the twilight zone essay

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Social justice from the twilight zone: rod serling as human rights activist.

Hugh A.D. Spencer Toronto, Ontario, Canada [email protected]

Rod Serling achieved critical acclaim in the First Golden Age of Television writing realist teleplays that express a strong moral sense and social consciousness. With the decline of anthology drama at the close of the 1950s, Serling created The Twilight Zone , which would become a forum for telling relevant stories while circumventing commercial and bureaucratic interference. As a means of exploring Serling’s use of drama as a tool for social justice, this paper compares themes from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery with charter and constitutional statements of human rights. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the moral template applied in this discussion. Serling saw drama as a political act and his commitment to social justice often extended to his activities off the page. The content and consequences of his 1968 speech at Moorpark College are cited as an important example of his real world political behavior.

Keywords: Rod Serling, Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Science Fiction Television, Golden Age of Television, Television Censorship

Things and Ideas: Politics and Science Fiction

The use of futuristic settings and narratives to convey social messages and political arguments is not new to science fiction in any medium. Examples range from the techno-optimism of Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911), the dystopias of Huxley, Zamyatin, and Atwood; the literary and cinematic future histories in Wells’ Things to Come (1936); and even the morality plays sometimes found in the television series Star Trek (1966-29) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94). Not every science fiction story may be a political tract, but science fiction can be a relevant and powerful vehicle for social commentary. As the scholars Hassler and Wilcox observed:

The politics of the real world on our planet continues with events, with struggle, with individual and collective success and failure. The fictional world of science fiction continues to be reinterpreted, newly invented and widely attended to in our culture. (vii)

In other words, ongoing and active connections exist between politics and science fiction – with events, things, and ideas forming the basis of social polemics and serving as part of the fictional world where the stories take place. From Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735) to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) and the Canadian television series Orphan Black (2013-2017), politics have provided both cultural fuel and creative structures for speculative storytelling, most especially for the science fiction genre.

Rod Serling started his writing career as one of television’s “angry young men” from the medium’s first golden age in the 1950s and the author of many critically acclaimed realist dramas. 1 He is now primarily remembered as a leading practitioner in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror; his best-known television projects were The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and, to a lesser extent, Night Gallery (1969-1973).

On the surface, Serling’s literary career path might appear to represent a major change in genre and creative focus (from realist to fantasist), but on closer examination, there is a consistent and growing concern with human worth and social justice in all of his major works. As noted by scholar Leslie Dale Feldman: “…his writing was more than science fiction; it was political theory” (6).

This paper examines three episodes of The Twilight Zone and three Night Gallery segments and compares them with specific articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]. These examples represent the range of Serling’s work in speculative fiction with some of the most overt statements of political themes. The purpose of this comparison is not to assert that Serling set out to deliberately educate viewers about a specific international legal charter, but to explore how the political message of one of the 20th Century’s most important television dramatists closely parallels and complements the goals of a landmark proclamation of human freedom and dignity.

Cultivating the Vast Wasteland

Examining the broader cultural and political contexts in which these episodes of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery were produced is informative because the state of American broadcast television in the 1960s both shaped the course of Serling’s career as a writer, and influenced the content and format of his scripted dramas.

In his famous 1961 speech, “Television and the Public Interest,” to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chair Newton Minow noted that there were indeed some excellent television programs on the three existent national networks and he even named The Twilight Zone as one of them. However, the FCC chairman then issued the following challenge to network professionals:

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland [emphasis added]) .

Creating and communicating in such an intellectually and creatively bankrupt milieu filled with (in Minow’s words): “unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons” offered little opportunity to tell stories of any value or artistic integrity. After Minow’s speech, “a vast wasteland” became critical shorthand for the argument that television was undergoing an inevitable process of crass commercialism and the “dumbing down” of content to the lowest intellectual denominator. As of 1961, there seemed little potential to use drama and storytelling to explore political issues or advance the cause of human rights and social justice.

Traveling Through Another Dimension: The Activist Disguised as Entertainer

By the end of the 1950s, Rod Serling was one of the most famous and honored writers in television. Teleplays such as Patterns (1955), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), and The Comedian (1957) were powerful and respected highlights of television’s first Golden Age of drama. He received six Emmy awards for these and other plays, as well as the Peabody and Sylvania awards (Doll).

The impact of Serling’s vision is found in Jack Gould’s review of Patterns in The New York Times , printed soon after its first broadcast:

Nothing in months has excited the television industry as much as the Kraft Television Theatre’s production of Patterns , an original play by Rod Serling. The enthusiasm is justified. In writing, acting and direction, Patterns will stand as one of the high points in the TV medium’s evolution … a repeat performance at an early date should be mandatory.

In the era of live television drama, when programs were not routinely videotaped, a call for a rebroadcast was quite extraordinary and one that NBC agreed with, setting up a second performance the next month.

A survey of the body of Rod Serling’s work reveals that he viewed the processes of writing and storytelling as political acts. Much of his fiction contains moral and political themes, and Serling publicly stated that it was the duty of writers to explore relevant and socially significant content in their work. He resisted the interference of sponsors, censors, or outside agencies in the exercise of this artistic responsibility stating that: “I think it is 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” (Zen).

Serling also had astonishing creative output. He wrote 99 of the 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone, and penned several major motion pictures including Seven Days in May (1964) and Planet of the Apes (1968). He found time to teach at Antioch College and was involved in political causes including the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and campaigning for incumbent Pat Brown against Ronald Reagan in the California 1966 gubernatorial race (Zen).

Serling’s concerns about the political meaning and artistic merits of scripted television led to the creation of The Twilight Zone . At the end of the 1950s, and increasingly in the 1960s, it was not unusual for writers to encounter regular interference with the content of scripts from sponsors who feared their products could be cast in an unfavorable light or that certain themes might alienate audience members and potential consumers. One biographer provides a specific example of this commercially-motivated censorship:

Serling was even more shocked and angered that year (1956) to what happened to “Noon on Doomsday”, which was inspired by a murder case then in the news – the Emmett Till case, in which a young black boy had allegedly been kidnapped and killed by two white men who went to trial and were exonerated on all counts. (Sander 117)

Later, Serling described to interviewer Mike Wallace what happened to his script:

…I wrote the script using black and white skinned characters initially, then the black was changed to suggest ‘an unnamed foreigner,’ the locale was moved from the South to New England – I’m convinced they would have gone to Alaska or the North Pole and used Eskimos except that the costume problem was of sufficient severity not to attempt it. (“Featuring Rod Serling”) 2

To audiences in 1959 it may have sounded as though Serling, frustrated with the political and moral evisceration of this work, had surrendered in his artistic battle with sponsors and networks:

I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want to have to battle sponsors and agencies. I don’t want to have to push for something that I want and have to settle for second best. I don’t want to have to compromise all the time, which in essence is what a television writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes. (“Featuring Rod Serling”)

“Controversial” in this context equates with political content and social justice themes. In the same interview Serling goes on to describe his latest project, an anthology series called The Twilight Zone . Here, the focus would be on good, entertaining stories that would avoid “controversy” and interference:

…these are very adult, I think, high-quality half hour, extremely polished films. But because they deal in the areas of fantasy and imagination and science-fiction and all of those things, there’s no opportunity to cop a plea or chop an axe or anything.

The Twilight Zone did not, in fact, represent surrender, but rather a change in tactics, a covert operation. The anthology series would become a forum for telling relevant stories while circumventing commercial or bureaucratic interference. Serling’s creative strategy was to set the narratives in an imaginary setting with fantastical characters but to give them greater resonance and relevance by making them about something.

A Signpost for Social Justice: The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Rod Serling may have started writing as a social realist, but he quickly developed a master’s understanding of the power of mass entertainment and how popular culture works in the context of broadcast media. He was a major dramatist with a prevailing political sensibility and with an awareness of the polemic potential of speculative fiction; the struggle for human rights was likely critical inspiration to his creative vision. Some of the themes and ideas in Serling’s speculative fiction are so central that it is possible, and even useful, to compare themes from Twilight Zone and Night Gallery episodes with charter and constitutional statements of human rights, such as, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Briefly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and in 1976 it was ratified as international law. The Declaration was a response to the atrocities and conflicts of World War II and is the first worldwide expression of the inherent rights of all persons. The UDHR is significant because it was developed by an international body and as such represents one of the most inclusive and comprehensive statements of human rights to date.

Referring to the values and principles set out in the UDHR can serve as a series of “signposts” into the significance of television dramas whose popularity endures and grows decades after they were first broadcast.

Robots, Militray Schools, and Truthful Education: “The Academy” and “The Class of ‘99” 

Access to, and the content of, education is viewed as a fundamental human right in the UDHR and the morality of education is also a central theme in one of Serling’s most powerful speculative stories. Article 26 of the UDHR states:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Both of these dramas explore the role and process of education; or rather the potentially nightmarish consequences of the perversion of education where schooling is not directed to the humane growth of the student but rather dedicated to the subjugation of the individual to a controlling (and inhumane) social structure.

In the Night Gallery segment, “The Academy,” Mr. Holston is given a guided tour of Glendalough Academy by its Commandant. Holston’s goal is to determine the suitability of this military school for his son, Roger. The establishing shots and opening dialogue quickly reveal that Glendalough is an isolated and highly exclusive institution and that Holston is a man of considerable means. The conversation between Holston and the Commandant tells the audience that Roger has a chronic discipline problem and the application of a strict regime of traditional curriculum and military discipline may be precisely what the boy needs.

“Discipline is the major item word here,” the commandant states. Studies and the daily schedule are accompanied by continual drill: “Physical drill…drill at every level.” Shots of the Academy students in the mess hall, classrooms and grounds, uniformed and moving in unison illustrate the Commandant’s assertion.

The episode is structured as an expositional exercise where the Commandant gradually explains more and more about the nature and purpose of the Academy: First, Mr. Holston learns that Glendalough is a self-contained world with little contact with family and the outside world. Then, when Holston asks an older man in uniform how long he has been employed by the Academy, the man replies that he is actually a student and has been enrolled there for his entire adult life. This is the first major revelation in the story: essentially enrollment in the Academy is a form of life imprisonment. The final revelation occurs when Holston shares own beliefs and charges that his son Roger is “a rotter” and being locked in the Academy for the rest of his life is just the thing for him.

The dramatic tension emerges from the gradual discovery of the true terrifying nature and purpose of the Academy where education has been turned into an insidious form of incarceration, plus the sudden revealing of the antagonism between a father and his son – a generation gap in this American family.

So, who is the real villain, “the rotter” in this case? Could Roger’s behavior be a reaction to his father’s cruelty and callous nature? Is the audience witnessing some manifestation of a dysfunctional family? Or perhaps the son’s rebellion is some form of political action? The answers to these questions can’t be known because the story stops at this point. However, one could conclude that “The Academy” represents a monstrous distortion of the right to education, because in this episode, schooling becomes a form of punishment. The premise represented by the Academy is a violation of the next provision in the UDHR’s statement of educational rights, which declares:

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. (Article 26)

Based on a 1965 story by David Ely, “The Academy” was broadcast in 1971 in the midst of a decade of anti-war and civil rights protests, and a climate of unrest and civil disobedience on many college and university campuses – including the Kent State University shootings on May 4, 1970. It is not difficult to imagine that at least some of the television audience believed that a return to traditional education with a heavy emphasis on conformity and discipline was exactly what the then-younger generation needed to restore order to society.  The unfulfilling resolution and lingering message of “The Academy” is a challenge to such socially conservative attitudes because the excesses of discipline run counter to the development of the student’s intellect and personality. Further, the suppression of civil rights undermines the fundamental values of a democratic and open society.

The Night Gallery episode “The Class of ‘99” also addresses the question of education, and produced in the same year as “The Academy,” shares the same sociopolitical context. The action in “The Class of ‘99” starts in a lecture hall of a slightly futuristic, co-educational university. The professor administers an oral exam to the class after informing them of the test’s format:

Let me review briefly our procedure: I will direct random questions to each of you and will grade you immediately. Keep in mind, however, that the question may be repeated at any time to someone else.

In doing so, the professor makes it clear that the audience is about to witness an extraordinarily difficult exam that is a manifestation of a very exacting and unforgiving educational system. The professor is very formal and authoritarian, and there is no evidence of empathy or even communication between the students.

For the first set of questions, the professor draws upon arcane fields of math and physics; and because the subject matter seems so far removed from the students’ normal experience, the exam is extremely taxing and with questionable relevance. The questions soon address even more challenging issues and the tone of the oral exam shifts from intense competition to outright hostility. When the Professor asks a student (Mr. Clinton) if an African American classmate (Mr. Barnes), represents a “special problem,” Mr. Clinton responds, “Possibly inferior,” looks towards Barnes, and adds, “Being black, he might be inferior.”

The rest of “The Class of 99” unfolds like a dramatization of a social psychology experiment that might have been designed by Stanley Milgram 3 , in which the students are coached through different conflict situations based on race, class, income, politics and war. Every time the students follow the instructions of the professor there is a certain amount of psychological and physical violence involved: Verbal abuse, slapping, spitting and even gunfire. As in Milgram’s experiments, students execute noxious, even criminal, behavior under the Professor’s orders because it all occurs at the behest of an intellectual authority.

Unlike most of Milgram’s test subjects, one of the students (Mr. Etkins) eventually rebels and refuses to kill another student, Mr. Chang, who has been identified as a member of an “enemy culture.” Mr. Etkins is gunned down by another student (Mr. Johnson) for his trouble and his destruction reveals the true nature of the Class of ‘99. They are humanoid robots built by the university to repopulate society, which has been devastated by war and environmental degradation.  As Mr. Johnson, now the class valedictorian, states, education is crucial to achieving the university’s ultimate goals for the class of ‘99:

All that we know…our attitudes…our values…are part of the integral data fed into us and we shall use them as a point of beginning. We must be just…but ruthless in terms of survival. We must recognize that many of the ancient virtues are simply weaknesses.

Clearly, the education of the Class of ‘99 is not dedicated to their personal development or to instilling a respect for human dignity and freedom. Instead, the university has inculcated the class with cultural misunderstandings, intolerance and hostility. Serling’s thesis can be understood both as a criticism of contemporary education which often stress so-called “utility” over morality and a fear of where such trends will take society in the future.

Privacy, Personhood, and Aliens: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”

Just as “The Academy” and “The Class of ‘99” can be interpreted as critiques of educational systems, so too can the seminal The Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” be interpreted as a critique of McCarthyism and similar political witch-hunts. UDHR Articles 6 and 12 address the rights of personhood, privacy, and reputation, which were rights directly under attack during the McCarthy era: 4

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. (Article 6) No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (Article 12)

At first, there is little to suggest the serious and dangerous subject matter of, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” The opening shots could be from Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), or any other family situation comedy of that era: A pastoral suburban neighborhood, with freshly cut grass, polished new cars in driveways, and friendly (and white) neighbors in every house. However, this is the Twilight Zone and not Mayberry and the narrator suggests that this serenity will not last long: “Maple Street. Six-forty-four P.M., on a late September evening. [ A pause .] Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moments…before the monsters came!”

Happiness on Maple Street is the result of certainty, security and conformity. Ambiguity and the threat of danger stress community life; and in turn jeopardize the human rights of its residents. The tension in this story starts with a meteor passing overhead and the unexpected interruption of electrical power, communications and transportation – the essential services and infrastructure that make suburban life possible. A potential crisis of uncertainty is then made worse when Tommy, who looks to be between 12-14 years old, refers to science fiction scenarios from comic books as possible explanations to Steve Brand, the episode’s viewpoint character: “That was the way [the aliens] prepared things for the landing. They sent four people. A mother and a father and two kids who looked just like humans… but they weren’t.”

Steve replies, ironically: “Well, I guess what we’d better do then is run a check on the neighborhood and see which ones of us are really human.”

As the episode continues, events and situations that would normally be regarded as innocent or trivial by most suburbanites occur: Lights flash on and off, car engines start and stop, owning amateur radios and suffering from insomnia (which one neighbor admits to) – are now seen as highly significant and potentially dangerous.

Steve Brand is one of the few residents who seriously questions the “aliens among us” theory and struggles to defend both his own and his insomniac neighbors’ integrity and reputations. Brand also defends his right to privacy when his neighbors insist on coming into his home to determine if he has been using his radio to signal the space aliens. Mrs. Brand, his wife, tells the insistent crowd of neighbors that he just has an amateur ham radio, and offers to show them the equipment in the basement. In response, Steve whirls upon her and orders, “Show them nothing! If they want to look inside our house – let them get a search warrant.”

This specific confrontation is interrupted by a car that mysteriously starts on its own and more flashing lights – but it is brief reprieve for Brand who is eventually overwhelmed by his neighbors as Maple Street degenerates into house-to-house warfare using torches, axes, and firearms. Meanwhile, actual alien invaders observe the chaos from their distant spacecraft, noting that the inhabitants of all the Maple Streets in the world cannot imagine any menace greater than themselves. The aliens have identified the inability to respect the rights and integrity of others as a fundamental human flaw that invaders can easily exploit. We are the monsters on Maple Street.

This episode concludes with the following powerful words literally delivered in Serling’s voice as the episode’s narrator:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, and prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is…that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone!

This closing narration is a stark and unforgettable warning about the dangers of social paranoia and the failure to respect the dignity and privacy of others. When we disregard these rights we place the essential ties of trust that hold communities together at risk. The chaos at the end of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” can even be interpreted as a demonstration of the need for legal and moral charters such as the UDHR.

Individuality, Community, and Asylum: “The Eye of the Beholder” and “The Different Ones”

Even by 1960, the values expressed in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” would have seemed familiar to those followed Serling’s work. The inherent value of the individual and the need to protect the individual, are frequent themes throughout Serling’s literary career, starting with the abandoned executives in Patterns (1955) and the Night Gallery episode, “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” (1971) through to the charity placement child in, A Storm In Summer (1970, remade 2000).  

The episodes “The Eye of the Beholder” ( The Twilight Zone, 1960) and “The Different Ones” ( Night Gallery , 1971) also explore the plight of nonconformists in a world that demands uniformity. These stories can be viewed as inversions of each other: In, “The Eye of the Beholder,” the audience meets a normal-looking woman surrounded by a society of monsters. In “The Different Ones,” a young man with bizarre facial deformities lives in a world of people who look just like ordinary humans.

In both episodes, the person who is different is abused by the conforming majority, which makes monstrosity not a function of outward appearances but rather of an internal failure to respect the dignity and innate rights of others.

In “The Eye of the Beholder,” Janet Tyler awakes in a hospital bed, her face completely covered in bandages, awaiting the results of the series of State-mandated cosmetic surgeries. Although the audience cannot see Janet’s face, the dialogue indicates that her appearance is considered so grotesque that she must undergo treatments to make her closer to “the norm.” Janet has little say in the course of her treatments or even in the details of her daily life – she’s not allowed sit in the hospital garden or even open the window of her room. Janet is not a citizen, a person with rights; she is a patient, a medical and social problem whose different appearance prevents her from functioning in society. Janet Tyler is defined by the State as a problem that must be solved by Janet’s surgeon, and the staff at the hospital who are agents of this paternalistic but ultimately oppressive society.  Janet’s experience exemplifies the medical deprivation of human rights and civil liberties. While the authorities stress their compassion for Janet’s situation they also say that this is her final treatment and that she is running out of options. Just before her bandages are removed, her surgeon, Dr. Bernardi warns her, “This is your eleventh visit to the hospital where you have received the mandatory number of treatments and afforded as much time as possible, Miss Tyler.” Even Tyler’s status as patient will not protect her from her persistent individuality indefinitely.

In the Night Gallery segment, “The Different Ones,” Victor Kotch is also marginalized because of his hideous appearance, albeit not as a hospital patient but as a housebound recluse who only interacts with his widowed father, Paul Kotch. Paul tries to protect Victor in the context of a traditional family, but both know they will eventually be unable to shield themselves from growing verbal and physical assaults from an increasingly hostile community.

Paul Kotch uses his videophone to contact the Office for Special Urban Problems for help, but learns that his son’s condition is so extreme that it is beyond the scope of the State’s compassion and capacity to help. Furthermore, Victor’s unusual appearance is in violation of The Federal Conformity Act of 1993 5 , which requires Paul to “do something” about his son before higher authorities are called.

In both episodes, the “State” is the off-screen villain with the power to end both Janet’s and Victor’s lives. After the failure of Janet’s final treatment, she asks to be euthanized, but her surgeon, Dr. Bernadi is reluctant to do so, instead encouraging her to immigrate to one of the officially sanctioned colonies set up for “people of her kind.”

The State in “The Different Ones” is less compassionate, there are no such communities in Victor’s world, and the representative from the Office of Special Urban Problems even raises the possibility of euthanizing Victor, saying, “Putting him to sleep for humanitarian reasons is hardly an act of murder, Mr. Kotch.”

Victor Kotch and Janet Tyler escape death and their oppressive situations by fleeing to different, more tolerant, communities. Janet meets a representative of one the colonies who is “just like her,” beautiful and physically perfect by the viewers’ own standards but deemed “ugly” by her own society. Victor ultimately leaves the Earth as a part of an interplanetary cultural exchange program, where he meets people who are “just like him,” grotesque yet kind and accepting.

“The Eye of the Beholder” and “The Different Ones” can be viewed as test-cases demonstrating the need for the following principles expressed in the UDHR:

…All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country” and, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution…” (Article 14)

Both “The Eye of the Beholder” and “The Different Ones” have happy endings but they offer a qualified happiness; seeking asylum, which means an individual is forced to leave their native land, is a right of last resort. Though Janet and Victor ultimately find acceptance among “their own kind,” Serling criticizes actual modern societies that cast out the “different ones” because the societies refuse to tolerate nonconformity.

“The Obsolete Man” and the Right to Life

The “Obsolete Man” (1961) is an episode of The Twilight Zone that features direction and acting that could be from a Berthold Brecht play with sets and cinematography that are reminiscent of German expressionist cinema. As with many Twilight Zone and Night Gallery stories, the intent is to create a sense of nightmare and “The Obsolete Man” is a political nightmare.

Romney Wordsworth, who states his profession as “librarian,” has been tried by the State and has been judged in the words of the State’s Leader as “obsolete” and a “bug not a person.” This teleplay is one of Serling’s most passionate pleas for human dignity and the events of the story touch on the right of worship and belief, as when Wordsworth disputes the Leader’s broadcast proclamation, “The State has proven that there is no God!”

The “Obsolete Man” also refers to the right to freedom of expression and education when the Leader argues that Wordsworth’s profession has no value:

You’re a librarian, Mr. Wordsworth. You’re a dealer in books and two-cent fines and pamphlets in closed stacks in the musty finds of a language factory that spews meaningless words on an assembly line. WORDS, Mr. WORDSworth. That have no substance, no dimension, like air, like the wind. Like a vacuum, that you make believe have an existence, by scribbling index numbers on little cards.

Both freedom of worship and belief and freedom of expression and education are dependent on the more fundamental right to life, liberty, and security as stated in Article 3 of the UDHR.

Mr. Wordsworth is more effective in defending his human dignity and rights than Steve Brand was in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” because he paradoxically exercises the one right the State does extend to him: the right to select the method of his execution.

By choosing death by explosion, which is broadcast live on television, Wordsworth demonstrates the cowardice and moral weaknesses of the Leader who, trapped in the same room with Wordsworth and the bomb, pleads for his life and is finally granted mercy by the condemned man. This action reveals the inherent contradiction of this totalitarian state and as the episode’s closing narration notes: “Any state, entity or ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the rights, the dignity of man…that state is obsolete.”

In the surreal closing scene, the Leader returns to the courtroom after Wordsworth’s death, only to be physically torn apart by his followers. One could interpret this scene as Serling asserting that a society that abandons respect of human rights, individual dignity, and social justice is ultimately doomed to barbarism and destruction.

Things and Ideas in the Real World: The Moorpark College Speech

Serling did not restrict his political statements and actions to fiction as noted earlier; he was active in a number of political organizations and supported a range of progressive causes, particularly those associated with the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements:

As he carved out a critically and commercially successful career as a scriptwriter and television producer, Serling maintained an active agenda of writing such letters 6 to newspapers, to both fans and detractors and giving political speeches. (Boulton 1227)

Just one example of Serling stating and acting on his political beliefs is found in his 1969 lecture “The Generation Gap,” at Moorpark College. His talk has a truly remarkable opening:

… I refused to sign a loyalty oath which was submitted to me as a prerequisite both for my appearance and my pay… I did not sign the loyalty oath and I waived my normal speaking fee, only because of a principle. I think a requirement that a man affix his signature to a document, reaffirming loyalty, is on one hand ludicrous – and on the other demeaning…I believe that in a democratic society a man is similarly loyal until proven disloyal. No testaments of faith, no protestations of affection for his native land, and no amount of signatures will prove a bloody thing – one way or the other as to a man’s patriotism or lack thereof. (In Marshall)

Serling refused to comply with a requirement of the State of California, which he believed questioned his loyalty, personal integrity, and violated his rights of free expression and presumed innocence. He had a valid point; as Article 19 the UDHR states,

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

There were costs to Serling for taking this stance. For a successful writer and celebrity, foregoing the fee for a speech may seem insignificant; however it is very likely that Serling earned the enduring animosity of those in power who created and supported the loyalty oath legislation.

While Serling ends his lecture with specific reference to the American involvement in the War in Vietnam, his criticisms shed insight into twenty-first century concerns such as racism, the rights of privacy, and personal integrity, as well as the growing militarization of society.

Between Light and Shadow: The Artist as Disguised Activist

When we compare themes from vintage television programs with clauses from an international legal document we are engaged in much more than a curious categorization exercise. There is an almost intuitive appeal and intellectual impact when we view the artistry of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery through the ethical lens of the UDHR.

The UDHR expresses values and principles that Rod Serling embraced as a writer, as a citizen of his country, and as a human being. Much of his work addresses the dangers of intolerance, prejudice, and systemic cruelty. It is not surprising that Serling used fiction, whether realist or magic-realist, in combination with real-world activism to oppose injustice and promote his political views.

The creative strategy that led to the creation of The Twilight Zone was ingenious because it became more than a way to avoid interference from sponsors and network censors. The ongoing popularity of The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and even later projects, such as Witches, Werewolves and Warlocks (1963), The Season to be Wary (1967), and Planet of the Apes (1968), generated vast audiences for Serling’s work and these audiences renew with each new generation. As biographer Joel Engel observes:

…(Serling) remains to this day…the only writer whose name, face and voice are easily recognizable to the masses…There can be no overestimation of the impact that Serling’s series has had on popular culture. (343)

Many viewers and readers may be drawn to the fantastical nature of such speculative stories for their entertainment value, but some audience members will probe deeper, seeking to discover the moral core of these narratives.

Part of Rod Serling’s legacy is undoubtedly political. It is difficult not to feel moved by the rejection and shame of Janet Tyler in “The Eye of the Beholder,” or experience rage and disgust at the cynical curriculum governing “The Class of ’99.” These are brilliantly produced works of science fiction, but they are also powerful pieces of political fiction. The opening narration to the first season of The Twilight Zone provides insight into the still-extant popular appeal of Serling’s stories more than half a century later:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

These narratives originate from the fringes – those aspects of our experience that are hard to define, that are about more than one thing – and makes viewers want to keep thinking about the social challenges and moral choices facing humanity. Ultimately, the ideals of human worth and dignity cannot only be appreciated at the legal or intellectual level – they must be embraced in our hearts and imaginations, and, as Serling demonstrates, science fiction is a frequent reminder that we must do so.

[1] The Last Angry Man is the title of Gerald Green’s 1956 novel about an uncompromising physician and struggling television producer. The term was sometimes paraphrased to describe radio writers and producers such as Norman Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Orson Welles, whose work often addressed controversial social issues. The expression “television’s angry young men” was also applied to emerging writers including Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Sterling Silliphant, who were primarily associated with live and anthology drama in the 1950s. Of the latter group, Serling was the one to remain the longest and most involved with television, both asserting the artistic and political potential of the medium while denouncing its trivialization and excessive commercialization (Sander iv).

[2] The context of the Mike Wallace interview does not reveal the full extent of reviews, revisions, and re-writes that “Noon at Doomsday” and an alternate version of the Till case, “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” were subject to. Christopher Metress’ overview of the development process for these scripts makes a persuasive case that the core problem was a deep and intractable reluctance by sponsors and networks to address the issue of racial injustice at a time when television advertising markets were opening up to Southern States in the 1950s.

[3] Stanley Milgram (1933 –1984) was a social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the 1960s at Yale University. Milgram studied the willingness of study subjects to obey a researcher (an authority figure) to the extent that they thought they were administering potentially fatal electrical shocks to another study subject.

[4] From 1950 to 1956, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and were subjected to intense investigation by government and private-industry agencies. Named after the dogged anti-communist pursuits of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “McCarthyism” now describes reckless accusations and attacks on the character or patriotism of individuals.

[5] A fictional construct in this story.

[6] Here, Boulton is using as an example a letter written by Rod Serling to the LA Times where he both satirizes and criticizes a leading pet food maker for sponsoring a televised speech by the founder of the John Birch Society (1226).

Works Cited

Boulton, Mark. “Sending the Extremists to the Cornfield: Rod Serling’s Crusade Against Radical  Conservatism.” Journal of Popular Culture , 6 (47), 1226-1244. 2014. Print.

Doll, Mike. “Rod Serling’s Binghamton Obituary.” Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin . Web. 30 June. 1975.

Ely, David. “The Academy.” Playboy 12 June. 1965. 113-14. Print.

Engel, Joel. Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in The Twilight Zone . Contemporary Books. Chicago. 1989. Print.

Feldman, Leslie Dale. Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serlin g. Lanham, Lexington Books. Maryland. 2010. Print.

Fried, Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press. New York, N.Y. 1997. Print.

Gould, Jack. “Patterns is hailed as a notable triumph.” New York Times . Web. 17 Jan. 1955.

Hassler, Donald M., and Clyde Wilcox . New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press. 2008. Print.

Marshall, Jeanne. “Rod Serling rips loyalty oaths, the Vietnam War, and social inequity. “ Web. QUEST Magazin e. Dec. 1968.

Metress, Christopher. “Submitted for Their Approval: Rod Serling and the Lynching of Emmett Till.” Mississippi Quarterly , 1-2 (62), 143-172. Web. 2008-2009.

Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral study of obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67 (4), 371–8. 1963. Print.

Minow, Newton N. (1961). “Television and the public interest.” Speech presented at National Association of Broadcasters in Washington DC. Web. 1961.

Patten, Steven C. “Milgram’s shocking experiment.” Philosophy , 52, 425-440. 1977. Print.

Sander, Gordon F. S erling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man.   Dutton/Penguin Books. New York, N.Y. 1992. Print.

Serling, Rod. “Featuring Rod Serling.” The Mike Wallace Interview . Web. 22 Sept. 1959.

—. The Twilight Zone . “Where is Everybody?” CBS, Los Angeles. 2 Oct. 1959.

—. The Twilight Zone . “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” CBS, Los Angeles.  4 March 1960.

—. The Twilight Zone . “Eye of the Beholder.” CBS, Los Angeles. 11 Nov. 1960.

—. The Twilight Zone . “The Obsolete Man.” CBS, Los Angeles. 2 June 1961.

—. Night Gallery. “ The Class of ‘99.” NBC, Los Angeles. 22 Sept. 1971..

—. Night Gallery. “ The Academy.” NBC, Los Angeles. 6 Oct. 1971.

—. Night Gallery. “ The Different Ones.” NBC, Los Angeles. 29 Dec. 1971.

“TV’s Rod Serling, 50, dies 2 days after heart surgery.” Los Angeles Times . 29 June. Web.1975.

United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Right s. 2016. Print.

Zen, Beringia. “Rod Serling.” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography . Web. 16 Sept. 2001.

Author Bio:

Hugh Spencer (BA, MA, MMST) is President and Senior Consultant with the Toronto firm of Museum Planning Partners. He has completed graduate level studies in Anthropology (McMaster University) and Museum Studies (University of Toronto). His first novel, Extreme Dentistry , was published in 2014 and his collection of short stories, Why I Hunt Flying Saucers and Other Fantasticals , was released in 2016. He has written over a dozen audio dramas produced by Shoestring Radio Theater in San Francisco and broadcast over the Satellite Network of National Public Radio. He has been twice nominated for the Canadian Aurora Award. Hugh delivered an earlier version of this paper at the 2011 Rod Serling Conference at Ithaca College.

Reference Citation

MLA Spencer, Hugh. “Social Justice from the Twilight Zone: Rod Serling as Human Rights Activist.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy , vol. 5, no. 1, 2018  http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v5-issue-1/social-justice-from-the-twilight-zone-rod-serling-as-human-rights-activist /

Tags: Golden Age of Television , Night Gallery , Rod Serling , Science Fiction Television , Television Censorship , Twilight Zone , Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Communication Currents

The Twilight Zone and the Power of Ideas

In 1959, one of television's most important programs debuted. Although  The Twilight Zone  appeared during the golden age of television, it represented a significant departure from the norms of its era, and in many ways it redefined the meanings presented by American popular culture. Through the lens of fantasy and science fiction,  The Twilight Zone offered powerful messages on topics such as war, racism, addiction, extremism, violence, ageism, and consumerism.

The Twilight Zone  changed the popular cultural landscape in three distinctive ways that continue to resonate in television and other forms of entertainment. 

First, the show violated the rule of predictability that governed television programming in the 1950s and early 1960s. Plots, sets, costumes, and characters were highly uniform and one dimensional in television's early decades–a trend that continues to dominate network programming.  The Twilight Zone  violated this uniformity, as it had no regular cast members. Additionally, episodes were often set in the past or in the future and sometimes in locations beyond earth. Some episodes suggested optimism for humanity, others dismissed the human experiment as doomed. Some episodes took a humorous look at life while others were sober and even dark. Each week brought something new and provoking.

Second, the show gave voice to people at the margins of society and questioned the rules for holding power. Corruption in both public and private life was commonplace and no group was immune to criticism. Many episodes asked viewers to consider who had power in society, whether it was being used to help or oppress others, and how society might find ways to empower those who had been shut out by virtue of wealth, gender, race, or belief. A powerful example of this message came in “The Obsolete Man” which aired in season two. Starring Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver, the episode examined a future society in which books were banned and librarians were sentenced to death. In the end, viewers learned about the power of the state versus the power of ideas.

Third, the show rejected placing faith in science and technology to make the world a better place. Plots often portrayed the loss of humanity when people embraced technology as a savior for human failings. Most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s accepted science and technology as unquestioned forces for making the world a better place. In contrast,  The Twilight Zone  asked about unintended consequences and the loss of control that people were willing to accept in the name of progress. The future was often viewed as a bleak place because of human mistakes, greed, and conceit.

The power of television to help viewers confront, and not simply escape, the problems of contemporary life continues to be a rare commodity in today's television landscape. At its core,  The Twilight Zone  was more about ideas than commerce. Creator and writer  Rod Serling  used the show as an electronic town hall which asked viewers questions about their beliefs in morality, ethics, power, and humanity. That is why people continue to watch reruns of episodes they have seen time and again.

The best television programming of the last fifty years has followed  The Twilight Zone's  notion that viewers should be treated as serious consumers of ideas, not disconnected individuals attracted to the novelty of visual images. Thoughtful observers understand that  Star Trek  was not a show about space travel in the future, that  All in the Family  was not about a cranky father living in New York City, or that  Northern Exposure  was not about an urban doctor trapped in the Alaskan wilderness. These programs and others followed  The Twilight Zone's  penchant for asking deep questions about values, technology, relationships, and, ultimately, the future of humanity. Watch an episode of  The Twilight Zone --you too will be asked to think critically about your own life and how you communicate with others in a complicated and challenging world.

The Enduring Legacy of The Twilight Zone

Brian Murray

In his 1961 address to the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, Newton Minow famously offered a pessimistic assessment of America’s most exciting new industry. Television, declared Minow, was turning into a “vast wasteland” of “blood and thunder” and “formula comedies.” Minow, the recently appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, specified only one weekly series he found “dramatic and moving,” a hopeful sign of what broadcast television could become. This was The Twilight Zone , which its creator and chief writer, Rod Serling, described as “a series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of nature.”

The Twilight Zone won numerous industry awards and wide critical praise during its five-season run from 1959 to 1964 on CBS, confirming Serling’s place as one of the most prolific and innovative writers and producers to emerge from the live-drama era of the 1950s, television’s original “golden age.” But by the time he died in 1975, Serling was probably less well known for his writerly creativity than as the host of a quiz show and as the face of TV commercials for cigarettes and cars.

What happened? How did the man who longed to be — and arguably was — television’s answer to Arthur Miller end up instead as an edgier version of Ed McMahon?

Exhaustion played a part. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, Serling said he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on The Twilight Zone , seven days a week, even as he kept other projects simmering. “When I bend down to pick up a pencil,” he joked on another occasion, “I’m five days behind.” At least one of his biographers, Joel Engel, also blames a growing taste for what Serling himself called the “crazy, pink, whipped-cream world” that media fame opens up. Serling’s late career as a “commercial huckster,” “ham actor,” and “professional celebrity,” Engel writes in his insightful Last Stop, the Twilight Zone (1989), grew out of an “addiction to fame — and fortune — that cost him his chance at true greatness.”

But it is also true that by the time The Twilight Zone left the air, the trends that had worried Minow in 1961 were even easier to discern. During the 1950s the commercial networks were still burnishing television’s image, hoping to prove that this new and relatively expensive device was far more than an “idiot box” or a “boob tube.” Commercial television supplied culture as well as vaudeville — Shakespeare and Beethoven as well as Sergeant Bilko and Gorgeous George. In the late 1950s, when The Twilight Zone debuted, Omnibus was still on the air; that show had aired lectures, interviews, and performances of original screenplays as well as abbreviated versions of such classic works as King Lear and La Bohème . Richard Burton appeared as Heathcliffe in the DuPont Show of the Month production of Wuthering Heights , and Leonard Bernstein gained national fame because CBS broadcast his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic from Carnegie Hall.

But by 1970, if not before, almost none of the TV industry’s leaders really believed, with Minow, that they were “public trustees” who should have faith in “the people’s good sense and good taste,” shunning “a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator.” Television now demanded celebrity, not literary ability — probably the main reason Serling shifted from scriptwriting to shilling, lending his distinctive persona to the makers of toothpaste and beer and many other products. Of course it was ironic that the man who once compared television’s endless advertisements to “ traveling snake-oil shows ” should end up as Madison Avenue’s go-to guy. But it was probably inevitable too, given the economic factors and programming assumptions shaping network TV. “We had tilted at the same dragons for seven or eight years,” Serling said about the early television dramatists who, like himself, had battled publicly for quality TV. “And, when the smoke cleared, the dragons had won.” Serling’s idealistic career, turned tacky in the end, reflects the direction of American television during its formative years.

Going Big on the Small Screen

R odman Edward Serling, born in 1924, grew up in Binghamton, New York, the son of a butcher who was also an amateur inventor whose most inspired idea — the “frankburger,” a hamburger-shaped hot dog — somehow failed to catch on. By his own account Serling enjoyed a pleasant childhood. He was popular and athletic, active at the Jewish Community Center and at Binghamton Central High School, where he was a member of the debate team and a frequent performer in student plays. A lingering nostalgia informs several well-known Twilight Zone episodes, including “Walking Distance,” in which a workaholic advertising executive, a stand-in for Serling himself, goes “looking for sanity” in his old hometown, where he finds himself face-to-face with his boyhood self and discovers that, alas, one cannot escape the present by retreating into a vanished past. It is one of Serling’s favorite themes on The Twilight Zone , which deals frequently with failure, regret, and loss. This “sentimental streak,” writes his daughter Anne Serling in As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling (2013), was “almost as intense as his crusading moralistic streak.”

In 1943 Serling joined the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division. Standing five foot four, he barely qualified. Assigned to the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Serling saw action in the Philippines during the fierce closing months of the war. He took part in the Battle of Manila, where American casualties were high. Serling was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and, according to his daughter, when he returned to the States he suffered from what used to be called “shell shock.” In her memoir she writes that, as a child, she often heard her father scream out in the middle of the night. For years in his dreams he continued to fight the Japanese. He turned to writing, he admitted, as “a kind of compulsion,” a “terrible need for some sort of therapy.”

Attending Antioch College on the G.I. Bill, Serling studied literature and imitated Hemingway: “Everything I wrote,” he later recalled, “began, ‘It was hot.’” Serling’s other models included the radio dramatist Arch Oboler, whose highly inventive horror series Lights Out almost certainly helped inspire The Twilight Zone . After graduating in 1950, Serling worked as a copywriter and, in his spare time, managed to place some of his own rather melodramatic scripts with popular radio serials like Dr. Christian , about a small-town physician. As his skill and confidence improved, Serling turned to television, where an urgent demand for original material allowed a now-legendary cadre of young writers — which also included Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose — to start their careers.

Serling quickly sold television plays to the better New York-based anthology programs. His first real hit, “Patterns,” was a character-driven big-business drama broadcast live on the Kraft Television Theatr e ; it was, New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote a few days after its broadcast, “one of the high points in the TV medium’s evolution.” In that age before reruns, “Patterns” became the first television drama to get a second airing — by having the original cast reassemble a few weeks later for a second live performance. It earned Serling his first Emmy, and would later be adapted into a film . Serling soon succeeded again with “The Rack” (1955), about an American soldier “brainwashed” as a prisoner during the Korean War; this teleplay, too, was adapted into a movie, starring Paul Newman. Serling’s second Emmy came for “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1956), a grimly sentimental portrayal of an aging prizefighter scrapping to save his dignity in a sport long marked by corruption and betrayal. A 1957 adaptation of Ernest Lehman’s short story “The Comedian,” which featured Mickey Rooney as a cruel and vulgar TV funnyman — a sort of sadistic Sid Caesar — brought Serling Emmy number three.

Young and articulate, Serling was widely interviewed and profiled for many leading newspapers and magazines. “All of a sudden,” he remembered , “with no preparation and no expectations, I had a velvet mantle draped over my shoulders…. Like a good horse, or a swivel-hip halfback, I was the guy to watch.” Offers flowed in, including offers to write for film, but somehow it never really worked out. Engel suggests that Serling was too cocky and impatient to find “the time and care it takes to develop a worthwhile film.”

So television remained Serling’s medium, and he used his new stature to emerge as one of TV’s most eloquent champions. For example, in a 1957 essay introducing a collection of four of his scripts, Serling argued that television was ideal for the sort of smart, provocative drama that he, Rose, and Chayefsky, among others, aspired to write. The movies may have had CinemaScope, but the small screen offered “intimacy.” The teleplay was nothing less than a “new art form” featuring recognizable people in everyday settings. Television drama relied on close-up shots, facial studies, carefully chosen words; it “won’t take stark villainy or lily-white heroism,” as he put it in a 1955 newspaper article. The best television dramas — he was especially fond of Chayefsky’s Marty , about a homely butcher looking for love in the Bronx — dealt “in all the grays that make up character” in an effort to say something meaningful about the human condition. Even “a few intellectual diehards,” Serling observed, had begun to believe that “a television play could come close to the legitimate theater, and even surpass it sometimes in terms of flexibility.” At its best, TV combined “the immediacy of the living theater” with “the flexibility of the motion picture, and the coverage of radio.”

Radio, however, supplied an unfortunate precedent. For decades the big radio networks — CBS and NBC — had dominated the medium’s programming, providing endless hours of drama as well as news, sports, and information. But almost no one, noted Serling, thought of radio as a medium for literary art. With the exception of Oboler, Norman Corwin, and a few others, radio’s writers were complete unknowns. Even within the industry, Serling observed in that 1957 essay, they were considered “hacks” whose scripts were mere “appendage[s]” to sales messages from Ivory Soap, say, or Fleischmann’s Yeast. For the most part radio drama “aimed downward”: it became “cheap and unbelievable” and “willingly settled for second best.”

Serling worried that television would go the way of radio. The television sponsor also “invests heavily” in a mass “organ of dissemination,” and without him, Serling conceded, that organ would “wither away.” But Serling wanted sponsors to think of television not as an animated billboard but a great national stage where dramatic entertainment could incorporate a more mature interest in social issues and more subtle themes. Like Minow, Serling urged the medium’s leaders and funders to cultivate and liberate literary talent, much as certain theatrical producers or the funders of great orchestras saw themselves primarily as champions of crucial cultural institutions rather than as salesmen and entertainment profiteers. Too often, Serling complained, television’s best programs were interrupted by “raucous singing jingles that dent the ears.” As a result, “the audience must then make its own mental and emotional realignment to ‘get back with’ the sole object of its intentions. That it can do it at all is a tribute to mass intelligence and selectivity.” “No dramatic art form,” he added, “should be dictated and controlled by men whose training, interest and instincts are cut of entirely different cloth.” This, he wrote, was rather like letting a beer baron manage a professional baseball team simply because his ads bankrolled their televised games.

And Now a Word from Our Censor

F rom the start, however, Serling faced intrusions great and small. In one early episode of The Twilight Zone , for example, a sponsoring coffee company protested a scene in which a ship’s officer called out for tea. Far worse, however, was an incident a few years previous involving a teleplay Serling wrote for a weekly show sponsored by U.S. Steel. Serling’s script alluded to the 1955 lynching murder in Mississippi of the black fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. At the behest of the sponsor, the script was “vitiated, emasculated,” Serling remembered , so that all references to racism in the South were generally expunged. Here is how Marc Scott Zicree recounts the incident in his Twilight Zone Companion :

The plot concerned a violent neurotic who kills an elderly Jew and then is acquitted by residents of the small town in which he lives…. U.S. Steel demanded changes in the script. The town was moved from an unspecified area to New England. The murdered Jew was changed to an unnamed foreigner. Bottles of Coca-Cola were removed from the set and the word “lynch” stricken from the script (both having been determined “too Southern” in their connotation). Characters were made to say “This is a strange little town” or “This is a perverse town,” so that no one would identify with it. Finally, they wanted to change the vicious, neurotic killer into “just a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong.”

Serling was left feeling he was “striking out at a social evil with a feather duster.”

A later script for Playhouse 90 , also based on the Emmett Till story — this time retelling it in a Western setting — was altered as well. “They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer,” Serling complained. Years later, he would say that, “From experience, I can tell you that drama, at least in television, must walk tiptoe and in agony lest it offend some cereal buyer from a given state below the Mason-Dixon.”

In politics Serling was a Kennedy Democrat ardently supportive of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Hollywood chapter of Citizens for a Sane Nuclear Policy. After Kennedy was assassinated Serling wrote a short documentary for the U.S. Information Agency; it was intended to portray — especially for foreign viewers — the new president, Lyndon Johnson, as a gruff but humble man, a paternalistic populist who, with the help of the United Nations, would work to abolish poverty and end war. By 1968, like many others in Hollywood, Serling was denouncing Johnson’s Vietnam policies while hailing “the goals and aspirations of America’s young.” And yet, as Anne Serling recalls, her father wore his silver paratrooper’s bracelet for the rest of his life, calling himself a patriot of the old school. “I will salute our flag and stand for our anthem,” he told a college audience in 1968. “This, on the face of it, removes me from the pale of the New Left.”

In short, he was a liberal whose moral convictions influenced the tales he wanted to tell and how he wanted to tell them. But overt stories of social criticism risked raising problems with the sponsors and the network censors. This was a major motivation for the creation of The Twilight Zon e : allegories, science fiction, and unusual premises not only allowed complicated moral and political stories to be distilled to a potent purity, but they could liberate Serling from some of the limitations of drama on commercial television. “A Martian,” he noted, “can say things that a Republican or Democrat can’t.”

After initial hesitance, CBS in 1959 welcomed the new weekly series, presumably hoping to capitalize on Serling’s high-toned reputation and on the growing appeal of books like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956), and on such similarly cerebral science-fiction movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Moreover, the network had considerable success with Alfred Hitchcock Presents , which also served up a fairly sophisticated mix of dark irony and suspense. The network was less certain about using Serling, à la Hitchcock, as the face of the show, opening and closing each episode with wry, scripted remarks. Although telegenic in his way, Serling was less recognizable than the rotund director. And he looked nothing like the typically nondescript on-camera host. He looked like a well-tailored young rabbi, upright but hip, delivering droll sermons through clenched teeth in a clipped and alliterative style. CBS hedged its bets, scheduling The Twilight Zone against relatively light competition on late Friday nights, the fringe of primetime.

Mike Wallace was also skeptical. In his interview with Serling — conducted just days before The Twilight Zone premiered — Wallace implied that writing about flying saucers and time machines for the new show was something of a comedown for the man whose incisive character studies, realistic in approach, had become touchstones for quality television. After all, science fiction on television heretofore meant shows like Flash Gordon and Rocky Jones, Space Range r — kiddie stuff made on the cheap. Serling, Wallace implied, would be turning out “potboilers” now, and laughing all the way to the bank. But Serling was adamant: The Twilight Zone was a “high-quality” anthology series, as “adult” in its way as other TV drama had been.

Traveling Through Another Dimension

S hot at MGM, The Twilight Zone employed the talents of several accomplished Hollywood veterans, including the directors Mitchell Leisen, Joseph Newman, and Ida Lupino; the composer Bernard Herrmann, famed for scoring Citizen Kane and various Hitchcock hits; and George Clemens, who would win an Emmy for his cinematography on the series. Actors from across four generations appeared on the show, from respected senior figures like Buster Keaton, Gladys Cooper, and Agnes Moorehead, to character actors like John McGiver and Ed Wynn, to up-and-comers like Burt Reynolds, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, William Shatner, Robert Redford, and a young Ron Howard.

Serling himself wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show’s 156 episodes, but not every episode was a gem. Some were “real turkeys,” he admitted, such as “Mr. Dingle, The Strong,” a second-season episode in which a two-headed alien walks into a bar — perhaps an attempt, one of several on Serling’s part, to imitate the writings of Fredric Brown, popular in the Fifties for mixing comedy and science fiction in such offbeat classics as Martians Go Home (1955). But for the most part The Twilight Zone was written “with an eye towards the literacy of the actor and the intelligence of the audience.”

In fact, Minow’s analysis in 1961 now looks unduly pessimistic, or perhaps premature. The Twilight Zone belongs in some ways to a golden age of its own. To be sure, by the late 1950s, the networks were cutting links with New York’s art and theater scene and turning almost exclusively to Big Hollywood for their most popular shows. As a result, the live drama showcases disappeared, along with Omnibus and other up-market offerings. But in retrospect, the growing role of Disney, Warner Brothers, and Universal seems inevitable. The nation’s fifty million television owners (up from around three million when the decade began) wanted programs that were less like off-Broadway productions and more like the movies, with bigger design budgets, higher production standards, and more recognizable faces. Moreover, the networks were discovering that filmed series (like old movies) could rerun on television repeatedly, for years, sold in syndication packages to affiliates across the country and independent stations around the world.

Certainly, most of the popular dramatic serials of the late 1950s and early 1960s were not much noticed by what Serling called the “intellectual diehards.” Instead, those shows were considered middlebrow entertainments assembled to connect advertisers with a mass audience and to give those viewers generally happy endings and fairly static heroes symbolizing bourgeois virtue and civic order. Still, the best of them — including Perry Mason , Naked City , The Defenders , Gunsmoke , Bonanza , even The Untouchable s — were artful in their way. They were well-acted, well-directed and often surprisingly well-written, and, like most Hollywood movies, required a certain amount of concentration to be fully enjoyed. During much of the 1960s, the television networks still assumed that most viewers were probably also readers, not of Henry James perhaps, but of Erle Stanley Gardner or Zane Grey. They read bestsellers like The Caine Mutiny , Peyton Place , East of Eden , and On the Beach , as well as the short stories in Collier’s , The Saturday Evening Post , and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine . For such viewers, then, good popular fiction need not be sensational or simplistic, but it did require, even within well-worn genres, compelling characters and reasonably fresh storylines. Viewers would welcome shows that avoided juvenility and that aimed to “say something” in a reasonably intelligent way. “It’s our thinking,” Serling insisted in a short promo film aimed at potential sponsors, “that an audience will always sit still and listen and watch a well-told story.” Besides, as he told Wallace, “I don’t think calling something commercial tags it with a kind of an odious suggestion that it stinks.”

Not surprisingly, the stories on The Twilight Zone are replete with postwar liberal themes. Several of them attack prejudice, which Serling later called “the singular evil of our time” and the one from which “all other evils grow and multiply.” Thus in one of the show’s most memorable episodes, “The Eye of the Beholder,” the victim is a young woman, beautiful by our standards, who lives uneasily in a society where “normal” citizens have large bent mouths and pig-like snouts — a twist cunningly hidden until near the episode’s close. In other episodes, the underdogs are slightly comical types who, in an era of gray flannel suits and organization men, insist on pursuing harmlessly eccentric ways. The title character in the episode “Mr. Bevis” cannot hold a job or pay the rent. He reads Dickens, listens to zither music, and plays street games with the neighborhood children. The modern world has little use for Mr. Bevis, who will never be powerful or rich. Mr. Bevis — like Carol Burnett’s hapless Agnes Grep in the episode “Cavender is Coming” — gets some nudges from a guardian angel, but ultimately chooses to stay true to his misfit self. Without the likes of Mr. Bevis, notes Serling in his intro voiceover, the world might be “a little saner” but “would be a considerably poorer place.”

In the fifth-season episode “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” something of a remake of Dickens’s Hard Times , the outcasts are factory workers who, in the name of progress, are replaced by “automatic assembly machines” that work nonstop, without complaint, and — as the company’s president happily points out — without the bother of pensions, coffee breaks, or powder rooms. Like much science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, The Twilight Zone looks frequently at the bewildering effects of science and technology, including the “battle between … the brain of man and the product of man’s brain,” as Serling puts it in the episode’s opening. And yet the series largely avoids the easy portrayal of modern machinery as monstrous and threatening; generally, as in “Whipple’s,” technology is dangerous only when it is misused by foolish people who fail to appreciate the power of their tools. Wallace V. Whipple, the antagonist here, is a humorless numbers man who, over the protests of his loyal employees, clearly savors the delicious sense of power that comes from slashing costs and making “the stockholders cheer.” He fires his foreman and chief engineer who, in passionate speeches worthy of Clifford Odets, protest the heartless dismissal of “men who have worked here for twenty to thirty years.” “You can’t pack ’em in cosmoline like surplus tanks!” shouts the foreman. But the sight of the sleek new machines whirring away simply intoxicates Whipple — until he too is replaced by a stout robot (the famous “ Robby ,” first featured in Forbidden Planet ) shown busily ensconced in the executive suite in the final scene. Serling remarks in closing that man too often “becomes clever instead of becoming wise.”

The Pit of Man’s Fears

T he Twilight Zone is famous for its twist endings — its unexpected inversions and ironic moral lessons. In “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” a clever scientist and his criminal cohorts steal a fortune in gold bars and then, to escape, enter a series of hidden chambers designed to keep them in a state of suspended animation for a hundred years. When they do emerge, after a century of sleep, they eagerly grab their stashed gold — only to discover that the metal, now industrially produced, has virtually no value.

In “Time Enough at Last,” perhaps the most famous Twilight Zone episode, a myopic bank clerk — the bookworm Henry Bemis, played unforgettably by Burgess Meredith — hides from his boss by ducking into the bank’s vault to read in peaceful solitude. A nuclear bomb falls. Bemis survives the blast and finds food enough to last him for years, but his terrible aloneness and boredom in the wreckage lead him to consider suicide. A moment before he pulls the trigger and permanently depopulates the planet, Bemis sees in the rubble what remains of a public library. “Books, books — all the books I’ll need!” he says. He arranges the volumes in stacks, planning a reading schedule that will keep him occupied for years to come. “And the best thing, the very best thing of all, is there’s time now. There’s all the time I need and all the time I want.” But his eyeglasses fall from his face and shatter. “That’s not fair!” he cries, as the camera pans out, leaving him a tragicomic symbol of the blindness of man.

The anxieties of the nuclear age loom large in many other episodes as well. In fact, among popular television programs of the era, only Star Trek (1966–69) made so much use of such apocalyptic themes. When the third-season Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” begins, some friendly neighbors are shown celebrating the birthday of a local physician. The mood darkens, however, when radio bulletins begin warning of an impending attack by unidentified flying objects. Suddenly, the episode turns into a retelling of Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant. As the doctor calmly enters the small fallout shelter he built for his family, the neighbors panic: they have no shelters or survival plans of their own. They turn vicious and violent, bludgeoning the door of the doctor’s basement shelter before the threat passes: the “missiles” were merely satellites. The partygoers are ashamed and the doctor is left scarred — aware that his benign notions of human nature must necessarily be revised. He now knows that his jocular friends, just beneath the skin, are little better than a bunch of “naked, wild animals, who put such a price on staying alive that they’ll claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege.” “We were spared a bomb tonight,” declares the doctor, “but I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.”

Suburbanites also run amok in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” an episode still sometimes shown to students in middle school and high school civics classes. The residents of Maple Street convince themselves that space aliens, masquerading as human beings, have been hiding among them in their “tree-lined little world” as a first step toward global rule. Immediately, suspicions fall upon the local oddball, an insomniac often spotted standing alone late at night, staring at the sky. “Let’s not be a mob!” cries one man — but as the paranoia spreads, Maple Street becomes a frenzied war zone, with rocks and bullets flying. Predictably, the episode is often cited as an indictment of McCarthyism during the “Red Scare,” which is now lodged in the popular imagination as a postwar period of unprecedented tribulation and fear. But the episode also recalls, even more explicitly, the mob-driven irrationalities that fueled the rise of Nazism, still fresh in the public mind in the 1950s, and the subject of several other Twilight Zone episodes. The threat of barbarism, Serling repeatedly suggests, never ends; the margin between order and murderous chaos is thin. “For the record,” asserts Serling at the episode’s close, “prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own.”

Other frightening episodes also counter the wide notion that TV in the late Fifties and early Sixties offered little more than singing cowboys and implacably cheerful families. In the famous episode “To Serve Man,” alien beings — towering, seemingly courteous “Kanamits” — arrive from a far-off planet promoting peace, even as they scheme to harvest gullible humans for food. In “People Are Alike All Over,” an astronaut crash-lands on Mars, where seemingly hospitable residents — looking handsome and fit in their tunics and sandals — promptly lock him up in a Martian zoo, an amusing specimen of an inferior species. In “The Midnight Sun,” the earth drifts from its orbit and, apparently, heads directly toward the sun, leaving its hapless inhabitants to sweat buckets as the planet sizzles and boils. But often, The Twilight Zone portrays a cold world — a world in which hopes and illusions are crushed, and big-talking but “flimsy” earthlings, with their “tiny, groping fingers,” and “undeveloped” brains (as Serling puts it in “People Are Alike All Over”) fall prey to merciless forces beyond their control.

Between Science and Superstition

A nd yet, other equally memorable episodes are less far-fetched and bleak; some portray a more familiar world that is only slightly askew. Some such episodes are morality tales with effective film noir touches — shadowy streets, slick tricksters, desperate men facing down their deepest fears. In “Nick of Time,” written by Richard Matheson, a newly married couple find themselves stuck in a small Midwestern town after their car breaks down. Killing time in a local diner, the husband — a young William Shatner — becomes obsessed with “The Mystic Seer,” a weird little table-top machine that purports to answer profound questions for the price of a coin. Its brief assertions, dispensed on slips of paper — “What do you think?” “If that’s what you really want” — are mere generalities, but Shatner’s character finds them uncannily accurate, even as the camera cuts frequently to the toy-like devil’s head that bobs atop the device, a sly smile fixed creepily on its rubber face.

Is the Mystic Seer a tool for satanic mischief? Or does its power come entirely from the whims and anxieties swirling about in the husband’s head? Don’t be vain. Don’t be selfish. Don’t hanker after easy riches or eternal youth. Be careful what you wish for. These are recurring themes on Serling’s show. And, be very careful when you find yourself in that “middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition,” for it is this, “the dimension of the imagination,” that is in fact “the twilight zone,” as Serling announces in the intro of some of the show’s seasons — the seductive but precarious province that “lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” In “Nick of Time,” Shatner’s character finally gets a grip and departs the diner, just as another couple settles in before the Mystic Seer, clutching their coins, looking for answers. This pair, Serling implies in his closing remarks, is doomed — too willing to submit to superstition, too likely to face the future “with a kind of helpless dread.”

Similarly, in Serling’s “A Thing About Machines,” a snooty writer’s elegant home is, it appears, haunted. Bartlett Finchley (character actor Richard Haydn) is “a practicing sophisticate,” who “writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like” when he is not kicking his television set and denouncing the “mechanical contrivances” of modern life. At first glance, this episode appears to evoke the critique of consumerism and gadgetry that was almost requisite among American intellectuals during the postwar years. (Max Lerner, to choose just one example among many, complained in 1957 that “America has taken on the aspect of a civilization cluttered with artifacts and filled with the mechanized bric-a-brac of machine living,” part of a soul-killing social tendency toward “uniformity” and “conformism.”)

Serling, though, does not identify with Finchley, whose high-handed contempt for his neighbors and employees is enough to make him dislikable. For Serling, who was quite fond of mechanized bric-a-brac, it is Finchley’s hatred of radios, TV sets, typewriters, and other benign devices that make him absurd and prompt his demise. Finchley is spooked when, suddenly, he begins receiving malicious messages from his household appliances. His telephone orders him to leave the house. He is attacked by his suddenly snake-like electric razor. He is chased about and, it seems, driven to death by his own car. But Finchley, the episode implies, has been destroyed by his own prejudices and fears — by a self-absorbed refusal to live contently with what he sneeringly calls “the miracles of modern science.” He has “succumbed,” suggests Serling in closing, to “a set of delusions.” He is “tormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes.”

Shaped by Television

J oel Engel’s 1989 biography and another by Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV’s Last Angry Man (1992), depict Serling’s growing weariness with the workload of The Twilight Zone , his unhappiness with his declining ability to write in a way that satisfied himself or others, and his retreat into drinking and what seems like a kind of depression. Anne Serling in her memoir aims to amend these portraits that suggest her chain-smoking father descended into a bibulous funk as his writing career declined. Instead, she remembers a “gregarious and outgoing” man with boyish enthusiasms who amused her friends and his houseguests with a talent for mimicry, who fitted his vintage roadster with a horn that, when pressed, blared forth the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai .

Serling’s hopeful and upbeat side is often on display in The Twilight Zone , even in some otherwise dark episodes. The fifth-season episode “In Praise of Pip,” written by Serling, has sentimentality and hope puncturing a noir gloom. It also features one of Serling’s favorite types — the shabby loser “whose life has been as drab and undistinguished as a bundle of dirty clothes.” Max Phillips, a small-time bookie, is devastated by news of his son’s wounding in battle in far-off Vietnam. This episode includes memorable scenes in which Phillips (Jack Klugman, in one of several appearances on the show) finds himself lost within a funhouse mirror maze — a deft nod, one assumes, to Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). The episode ends with Phillips’s spiritual redemption, his aching awareness that “the ties of flesh are deep and strong,” as Serling sermonizes in his epilogue. “You can find nobility and sacrifice and love wherever you may seek it out: down the block, in the heart, or in the Twilight Zone.”

In general, the quality of the show dropped in its last two years. During the fourth season, the episodes were doubled in length to a full hour — but the stories did not always merit that much time, and the pacing sometimes seemed lethargic, so the half-hour format returned for the fifth season. The writing declined in other ways, too: the characters were less sharply drawn, and various conceits were recycled.

Finally, James Aubrey, the CBS programming chief, wanted the show gone, citing cost overruns as well as mediocre ratings and a chronic inability to attract top sponsors. Aubrey, a sort of anti-Newton Minow, had no patience with critics and intellectuals who insisted that the commercial networks had a moral, cultural — even patriotic — duty to “aim higher, write better, dig deeper,” as Serling had put it back in the 1950s. In 1961 Minow, noting the growing global reach of American TV, had asked :

What will the people of other countries think of us when they see our western bad men and good men punching each other in the jaw in between the shooting? What will the Latin American or African child learn of America from this great communications industry?

Aubrey, whose roots were in advertising, did not brood about such things. Most Americans, he believed, did not watch television selectively, by the program, but by the clock, principally as a means of filling up time. Aubrey did not seek to perplex or edify viewers — just to keep them from switching the channel. His idea of good television was The Beverly Hillbillies , not The Twilight Zone , which he believed too idiosyncratic to sit alongside Petticoat Junction and The Munsters in the network’s enormously profitable schedule. Aubrey declared that he was “sick of it.”

And so was Serling, or so he claimed. Before The Twilight Zone , in his 1959 interview with Wallace, Serling had noted that his temperament and talent were best suited for television, “the medium I understand.” He offered his own psychological interpretation: “I suppose this is an admission of a kind of weakness or at least a sense of insecurity on my part…. I want to stay in the womb.” He never quite managed to leave that womb. For years he had promised to quit TV for more ambitiously literary projects — a novel, perhaps, some feature films, a Broadway play. But he had grown accustomed to weekly television’s pressing deadlines: using a Dictaphone, he could polish off a half-hour script in a single afternoon. Highly strung and easily distracted, he lacked the patience for the sort of extensive revisions that good literary prose demands. (Anne Serling quotes a Twilight Zone producer who recalls that a “ten-minute story conference” was, for her father, “the limit, then he’d go out and get an ice cream soda or shoe shine.”) He also had difficulty stretching out a story to fill the bigger frame of a feature film, and, with the exception of Seven Days in May (1964), about a military coup, his clunky screenplays were either poorly received or never made.

So, not surprisingly, after The Twilight Zone ended its run, Serling kept pitching the networks new ideas for weekly series, including The Loner , a “cerebral Western” about a Civil War veteran ambushed by assorted ethical dilemmas while roaming the plains; CBS picked it up in 1965 but canceled it before the first season was over. In 1970 Serling began hosting The Night Gallery , an uneven Twilight Zone knock-off to which he also sometimes contributed scripts. But the show’s producers apparently saw Serling as something of a relic, and limited his creative role. Serling, in turn, became bored with a series that was increasingly formulaic and trite — “ Mannix in a cemetery,” he complained. “Good evening sports fans,” he sarcastically announced at the start of one installment. “In discerning circles I’m known as the Howard Cosell of the crypt.”

A Face and a Voice

S erling was still in his forties, and still insisting (during a disastrous tenure as president of the Television Academy) that TV should see itself as “not just an industry but an art form.” But television had passed him by on its way to becoming “with the single exception of the workplace,” the “dominant force in American life today,” as Jeff Greenfield observed in Television: The First Fifty Years (1977). It was now “our marketplace, our political forum, our playground, and our school.” CBS had become the “single biggest advertising medium in the world,” wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be (1979), a fact not lost on the industry’s leaders, who had presumably embraced the maxim, commonly attributed to Aubrey, that TV worked best when it relied on the surefire recipe of “bosoms, broads, and fun.” “We’re a medicine show,” confessed one network official quoted in Greenfield’s book. “We’re here to deliver the audience to the next commercial. So the basic network policy is to set in motion from the beginning of prime time to the end of prime time, programs to maintain and deliver those audiences to the commercial.”

Of course, commercial networks in the 1970s were not, as they are today, almost entirely lowbrow, pitched to high school kids and adults who share their tastes. Certain popular comedies, like The Bob Newhart Show and M * A*S*H , featured smart writing and distinctive characters who, despite their quirks, lived like grown-ups in a recognizable world. Even the hit police drama Kojak provided skilled acting and fairly thoughtful narratives that are still watchable today. But during the 1970s the growth of cable and the rise of PBS, which Newton Minow championed, effectively freed CBS, NBC, and ABC to fight with each other in the high-pressure ratings races without the added burden of catering to more discriminating viewers, who could now be directed to Nova and Masterpiece Theatre instead. Moreover, as Greenfield notes, the shift from black-and-white to color programming meant that “the original attraction of television drama — a close-up look at people in conflict,” was now definitively replaced by “an obsession with action” — explosions, car chases, stock heroes and villains, girl cops in swimsuits punching out bad guys in tropical locales. Not surprisingly, in 1976, just a year after Serling’s death, several of the most popular network shows were, in effect, comic strips — The Six Million Dollar Man , The Bionic Woman , Charlie’s Angels .

Serling attacked these trends, picking up where Minow left off. In lectures and interviews, Serling suggested that TV’s most representative programs were becoming even worse than the cliché-ridden radio and television serials he had mocked in the 1950s for their stale plots “sprinkled with a kiss, a gunshot, a dab of sex, a final curtain clinch.” Engel quotes a luncheon speech in which, among other barbs, Serling called Let’s Make a Deal a “clinical study in avarice and greed” and said The Dating Game featured “thinly veiled sexual fantasies” pitched by airhead contestants to “a trio of trick-or-treat Charlies.” Serling, who had set one particularly harrowing Twilight Zone episode — “Death’s-Head Revisited” — in the Dachau concentration camp, particularly hated Hogan’s Heroes , which featured “the new post-war version of the wartime Nazi: a thick, bumbling fathead whose crime, singularly, is stupidity — nothing more. He’s a kind of lovable, affable, benign Hermann Goering.” In a speech at the Library of Congress, quoted in his daughter’s memoir, Serling said Hogan’s Heroes could appeal only to those “who refuse to let history get in the way of their laughter.” The show was, in short, “a rank diminishment of what was once an era of appalling human suffering.”

And yet, Serling himself waded in the shallow end of the TV pool. He hosted a quiz show called Liar’s Club in 1969 and 1970. At the time he died in 1975 at the age of fifty, he was set to host Keep on Truckin’ — a summer variety show starring “Madame,” a wise-cracking puppet made popular on Hollywood Squares . And then there were the commercials. Engel, whose book is especially vivid in depicting how Serling’s ads and endorsements were both a cause and an effect of his depression and self-doubt, offers a partial list:

In 1968 and 1969, Serling touted an almost unending stream of products, including Crest toothpaste, Laura Scudder potato chips, auto loans at Merchant’s Bank in Indianapolis, B. F. Goodrich radial tires …, Packard Bell color televisions, Westinghouse appliances, Anacin, Samsonite luggage, Volkswagens, Gulf Oil, and Close-Up toothpaste (Serling actually introduced the product to the marketplace). He also got paid for his public service announcements for the National Institute of Mental Health (anti-drug abuse), CARE (for Biafran refugees), Epilepsy Foundation of America, United Crusade, the Des Moines Police Association, and the Save the Children Foundation.

And yet, even as he recorded countless ads, Serling continued to rail against the stupidities of commercial television, as in a 1974 speech to the American Advertising Federation: “You wonder how to put on a meaningful drama that is adult, incisive probing when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper.” He did sometimes apologize for his second career as a commercial pitchman. On at least one occasion, he admitted that “a sizable check was thrust in front of me and I plowed in with no thought to its effect or ramifications.” In certain literary circles, hosting the quiz show and doing all those commercials brought Serling scorn. But it was work; it kept him in the game, and more than paid the bills.

Some Wisp of Memory

S erling — who, early in his career, overestimated the potential of broadcast television — clearly underestimated the staying power of the show that sustains his name. In 1966 he sold back to CBS his sizable stake in The Twilight Zone , suspecting, apparently, that the show, having run its course, would just gather dust in the network’s vaults. But he did not foresee the age of syndication. From the start the series was a hit in reruns, and it is still shown regularly on broadcast and cable outlets around the world, including on Syfy, which for twenty years has run a Twilight Zone marathon on New Year’s Eve. After its cancellation, the show went on to earn “hundreds of millions” of dollars, as Anne Serling ruefully notes, saying that selling it may have been “the worst mistake of his life.”

He did not live long enough to enjoy the continuing influence of the show James Aubrey loathed. Over the years, The Twilight Zone has inspired board games, a magazine, graphic novels, and two other, albeit less successful, series using the same format and name. A 1983 feature film, Twilight Zone: The Movie , was co-produced and co-directed by Stephen Spielberg, who began his career directing scripts for Night Gallery , and whose first feature, Duel (1971), about a murderous tanker truck in pursuit of a terrified motorist, was written by Richard Matheson and has clear Twilight Zone overtones of its own. Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files , has also acknowledged his debt to The Twilight Zone , and echoes of Serling’s series persist everywhere in contemporary science fiction and film. Thus “The Lonely,” the early Twilight Zone episode in which a man falls in love with an attractive robot, his sole companion on a distant, dusty planet, prefigures Her , the 2013 film by Spike Jonze about a lonely man obsessed with the shrewd and seductive female voice on his computer’s operating system.

One wonders how Serling would fare in today’s very different television environment. The kind of time-filling, lowbrow programming that he decried and Aubrey preferred remains widely popular. But alongside it we now have high-quality scripted series distributed by cable channels and streaming companies — dramas of a scope that the movies cannot hope to match, shows that viewers can binge-watch at home on giant screens, often without any interruptions by the dancing rabbits. At least for the moment and at least for that slice of the television market, Serling’s complaints — about advertising as the “basic weakness of the medium” and about the “interference” by commercial interests in the artistic process — no longer apply. Perhaps Serling, with his wish to use television as a vehicle of artistic expression on pressing moral and political issues, would fit right in. (In this regard, it is worth noting that Ithaca College, where Serling taught classes for several years, has created a Rod Serling Award for Advancing Social Justice Through Popular Media ; in 2016, the inaugural award was bestowed on David Simon, whose show The Wire is considered one of the foremost exemplars of our latest golden age of television.)

“A writer’s claim to recognition doesn’t take the passage of time very well,” Serling observed in 1957, adding that the aspiring TV writer should buy a scrapbook since that would be “probably the only way he’ll find permanence in recognition.” The creator of The Twilight Zone would be surprised to know that his show is not just remembered today, is not just studied by academics as an artifact from a bygone era, but is still available and watched and loved for its stories and characters and insights into human nature. Almost nothing is left of Rod Serling’s many commercials, the ads that sunk him in moneyed misery. But The Twilight Zon e — the show for which he struggled, the artistic achievement he worried would fade to oblivion — remains.

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Humane dissent from technocracy

Exhausted by science and tech debates that go nowhere?

Winter 2016

The Cornell Undergraduate Philosophy Journal & Club

The twilight zone and philosophy.

The Twilight Zone and Philosophy “A Nice Place to Visit”

Have you ever seen an episode of the Twilight Zone? Each is a small, beautifully strange slice of the human experience. The episodes take on a definitively moral, existential undertone and overtone. That is to say, they’re moral and existential through and through. Though, it’s left as an “exercise to the viewer” to decipher the so-called “moral of the story”. The Twilight Zone thus imparts, in addition to its already meaning-rich content, the further opportunity for personal existential engagement and reflection.

By now, you are probably getting the sense that my main agenda is for an individual to develop a personal connection to philosophy. I want to work with and understand my thoughts, ideas, beliefs…and I invite you to do the same. This is your mind and your life, after all: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And unlike a used car salesman, I’m not here to scam you. (Though I assume by selection bias my readers are already philosophical and thus I ought not sound too preachy, I think this is an important point to reiterate). Furthermore, while I think my philosophy classes are excellent, I often feel constrained by standards of academic rigor or by the narrower subject material with which we are working. I find myself working in the confines of other people’s thought, all the while longing for the chance to ponder and explore freely. This column thus serves a beautiful purpose in allowing me to freely share my thoughts with others.

Today I’m writing about my favorite episode of the Twilight Zone. It’s called “A Nice Place to Visit”. If you’d like to pause now and watch the episode, feel free; I won’t know the difference. In any event, I don’t think you’ll need to have watched the episode to understand what I am going to write here—but there is something to be said about direct, first-hand experience, so it is my gentle suggestion that you watch it! It’s season 1, episode 28.

Doomed to Get Everything You Want for Eternity

Imagine there is a chain of take-out restaurants that gives out fortune cookies whose predictions are always 100% accurate for their recipient. All of these fortune cookies, I might add, are precise in their choice of words, and the intention is never to mislead the recipient, but merely to state that which is to be the case. Each fortune cookie in this particular restaurant tells the recipient their fate in the afterlife.

Imagine you’re a bad person. Imagine you’ve violently robbed people your entire adult life. You don’t need what you steal, but instead you steal out of your sheer (and sole) desire for material goods. You also physically harm the people you’re stealing from if you “need” to in order to get what you want. And, in fact, you stole the very fortune cookie that has your ultimate fate sealed within it. It would seem fitting for the fortune to foretell punishment for you, but instead, it says something that appears quite different: You will get everything you want for all of eternity. You smirk and eat the fortune cookie, then wad the fortune up and flick it at someone. How do you feel about your fate? You’ve never felt better in your life. You then suffer a massive heart attack, the result of years of too much MSG, and are pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

A Response to Fortune Cookie Fate

The simple response is that the fortune cookie is simply deceitful, because there is a second-order consideration to which we might want to attend. That is, you may get everything you want for all eternity, but is it true that you want to get everything you want for all eternity—is this something you could in actuality desire?

This is essentially what “A Nice Place to Visit” explores—the idea that a person whose sole focus and pleasure in life is on gaining material goods would in fact become miserable in the afterlife if they were granted everything they ever wanted. In life, the villain protagonist of the episode thinks his true end is the material goods, but might it in fact be the struggle of getting them? For instance, if you need to steal from people to get what you want, there is no instant gratification. Theft takes, in most cases, prior planning, or at the very least brute physical force in the absence of pre-meditation. When the struggle to obtain material goods, for instance, is removed, the futility underlying the pursuit of them is revealed. This is what I take the moral of the episode to be, put very simply. But let us interpret it further. Assuming we are not morally “evil” (whatever that might mean), or aren’t habitual criminals, what meaning can we derive from “A Nice Place to Visit” (which I think should be be sub-titled “But Not to Stay”)?

Material Goods Aren’t Enough

We might just counter that this is not really a problem of order (i.e., wanting to get everything we want) because if the goods in question are inherently valuable, it should automatically follow that to the n th order, we would want to want them, even eternally. It might instead be a category error: that is, we are assigning a status to material goods that belongs only to another type of good, such as immaterial goods; therefore we get the absurdity that “getting everything you want for all of eternity” is a curse, not a blessing, but only when the goods in question are of the wrong sort. But then, how do material goods differ from immaterial goods? Let’s give some examples.

A material good might be the following: jewelry, a fancy car, and maybe things with value insofar as they can be used to obtain other, in this case material, things (e.g., money). Material goods can also be modest necessities like food, shelter, clothing. Think back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and recall Augustine’s contention that no substance, i.e., thing, is bad in and of itself.  What we call “evil”, according to Augustine, is a privation of good that is the result of a misdirection of the human will towards an overvaluation of lower (i.e., material) goods, and away from higher goods—the immaterial ones.

So, the issue in “A Nice Place to Visit” is not that material goods are valued or pursued, but rather that they are pursued as ultimate goods, which they are not. The villain protagonist of the episode, furthermore, has no ability to transcend the material and get to something greater. Hence, it would be impossible to derive any eternal fulfillment from material goods because by nature they are transient and mutable.

This is leaving something out though, in focusing exclusively on “ends”. What about the means we use to obtain certain ends, regardless of what the ends themselves are?

Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine and The Idea of Overcoming as Granting Meaning

If you’ve heard of Nozick’s famous Experience Machine thought experiment, you may want to respond to “A Nice Place to Visit” by further claiming that the issue lies in the fact that if we are just “granted” everything we want, we are deprived of our individual agency. Perhaps by nature, metaphysically or psychologically, we want to feel we are exerting effort in accomplishing our goals: that we accomplish things not just through natural law, or chance, or divine intervention, but through our own efforts . So, we would then suffer if our ability to struggle against the world to pave our own way were suddenly taken away from us in the form of a supposed “gift” (the gift being ‘whatever you want, instantly, forever’).

In essence, do we desire to struggle? Desire itself seems like a sort of struggle. For instance, we often want something until we get it—the desire is strongest until we receive the object of our desire, then we move onto desiring something else, until we either run out of desires or run into an unfulfillable desire. To extend this to the means we use to pursue goods, the process of pursuing goods itself might have some inherent value insofar as working to gain what we want—whether this is by “moral” or “immoral” means—gives us fulfillment and meaning in life. Perhaps it even gives us a sense of identity. The thief is defined not just by what they steal, but that they steal. The philosopher is defined not just by the ideas they propose, but by the often arduous thought process they utilize to arrive at certain conclusions. Without a sense of identity in the world, with only the external (material) goods taken as an end, where are we in the equation of life? It would then make sense that we’d feel empty and without meaning.

We might further stipulate that there is another, deeper distinction between material and immaterial goods that has to do with internal agency. That is, internal agency and effort inheres within an immaterial good like knowledge or wisdom. Unlike a material good, where you can in theory have one (the object) without the other (the effort to gain it), in immaterial goods, the two are conceptually inseparable. For instance, when you know something, you possess it , and you possess it in a way unlike a physical object. Your knowledge that 2+2=4 is universal, and yet particular. Most everyone knows this mathematical truth, and you own it in the sense that you comprehend it with your own rational faculties. However, material (or sensory, if you like) goods are not like this. We cannot all have the same cake and eat it, too. (For more information on this general thesis, consider the Medieval Problem of Universals and Aristotle and Aquinas’s discussions of the different types of the intellect. I believe Avicenna and Averroes had much to say on this matter as well).

Confusing the End with the Means

In general, we might confuse an end with a means. By this I mean we might think the ultimate end in life is to get some “thing”, when it may really be to strive for something—not a new idea. Ultimate fulfillment may then very well be a confused concept, as the absence of desire (fulfillment) might be an undesirable state, or, on the contrary, the absence of all desire might be a desirable state. This all sounds weirdly paradoxical, so could desire itself even be an ultimate good? Could the ultimate end be a means? That doesn’t sound right either.

We might then arrive back to the immaterial, wherein means and ends might be united. In the pursuit of the immaterial and in the immaterial itself (e.g., in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom), we utilize our individual capacities, possess Truth in a way more profound than from possession of mere material goods, and may attain lasting fulfillment—truths are neither transient nor mutable. So if by “getting everything we want for all of eternity” we mean working to attain self-knowledge and knowledge of eternal truths, this may not be a curse after all.

In any event, all of this is contingent on what the randomized fortune cookie deity says, so we may as well relax in our fate, whatever it may be, for now, in this twilight zone of our musings.

Thank you and goodnight.

– Ashley Gasdow

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Entering "the Dimension of Imagination": The Twilight Zone 's Tales of Madness Adam Cetorelli George Washington University Email: [email protected]

Twilight Zone; anxiety; mental health; mental illness; madness; Cold War; television; rationality; madness metaphors; disability metaphors; Rod Serling

Delusions. Illusions. Over-tension, over-anxiety, and under-confidence . The original Twilight Zone series employed madness as a metaphor to critique the late-1950s and early-1960s American cultural ideals of uncompromising rationality, social conformity, and the organization of life around work. The series's representations of madness were not, however, solely metaphorical, as they also served to expose the norm of able-mindedness as compulsory and dangerous to Americans and American society. The protagonists of "Mirror Image," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," and "The Arrival," as well as those of other episodes, experience inexplicable yet undeniable phenomena and adjust their normative, rational worldviews to accurately interpret their surroundings. This potential for accurate irrationality reveals madness as socially constructed, while the surveillance of these protagonists' adherence to normative standards of middle-class American behavior by other characters highlights able-mindedness as compulsory.

The Twilight Zone was produced during a time when American attitudes toward mental healthcare were undergoing a significant shift. The deinstitutionalization movement affected the release of mental health patients back into American society while psychoanalysis collided with a new preventative approach to medicine, resulting in the idea that lying dormant in all people was a latent madness, which responsible middle-class Americans would ensure did not overtake them. The asylum features heavily in The Twilight Zone , and each of the three episodes I analyze in this essay ends with its protagonist's forced removal to a mental hospital for his or her refusal to perform able-mindedness when confronted with a situation that cannot be rationally comprehended. With its tales of madness, The Twilight Zone illuminated the dehumanizing treatment of mental health patients in mid-twentieth century America and pushed viewers to find creative, nonnormative, or even mad alternatives to the status quo.

I. Introduction

"What's the matter with me? What on earth is the matter with me? What's happening? Delusions, that's what they are. They're delusions. I must be sick." 1

The Twilight Zone episode "Mirror Image" follows the internal strife of a young professional woman, Millicent Barnes, as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that she is sharing a bus station with her doppelganger, despite the irrationality of the situation. Millicent initially takes her encounters with her duplicate as evidence that her mind is failing but soon grows confident that she is correctly perceiving the strange phenomena around her. Fellow travelers and the bus station employees do not share Millicent's irrational explanation of the situation—that a collision of two planes of existence necessitates Millicent's replacement by her counterpart—and, viewing her experience as a descent into madness, call the police to have her whisked away to a mental hospital.

Plotlines in which protagonists experience inexplicable yet undeniable phenomena and subsequently become mad through accurately interpreting their surroundings are common for the series. The Twilight Zone employed madness as a metaphor to critique late-1950s and early-1960s American society, harnessing the universal potential to slip into madness through failing to live up to societal expectations of normal behavior as a narrative technique to challenge the strict American cultural ideals of uncompromising rationality, social conformity, and the organization of life around work. In knowing that there is this other realm of the Twilight Zone where the rules of the real world do not apply, viewers recognize the reality of the strange happenings therein and watch as characters like Millicent Barnes are made mad for overcoming the limitations of logical thought to make sense of these irrational realities. I write "made mad" here to convey the social construction of madness as revealed by The Twilight Zone , in which other characters produce madness in the protagonists in an attempt to regulate their nonnormative thoughts and behaviors. 2 In centering the cultural production of madness—rather than relying on the stale trope of "going mad" that focuses on the individual—the series shows that the ideals of rationality, conformity, and living a life driven by work contribute to the American conceptualization of what constitutes a properly functioning mind. 3 The Twilight Zone reinstructed its contemporary viewers to embrace the latent madness within them to explore what other possibilities exist for understanding their world.

During its production from 1959 to 1964, The Twilight Zone occupied a unique position in American television as a popular series whose express purpose was to expand its viewer's minds past the limits of what American society deemed normal and acceptable. As Wolfe notes, "the most popular TV sitcoms of the late 1950s… like I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver , and Father Knows Best , were bland glorifications of home and family both suburban in setting and conformist in social outlook." 4 The Twilight Zone , on the other hand, broadcast stories that explored the dark side of American life. With an average weekly audience of eighteen million viewers over the course of its original run, roughly one in ten Americans was tuning in to watch the series each week. 5 Against this competition, and with its significant viewership, The Twilight Zone stands out as a popular alternative to these idealized depictions of American life, offering a second opinion with its critical reading of American cultural ideals.

Much has been written about The Twilight Zone , with many scholars recognizing the series's project to challenge its contemporary American society. Boulton outlines how Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling used the science fiction genre to avoid censorship while publicly confronting racism, right-wing political extremism, and Cold War paranoia with his series. 6 Mortenson argues that The Twilight Zone 's signature shadowy imagery serves to visually represent the Zone as "a liminal space where imagination trumps reason"—a space where the series can address delicate social issues like conformity, suburban life, racial tensions, and nuclear anxiety. 7 Wolfe sees the inability of logic and reason to make sense of the happenings of the Twilight Zone as encouraging viewers to explore alternate ways of knowing and experiencing the world around them. 8 Feagin similarly notes that the twist endings of The Twilight Zone discredit the alleged superiority of rational thinking by revealing to viewers that their failure to accurately interpret the episodes' pre-twist plot points stems from their insistence on maintaining a strict, logical worldview. 9 These scholars collectively recognize The Twilight Zone as a critique of rationality, conformity, and conservatism (both political and social) that sought to push viewers to reevaluate how they thought of the world and what they should expect from it.

Having convincingly identified the critical project driving the series, however, scholars of The Twilight Zone overlook the integral part that madness plays in its critiques. 10 Even those who have offered readings of the famous episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a fresh-out-of-the-sanitarium Bob Wilson witnesses a gremlin dismantling the engine of the plane he is traveling on, quickly move past an analysis of madness and take up an exploration of its metaphorical representations, despite the episode's consistent and prominent featuring of Bob's anxiety. 11 Telotte describes the episode as Wilson's coming to terms with the fact that "the calm, quiet, brightly lit aeroplane interior is itself the artificial, deluded world—just a fragile barrier against the real world outside that is dark, chaotic and threatening"—in other words, Bob learns that early-1960s Americans use modern technologies to insulate themselves from the ugliness and uncertainty of the world, with his anxiety serving only as the entry point to this revelation. 12 Both Lintott and Wolfe describe Bob's witnessing of the gremlin as "outlandish" in a way that extracts eccentricity from his madness and discards the rest. 13 While these readings might mention or allude to Bob's recent stint at the mental hospital, they do not adequately attend to the importance of madness to the episode's plot; taking madness solely as a metaphor, or erasing it with euphemism, ignores the real presence of madness in the narrative and simplifies the episode's critique of American cultural ideals. Analyses of other Twilight Zone episodes similarly incompletely represent the critiques they make by overlooking the presence of madness as both metaphor and madness itself. 14

The historical backdrop against which The Twilight Zone was created supports the reading of its episodes for madness itself in addition to its metaphorical representations. The Twilight Zone originally aired during the time of the American deinstitutionalization movement wherein political mobilization against the inhumane conditions of mental hospitals and innovations in pharmaceuticals affected the release of mental health patients back into American society. Anti-asylum activism gained popularity during the 1950s and 1960s as stories recounting the cruelty of mental hospitals became increasingly common. Even as early as World War II, conscientious objectors working in asylums had reported that their conditions were dire. 15 Pop-culture entertainment media like Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) portrayed asylums as inhumane prisons whose objective was not the treatment or rehabilitation of patients in need of help but instead the punishment and sequestration of Others from the public. 16 Modern medicine answered the calls of anti-asylum activists with new antipsychotic drugs like chlorpromazine, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1954, which reduced asylum patients' violent or aggressive outbursts, providing treatment options that did not need to be administered in mental hospitals. 17 Many released patients were pushed to the streets and jails because of the lack of infrastructure to continue their care after their release, including keeping them on the antipsychotic drugs that had promised their successful reintegration into American society. 18 With deinstitutionalization, the American public encountered a newfound visibility of mental illness, both in the media and on the streets.

Madness was not, however, the exclusive property of these newly released patients—conventional wisdom of the time made clear that everybody had at least a little bit of it. Psychoanalysis reached its heyday in American medicine and pop culture between the 1940s and 1960s, with even non-doctors regularly encountering Freudian ideas in their daily lives. 19 Psychiatrists welcomed this popularity as an opportunity to make a lot of money: With middle-class Americans preoccupied with maintaining the health of their unconscious minds, practitioners left the asylums and set up private practices where they could welcome this new kind of patient. 20 The 1950s was an era of rapid growth in the healthcare industry, with the rise of the preventative medicine approach to physical and mental health. A 1959 Life magazine article found that "patients now see their doctors twice as often as they did 30 years ago," as insurance companies and the media had begun pressuring Americans "to go see their doctor before it is too late." 21 This shift in patients' attitudes toward medicine from treatment to prevention represents a concerted effort on behalf of these insurance companies and other media actors (like the pharmaceutical companies that advertised in magazines like Life , as well as Life itself) to cultivate mass concern about staying healthy in the face of inevitable and costly disease. Preventative medicine and psychoanalysis collided in the idea that lying dormant in all people was a latent madness, which responsible middle-class Americans would ensure did not overtake them. 22 This threat-from-within characterized American cultural attitudes toward mental health during the time that The Twilight Zone was produced, undoubtedly informing its content.

In order to demonstrate that The Twilight Zone used madness metaphors to challenge viewers to reject the strictly rational, conformist, and work-centered lives culturally prescribed to them, I adapt the disability studies theories of compulsory able-mindedness and the mad border body for my reading of the series. I first analyze the title sequences of The Twilight Zone for the ways they encourage viewers to read all episodes through the lens of madness, even when an individual episode seems unconcerned with the mind. I then turn to three episodes that use robust madness metaphors to explore different facets of the series's critique of American cultural ideals. "Mirror Image" (aired February 26, 1960) presents a protagonist who chooses to recognize her irrational reality rather than abandon truth for conformity. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (aired October 11, 1963) hijacks the viewer's gaze to make them adopt the irrationality of a madman, harnessing their emotions to expose able-mindedness as a compulsory social norm. "The Arrival" (aired September 22, 1961) offers a counterargument to the notion that work regulates a mind gone mad, arguing that a life consumed by a demanding career creates pressures that can actually cause severe harm to the mind. These episodes are only three of the many that use madness metaphors; I have selected them because they demonstrate that The Twilight Zone 's use of madness is not solely metaphorical but also exposes the dangers of compulsory able-mindedness to Americans and American society. All three episodes end with their protagonists sent to asylums for their deviations from American cultural ideals, punishing them for their nonconformity and offering normalization as the only cure for culturally produced madness.

II. Literature Review: Madness Metaphors: Compulsory Able-Mindedness and the Mad Border Body Enter The Twilight Zone

I approach my analysis of The Twilight Zone 's use of madness metaphors through the budding theoretical perspective of disability media studies, as outlined by the works of Ellcessor, Kirkpatrick, Hagood, and McRuer, who recognize that a greater overlap between disability studies and media studies will improve both fields. 23 In the introduction to the collection Disability Media Studies , Ellcessor, Hagood, and Kirkpatrick write that they "hope that media scholars will become aware of a broader range of embodiments that shape and are shaped by our encounters with media… the field needs to recognize dis/ability as central to the study of media." 24 My goal with this essay is to initiate this application of a disability studies lens on a critical analysis of The Twilight Zone , as the many academic papers and several books dedicated to the series overlook madness as a theme. Far from being a project to merely expand the discourse on The Twilight Zone to include analysis of yet another identity category, this essay demonstrates the integral part that madness plays in the series's critiques of late-1950s/early-1960s American society. 25 An analysis of The Twilight Zone 's critical position on modern American life is incomplete without a thorough discussion of the ways it represents madness.

Foundational for many critiques of disability metaphors is Mitchell and Snyder's narrative prosthesis . Mitchell and Snyder coin the term to articulate the common literary practice of using disability to "[lend] a distinctive idiosyncrasy to any character that differentiates the character from the anonymous background of the 'norm.'" 26 Narrative requires intrigue, and, while deviating from norms outside a book's binding can be dangerous for the real-life deviant, deviation is tantalizing on the page. Disability becomes a go-to characterization device to spice up a tale replete with "uninteresting" able bodies, the default. 27 When authors invigorate their narratives with the alluring Otherness of disability, they typically flatten their disabled characters' disabilities to be only representations of Otherness, devoid of complex characterization or any sense of ordinariness and oversaturated with symbolism. 28 The symbolism that a disabled character facilitates becomes the entirety of that character, eliminating any potential for insight on the lived experiences of disabled people. The pervasiveness of narrative prosthesis helps explain the dearth of scholarly analysis of madness in The Twilight Zone ; disability is so common in entertainment media, and so commonly points to anything but itself, that to take up an analysis of disability as disability might seem unnecessary.

Like Mitchell and Snyder, Davis argues in "The Ghettoization of Disability" that the reduction of disability to symbolism is not exceptional but a rule in film: "In an ableist culture disability cannot just be —it has to mean something." 29 He notes that filmic representations of disability evoke predictable audience responses depending on the disability depicted, and that if a protagonist is shown to have anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, or "delusions," like those which Millicent Barnes experiences, then "the film or television special (never a series) will revolve around that character going mad . The madness, in turn, will then symbolize the response we might all have to a dehumanizing, stressful, disabling and demeaning society. The character becomes a tragic stand-in for any viewer facing the human condition." 30 Characters who descend into madness spark an empathetic response in viewers, who identify with these characters' generalized experiences of tragedy, pain, or uncertainty. With Mitchell and Snyder's narrative prosthesis in mind, the generalization of going mad to signify experiencing hardship is understandable; this is the very purpose of these characters' deviations from the sane norm. But Davis takes the role of these disabled "stand-ins'' a step further, arguing that when they triumph over their impairments or gain acceptance from the non-disabled people around them, their stories provide a comforting conclusion for nondisabled viewers who fear that they might someday become disabled themselves. 31 The Twilight Zone episodes that follow characters as they go mad deny their viewers the comforting conclusions that Davis describes, preventing them from seeing madness, along with their own problems or concerns, neatly resolved at the close of each episode. As The Twilight Zone forces its audience to grapple with the discomfort of unresolved madness, Mitchell, Snyder, and Davis' work on disability metaphors cannot fully explain how the series employs madness to critique the cultural ideals of 1950s/'60s America. Helping to round out a theory of madness metaphors in The Twilight Zone are the works of Schalk and Hillsburg, who analyze disability in literature for both metaphor and material reality.

Although disability metaphors have met plenty of scholarly scrutiny, it is possible for literature and film to portray disabilities with more realistic complexity, and writers can even use disability metaphors to radically challenge cultural ideologies that hierarchize people based on dis/ability, race, gender, and more. 32 In "Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night,'" Schalk argues that Duryea-Gode disease (DGD), the condition that Butler created for the short story, acts as a disability metaphor that exposes how ableism and anti-Black racism share elements of their historical construction and control of bodies. 33 For Schalk, disability metaphors "need not be either/or ( i.e ., this representation is either about race or about disability); in fact, they are often both/and, due specifically to the mutually constitutive nature of oppressions." 34 Hillsburg similarly concludes her analysis of Mary McGarry Morris's book A Dangerous Woman by arguing that the story of an angry, mentally ill woman is not just a metaphor for her response to patriarchal control or just a tale about being disabled in an ableist society, but one of "the devastating violence that occurs when individuals cannot adhere to hegemonic notions of normalcy"—both/and. 35 Crucial for both/and disability metaphors is that they intertwine a reading of oppression, pain, or hardship with a nuanced representation of disability; the disability cannot exist solely to highlight some other thing. 36 In The Twilight Zone episodes I analyze below, madness functions as a both/and metaphor in which the inescapable threat of one's latent madness is used to critique the rigid American cultural ideals of rationality, social conformity, and organizing one's life around work, which perpetuate ableism, among other oppressive ideologies. The series presents madness as a social construct that, while devalued in American society, is actually necessary to fully understand the strange happenings of the Twilight Zone. The protagonists of these episodes abandon conformity by embracing madness to encounter reality and are swiftly punished for the counter-normative approaches they adopt to make sense of their world, revealing the limitations of a society built on compulsory able-mindedness.

The Twilight Zone does not employ madness metaphors in a singular, uniform way. Some characters, like Millicent Barnes, have no diagnosed conditions prior to entering the Zone but are made mad by those around them for accurately perceiving the strange phenomena of the alternate dimension; others, like Grant Sheckly, have conditions that initiate their encounter with the Zone; still others, like Bob Wilson, both have diagnosed conditions prior to entering the Zone and find their encounters there to produce new conditions or exacerbate existing ones. Even though these disability metaphors fall on a spectrum that includes "actual" mental health conditions alongside perceptions of madness, they are united by their common critique of compulsory able-mindedness as a dangerous foundation of American culture, where all Americans have the potential to fail to maintain a convincing performance of sanity.

The concept of compulsory able-mindedness originates with McRuer's adaptation of Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity to the study of physical disabilities. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability , McRuer argues that, like heterosexuality, able-bodiedness is differentiated from an undesirable Other (disability) and defined by contrast as a norm. 37 Able-bodiedness is compulsory in that, as an identity constructed as superior, it encourages aspirations toward it through endless re-performance and devalues those who cannot achieve it. I use the passive voice here because as a norm, able-bodiedness seems to "[emanate] from everywhere and nowhere;" indeed, the compulsoriness of able-bodiedness, like heterosexuality, is so naturalized because of its obfuscated origins. 38 While compulsory able-bodiedness is deeply woven into the fabric of our culture today, McRuer locates its origin in the nineteenth-century rise of industrial capitalism, an economic system that reoriented life around the ability to offer one's body up for manual labor, requiring a predictable, standardized body—as well as, I would add, a predictable, rational mind for taking direction, meeting deadlines, and reaching production goals. 39

Throughout this essay, I use the term compulsory able-mindedness to more precisely reflect the madness metaphors of The Twilight Zone . Although some episodes highlight physical disabilities (also in metaphorical ways, as in "Eye of the Beholder"), I focus here on the mind because of its centrality to the series's critiques of strict rationality, social conformity, and the primary position of work in normative American life. 40 I adopt Schalk's definition of able-mindedness for its concision and thoroughness: In Bodyminds Reimagined , Schalk defines able-mindedness as "the socially constructed norm of mental capacity and ability that is typically posed in binary opposition to mental disability… [and] includes concepts such as rationality, reasonableness, sanity, intelligence, mental agility, self-awareness, social awareness, and control of thoughts and behaviors." 41 As with Schalk's analysis, I foreground the mind in this essay even though it cannot be entirely excised from the physical body because The Twilight Zone is primarily concerned with madness, although I will nod at the inseparability of the bodymind throughout the analysis below with close readings of the episodes' visual representations of madness through the bodies of the actors who play mad. 42

Able-mindedness, as a norm, is positioned as the ideal side of a sane/mad binary, but its required endless performance for only tenuous or deferred achievement reveals the vast gray area between these two extremes. 43 McRuer, again adapting Butler's gender theories, terms the "inevitable impossibility" of forever and fully achieving able-bodied identity ability trouble . 44 If the "always elusive normalcy" of compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness exposes the normate position as aspirational, not actual, then the only social positions that have any sort of stability are those at the mad extreme or approaching it. 45 While the origins of compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness are shrouded by their normative structure, the idea of ability trouble was actually central to psychoanalytic psychology, albeit from a controlling rather than critical perspective: Lying dormant in each person was the potential for a psychotic break—what I have above called latent madness —waiting to be stirred by the mounting pressures of modern life. This latent madness of each individual is echoed by Kafai's conceptualization of the mad border body , defined as a positionality between the constructed, binary identity categories of sane and mad. 46 Stemming from her own "phenomenology of living" as a woman with manic-depression, Kafai puts the mad border body in conversation with racial and queer forms of passing and border crossing in order to argue that the sane/mad binary is political, not natural. 47 The flexibility of the mad border body stokes fear in the normative society that seeks to define it away and grants "transformative power" to those who identify with this positionality. 48 Although Kafai offers the mad border body as a "personal template," putting her work in conversation with McRuer reveals that the mad border body need not be limited to describing only Kafai or others who have similar lived experiences; where able-mindedness is unachievable yet compulsory, all people who have not been deemed fully mad could to some degree occupy a mad border body so long as they recognize the inevitable failure of their normate performances and wield this knowledge critically. 49 By rejecting culturally normative understandings of the world—understandings which they themselves had previously accepted uncritically—in order to truly witness the Twilight Zone's strange phenomena, Bob, Millicent, and to some extent Grant can all be understood as occupying mad border bodies.

III. Structural Madness in The Twilight Zone

Before analyzing individual episodes as representative of how The Twilight Zone uses madness metaphors to critique American cultural ideals, I want to briefly discuss the series's title sequences, as they prime viewers to interpret all episodes through the lens of madness, revealing madness as integral to the very structure of the series. In the title sequence of season one, Serling's voiceover tells viewers that the Twilight Zone is "the dimension of imagination," the "middle ground between… science and superstition" that lies "between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." 50 The title sequences of the other seasons similarly describe the Twilight Zone as "a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." 51 Before even being introduced to the characters or plot of the episode, viewers learn that the story they are about to watch will involve unfamiliar rules of existence, the blurring of the boundary between logic and fantasy, the manipulation of one's firmly held beliefs and horror at the realization of their shortcomings, and the need to imagine otherwise in order to make it all make sense. These voiceovers instruct viewers to understand the inexplicable phenomena of the Twilight Zone as real—not inventions of the protagonists' minds. In recognizing this reality, viewers are already positioned to empathize with the characters who are made mad, opening them up to taking a critical stance on the American cultural ideals that help produce madness.

In addition to the script, the audio and visual components of these title sequences also work to structure the series around madness. The music that accompanies season one's title sequence is dreamy, but in a nightmarish way: its gradually building melody unsettles the viewer, while its repetitiveness lulls as if hypnotic. Season two brought with it The Twilight Zone 's iconic guitar picking and aggressive percussion that serve to startle and disorient the viewer. The series retains this theme song in the rest of its seasons' title sequences, indicating Serling's satisfaction with the anxious tone it sets for the episodes it precedes. Season three's title sequence opens with hypnotic, spinning eccentric circles that encompass the entire screen before drifting away from the audience and disappearing into the vastness of outer space. This opening offers hypnosis as the door through which viewers enter the Twilight Zone, reinforcing the connection between the happenings of the Zone and madness. The matter-of-fact tone of Serling's voice also encourages viewers' association of the Zone with hypnotherapy. Like a hypnotist ushering a patient into their unconscious, Serling makes commanding statements to guide the viewer into this strange place: "You are traveling through another dimension;" "You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone." 52 These imperatives cast Serling as both a tour guide and a psychoanalyst, an authority who leads viewers through unfamiliar territory by manipulating their minds. Finally, after most episodes' title sequences, Serling appears on screen to directly address the audience, frankly introducing the plot that will unfold and the characters involved—in essence, giving his diagnosis of the episode to come. With its title sequences alone, The Twilight Zone structurally links the Zone to the mind—both the characters' and viewers'. The mind here is a medicalized mind, a mind slipping into madness or maybe already made mad, as is clear from the many audiovisual references to hypnosis present in these title sequences. I now turn to the individual episodes that I have selected, whose madness metaphors expose able-mindedness as a compulsory norm that is socially constructed in part through the American cultural ideals of rationality, social conformity, and making work the purpose of life.

IV. Doppelgangers-As-Conformity, Anti-Rationality, and Punishment in "Mirror Image"

Instead of chronicling the gradual decline of Millicent's mental health, "Mirror Image" presents a transformation of her perspective from a mindset of uncompromising rationality to one that prioritizes lived experience over scientifically deduced knowledge. By allowing herself to realize that her duplicate is real, Millicent embraces the positionality of the mad border body most precisely of the protagonists of the three episodes I examine, as she refuses to perform able-mindedness for those around her, even though she could pass as sane if she discontinued her pursuit of truth. As a both/and metaphor, Millicent's madness first and foremost signifies her experience of being made mad but also presents a critique of American society's culture of social conformity, which treats individuals as interchangeable parts, with her doppelganger's literal duplication and replacement of her. Millicent's refusal to perform able-mindedness or conform to the standards of middle-class American behavior results in surveillance by those around her who seek to uphold these norms and, ultimately, in her punishment, with her forced removal to a mental hospital by police. Finally, using the sound of a bell to train viewers to recognize the actions of Millicent's doppelganger, "Mirror Image" concludes by forcing viewers to consider their own future experiences of inexplicable phenomena, pushing them to adopt the mad border body positionality themselves.

"Mirror Image" outlines three stages of Millicent's transformation into a mad border body: her normate stage prior to her encounters with her doppelganger, a denial stage where she clings to able-mindedness for fear of deviating from the compulsory norm, and the final stage in which she adopts the positionality of the mad border body. Stage One: In the opening monologue, Serling describes Millicent as "not a very imaginative type… not given to undue anxiety or fears, or, for that matter, even the most temporal flights of fancy" (S1E21, 3:12). She lacks any characteristics that could be construed as mental illness, even relatively safe traits like having a colorful imagination or dreaming too big. Millicent is rational and career-driven, a "quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote" (S1E21, 3:26). Serling draws attention to the cultural importance of having one's head on one's shoulders by verbalizing the quotations around the common expression, thereby encouraging viewers to linger on the social construction of the value placed in rational decision-making. His tone is matter-of-fact, but also a bit smug: Millicent's rationality fails to prevent her from encountering her doppelganger; in fact, having her head on her shoulders hinders her grasp of the Zone's reality. When reason can no longer explain her experiences, Millicent's sense of self is thrown into crisis, and she enters Stage Two. After seeing her doppelganger for the first time, Millicent meets fellow traveler Paul Grinstead, introducing herself by saying, "I'm Millicent Barnes… at least, I was Millicent Barnes" (S1E21, 11:15). The irrationality of her reality tests her understanding of herself to such an extent that she worries that the experience might have fundamentally altered, or even erased, her identity—and in some ways it has. For one, Millicent soon understands that the doppelganger seeks to replace (erase) her, and, perhaps more important, her experience at the bus station will forever mark her as unable to firmly, once-and-for-all achieve sanity, regardless of whether or not her duplicate is successful in taking over her life. Her latent madness exposed, she reexamines what makes someone mad and arrives at Stage Three. After Millicent faints from seeing her doppelganger a second time, she awakens from her unconsciousness, literally and metaphorically, recalling to Paul something she once heard about an alternate plane of existence, where "each of us has a counterpart… [who,] after the two worlds converge, comes into our world, and in order to survive… has to take over!" (S1E21, 16:43). Millicent is contemplative, speaking in short bursts followed by pauses, but her self-assuredness is clear. She recounts the hypothetical series of events with rising confidence, and concludes that this science fiction defines her reality. Having passed for a normate until this fateful evening at the bus station, Millicent struggles to grapple with the irrationality of her reality but eventually becomes a mad border body. Her firm belief in the reality of the strange phenomena she witnesses challenges the system of compulsory able-mindedness that makes her mad because she rejects rationality, thereby revealing madness as socially constructed.

Millicent's madness also serves as a metaphor that critiques the extreme social conformity prized by early 1960s American culture. Doppelgangers are by definition replicas of individuals, and, as Millicent is portrayed as being an ideal American woman (pre-madness, at least), one could almost imagine that having two of her would fit the bill for conformity rather nicely. "Mirror Image" offers exact duplication as a hyperbole of American conformity in order to highlight the instability of a society that devalues originality. Instead of concluding the episode with a celebration of Buffalo, New York's having two Millicents—two girls with heads on their shoulders—one replaces the other, with the real Millicent locked away in an asylum. That the final scene of the episode shows Paul chasing after his own doppelganger reinforces The Twilight Zone 's critique of the ideal of conformity as producing a revolving door of the same people, uninteresting and interchangeable. 53

Before this final scene, however, Paul personifies the social pressure to perform able-mindedness, as he tries to convince Millicent to abandon her pursuit of truth and facilitates her punishment when she refuses to do so. As Millicent becomes more and more certain that she has in fact crossed paths with her doppelganger, Paul desperately tries to get her to see the light of reason, and upon failing, urges her to feign normativity, imploring her, "Forget about it, please ! Don't think about it," (S1E21, 18:01). When she rejects his last-ditch effort to salvage her normativity, he surreptitiously calls the police to have her removed from the bus station—and the American public sphere. While Paul feels helpful for calling the police to get Millicent's alleged mental illness treated, his actions actually punish her for being the subject of strange phenomena external to her mind. That Millicent's madness is not the result of some biological difference of her brain does not ultimately matter, though, for the social construction of madness relies on cultural ideals like rationality and conformity, which Millicent has surely deviated from. Paul, along with the baggage handler and custodial worker, all function as agents of surveillance who monitor normativity in the station and produce madness in those who violate its boundaries. None of these agents of surveillance is a doctor, but they need not be, as defying American cultural ideals constitutes madness in this era of extreme conformity.

With the sound of a bell, "Mirror Image" trains viewers to identify certain events that take place in the bus station—like Millicent's suitcase moving back and forth from the baggage room—as coming from her doppelganger, then uses this pattern to influence viewers' perception of their own lives. After Millicent has been removed from the station, Paul's bag goes missing with that recognizable ding of a bell, indicating to the audience that he is about to meet his duplicate (S1E21, 23:00). The closing monologue begins as a distraught Paul frantically looks around for his doppelganger—and a rational explanation for his irrational reality (S1E21, 23:37). Serling's last words are, "Call it parallel planes or just insanity. Whatever it is, you find it in the Twilight Zone," equating Millicent's accurate, albeit irrational, interpretation of her reality with madness in a final nod to the social construction of able-mindedness, and the bell dings once more before the credits roll (S1E21, 23:50). The episode's Pavlovian use of the bell trains the audience to recognize each interaction that the protagonists have with their doppelgangers, but at the close of the episode, the protagonists are not to reappear on screen, and the sound of the bell can only precede the remainder of the viewers' lives. With this final ding of the bell, viewers are led to anticipate their own experiences of inexplicable phenomena, experiences that will test their willingness to overlook reality to maintain conformity and avoid madness. They do not really have a fair choice, though, as even Paul, who firmly sticks to his normative rational worldview for most of the episode, is unable to prevent his encounter with his duplicate from altering his perspective. With its use of Pavlovian conditioning, "Mirror Image" encourages viewers to confront the American cultural ideals of rationality and conformity, leaving as their only option the adoption of the mad border body positionality.

The Twilight Zone 's "Mirror Image" employs a critical both/and madness metaphor to simultaneously signify the social construction of able-mindedness and the inadequacy of a culture that devalues originality. Millicent initially resists madness, searching for a rational explanation of her doppelganger, but eventually abandons her impulse to conform and trusts her irrational perception of the world around her, becoming a mad border body. Although Millicent is ultimately punished for her refusal to perform able-mindedness and maintain social conformity, "Mirror Image" presents her punishment not as a warning but as a critique, and the episode encourages viewers to reevaluate their own adherence to strictly rational thought—and their complicity in a system that penalizes those who cannot, or will not, maintain normativity. I now turn to the episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which takes viewers' identification with a made-mad protagonist even further by putting them inside Bob's mind as he navigates his anxiety and fights to save his fellow air travelers from a gremlin-caused crash.

V. Mental Breakdown at 20,000 Feet

The episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" follows Bob Wilson after his six-month stay at a sanitarium, prompted by a mental breakdown on a flight. Bob must now take to the skies again in order to return home, testing the effectiveness of his treatment. Although he is allegedly cured of his "over-tension and over-anxiety, due to under-confidence," he has some doubts, and for good reason: In the opening monologue of this episode, Serling forewarns that "contrary to Mr. Wilson's plan" to return to some semblance of a normal American life, the destination of his flight will not be his hometown but instead "the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone" (S5E3, 3:13, 4:15). His journey will be disrupted by a gremlin, who, balancing on the wing of the plane, works to dismantle its engine—and the formerly institutionalized Bob is apparently the only passenger aboard who can see it. Through deft camera work, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" forces viewers to share in Bob's anxiety about air travel, uncertainty of the gremlin's reality, and eventual fear that the plane will be downed by this very real threat. Bob's madness is both material and metaphorical, standing in for rationality and social conformity with his aversion to flight signifying inappropriate middle-class American behavior. His failure to reproduce normative comfort with flight technology contributes to his madness, revealing able-mindedness as socially constructed in part through one's ability to conform to class-based behavioral standards. The episode also portrays modern medicine as inadequate for curing patients whose minds are made mad by their deviation from the American cultural ideals. Nonetheless, Bob, his wife, Julia, and the flight attendant all place an immense amount of faith in the curative powers of medicines and mental institutions. This faith is so strong that, even when given an abundance of evidence with which to question the success of Bob's treatment at the sanitarium, those around him continuously advocate for medical intervention to try to fix Bob's non-normative behavior.

Early on in the episode, visual cues encourage viewers to identify with Bob's anxiety about air travel. From the beginning of the episode, Bob is jumpy, tightly grips his seat's armrest, and makes dramatic, anguished faces. Drawn-out, slightly upward-angled close-ups of Bob's face show his eyes shifting about anxiously as he purses his lips, gulps, and chews at nothing. Progressively more sweat accumulates and drips off his face as the episode moves along. This combination of skillful acting from William Shatner, makeup, and camera direction indicates that Bob's past mental breakdown will not be a one-time occurrence, thereby sparking in viewers a nervous anticipation of his next one. But this anticipation is that of an onlooker from the other side of the television; it is not until the flight attendant makes her final run through the cabin before takeoff that viewers begin to feel trapped in the plane alongside Bob and start to co-experience his anxiety about plane's safety. The flight attendant leaves the cockpit and quickly closes its door behind her, her eyes shifting downward suspiciously (S5E3, 4:45). After closing the door, she looks up, maintaining her strange expression for the slightest moment before putting on her happy, everything's-fine customer-service face. But her smile is forced and becomes distorted both in how she steadfastly holds it, losing any semblance of authenticity, and because of the overhead lighting that darkens her eyes as she moves down the aisle, making her expression appear sinister. The camera follows her briefly down the aisle from a single point, like the eyes of a person craning their neck. This shot is not from Bob's point of view; it is the audience's gaze, and viewers might imagine that they are another passenger on the flight. Bob does not notice the flight attendant's foreboding expression—scrutinizing her face is solely the audience's domain, allowing viewers to identify with Bob's flight anxiety through their own observations. Now trapped in the cabin alongside Bob and sharing his paranoia about the flight's safety thanks to this exclusive evidence, the audience becomes the only other maladjusted occupant of the plane. All of the other passengers besides Bob and the audience have gotten comfortable in their seats and resumed their friendly banter or settled into a nap, reflecting a proper, middle-class American comfort with air travel. Against this standard of normative behavior, Bob and the audience have nonconformist concerns, and the episode builds off this initial identification with Bob's anxiety in subsequent scenes that involve the gremlin by placing the viewer in Bob's body itself for an even more intimate understanding of his perspective.

The plot soon progresses past just portraying Bob's uncured mental illness, with the gremlin appearing as an additional—but inseparable—source of anxiety for Bob and the audience. With the introduction of the gremlin, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" begins incorporating subjective shots from Bob's point of view, forcing viewers into Bob's mind to experience this harrowing event in the most direct way possible. In one example of this, Bob writhes in his seat for over half a minute, trying to work up the courage to open the curtain of his window to see if the gremlin is still on the wing (S5E3, 8:30). The scene alternates between close-ups of Bob's face and subjective shots of his sleeping wife, putting viewers in Bob's head as he prepares himself to take a peek. There is no dialogue or music to ease the building tension in the scene—that is, until Bob finally tears back the curtain, revealing in jump-scare fashion the gremlin's grotesque face pressed onto the glass. Horns blare and cymbals crash, and the film editors cut from a medium close-up of Bob looking at the gremlin to a close-up of the gremlin from Bob's point of view. Viewers now feel Bob's fear, both alongside and as Bob. Telotte notes the importance of the shared gaze between Bob and the audience, arguing that, through the incorporation of subjective shots from Bob's perspective, the audience joins Bob as the only witnesses of the gremlin on the wing, leaving them to "wonder for much of the narrative… if he is simply projecting that nightmarish image, giving external shape to his inner fears, or if, perhaps by virtue of his 'difference', he sees more than normal people." 54 Viewers' wonder about whether or not the gremlin is actually there within the reality of the episode, whether the episode is a tale of madness or misunderstanding, is an additional source of gnawing anxiety for them to wrestle with—and one that they share with Bob. But posing the question of whether this story is one of madness or truth, as Telotte does, precludes the possibility that it might be both. In fact, it surely is: Regardless of the reality of the gremlin—and it is real—Bob will be deemed mad because what he claims to see exists outside the bounds of rational thinking.

As the episode forces viewers into Bob's mad mind, it also works to portray the insecurity of Americans' faith in modern medicine's ability to cure mental ailments. The faith starts out strong: As they settle into their seats, Julia assures Bob, "If you weren't well, Dr. Martin just wouldn't let you fly all the way back home. It's just that simple" (S5E3, 1:50). She has full faith that he is cured of his illness, and works to convince him that his uneasiness is just a reasonable bout of nerves—after all, this is a test of the success of his treatment, but it is one that he should surely pass. But soon Bob starts seeing the gremlin, and the faith that the people around him have in modern medicine begins to dwindle. Rather than critiquing the cure-all potential of American psychiatry, however, Julia and the flight attendant take the path of trying to cover up and ignore Bob's madness. Though she is clearly alarmed by Bob's behavior, the flight attendant is quick to dismiss his first sighting of the gremlin, reassuring Julia that "it's nothing" (S5E3, 7:00). Even after multiple sightings and outbursts, Julia lies to Bob and herself about his sanity: Bob asks her with pleading, teary eyes, "Do I look insane?" to which she forces a chuckle and lightly replies, "No, darling, no" (S5E3, 12:34). But her face oversells her confidence in his sanity, and he knows she is lying. In an attempt to convince her that he is not insane, Bob grabs Julia's face and shoulder in a way that he intends to be comforting, but she flinches—he's gone mad, and that makes him physically dangerous (S5E3, 13:50). Despite what she says about Bob's state of mind, it is clear that Julia no longer believes that Dr. Martin was correct in signing Bob's release papers. Moreover, the primary concern of Julia and the flight attendant seems not to be Bob's welfare but maintaining the appearance of normalcy, feigning Bob's rationality and behavioral conformity, however unsuccessfully.

Despite the ineffectiveness of Bob's past treatment, the sanitarium remains the only avenue imaginable to the normate Julia for fixing his unwanted mental illness. Still trying to convince Julia of his sanity and the danger that the gremlin poses to the passengers on the flight, Bob gambles with his future by appealing to her faith in psychiatry, saying that if she tells the pilots to keep an eye on the wings and they see nothing, he'll recommit himself to the sanitarium (S5E3, 14:18). As the sanitarium clearly did not yield the results Julia would have wanted (a normate for a husband), it is an odd choice to re-appeal to its promise. But the episode portrays this as the only conceivable option for respectable, middle-class Americans of the time, with the treatments administered by the sanitarium concerned first and foremost with correcting non-normative behavior. With nothing else to do but return to the sanitarium once more in attempt to secure unachievable normalcy, Bob's experience (always shared with the audience) of being made mad leaves viewers to ask for more—more from themselves, each other, and in particular from an American culture that enforces rigid cultural ideals of how people should view and participate in the world. Bolstering this reading are the several instances throughout the episode when Bob refuses to take sleeping pills or medicine to calm his nerves. At one point, he even pretends to take a pill and then stealthily discards it (S5E3, 19:30). Bob's rejection of pharmaceuticals is a quiet protest of the controlling system that produces his madness and tries to push him toward conformity. By embracing his madness in order to really see the world around him, Bob can be seen to adopt the politicized positionality of the mad border body, challenging the American cultural ideals of rationality and conformity—and saving his and the other passengers' lives.

The final scenes, in which Bob's anxiety culminates in his killing the gremlin and he is subsequently detained by paramedics and police, portray the danger of compulsory able-mindedness by harnessing the established viewer identification with Bob to offer a dissatisfying—rather than triumphant—conclusion to the episode. Initiating the episode's climax, Bob desperately steals a gun from a police officer on board to take matters into his own hands and kill the gremlin (S5E3, 20:30). He busts open the emergency exit, empties the revolver into the gremlin, and lets out a big yell as blaring horns and shrieking strings compete to see which can make the viewer's heart race faster (S5E3, 21:40). The camera zooms in on his screaming face, lingering momentarily, and then the close-up becomes a transition, in which the audience briefly becomes Bob for one final time: The dissonant music and screams of Bob and the other passengers abruptly cease, and the camera returns to Bob's perspective. The audience as Bob looks up at a police officer, who is at the foot of the gurney that the audience/Bob is strapped onto. The plane has landed safely while the audience/Bob lays unconscious after the incident. Viewers then leave Bob's body to see him being carried out of the plane by paramedics. 55 The flight engineer turns to the flight attendant and describes the incident as "the nuttiest" suicide attempt he's ever heard of, providing a rational, medicalized interpretation of Bob's actions (S5E3, 23:34): There couldn't have been a gremlin on the plane's wing, it must have been a suicide attempt—after all, crazy people do commit suicide. Now outside the plane and about to be loaded into an ambulance, Bob is content. Julia reassures him, "It's all right now, darling"—still putting her faith in modern medicine—and he sits up, responding, "I know. But I'm the only one who does know… right now" (S5E3, 23:40). With Serling's closing monologue, the camera zooms out to reveal the gremlin-damaged plane wing. Bob's first stay at the sanitarium might have had no cause other than his mind, but this one will have had an exterior, tangible reason. Despite the physical evidence of the gremlin's reality, nobody bothers to check the wing to see if Bob had accurately interpreted his surroundings. That nobody inspects the plane for damage can represent nothing except a willful overlooking of the inexplicable for the sake of avoiding being deemed mad alongside Bob. The other passengers had looked on in horror as Bob shot at the gremlin, yet nobody came forward to support his account of what happened. Collectively, the other passengers, the flight crew, the police officers and paramedics, and even Julia band together to sweep the incident under the rug, sacrificing Bob to maintain their sanity. But they don't challenge their worldviews so that the audience can: In seeing this conspiracy against Bob, with its goal to maintain the status quo for those who can benefit from it, viewers are encouraged to question the lengths they go to present themselves as non-mad, even if it means concealing what they know or believe about the world.

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet'' forces viewers into Bob's mad mind to make them rethink the supposed infallibility of rationality, challenge their unquestioning faith in American psychiatry, and critique able-mindedness as a compulsory and dangerous social norm. Bob's madness is a both/and metaphor that reveals how Americans are made mad through their failure to reproduce the standards of middle-class American life. He can be seen as occupying a mad border body, as he resists his devaluation as a madman, is confident in his ability to accurately interpret his surroundings, and uses his non-normativity for the betterment of his community. Bob's ultimate punishment for his insight, while disappointing for the viewer, serves as a call to action for greater compassion, understanding, and acceptance of difference in American society.

VI. "The Arrival" of Madness Through Labor

While Serling was certainly no Communist, The Twilight Zone did on occasion critique economic inequality and the exploitation of workers under American capitalism. 56 One such occasion is the episode, "The Arrival," which follows Federal Aviation Agent Grant Sheckly, whose mind constructs the mysterious case of Flight 107, in which an airplane lands with no passengers, crew, or luggage, in attempt to cope with his failure to maintain a perfect record of solved air crash investigations. 57 By portraying Grant's hallucination of being a perfect laborer in response to his human fallibility, "The Arrival" employs a both/and madness metaphor to argue that having a life consumed by a demanding career, while central to the idealized American middle-class identity, can actually inflict severe damage on an individual's psyche. 58 This depiction of madness caused by the pressures of work counters the 1950s American belief in the unequivocal good that working does for the mind, as seen in educational films like Mental Hospital (1953). Finally, the double plot twist in the latter half of "The Arrival" stimulates viewers' imaginations, guiding them to adopt multiple, contradictory interpretations of the episode—all of which expose the mad-making potential of the demanding labor expectations of American capitalism.

If being a good laborer was central to defining American normativity during the post-World War II economic boom, work became a treatment for Americans' mental illnesses. This ideology appears in the film Mental Hospital , released just eight years prior to "The Arrival." In the film, Fred Clanton is admitted to an Oklahoma state mental institution for symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. 59 Although the film introduces the multiple methods of therapy used at the time to treat people with mental illnesses—including hydrotherapy, electroshock therapy, and insulin shock therapy—labor is named the "first step along the road that leads to recovery and release" ( Mental Hospital , 4:47). Chores in the kitchen and on the hospital grounds provide "the therapy of busy hands," an identification of labor not only as helpful in its ability to distract but as the core element of a multifaceted therapeutic regimen ( Mental Hospital , 4:33). Fred's job as a hospital grounds crew member eventually cures his schizophrenia, and when his doctor asks how he's feeling, he replies, "Fine, Doctor. As a matter of fact, I feel like going back to work!" ( Mental Hospital , 15:42). The film thus portrays labor not only as a preeminent therapy for mental ailments but also the goal of post-treatment life. As a cured Fred packs his suitcase, the narrator reports that the hospital is proud to send him home to "face the world as a man again!" ( Mental Hospital , 17:57). Work has banished Fred's mental non-normativity and solidified his masculinity through empowering him to realize his capacity to be a productive member of American society. Given the historical context in which Mental Hospital was produced, it is unsurprising that doctors might prescribe labor as a treatment for mental ailments, as the goal was to mold patients into the normative American identity, a central component of which was being a successful, self-reliant worker. The stakes of these patient transformations couldn't be higher: During the Cold War, bad workers, not excepting those who were unproductive because their mental illnesses impeded their capacities to work jobs designed for normative, able-minded Americans, could, within Red-Scare logic, be Communists, Communist sympathizers, or potential recruits to the Communist cause. Moreover, the inability of an American worker to embody the self-reliance, productivity, and competitiveness of the idealized laborer under capitalism was not solely a failure of the individual but a failure of American capitalism and, by extension, America itself. Americans with mental illnesses, then, must be redirected back to the labor that consolidates American capitalist excellence—in other words, "cured." The Twilight Zone 's "The Arrival" counters this dominant ideology of labor-as-treatment, portraying a less optimistic view of work's influence on the mind. 60

While Mental Hospital extols work for its healing power, "The Arrival" imagines its destructive potential. The episode opens in the midst of Grant's mad fantasy, and viewers are led to believe that he has a perfect record in his twenty-two years solving cases of crashed planes. After the mysterious landing, Grant, Airline Executive Bengston, Public Relations Representative Malloy, and Ground Crewmember Robbins gather in the hangar to inspect the plane for clues that could lead them to a rational explanation for why it landed without any passengers or crew. After throwing around ideas, Grant has a flash of brilliance, theorizing that because each of them sees a different model number on the plane's tail and different seat colors, they have all been hypnotized in a conspiracy of "Mass Suggestion"—in other words, the plane doesn't exist (S3E2, 13:00). If "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" are any indication, this is a bold and potentially dangerous claim for Grant to make, and Malloy provides the obligatory "Are you mad?" in response to it (S3E2, 14:12). Viewers might expect that Grant, like Millicent and Bob, will soon be forcibly taken to an asylum, but although his theory approaches irrationality, it only matches the irrational situation that everybody in the hangar knows to be real, so he is given the opportunity to prove it. Outside the hangar, he puts his hand in one of the plane's running engines, and, instead of mangling or killing him, the plane disappears, leaving behind a very satisfied Grant (S3E2, 16:41). For a moment, it seems that irrationality triumphs over reason yet again in the Zone's reality, but then the other men disappear, and Grant's theory turns on its head. Viewers learn that the entire mystery was an elaborate trick of Grant's mind in a plot twist that refocuses the entire episode retrospectively. Throughout the episode, Grant notes the familiarity of the pilot's and passenger's names; they turn out to be casualties of a disappeared flight—Flight 107—from seventeen or eighteen years ago that was lost in fog and never found, making it the only case that Grant could never solve (S3E2, 20:52). Grant's failure would come to haunt him and ruin his confidence in his work. Upon realizing his mental break, Grant becomes hysterical, and denial sets in as he whimpers, "But I never been licked on a case yet. Never. We've always found the causes. Always," (S3E2, 21:47). Rather than accept his inability to solve this one case, Grant has constructed an alternate world where everyone around him is confronted with a problem that only he can solve, an irrational situation that requires an equally outside-the-box explanation that only he can provide, thereby absolving him of his real-world inadequacy in his work. This single failure on the job marks Grant as a failed American man and reveals the immense power that work has on the mind and one's standing in American society. 61 While this twist deviates the episode from the pattern that emerges when viewing "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" together, "The Arrival" nonetheless exposes madness as culturally produced—this time, specifically out of the pressures of work in a society that makes excellence in one's career a primary site of identity-formation.

As is common for episodes of The Twilight Zone , which often encourage multiple, overlapping, and even contradictory interpretations, "The Arrival" ends with a second twist that calls into question the revelation that Grant's mind constructed the landing of the empty plane. In his concluding monologue, Serling reports that, like Millicent and Bob, Grant will be taken to an asylum, with the incident of the mysterious plane landing clinically diagnosed as an "illusion." But, he continues, addressing the viewer directly, "If you choose to think that the explanation has to do with an airborne Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship in a fog-enshrouded night on a flight that never ends, then you're doing your business in an old stand in the Twilight Zone," (S3E2, 23:58). This conclusion twists the story again, in a much vaguer way: Was the empty plane real? Could it somehow be connected to the Flight 107 that was lost nearly two decades prior? Does Grant's insistence on the reality of his illusion signify his adoption of the mad border body positionality, from which he acknowledges his irrational lived experiences despite the "evidence" of their fabrication? The ending raises questions that the audience is unequipped to answer with the information given in the episode, but discerning the truth in this fictional story is beside the point: "The Arrival" provides the audience with multiple possible interpretations to choose from because the driving goal behind The Twilight Zone was to stimulate viewers' minds and force them to think beyond the limits set by the American cultural ideals of rational thought and conformity. Furthermore, no matter which interpretation(s) a given viewer will arrive at, Grant ends up in a mental hospital all the same; right or not about this Flying Dutchman, he is made mad by the unachievable standards set by American capitalism and removed from the public, not only for his irrationality but also for his inability to cope with the pressures of his work.

Whereas Mental Hospital offers labor as a cure-all for mental illness and a defense of the American way of life, "The Arrival" presents labor as a danger to the psyche when made central to one's identity as dictated by American capitalism. With "The Arrival," The Twilight Zone uses madness as a metaphor for living in a society that idolizes work. In the process, the episode locates an individual's inability to work in accordance with American standards of success as a source of madness, revealing the social construction of able-mindedness. As with "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Arrival" challenges viewers to rethink not only the social conformity and strict rationality of late-1950s/early-1960s American culture but also the many ways that America produces and devalues mad Americans.

VII. Conclusion

The Twilight Zone was born out of an American culture that idealized social conformity and rational thought, during a time of post-World War II economic expansion that encouraged Americans to lead work-centered lives. Dissatisfied with these restrictive cultural ideals, Serling's television series frequently used madness as a narrative device to expand viewers' minds. Viewers learn from The Twilight Zone 's title sequences that the Zone does not follow the rules of the real world, opening up the possibility that characters like Millicent, Bob, and Grant are correctly interpreting the inexplicable phenomena that they experience. This potential for accurate irrationality exposes the protagonists' madness as culturally produced, with the characters around them policing their adherence to the normative standards of middle-class American behavior. From this surveillance, it becomes clear that able-mindedness is a compulsory social norm. While the language of compulsory able-mindedness that I have used throughout this essay comes from twenty-first-century disability studies scholarship, this mid-twentieth-century television series nonetheless portrayed madness as socially constructed, the negative half of a binary that determines Americans' standing in society, right to self-determination, and humanity.

With this paper, I have worked to demonstrate that scholarly analyses of The Twilight Zone have thus far overlooked madness as a crucial component of the series's critiques of the American culture of its time. On the one hand, The Twilight Zone uncovers the important roles that social conformity, rationality, and the idolization of labor play in the production of madness in American citizens. On the other hand, the series reveals able-mindedness as a foundational element of these cultural ideals. Rather than merely arguing for a scholarly identification of madness in The Twilight Zone , I have attempted to highlight madness as an integral yet underappreciated part of the series's critical stance on American society.

In addition to portraying the mutual construction of able-mindedness and these cultural ideals, The Twilight Zone consistently presents the asylum as a dangerous facet of American society. By the end of their episodes, Millicent, Bob, and Grant all end up in asylums as punishment for their nonnormative worldviews. While these episodes do not include scenes set in mental hospitals, others do feature medical facilities to critique their treatment of mad people and their powerful position in mid-twentieth century American society. "Twenty Two" depicts the hospital where Liz Powell stays to recover from "overwork and nervous fatigue" (and dreams that turn out to be visions of the future) as a callous place where doctors silence their patients by rationalizing everything and revel in the power that their careers grant them, even sexually harassing those in their care. 62 "Person or Persons Unknown" presents the medical field as a branch of law enforcement, with David Gurney, who wakes up one morning as a stranger to everyone he knows, removed by police from his alleged place of employment and institutionalized. 63 When David escapes his detainment, the police and his doctor band together to hunt him down and return him to his prison, the asylum. Taken together, "Mirror Image," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," and "The Arrival," as well as "Twenty Two," "Person or Persons Unknown," and other episodes, reveal The Twilight Zone 's anti-asylum stance. Given that The Twilight Zone did not rise to fame as an anthology of anti-asylum texts, it would be a stretch to argue that the series contributed as much to the American deinstitutionalization movement as, say, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest . But it would be equally inaccurate to claim that the series did not offer subtle yet provocative representations of mental hospitals to encourage viewers to question the authority of these institutions to override Americans' freedoms, as the series consistently denounced asylums as punitive detention centers where made-mad Americans could be sequestered from the American public sphere indefinitely.

In addition to bringing madness into the scholarship on The Twilight Zone and recognizing its episodes as pop-culture anti-asylum texts, this essay joins the work of Schalk and Holder in its understanding of the potential for science fiction to critique ableism and imagine anti-ableist futures. 64 Holder notes that the science fiction genre is often put to ableist uses in stories wherein advanced societies possess technologies with which to fully "cure" (read: normalize) people with disabilities, thereby presenting the erasure of disability from society as progress, but imagining disability-free futures is far from the only way that science fiction can convey stories of mental and bodily non-normativity. 65 With "Mirror Image," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Arrival," and other episodes, The Twilight Zone presents stories in which made-mad protagonists are removed from society, effectively returning their surrounding environments to normalcy by disguising the actual, inexplicable phenomena of the Zone as madness—but these are stories not of a utopian future but of a deeply flawed present. Although the strange happenings of the Zone are fictional and did not reflect the reality of 1950s and '60s America, characters like Millicent, Bob, and Grant demanded empathy from their contemporary viewers who were subjected to relentless pressure to perform compulsory able-mindedness, social conformity, rationality, and perfect labor—despite the impossibility of success. With each American's latent madness waiting to rear its ugly head as they dealt with the daily struggles of modern American life, becoming a Millicent, a Bob, or a Grant was not as impossible as it might initially seem. The science-fiction dimension of the Twilight Zone illuminated the real-world issues of its time, pushing viewers to find creative, nonnormative, or even mad alternatives to the American status quo.

• The Twilight Zone , "Mirror Image," Season 1, Episode 21, directed by John Brahm, CBS, February 26, 1960, 9:10. Return to Text
• My understandings of norms and surveillance are indebted to Foucault's theorizations of how power operates in modern society. See selections from Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 179-213. Return to Text
• Lennard J. Davis, "The Ghettoization of Disability: Paradoxes of Visibility and Invisibility in Cinema" in Culture – Theory – Disability: Encounters Between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies , ed. Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), 40. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839425336-005 . Throughout this essay, I use the term "cultural production" to emphasize the social construction of madness through surveillance of the protagonists' (in)ability to embody American cultural ideals. Return to Text
• Peter Wolfe, In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 17. Return to Text
• Viewership data from Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 1. The population of the US in 1960 was approximately 179.3 million ("United States," 1960 Census of Population Advance Reports: Final Population Counts (United States Bureau of the Census, November 15, 1960), 1, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1960/dec/population-pc-a1.html ). Return to Text
• Mark Boulton, "Sending the Extremists to the Cornfield: Rod Serling's Crusade Against Radical Conservatism," The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 6 (2014), 1229. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12208 Return to Text
• Erik Mortenson, "A Journey into the Shadows: The Twilight Zone 's Visual Critique of the Cold War," Science Fiction Film and Television 7, no. 1 (2014): 60, 57. https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2014.3 Return to Text
• Wolfe, 16, 24. Return to Text
• Susan L. Feagin, "Existentialism and Searching for an Exit" in Philosophy in The Twilight Zone, ed. Noël Carroll and Lester H. Hunt (West Sussex, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009), 98, 103. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444310375.ch6 Return to Text
• While there is no evidence that an explicit project to advocate for disability rights with The Twilight Zone drove Serling's frequent use of madness metaphors, his advocacy for empathy and acceptance of difference certainly lends itself to respecting people of varying abilities. See Boulton for a comprehensive analysis of Serling's project to promote civil rights and cultivate a culture of compassion through The Twilight Zone and his other works. See also Leslie Dale Feldman, Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), for more on the civil rights themes of the series. Return to Text
• The Twilight Zone , "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," Season 5, Episode 3, directed by Richard Donner, CBS, October 11, 1963. Return to Text
• J.P. Telotte, "In the Cinematic Zone of The Twilight Zone ," Science Fiction Film and Television 3, no. 1 (2010): 9-10. https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2010.1 Return to Text
• Sheila Lintott, "Epistemology at 20,000 Feet" in Philosophy in The Twilight Zone, ed. Noël Carroll and Lester H. Hunt (West Sussex, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009), 146. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444310375.ch9 ; Wolfe, 83. Return to Text
• See, for example, Feagin's analysis of "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." Return to Text
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 277. Return to Text
• Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (New York: Signet [Penguin Putnam, Inc.], 1962). Return to Text
• Shorter, 279. Return to Text
• Shorter reports that because of deinstitutionalization, one-third of homeless people were mentally ill and fourteen percent of county jail inmates had previously been psychiatric patients (Shorter, 280-81). Return to Text
• John C. Burnham, "Introduction," After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America , ed. John Burnham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226081397.001.0001 Return to Text
• Shorter, 145. Return to Text
• Warren R. Young, "Rx: For Modern Medicine Some Sympathy Added to Science: Recent Studies Show Kindly Insight Is Still a Vital Tool," Life , October 12, 1959, 148. Return to Text
• Menand argues that "one reason for the 'fit' between Freudianism and postwar American culture had to do with what might be called the Cold War discourse of anxiety" in which shared fears of Communism, spies in American communities, and nuclear warfare during the early years of the Cold War were made treatable through individualizing the collective issue and addressing it with psychoanalysis. (Louis Menand, "Freud, Anxiety, and the Cold War," After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America , ed. John Burnham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 189. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226081397.003.0010 ) Return to Text
• See: Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, "Studying Disability for a Better Cinema and Media Studies" in "IN FOCUS: Cripping Cinema and Media Studies," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 144. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0043 ; Elizabeth Ellcessor, Mack Hagood, and Bill Kirkpatrick, "Introduction: Toward a Disability Media Studies" in Disability Media Studies , ed. Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 4. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479867820.003.0001 ; and Robert McRuer, "Introduction" in "IN FOCUS: Cripping Cinema and Media Studies," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 4 (Summer 2019). https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0042 Return to Text
• Ellcessor, Hagood, and Kirkpatrick, 4. Return to Text
• Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 144. Return to Text
• David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, "Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor" in The Disability Studies Reader , 2nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 205. Return to Text
• Mitchell and Snyder, 215. Return to Text
• Mitchell and Snyder, 210, 213. Return to Text
• Davis, "The Ghettoization of Disability," 44; Mitchell and Snyder, 215. Return to Text
• Davis, "The Ghettoization of Disability," 40. Return to Text
• Davis, "The Ghettoization of Disability," 47-48. Return to Text
• For additional examples of academic critiques of disability metaphors, see Sami Schalk, "Metaphorically Speaking: Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Writing," Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2013). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3874 , and Jakubowicz and Meekosha, "Detecting Disability: Moving Beyond Metaphor in the Crime Fiction of Jeffrey Deaver," Disability Studies Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2004). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v24i2.482 Return to Text
• Sami Schalk, "Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night,'" African American Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 140, 141. https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2017.0018 Return to Text
• Schalk, "Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night,'" 141. Return to Text
• Heather Hillsburg, "Mental Illness and the Mad/woman: Anger, Normalcy, and Liminal Identities in Mary McGarry Morris's A Dangerous Woman " Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 14. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.1 Return to Text
• I am not claiming that this is the only criterion for determining whether or not a disability metaphor is politically responsible or appropriate; rather, stemming from my reading of Schalk and Hillsburg together, I outline this as the core requirement for crafting a successful both/and disability metaphor. Return to Text
• Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 6-8. Return to Text
• McRuer, Crip Theory , 8. Return to Text
• McRuer, Crip Theory , 8; Robert McRuer, "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence" in The Disability Studies Reader , 2nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 303. McRuer focuses on examples from the post-1970s neoliberal era, which has offered an ambivalent treatment of both queerness and disability. Compulsory able-bodiedness would of course adapt as industrial capitalism developed over the centuries, making McRuer's examples less useful to a study of The Twilight Zone , as the series predates neoliberalism's domination of American economic policy. McRuer's overall framework is still valuable to my analysis of the series, though, with its origin in the nineteenth century. Kafer is often cited for having explicitly incorporated compulsory able-mindedness into her analysis in Feminist, Queer, Crip , but I find that adapting McRuer's theory to the mind allows for more specificity than would contextualizing my analysis through Kafer, as her book theorizes the temporality of disabled people's lives and dedicates relatively little space to defining compulsory able-mindedness. (Nonetheless, for Kafer on compulsory able-mindedness, see Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 16, 43.) Return to Text
• The Twilight Zone , "Eye of the Beholder," Season 2, Episode 6, directed by Douglas Heyes, CBS, November 11, 1960. Return to Text
• Sami Schalk, "Whose Reality Is It Anyway?: Deconstructing Able-Mindedness" in Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 61. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371830 Return to Text
• Schalk, "Whose Reality Is It Anyway?," 61-62. Return to Text
• For an analysis of the idealization of norms in a disability studies context, see Lennard J. Davis, "Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power" in The Disability Studies Reader , 5th ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2-3. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315680668 Return to Text
• McRuer, Crip Theory , 10. Return to Text
• McRuer, Crip Theory , 31. "A very narrowly defined profile that describes only a minority of actual people," the normate is the subject who embodies everything that marks the failure of disabled people, homosexuals, and other deviants to achieve full humanity in a society built on compulsory norms (Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8). Return to Text
• Shayda Kafai, "The Mad Border Body: A Political In-Betweeness," Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2013). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i1.3438 Return to Text
• Ibid. Return to Text
• Similar to Kafai's mad border body, Hillsburg offers the broader category liminal identities to organize literary characters who straddle binaries like normal/abnormal, beautiful/ugly, and dependent/independent, although as a description, rather than a political perspective, liminal identities do not require the coming-into-consciousness necessary to the mad border body (Hillsburg, 1-2). Return to Text
• Season 1 title sequence, The Twilight Zone , created by Rod Serling, CBS, 1959. Return to Text
• See season 1 alternate introduction and seasons 2 and 3 introductions. The season 4 and 5 introduction is also similar. Return to Text
• Seasons 2 and 3 title sequences, The Twilight Zone , created by Rod Serling, CBS, 1960-1962. Seasons 4 and 5 title sequences, The Twilight Zone , created by Rod Serling, CBS, 1963-1964. Return to Text
• Interestingly, it is only the two successful, middle-class, Anglo-American protagonists of the episode—Millicent and Paul—who experience these strange phenomena. "Mirror Image" positions Americans who are considered to be the era's ideal citizens as the ones who are made mad for their perceptions of another dimension. This is not to say that Serling saw this privileged subgroup of the American population as uniquely equipped to challenge norms; rather, the episode employs representatives of the pinnacle of American normativity to prove that a change of worldview is possible for even those who are most accountable for maintaining it—and benefit most from its perpetuation. It is an assertion that complacency with systems of hierarchy is inexcusable no matter who you are. Return to Text
• Telotte, 8. Return to Text
• They pass by Julia, who has put her hair in a scarf, referencing the figure of the mourning wife. While wrapping one's hair in a scarf was common during the 1950s and '60s to protect one's coiffed hairstyle from the wind, when read along with her downward glance and within the context of her husband's alleged mental breakdown, the scarf resembles funeral garb, representing Julia's mourning the loss of her husband's sanity. Following this line of interpretation, Bob's gurney resembles a coffin being loaded onto a hearse. Return to Text
• Boulton, 1233. For a critique of the callousness of American industry, via the replacement of workers with machines, see The Twilight Zone , "The Brain Center at Whipple's," Season 5, Episode 33, directed by Richard Donner, CBS, May 15, 1964. For a plot that chronicles a protagonist's desperate need for unattainable wealth, see The Twilight Zone , "The Trade-Ins," Season 3, Episode 31, directed by Elliot Silverstein, CBS, April 20, 1962. Return to Text
• The Twilight Zone , "The Arrival," Season 3, Episode 2, directed by Boris Sagal, CBS, September, 22, 1961. Return to Text
• Garland Thomson writes that "nowhere is the disabled figure more troubling to American ideology and history than in relation to the concept of work: the system of production and distribution of economic resources in which the abstract principles of self-government, self-determination, autonomy, and progress are manifest most completely." (Garland Thomson, 46-47.) Return to Text
• Mental Hospital , directed by Layton Mabrey (1953, Chicago: International Film Bureau), film. Return to Text
• With her analysis of the Canadian educational film Feelings of Depression (1950), Martin argues that by the end of World War II, "the link between mood and productivity in the workplace was well entrenched in North America." The film follows the story of John, who is unsuccessful in his job and worries that he is compromising the overall quality of his company because of his depression. While this film is Canadian, Martin uses it in tandem with American examples to make arguments about North American culture generally during this time. (Emily Martin, "Imagining Mood Disorders as a Public Health Crisis," Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture , ed. David Serlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 251. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816648221.003.0012 ) Return to Text
• This is not just Grant's internalized feeling of failure; the real Bengston also remembers Grant's inability to solve that case from so long ago, and he seems to have some excitement when recounting the lost flight's story to Grant (S3E2, 21:19). Return to Text
• The Twilight Zone , "Twenty Two," Season 2, Episode 17, directed by Jack Smight, CBS, February 10, 1961. Return to Text
• The Twilight Zone , "Person or Persons Unknown," Season 3, Episode 27, directed by John Brahm, CBS, March 23, 1962. Return to Text
• Schalk, "Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night;'" Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined ; Matthew Holder, "Imagining Accessibility: Theorizing Disability in Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction " Disability Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i3.6685 Return to Text
• Holder. Return to Text

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August 15, 2024

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‘The Twilight Zone,’ from A to Z

February 18, 2018

public domain

Burgess Meredith, Robert Sterling, and Patricia Crowley in “Printer’s Devil,” The Twilight Zone , 1963

The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on, and the weather forecast is “more of the same, only hotter.” Despite the unbearable day-to-reality of constant sweat, the total collapse of order and decency, and, above all, the scarcity of water, Norma can’t shake the feeling that one day she’ll wake up and find that this has all been a dream. And she’s right. Because the world isn’t drifting toward the sun at all, it’s drifting away from it, and the paralytic cold has put Norma into a fever dream.

This is “The Midnight Sun,” my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone , and one that has come to seem grimly familiar . I also wake up adrift, in a desperate and unfamiliar reality, wondering if the last year in America has been a dream—I too expect catastrophe, but it’s impossible to know from which direction it will come, whether I am right to trust my senses or if I’m merely sleepwalking while the actual danger becomes ever-more present. One thing I do know is that I’m not alone: since the election of Donald Trump, it’s become commonplace to compare the new normal to living in the Twilight Zone, as Paul Krugman did in a 2017 New York Times op-ed titled “Living in the Trump Zone,” in which he compared the President to the all-powerful child who terrorizes his Ohio hometown in “It’s a Good Life,” policing their thoughts and arbitrarily striking out at the adults. But these comparisons do The Twilight Zone a disservice. The show’s articulate underlying philosophy was never that life is topsy-turvy, things are horribly wrong, and misrule will carry the day—it is instead a belief in a cosmic order, of social justice and a benevolent irony that, in the end, will wake you from your slumber and deliver you unto the truth.

Elizabeth Allen and her mannequin double in “The After Hours,” 1960; click to enlarge

The Twilight Zone has dwelt in the public imagination, since its cancellation in 1964, as a synecdoche for the kind of neat-twist ending exemplified by “To Serve Man” (it’s a cookbook), “The After Hours” (surprise, you’re a mannequin), and “The Eye of the Beholder” (everyone has a pig-face but you). It’s probably impossible to feel the original impact of each show-stopping revelation, as the twist ending has long since been institutionalized, clichéd, and abused in everything from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects to Twilight Zone- style anthology series like Black Mirror. Rewatching these episodes with the benefit of Steven Jay Rubin’s new, 429-page book,  The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia,  (a bathroom book if ever I saw one), I realized that the punchlines are actually the least reason for the show’s enduring hold over the imagination. That appeal lies, rather, in its creator Rod Serling’s rejoinders to the prevalent anti-Communist panic that gripped the decade: stories of witch-hunting paranoia tend to end badly for everyone, as in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which the population of a town turns on each other in a panic to ferret out the alien among them, or in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” which relocates the premise to a diner in which the passengers of a bus are temporarily stranded and subject to interrogation by a pair of state troopers.

Leah Waggner and Barry Atwater in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street ,” 1960; click to enlarge

The show’s most prevalent themes are probably best distilled as “you are not what you took yourself to be,” “you are not where you thought you were,” and “beneath the façade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of monsters, clones, and robots.” Serling had served as a paratrooper in the Philippines in 1945 and returned with PTSD; he and his eventual audience were indeed caught between the familiar past and an unknown future. They stood dazed in a no-longer-recognizable world, flooded with strange new technologies, vastly expansionist corporate or federal jurisdictions, and once-unfathomable ideologies. The culture was shifting from New Deal egalitarianism to the exclusionary persecution and vigilantism of McCarthyism, the “southern strategy” of Goldwater and Nixon, and the Cold War-era emphasis on mandatory civilian conformity, reinforced across the board in schools and the media. In “The Obsolete Man,” a totalitarian court tries a crusty, salt-of-the-earth librarian (played by frequent Twilight Zone star Burgess Meredith, blacklisted since the 1950s, who breaks his glasses in “Time Enough At Last” and plays the titular milquetoast in “Mr. Dingle, the Strong”), who has outlived his bookish medium; but his obsolescence is something every US veteran would have recognized given the gulf between the country they defended and the one that had so recently taken root and was beginning to resemble, in its insistence on purity and obedience to social norms, the fascist states they had fought against in the war. From Serling’s opening narration:

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. 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. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

The show’s subversive credentials —buoyed by semi-satirical “soft” science fiction writers like Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, and Ray Bradbury—is one of the secret threads running through Rubin’s Encyclopedia , which logs each episode’s opening monologue, premise, and cast along with behind-the-scenes production notes. The book is so absurdly comprehensive, you start to pick up on the eerie synergy between the show and its personnel, who often come to bad ends or survive by uncanny close-calls. A particularly savage case is that of Gig Young, who played the advertising executive trapped in a bucolic small town nightmare in “Walking Distance,” and who in real life murdered his wife before turning the gun on himself in 1978. Or Cliff Robertson, the ventriloquist in 1962’s “The Dummy,” whose original flight to Hollywood to film the episode crashed into Jamaica Bay after he changed his reservation, and who also happened to be flying his own twin-engine airplane over New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. The effect is to render The Twilight Zone in a new light, as a realist television show that was simply the first to grasp that life itself is outlandish, more horrific and strange than a million Martian landscapes.

Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough at Last,” 1959

And then there’s the remarkable case of Charles Beaumont, the most prolific and celebrated of the show’s writers next to Sterling. At the time of his death at thirty-eight in 1967, he physically resembled a man of ninety years old, having abruptly aged into unrecognizable infirmity—due, depending on whom you ask, to a unique combination of Alzheimer’s and Pick’s Disease, or an addiction to Bromo-Seltzer, a shady over-the-counter antacid and hangover cure that was withdrawn from the market in 1975 due to toxicity. Beaumont was credited with twenty-two episodes of The Twilight Zone , including “Living Doll,” “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” and “The Howling Man,” the last adapted from one of his many short stories (collected by Penguin Classics in 2015, with an afterword by William Shatner). While Serling’s Twilight Zone scripts tended to concentrate on supernatural reversals of social norms or the just deserts of assorted pretenders, reactionaries, and bigots, Beaumont’s topics trafficked in existential despair, returning to themes of futility and isolation. A man on death row is caught in a cyclical dream where the stay of execution always arrives too late (“Shadow Play”); a lonely man can only function inside the fantasies taking place inside a dollhouse (“Miniature”); a dead man quickly tires of Heaven (“A Nice Place to Visit”); and in “Printer’s Devil,” a beleaguered small-town publisher, despairing of the death of print in 1963, more-or-less-knowingly hires the Devil as his new linotype operator (Burgess Meredith again). Charles Beaumont’s cultural contribution might, in other words, be termed the most salient and pitch-black representations of irony-in-action to have graced the small screen when The Twilight Zone began airing on CBS in 1959. More than any writer up to that point, Beaumont discovered an intersection between pulp fare and Sophocles, making sociopolitical morality plays out of dime-rack science fiction, a contribution—shared with Serling—without which contemporary pop culture, with its strong tendency to couch social commentary in a metaphysical vernacular borrowed from comics and monster movies, would be impossible to imagine.

The most fun to be had with The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia , aside from the archival joys of reading Rubin’s detailed biographies of cast members like George Takei, Charles Bronson, Peter Falk, Robby the Robot, Anne Francis, Billy Mumy (who played the aforementioned god-child Anthony Fremont in “It’s A Good Life” and went on to record the novelty song “Fish Heads” as an adult), and Burt Reynolds (doing a dead-on Marlon Brando in “The Bard,” in which William Shakespeare struggles as a television ghostwriter), is found in the entries for broadly generic themes like “Children,” “Aliens,” “Nostalgia,” “Eccentrics,” and “Monsters.” Each of these meditates on a given subject’s representation in the show, imparting a nutshell census of about a page and a half that both speaks to the varied depiction of, say, “Obsession” or “Disappearances,” and makes for perfect marathon binging-by-topic (a night devoted to “Spaceships,” for example, would have to include “The Invaders,” “Third From the Sun,” and “On Thursday We Leave For Home”). More telling is the entry for “Justice,” which reads:

Though networks of the period avoided tackling uncomfortable topics like the Holocaust in traditional television dramas, Serling often exploited his show’s fantasy milieu and allegorical approach to storytelling to evade the kind of censorship that constrained more realistic programs. CBS network programming head James Aubrey might complain that sponsors avoid such material like the plague—after all, how do you explore the Holocaust and then sell toilet paper or underarm deodorant?—but Serling always stuck to his guns.

Burgess Meredith in “The Obsolete Man,” 1961; click to enlarge

The Twilight Zone was developed from a pilot by Serling, “The Time Element,” originally broadcast as an episode of  Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in 1958, and concerning a psychiatric patient who relives the attack on Pearl Harbor, unaware that he in fact perished in the bombings. Besides the other wartime fables like “A Quality of Mercy,” “King Nine Will Not Return” and “Deaths-Head Revisited,” in which an ex-Nazi is driven insane by the ghosts of Dachau, Serling demonstrated his intolerance for discrimination and right-wing ideologies in the all-black cast of “The Big Tall Wish,” the lynching story “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” written in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination, and “He’s Alive,” starring Dennis Hopper as an American Nazi, who, “like some goose-stepping predecessors… searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting.” The Encyclopedia’s entries on virtually all of these explicitly progressive episodes give an account of the political interference Serling faced from the network. In “handsome, arrogant, egotistical” station executive James Aubrey, he found his most tenacious adversary, who consistently shortchanged The Twilight Zone , which was never a sure thing in the ratings, for the likes of Gilligan’s Island and The Beverly Hillbillies . Serling also weathered significant public outcry: an editorial partially reprinted in the Encyclopedia accused the show of Communist sympathies and criticized “He’s Alive” by observing that “the speech of the young Nazi, in the purely political aspects, sounded a great deal more like Barry Goldwater, a man of Jewish lineage, than it did like Hitler.” Serling, who was born Jewish and converted to Unitarianism, responded with characteristically biting candor that:

[the far right seems] to feel that racism, bigotry and hatred should be of little consequence to us in view of the fact that communists are trying to take over our government, invade our schools, and subvert our institutions… But I submit that we have other enemies no less real, no less constant, and no less damaging to the fabric of a democracy. It’s when we hear denials that these people exist, and that their poison is being disseminated, and that any comment to the effect is irrelevant—I wonder if The Twilight Zone isn’t something more than a television idea.

Television idea or not, The Twilight Zone was an American idea, and one whose commitment to the ideals of equanimity, brotherhood, and social activism gave rise to satire at its most pointed and Juvenalian, disguised as a supernatural anthology series. Educated at the Ohio liberal arts college Antioch, Serling recalled in his last interview, before dying during heart surgery in 1975 the age of fifty, that he was motivated by his disgust at postwar bias and prejudice, which he railed against so virulently that he confessed “to creating daydreams about how I could… bump off some of these pricks.” But writing ultimately covers more ground, and Serling confined his daydreams to television and film (he famously co-wrote  Planet of the Apes , another buffet of Cold War anxieties served up as an alternate-reality blockbuster).

It’s not quite the case that The Twilight Zone has been consistently influential since its early 1960s heyday. Instead, the anthology of “weird tales” format comes into vogue every fifteen years or so, with The Twilight Zone providing the obvious benchmark. Serling contributed to and hosted one of the first of these, Night Gallery , but rightly recognized that the new breed of shows abandoned the real spirit of The Twilight Zone in favor of cheap scares and special effects. Of its contemporary heirs, Black Mirror most resembles The Twilight Zone ’s perception of technology as a tool for flattening the individual beneath the corrupting gullibility of the masses. But, with the exception of the very best episodes—such as the immediately canonized “San Junipero” and fourth season premiere “USS Callister,” both of which introduce simulated realities where disenfranchised members of society can dwell indefinitely—these current episodes are merely chilling visions of what already is, in which technology is the villain, not people. Serling, Beaumont, and the rest of the show’s contributors identified the enemies within: orthodoxy, demagoguery, and, above all, compromised conscience. It was for this reason that every opening monologue reminds us that The Twilight Zone is beyond the door of imagination, but not beyond us, lying “between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge,” which is precisely the niche where politics ends and art begins.

Steven Jay Rubin’s The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia is published by the Chicago Review Press .

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The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise Paperback – August 30, 2024

More than sixty years after the The Twilight Zone debuted on television, the show remains a cultural phenomenon, including a feature film, three television reboots, a comic book series, a magazine and a theatrical production. This collection of new essays offers a roadmap through a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Scholars, writers, artists and contributors to the 1980s series investigate the many incarnations of Rod Serling's influential vision through close readings of episodes, explorations of major themes and first-person accounts of working on the show.

• Print length 279 pages
• Language English
• Publisher McFarland
• Publication date August 30, 2024
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 6 x 0.56 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1476681015
• ISBN-13 978-1476681016
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McFarland (August 30, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 279 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476681015
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1476681016
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.56 x 9 inches
• #463 in Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Television (Books)
• #693 in TV Guides & Reviews
• #23,240 in Performing Arts (Books)

About the authors

Nicholas diak.

Hello! My name is Nicholas Diak. I’m a Washington native who lives in Phoenix AZ. I’m a scholar of Italian genre film studies, neo-peplum and sword and sandal films, post industrial and synthwave music, H. P. Lovecraft and other facets of pop culture. I am one of the co-hosts of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast.

My hobbies include lots of movie watching, video games – both new and old, comic books, cooking, cocktail making, pinup photography and artwork, tiki culture, video gaming (both modern and retro) and cats.

Website: http://www.nickdiak.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vnvdiak

Ron Riekki’s books include U.P.: a novel (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic: A Memoir (Small Press Distribution), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), and Blood Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press), The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise (McFarland), and The Many Lives of the Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise; and edited And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, awarded a Michigan Notable Book from the Library of Michigan).

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Exploring The Twilight Zone #86: Kick The Can

Published October 17, 2011 Features , TV By Scott Beggs Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly , we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us?

The Twilight Zone (Episode #86): “Kick The Can” (airdate 2/9/61)

The Plot : An old man living in a rest home thinks playing a kid game will keep him young.

The Goods : While there are a ton of meaningful, challenging episodes of The Twilight Zone , this one is definitely not one of them. It’s a chore of an episode that’s silly beyond reason and more than a little preachy. The ultimate lesson is a nice enough one – that youth should be striven for by finding the magic in the world.

This story was made before Viagra was invented, but the lesson is still a good one.

Unfortunately, that’s about the only good thing about the episode. It’s light weight stuff that’s 22 minutes of padding. Charles ( Ernest Truex ) is withering away in a retirement home, facing the end of his days surrounded by the tired and wrinkly. He looks on with longing as a few neighborhood kids play tag with an empty tin can (an element that makes me want to watch this entry with someone in the iPod generation), and he gets it in his head that playing games is the key to staying young.

That’s about it.

The rest is an exercise in repetition where the writing reminds us 7 or 28 times that everyone gets old and that wanting to have fun means you’re going senile. Everything is so exaggerated that none of it really matters. Charles wants to get his friend to believe along with him, but since the man is made of nothing but mustard and time, the message doesn’t get through.

The saving grace is the ending which reveals that the story isn’t about Charles at all – but about that friend. It’s a sadder story about not believing in magic, but it takes the far-too long road to get there.

What do you think?

The Trivia : Were you aware that children used to play outside? It’s true!

On the Next Episode : Inexplicably, this was one of the episodes remade in Twilight Zone: The Movie .

Catch-Up: Episodes covered by Twitch / Episodes covered by FSR

We’re running through all 156 of the original Twilight Zone episodes over the next several weeks, and we won’t be doing it alone! Our friends at Twitch will be entering the Zone as well on alternating weeks. So definitely tune in over at Twitch and feel free to also follow along on our Twitter accounts @twitchfilm and @rejectnation.

Tagged with: Exploring The Twilight Zone Fantasy The Twilight Zone

Scott Beggs

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

46 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Creative Assignment: Imagine you are remaking “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” for the modern day. What changes would you make to modernize the screenplay’s story and theming? Would you make your script an allegory for a current issue? Why or why not? If yes, what issue would you address?

Is “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” an allegory for McCarthyism? Argue for or against this reading. 

Compare and contrast “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” with one of the following Twilight Zone episodes: “The Shelter,” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “Nick of Time,” “The Invaders,” “It’s a Good Life,” or “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” Make sure to consider genre and setting as well as thematic, stylistic, narrative , moral, and tonal parallels/differences in your analysis.

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Guest Essay

There’s a New Reason to Save Life in the Deep Ocean

By Porter Fox

Mr. Fox is an author who grew up on an island off the coast of Maine. He spent the last three years reporting on climate change and its effect on the oceans and extreme weather.

To most of us, the ocean is a no man’s land — a vast, bottomless and uncharted void. Three-quarters of the ocean has never been seen by humans, and only a quarter of its floor has been mapped in detail, which means we have a better understanding of the surface of Mars than we do of the seas on our own planet. It is this lack of exploration and appreciation — particularly of the layer of cold, dark water that begins where light fades, known as the ocean’s twilight zone — that has led us to a very precarious place.

Recently, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution wrapped up the most comprehensive study of the twilight zone in history, helping to establish that some 11 billion tons of microorganisms, crustaceans, squid, fish and gelatinous animals that live there are helping to draw down a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity, likely saving us and our planet from catastrophic climate change.

Just as we are learning to appreciate the extraordinary service of creatures in the twilight zone, companies that manufacture feed for industrial fish farms, fertilizer and omega-3 supplements are preparing to exploit it. Right now nations are considering authorizing commercial fishing fleets to grind life in the twilight zone into fish meal, fertilizer and plant food. Before they move forward with these plans, it would be wise to hit pause so we can understand how that decision will affect our planet.

Mass migration of life in the twilight zone — which can be found in the deepest parts of the ocean, between 650 feet deep and 3,300 feet deep — was first discovered in World War II, when sonar operators on the U.S.S. Jasper recorded an acoustic signature of what looked like the seafloor rising up. After studying the signature further, they realized the layer was alive, and that it rose and fell with the cadence of Earth’s rotation. What they were witnessing was the largest migration of animal life on the planet: trillions of creatures (copepods, bioluminescent lanternfish and basking sharks) swimming to the surface at night to feed, then sinking at dawn to hide in the depths.

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