On October 2, 1959, CBS aired the first episode of The Twilight Zone, a brilliant television anthology series that originally ran from 1959 to 1964. Though it was known to be largely responsible for introducing science fiction to American television viewers, the show was a mixture of several other different genres including drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, suspense and horror.
The term “twilight zone” was coined before the show ever existed and was used to refer to a grey area, but the way it was used in Serling’s narrations was as a metaphor for strange happenings. The term has now become synonymous with all things unexplainable. At the beginning of each episode, there is a set up of an extraordinary situation usually involving science-fiction or supernatural motifs. The episodes then dramatize and elaborate on the situation the surprising and thought-provoking twist at the end that makes the situation even more interesting than it had originally appeared to be.
Average American families were embracing the concept of suburbia by moving from small towns to big cities during the postwar years. After experiencing commercial success, Rod Serling made that move with his wife, but they began to notice an uncomfortable feeling of dislocation like many other young adults of the 1950s did.
What they felt was that they were missing something that was left behind in their old small towns, but no one knew what that thing was. This longing for “the good old days” or an “imagined past” was the start of the Nostalgia Craze and proved essential to a few of the earliest episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically the episodes, “Walking Distance”, “A Stop at Willoughby” and “The Incredible World of Horace Ford”.
“Walking Distance” and “The Incredible World of Horace Ford” are very similar in that they both have a central character who is a grown man that has accidentally traveled back in time to his childhood. After spending some time there, they have some sort of bad experience and return home, to their respective times with a new appreciation for their lives.
“A Stop at Willoughby” also played with the idea of traveling backwards through time to a perceived better time and place. This was different in that the place that the central character traveled to was actually better than his current living situation which led to his decision to stay there permanently. At the end, we learn that this place could possibly be heaven as he has actually died in his time.
Shifting between that which is normally considered to be separate is very popular in The Twilight Zone such as the confusion between the animate and the inanimate, life and death, or the fictional world of television and film and the real world.
“The Lonely” and “The Lateness of the Hour” are a couple of episodes that play on the confusion between the animate and th inanimate, specifically robots who are indistinguishable from humans. In “The Lonely”, the central character is convicted of murder and is sentenced to solitary confinement on a deserted planet. When he is a given a feminine robot as a companion, he becomes so emotionally attached to her that if it weren’t for someone thankfully shooting her in the face, he would have missed his opportunity to leave and return home in order to stay with her.
“The Lateness of the Hour” was similar to “The Lonely” and was just as sad if not more so in that it also involved a sort of death of a robot. The central character convinces her parents to stop relying on their robotic servants to do everything for them for fear that they will become completely dependent on them. When she eventually decides she is ready to go out and make a new life for herself, it is revealed that she is a robot. Her memory is then erased and she is used to replace one of the servants that she previously persuaded her parents to decimate.
Another robot-human episode that I feel is worth mentioning is “I Sing the Body Electric”. It is about a single father of three who buys a robotic grandmother to replace his children’s mother. The two younger of the three kids fall in love with her. The oldest girl’s distaste for the robot changes to love after the woman throws herself in front of an oncoming vehicle to save her after the girl runs out into the street in front of it. The reasons why I felt like this was worth mentioning is that it was written by Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, was ranked as the most disappointing episode in the entire series mostly because the dialogue is corny and unbelievable, and it is the one hundredth episode. A few other related episodes that are worth checking out are “The Steele, “The Mighty Casey” and especially “In His Image”.
The animate versus inanimate theme in the Twilight Zone also extends to the the resemblance between humans and dolls as shown in “The After Hours”, “The Dummy”, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” and “Living Doll”.
“The Dummy” was a role reversal episode in which a ventriloquist’s dummy eventually became sentient, claiming that it was the ventriloquist that made him alive. In the end, the dummy became the ventriloquist and used the ventriloquist as a dummy in his performances. This was an apparent reflection on the widespread sense of being helpless and in the control of larger forces like many Americans felt in the 1950s.
“The After Hours” and “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” also play on the doll motif, but are reflections about the anxieties 1950s Americans experienced about personal identity. In “After Hours”, a department store mannequin becomes human for a month and forgets she’s a mannequin. In the much more disturbing and suffocating episode,“Five Characters in Search of an Exit”, five characters of different, distinctive backgrounds are trapped inside of a very large cylinder housing with no memory or awareness of who they are, where they are, or their origin. When one of them is able to get out, over the edge and outside of the room, it is revealed that they are all dolls that have been tossed into a barrel to be donated as Christmas presents.
There was an obsession with aliens that developed in 1950s American due in large part to rapid advances in aviation during World War II, with jet planes flying higher and faster than ever before. All over, pilot’s reports of strange sights and occurrences led to close scrutiny of the skies by many people who also suddenly began noticing things that they hadn’t before. This influenced quite a few new releases of science-fiction films in the 1950s which in turn inspired quite a few Twilight Zone episodes that dealt with invasions from and voyages to outer space. Some of these Twilight Zone episodes even made use of leftover props from movies.
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” shows how destructive mob mentality can be. In this episode, all hell breaks lose in the form of a riot in, Maple Street, which was initially a typical 1950s suburban neighborhood when the residents suspect that someone among them are aliens. In the end, we find that a lot of what’s causing the paranoia and panic is manipulation from two aliens who are watching over the people in the neighborhood. The aliens have discovered that they can destroy inhabitants of Earth, one “Maple Street” at a time, by letting them destroy themselves. There were indeed no aliens among them.
Most of the alien episodes weren’t as serious as that one, however. They often took a parodic approach to this theme like in “Mr. Dingle the Strong” for example. In it, invaders from Mars use a pathetic salesman for a silly experiment in which they give him super human strength and observing the effects it has on his personality and life in general. After he eventually makes a full of himself, the Martians lose interest and move on, while a couple of Venusians use him in their experiment in which they give him super human intelligence.
Other Martian and Venusian invaders show up in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” hiding themselves among a group of travelers, then after all of the other travelers are killed, they reveal themselves to each other in a diner and discuss which of their invasions will be successful in taking over Earth.
The Twilight Zone’s willingness to approach this with a sense of humor suggested that the series was moving into postmodern skepticism concerning the paranoia of the previous decade.
I will have more episodes to talk about very soon.