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross”, 164, 166 Selzer, Milton, 185 Serling, Rod, xii; antiwar agenda of, 108, 109, 126, 133, 136; as auteur, xxvi, 1, 5, 6–9; biographical background, 2, 3–4, 105; creative freedom of, 5–6; influence of war experience on writings, 105–106, 108, 109, 110, 115, 120, 123, 127, 133; interviewed by Mike Wallace, 31, 47; social agenda of, 2; as “television’s last angry man”, 2, 4, 8, 44, 51, 108, 116; voice-over prologues and epilogues by, xv, 1, 19, 24, 25, 26, 32, 35, 37–38, 49, 51, 52, 61, 62, 75, 76, 79, 88, 89, 109, 110, 115, 118, 131, 142–143, 183, 191; writing for Desilu Playhouse, 107; writing for Kraft Television Theatre, xviii; writing for The Loner, xiv, xviii; writing for Medallion Theatre, 108; writing for Playhouse 90, xiii, xviii, 8; writing for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, xiv, xviii; See also specific Twilight Zone episodes Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man (Sander), xvii–xviii, 2 “The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms”, 106, 119–121

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Index

Shadow of the Hearth, 99 “Shadow Play”, 31–32, 35, 144 Shatner, William, 146 “The Shelter”, 92, 130, 145 Shields, Arthur, 18 “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain”, 177–178 “Showdown with Rance McGrew”, 106 Shutter Island (film), xv “The Silence”, 20, 143 Simmons, Georgia, 179 Simon, Robert F., 121 Singleton, Doris, 152 Singleton, Penny, 173 “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”, xiii, xxiii, 106 The Sixth Sense (film), xv Sloane, Everett, 64, 80 Smith, Howard, 148 social critique: in Hitchcock, 22, 25; in Maugham, 17; in O. Henry, 10, 13; in Twilight Zone, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxi, xxiv, xxiv–xxvi, 20, 24–25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 52, 57 social prejudice, 144–145 socialization, 82, 147–155, 172, 181 Socrates, 29, 30–32, 34, 37, 38, 43, 45 Sohl, Jerry, 165, 181 Sokoloff, Vladimir, 140 Sorrells, Robert, 74 “Sounds and Silences”, 173 South Pacific (film), 107 space invaders: as astronauts, 95–101; benevolent, 93–95; malevolent, 87–93 space race, 52, 62, 170 Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (Feldman), xviii, xxi–xxii, 133–134 Spigel, Lynn, 60 “Spur of the Moment”, 106, 166–168 Squire, Katherine, 24, 129 Stafford, Tim, 179 Stalag 17 (film), 107 Star Wars, 189 Stark, Steven D., 9 The Stars My Destination (Bester), 136 “Static”, 80, 106 “Steel”, 75 Stehli, Edgar, 165

Steiger, Rod, 4, 146 Steinbeck, John, 10–11, 14 The Stepford Wives (Levin), 74 Stevens, Inger, 68 Stevens, Warren, 13 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18 Stewart, George R., 99 “Still Valley”, 118–119 Stockton, Frank, 18 Stockwell, Dean, 110 “A Stop at Willoughby”, 36, 76, 106, 122 “Stopover in a Quiet Town”, 128, 170 Story Theater, 18 Strange Stories, 25 Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files (Booker), xxii–xxvi, 7, 58 Strassfield, Adele T., 154 Stratford, Tracy, 181 Stratton, Chet, 151 “The Strike”, 108 Stroll, Edson, 140 Stuart, Barbara, 79 Stuart, Maxine, xxvi, 140 Studio One, 5, 21, 108 suburbia: critique of, 161, 162, 170; myth of, 178; and suburban culture, 157–161; and the suburban ideal, 159–160, 169; and suburban psychopathology, 160 Sues, Alan, 185 Sullivan, Liam, 143 Sunset Boulevard (film), 79 Suspense, 21 Szörényi, Éva, 181 Takei, George, 126 Tales of Mystery, 25 Tales of Tomorrow, 25 Tandy, Jessica, 25 Tapscott, Mark, 118 Taylor, Rod, 51 Taylor, Vaughan, xxv, 50, 118, 164 technologies and technology: critique of, 69, 77–78; in daily life, 59–60, 74; distrust of, 79–80; future, 76–78; haunted, 78–76, 101, 174; vs. human socialization, 81, 82; ironic, 57–63; robotic, 63–76; as vehicle for irony, 60–61; in World War II, 111–113

Index Tedrow, Irene, 68 television: anthology series on, 17–26; Golden Age of, xiii, 4–6, 6, 44, 64, 68, 184, 186. See also Alfred Hitchcock Presents; The Outer Limits; Twilight Zone Tennyson, Jamie, 20 Thaxter, Phyllis, 171 Theophrastus, 152 They Shall Have Stars (Blish), 135 They Were Expendable (film), 107 “A Thing About Machines”, 78, 80, 82 The Thing from Another World (film), 85 “Third from the Sun”, 99–100, 128 “A Thirty-Fathom Grave”, 114 Thriller , 25 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 39 Till, Emmett, 6, 145, 146 “The Time Element”, xviii, 1, 61, 106, 107, 108 “Time Enough At Last”, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 49–50, 59, 128, 149–150, 194 Time Out of Joint (Dick), 62 time travel, xvii, xxiii, 76, 106, 118, 123; martial, 120; retrograde, 121, 122; timeloop scenario, 31–32 Tobin, Dan, 174 To Kill A Mockingbird (film and novel), 146 Tomerlin, John, 141, 143 Tone, Franchot, 20 Torn, Rip, 109 “To Serve Man”, 87–89, 102, 192 “A Town Has Turned to Dust”, 109, 145, 146 Townes, Harry, 31 “The Trade-Ins”, 63 Trapped , 25 Trio (Maugham), 14, 16, 17, 18 Trivia from The Twilight Zone (DeVoe), xvi “The Trouble with Templeton”, 106 Truex, Ernest, 153, 186 Truffaut, François, 141 Trundy, Natalie, 78 “TV Political Fantasy” (Worland), 9 Twain, Mark, 18 Twelve Angry Men (Rose), 5 “24 Men in a Plane”, 108

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“Twenty Two”, 101 Twilight Zone: cancellation of, xiv; Cold War context of, xvi, 3, 49, 52, 85, 86, 89, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 117, 119, 121, 128–129, 134, 149, 158; difference from other anthology series, 26; dystopian episodes, xii, 68, 79, 86, 131, 136, 141–143, 148; “femme fatale” episodes, 165–166; as formulaic show, xii–xiv, xviii, xxii, xxiii; influence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on, 22, 25, 26; ironic twist endings in, xii, xx, xxiii, 9–10, 17, 26, 50, 53, 57, 102, 192; musical score in, 73, 182; network promotion of, 9; psychological context of, 190; as science fiction, 189–190; Sconce’s thoughts on, 79, 80, 158, 159, 160; social consciousness in, 64; straight vs. satirical narratives, 191; syndication of, xi; use of black actors in, 145. See also Twilight Zone themes The Twilight Zone (John Blake), xvi Twilight Zone academic treatments: A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone (Presnell and McGee), xv–xvi, xxv, 62, 63, 71, 72, 96, 113, 129; Philosophy in The Twilight Zone (Carroll and Hunt), xviii–xxi; Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (Feldman), xviii, xxi–xxii; The Political Theory of Rod Serling (Feldman), 133–134; The Twilight Zone (John Blake), xvi; The Twilight Zone Companion (Marc Scott Zicree), xiv–xvii, xxv, 32, 48, 52, 62, 63, 70, 72, 73, 96, 113, 125, 129, 145; The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (Grams), xvi–xvii; Trivia from The Twilight Zone (DeVoe), xvi; The Twilight Zone Companion (Zicree), xiv–xvii, xxv, 32, 48, 52, 62, 63, 70, 72, 73, 96, 113, 125, 129, 145 Twilight Zone themes: alcoholism, 167, 170, 185; American politics, 135–146; automobile-related episodes, 80; children and family, 178–186; civil rights, 144, 146; computers, 63, 64, 76, 81, 128, 163; courtship, 161–168;

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Index

cryogenics, 76–77; government, fascist and/or totalitarian, 147; male alienation and estrangement, 168–170, 172, 177; marriage, 168–178; moral universe and social harmony, 81–82, 193; racial prejudice, 109, 144–145, 146; robots, 63–76; routinization vs. alienation, 58–59; socialization, 82, 147–155; submarine-oriented teleplays, 112–114; suspended animation, 76–77, 163. See also alien invasion; Cold War; military themes; suburbia; technologies and technology; time travel; twist endings The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (Grams), xvi–xvii Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (Barzman), 135 twist endings: in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 21, 22, 25; in Twilight Zone, xii, xx, xxiii, 9–10, 17, 26, 50, 53, 57, 102, 192 “Two”, 101, 128, 129 “Uncle Simon”, 65–67, 76, 134–135, 186 The Unexpected, 17, 25 The United States Steel Hour, 108 utopias: ironist, 45–50, 54, 57, 67, 78, 131, 144, 148, 149, 154, 173, 194; liberalist, 57, 65, 72, 97, 134, 153, 193. See also dystopias “Valley of the Shadow”, 77–78, 86, 99, 135 Van Cleave, 73 van Dreelen, John, xv, 48 van Zandt, Julie, 170 Vargas, Edmund, 93 The Veil , 25 “The Velvet Alley”, 8 “The Verger” (Maugham), 16, 17 Vidal, Gore, 9 Village of the Damned (film), 183 Voltaire, 151 Vulcan’s Hammer (Dick), 100 “Walking Distance”, xiii, xxiii, 36, 106, 122, 192 Wallace, Mike, 8, 31, 47 Walsh, Raoul, 107

War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells), 3 “War of the Worlds” broadcast (Orson Welles), 3, 131 Warden, Jack, 143, 162 Warwick, Robert, 117 Watling, Jack, 14 Wayne, David, xxvi, 13 Wayne, John, 107, 125 Weaver, Dennis, 31 Weaver, Fritz, 99, 142 The Web , 17 Welles, Orson, 2, 3, 131 Wellman, Manly Wade, 118 Wells, H.G., 3 Weston, Jack, 91 “What You Need”, 153 “What’s In the Box”, 80, 174–177, 192 “Where Is Everybody?”, xii, xiv, xxii, 11, 24, 61, 70, 128, 149–150, 151, 170 The Whistler, 17 White, David, 69, 169 White, Ruth, 172 Whitman, Walt, 72 Whitmore, James, 101 “The Whole Truth”, 80 Widmark, Richard, 13 Wikstrom, Patrik, 21 Wilcox, Collin, 141 Wilde, Alan, 42, 44–45 Wilder, Billy, 107 “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, 90, 102, 137, 192 Wilson, Anthony, 167 The Wings of Eagles, 107 Winwood, Estelle, 165 Wiseman, Joseph, 129 Wolfe, Peter, xvii Wolfsdorf, David, 29–30 women: depiction of, 35–36, 177; in postwar America, 60 Worland, Rick, 9 The World Jones Made (Dick), 100 “A World of Difference”, 59, 101, 169 “A World of His Own”, 34–35, 40, 73, 151, 174, 191 Wright, Ben, 112 Wyenn, Than, 76 Wynn, Ed, xii, xxii, 81 Wynn, Keenan, 34–35, 146, 174

Index xenophobia, 87, 94, 97, 101–102 York, Dick, 110, 174 “You Drive”, 80 Young, Gig, xiii, xxiii “Young Man’s Fancy”, xv, 106, 171 Your Favorite Story, 19 Your Show Time, 18

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Zetterling, Mai, 15 Zicree, Marc Scott, xiv–xvii, xxv, 20, 32, 33, 48, 52, 62, 63, 67, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 88, 89, 94, 96, 113, 115, 120, 121, 125, 127, 140, 145, 179, 181 Zinnemann, Fred, 107

About the Author

David Melbye, a native of Los Angeles, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in 2006. His previous book, Landscape Allegory in Cinema (2010), explores the psychological use of natural settings in avant-garde and mainstream films from the silent era to the present, according to the larger cultural trajectory of landscape depiction in literature, painting, and photography, dating back to the medieval era. Melbye has taught a broad range of media studies courses in a variety of universities and academies in Southern California; he also taught media theory and production courses as a Fulbright professor in Jordan, and then as a visiting professor in Saudi Arabia. Melbye has also worked in the Hollywood television industry, contributing as a music producer for popular shows including Friday Night Lights, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and One Life to Live.

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