Serling’s Obsolete Men
The resolution of “Welcome Home, Lefty” hinges on a baseball game in which a young, up-and-coming player hits a grand slam off a former star Major League pitcher. There may be no more contrived way to end a baseball story. “Welcome Home, Lefty” has one factor, however, that mitigates this contrivance: “Lefty” is not about a future star hitting a grand slam; it’s about a former star giving one up. While some may have been more attracted to the story of a rising star, the twenty-seven-year-old Rod Serling was already more interested in the character who appears to be on his way down. Lefty O’Bannion is one of several washed-up athletes who populate Serling’s stable of characters. This list includes Danny Fales, a boxer in Serling’s first published story, “The Good Right Hand,” and Fales’s direct literary descendant, Harlan “Mountain” McClintock of Playhouse 90’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” Each is an example of what could collectively be called Serling’s obsolete men.
Each of Serling’s obsolete men has reached a critical point when he questions his purpose, his function in society, and the value of his life. As evidenced by “The Good Right Hand,” Serling gravitated toward this character type from the beginning of his creative career, which began immediately following the end of his military career. “I came back with eleven million other guys who had very similar problems,” he later reflected. “And so it was not unique, nor was it not to be expected that of this class of ’46, that we were going to have very special problems we were going to write about.”1 Having served in a regiment that suffered heavy casualties and having lost his father during this period, Serling returned from war asking all of the big questions. While many of Serling’s “very special problems” would manifest in the expected settings of war and its aftermath, he most often addressed questions about the meaning of life in relatively ordinary settings through his obsolete men. This group includes not only aging athletes but several residents of the Twilight Zone, including Gart Williams (“A Stop at Willoughby”), Martin Sloan (“Walking Distance”), and Professor Ellis Fowler (“Changing of the Guard”). In each instance, the character in question finds purpose, validates his function, and confirms that his life has value—or dies. There is rarely a third option.
In “The Good Right Hand,” Danny Fales is a boxer who has traumatically injured his right hand and, as a result, he can no longer box. Though his manager tries to arrange other employment for him, he resists, insisting that a fighter is all that he was meant to be. He ultimately kills himself. “Requiem’s” Mountain McClintock faces the same existential crisis when an eye injury renders him ineligible to fight. Through the kindness of others, he finds a sense of purpose, realizes that he can still contribute to society, and renews his sense of self-worth.
This feeling of obsolescence visits Serling’s characters for a variety of reasons. For some, like Ernie Wigman of Chrysler Theatre’s “It’s Mental Work,” the feeling is the unavoidable traveling companion of advanced age. For the athletes, it is the by-product of their relatively advanced age in light of their chosen professions. Lying in a hospital bed after suffering a heart attack, Wigman asks the question common to all of them: “Why must a guy stay alive past his time?” He dies shortly thereafter.
Age is a factor in Martin Sloan’s and Gart Williams’s ennui as well, but more critical is each man’s sense that he was simply not built for the environment in which he finds himself. These two men have not become obsolete so much as they are obsolete in relation to their environments. Williams articulates this dilemma to his wife when he argues that, “some people aren’t built for competition.” He finds respite from his unrelentingly stressful existence by taking brief, surreal visits to Willoughby, a turn-of-the-century town where a man can “slow down to a walk and live life full measure.” To remain in Willoughby, however, requires suicide. Sloan similarly finds himself living “at a dead run” that he seems unequipped to handle. He escapes by traveling back in time to his childhood hometown, Homewood, a place of endless summer, band concerts, ice cream, and cotton candy. Unlike Williams, Sloan cannot stay in Homewood. Instead, his trip provides him with new perspective, and he returns to his proper time knowing that the valuable things that seemed lost and the sense of purpose that he needs are obtainable—he had merely forgotten how to look for them.
While Gart Williams’s suicide is presented within the trappings of fantasy, Professor Ellis Fowler explicitly considers suicide as a response to his feelings of obsolescence. Declared too old to continue working as a college professor, Fowler takes inventory of his life and doubts that he has accomplished anything of value. However, a ghostly visit from former students who relate valuable lessons he had taught them reassures Fowler that his life has meaning, and suicide is averted.
Serling has great sympathy for characters near the end of their lives, who look backward and weigh how much they have accomplished and look forward and wonder how much they have left to contribute. He also shows great compassion for characters who find themselves at the end of what might be called the first acts of their lives and who must find a way to instill the second acts with meaning. And Serling’s sympathy extends to characters like Sloan and Williams, who, through little fault of their own, find themselves in a “desperate search for survival” in environments that are inhospitable to their basic nature. All of these character types have little or no control over the position in which they find themselves.
There is, however, a breed of obsolete man for whom Serling displays somewhat less sympathy. This is the man who has been rendered obsolete by virtue of his refusal or inability to progress intellectually, socially, or artistically. These are men who have stubbornly anchored themselves to tradition and allowed time to pass them by. In one of his final scripts, “The Sad and Lonely Sundays,” Dr. George Sorenson is an elderly physician who has practiced medicine in a dying coal town, Fulton, New Mexico, for more than forty years. While he has been treating skinned knees and sore throats, the world of modern medicine has left him behind. Blinded by nostalgia and paralyzed by misplaced loyalties, he has stayed in this stagnant town as shops have closed and houses have been foreclosed, unable to see just how hopeless Fulton has become. When he finally decides to stop reading about modern medicine and start practicing it, it is too late. He returns to medical school to continue his education but fails his primary course and drops out. While driving back to Fulton, he has an opportunity to save the life of a man who has been involved in a car accident. Though he makes a heroic effort, he fails. As a physician, Sorenson had an obligation to himself and to the world to progress intellectually. Having neglected this obligation for forty years, he now must pay the price. The story ends with him continuing his return to the dying coal town. Though we do not see what happens after he arrives, chances are good that Dr. Sorenson did not live long afterward.
Places change. Some people can adjust. I couldn’t.
—HANK SLOCUM, “BUFFALO BILL IS DEAD”
Studio One’s “Buffalo Bill Is Dead” is set in 1918 and involves an aging cowboy who laments the passing of the Old West. He does not pine for any particular place in the way that Martin Sloan pines for Homewood, however; instead, Slocum laments what he views as a change in social values that accompanied the “death” of the West. In 1907, Slocum was sheriff of Bowie, a town in the untamed Oklahoma Territory. Slocum brought order to Bowie by the unilateral authority of his gun and badge. After Oklahoma petitioned for statehood, however, Slocum found that his methods were declared out of date. A federal marshal visited Bowie to introduce its sheriff to modern concepts such as due process and reasonable cause. To be granted statehood, Oklahoma would have to adopt the relatively enlightened legal practices of the twentieth century. Instead of adjusting to changing attitudes, Slocum mocked this so-called progress. He abandoned Oklahoma and ended up playing the part of a cowboy in a mock-authentic Wild West show, a fate reminiscent of Mountain Rivera wearing the ridiculous costume of a professional wrestler in the feature film version of “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”
“Buffalo Bill Is Dead” ends with Hank Slocum standing outside this Wild West show, mourning the fact that the West as he knew it is as dead as his old friend Buffalo Bill Cody. Two young children approach Slocum and are awed to learn that he knew the real Buffalo Bill. To these children, the West remains very much alive. The story ends with Slocum pridefully telling the two kids stories of his adventures. This is intended to serve as a happy ending. In truth, Slocum has just completed his downward spiral into becoming the equivalent of one of the boxers who populate the “graveyard bar” in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” endlessly rehashing stories of their glory days in the ring. If the escape from obsolescence is renewed purpose or death, this occasional third option, shared by Slocum and Mountain of “Requiem’s” feature film version, is the equivalent of a living death.
Mike Kirsch of Chrysler Theatre’s “A Slow Fade to Black” similarly clings to values that seem to have become outdated and thus has become a dinosaur in his field. Kirsch is a legendary movie mogul, but his status has taken a fall after he has financed several box office bombs. His studio’s stockholders are convinced that Kirsch’s run of failures has resulted from his lack of understanding of the tastes and attitudes of modern American audiences. The latest script that Kirsch has pitched confirms this suspicion. Adamant that this script will yield a box office success, Kirsch describes it as “a picture that has Mother in it, has the American flag and ice cream cones—not the agony you see today. You go to see a Western today, what do you see? Can you tell the good guys from the bad guys? No! You got a bunch of mental patients wandering around talking about Freud all the time!”
Although Kirsch is elderly, he has been rendered obsolete not by his age but by his failure to keep pace with a world in which films are becoming increasingly cynical and more morally complex. Unlike Martin Sloan or Gart Williams, Kirsch yearns less for a simpler time than for a time when films presented a simpler time. When faced with the subversive tone of Dr. Strangelove, Mike Kirsch yearns for the days of silent Westerns in which all the villains wear black hats. He is ultimately usurped by his much younger assistant and left to cry alone in a darkened theater as he watches silent movies that only he can appreciate.
While Serling had a well-documented weakness for nostalgia, and he often admitted to watching almost no television except for old movies late at night, he did not share Mike Kirsch’s nostalgic view of cinema. Serling was always acutely aware of the current state of filmmaking and harbored no illusions about the merits of those old movies. He told a college audience in 1973,
I think that in perhaps the last five to ten years, that I have seen more exceptionally good films than in the previous twenty-five years of picture-going.… Motion pictures are far more artistic than they ever were before. I think they’re more honest, they’re better performed, they’re infinitely more courageous, they’re more innovative, they’re more cinematic and more satisfying as experiences than the previous quarter-century of motion picture making.2
Mike Kirsch is at least tangentially an artist. In “A Slow Fade to Black,” Serling argues that artists must progress along with the world in which they live so that they may continue to make relevant comment on that world. While Serling paints a sympathetic portrait of Kirsch as a human being, his obsolescence is a result of his having neglected his responsibility as an artist, and he consequently garners less consideration.
One of Serling’s most well-defined obsolete men is Randy Lane of Night Gallery’s “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar.” A widower and World War II veteran who has worked for the same company for twenty-five years, Lane has reached the crisis point common to all of Serling’s obsolete men. Like Gart Williams and Martin Sloan, Lane turns to the past for emotional support. His employer and his co-workers eventually validate his worth and acknowledge his contributions, enabling him to survive in the present. According to Serling, “If the show had any philosophical point, it’s that it’s great to weep for the past and feel bittersweet and poignant in remembering, but you can’t visit graveyards every day of your life and take lunches there.”3
Several of Serling’s characters do just that. They then, literally or figuratively, never leave the graveyard.