Watching The Twilight Zone
A few weeks ago, the lymph nodes along my neck suddenly swelled up. I had a doctor check it out and he determined I had strep throat, and then a week later, added mononucleosis to the diagnosis. Sort of a one-two punch of undergraduate illness. I didn’t feel that sick, and suffered little symptoms other than the inflamed globules along my jugular, but it became clear to me, getting drunk off three beers and exhausted at 5pm, that I should probably take it easy. My regular leisure, after school, work, and whatever other responsibilities I’ve lined up for myself on a given day, is to kick back with a few-to-several beers and do things on the internet. The doctor recommended I avoid this, so there was only one viable solution to passing time at the same rate and pleasure level: watch TV. I am one of those lucky enough to have acquired a password to my friend’s Netflix Instant Watch account, and, after watching The Larry Sanders Show, Archer, The Stand miniseries, My So-Called Life, and The League in their entireties, I noticed that The Twilight Zone original series had been recently added to the queue. Though perhaps the most referenced and acclaimed cult series in history, I must admit, I’d never seen one episode. I resolved, then, it would be my next big tackle in my imperial takeover of internet television.
It did not take me long to discover that The Twilight Zone is well loved for a reason. Engaging, dark, frequently hilarious, and truly American, it kept me deeply invested in each strictly 25-minute sequence through the first season, 36 episodes, which I watched within a week. What was it, though, that was so different about this show from others? I pondered the question. The situations were dated, the acting flawed, the storylines repetitive. But there was something deeply poignant in the form. How every episode turns on a perfect pivot, almost never expected, and bearing considerable cultural and emotional weight. I started viewing the series as acutely literary in essence.
The Twilight Zone is of a dead genre. I challenge you to find a modern show that relies on an entirely fresh cast and plot every week, which covers a vast amount of social commentary and dives headfirst into the nature of human consciousness. The series was one of the most powerful and innovative aesthetic challenges that I can think of in recent history. It addresses perception, cognition, psychosis, alienation, judgment, revenge, the limits of time and space, the fears, mystery, and glory of war, all within the emerging American middle-class. It presents fantastic elements of possibility in a time when the reaches of science, politics, and technology were unparalleled. The Cold War was imminent, the rebel of youth was beginning to show its face, and the suburb had claimed a life force.
The resulting effects of the show are undeniable. Though a piece of a larger puzzle constructed by the emerging suburban middle class, its absolute bizarreness and originality separate the series, heaving it up on the shoulders of influence. Marketing, film, and modern humor can all trace roots back to the program. More interesting, perhaps, is its discernible effect on literature. Think Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” which was published in 1969, ten years after the premier of The Twilight Zone. This critical, disturbing, amorphous glimpse into the American climate is reminiscent of the stomach-turning and perplexing imagery and suggestion of the science fiction masterpiece. John Cheever’s “The Jewels of the Cabbots” launched a new approach to temporality, priority, and alienation in personal history and relations. And one cannot possibly overlook the Zone’s effect on DeLillo’s acclaimed White Noise. The middle class anxieties, estranged family, and immense fear of death, all playing out below the hovering cloud of chemical disaster, draws directly from Rod Serling’s comical fear-tactics.
Each week, Serling worked to capture the imagination and empathy of his viewers through a world so much like our own. The science fiction twists were like throwing acid on suburban realism (Kmart realism even). A man goes to his high power office career to discover his entire existence is devised as a character in a movie. An alien spacecraft lands outside a town and it takes nothing but a simple disruption of technology to set a neighborhood up in violent arms against one another. A man, fed up with the expectations of his work and home life, jumps off the train to a supposedly nonexistent nineteenth century town of tranquility. We readers, and writers, owe a lot to The Twilight’s Zone’s insistence on strangeness, and its strictness and attention to form. Like the short story, the un-serial weekly program requires excruciating time, risk, and balls, although unfortunately we see few of these as 1959 was a time of twin-room media impotence.
Think about the authority and history of these efforts the next time you want to bust your ass on 3500 words for three months. I know I will. Or don’t, that’s okay. Maybe just watch the show. We could all use the company.
Tags: Don DeLillo, John Updike, robert coover, short fiction, twilight zone
this is excellent
Great Post. Have only seen a handful of these, but will now make watching them all my project for the summer. Thank God for Netflix.
everybody please welcome David Fishkind, our newest contributor in the house
netflixed
Hell yeah, David Fishkind. Great article dude.
welcome david
welcome david
u should watch the outer limits, too. dunno if it was pre-TZ or post-TZ, but it’s campier and creepier than TZ.
I count The Twilight Zone among my most profound literary influences, for better or worse. It’s great to see this validated by another. I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t take this opportunity to get nerdy on the one thing that I truly can: Serling.
This is awesome. I think about Twilight Zone episodes all the time, especially when writing. A huge influence for my writing, no doubt. My husband and I just bought the season sets on DVD a few years ago and watched them all the way you did, and it was a pretty amazing experience, and yes, there is nothing at all like it today. Welcome, David, and nice debut!
This is awesome. I think about Twilight Zone episodes all the time, especially when writing. A huge influence for my writing, no doubt. My husband and I just bought the season sets on DVD a few years ago and watched them all the way you did, and it was a pretty amazing experience, and yes, there is nothing at all like it today. Welcome, David, and nice debut!
This is awesome. I think about Twilight Zone episodes all the time, especially when writing. A huge influence for my writing, no doubt. My husband and I just bought the season sets on DVD a few years ago and watched them all the way you did, and it was a pretty amazing experience, and yes, there is nothing at all like it today. Welcome, David, and nice debut!
ah, thank you jarrett. i have a problem with making mistakes like that. fixed.
glad you also like twilight zone + literature
Twilight Zone is, as David says, a cool show and a persistent splinter in the American head, but I agree: The Outer Limits was regularly more disturbing than Twilight Zone seemed even to try to be. It was mid-’60s, two or three seasons (>50 episodes), (to me) very cheap looking sets, devious and unpleasantly creepy. – a great show, of a type (as David says) that (why???) you can’t find newly minted any more. (Not sure about “campy”.)
ha this is great, i’ve just been watching a bunch of these on netflix as well, revisiting some favorite episodes. i showed my kid ‘nightmare at 20,000 feet’ and that monkey-troll-gremlin really disturbed her, ha ha.
“The resulting effects of the show are undeniable”
You’ve reversed the horse and its carriage (or the apple and its tree). The Twilight Zone (and, more specifically, the writing of Rod Serling) comes right out of a post War school of lurid, pulp-magazine-style fiction that, itself, is a direct descendant of de Maupassant, O Henry and even H G Wells.
May I submit, for your delectation/ perusal/ consideration (how would Rod put it…?): http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/9399/
And:
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2008/
And:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0018
One reason why the show is compelling is because Serling hired some of the best short fiction writers in the fantasy genre—Charles Beaumont, especially, but also Richard Matheson and others—to write scripts. Serling’s own scripts were often a little hackneyed and had to be punched up his friends who were more familiar with the field. Excellent show though; how wonderful that the OP got to see them for the first time as an adult.
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YES. What a way to come into this, David. Welcome! Thank you.
I was really bored by that show when I was a kid, but I was a kid, and it may have just been because it was in b&w or something.
Anyone remember Tales From the Darkside? It was dumb, but the intro/theme used to scare my little brother so bad he’d cry. So of course I would turn on the TV just in time and hold him down…
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excellent post, makes me want to go back and watch some TZ too – i remember one plot involving a wristwatch that a guy could use to stop time and move around the world doing whatever he wanted: stealing things, looking at people, groping housewives and then…he dropped the watch and the world was frozen forever – love that, the realization as it washes over the guy, the whole NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO that “Soylent Green IS people” moment – awesome
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