Say Something about Something
SERLING ON HAVING A POINT OF VIEW
A lot of these early scripts were rough, underdeveloped, hurried; some were still “pretty bad stuff.” But to be fair, it should be said that, if they were bad, at least they were bad in the right direction. A quality which could be seen in these scripts, even as it can be seen in Serling’s later scripts for The Twilight Zone, was that even the worst of them revealed a primary concern for people and their problems. Sometimes the situations were clichéd, the characters two-dimensional, but always there was at least some search for an emotional truth, some attempt to make a statement on the human condition.
—MARC SCOTT ZICREE, THE TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION
“The Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan’s Bluff,” a 1955 episode of Studio One, tells the story of a timid man, George Abernathy, who undergoes a drastic transformation of character after catching a home run ball at the Polo Grounds. Before making this fateful catch in the right field bleachers, he finds himself book-ended by a Brooklyn Dodgers fan to his right and a New York Giants fan to his left. They hound him to declare allegiance to one team or the other, but he meekly insists that he has no opinion on the matter. Incredulous, the Giants fan responds, “A guy ain’t human if he don’t got an opinion!” In most cases, this would seem a throwaway line of dialogue. For those attuned to Rod Serling’s sensibilities, however, this line may as well be delivered with a siren blaring behind it and flashing lights across the television screen.
Even Serling’s most nondescript work, when the story contains no element of political or social commentary, usually contains a moment when some part of his underlying philosophy peeks through. In this case, it was a simple statement of his belief that having an opinion is an essential part of being human, even when the issue involved is no more consequential than choosing a favorite baseball team.
Being outspoken and opinionated was part of Serling’s nature as early as his high school years. A 1941 issue of the Panorama, the Binghamton Central High School newspaper, described him as “always ready for a heated debate on almost any current issue.” He was verbally combative with classmates, friends, and especially his brother, Robert, with whom he frequently disagreed on matters of politics.
In one of Serling’s political dramas, “The Arena,” a politician is described as being the type of man who “fights not because he likes the issue but because he likes to fight.” Serling did not like to fight, verbally or otherwise. These debates were prompted by the issue at hand but even more by a basic desire to be engaged with his fellow man, to be involved in the world around him. And he often stressed that to be constructively engaged and involved requires not simply an opinion but an informed opinion. He once credited his alma mater, Antioch College, with nurturing this philosophy:
Antioch tries to build not just a student, not just a mind, but a person—a whole person. A citizen. A thinker. A person with a point of view, but not just any extraneous point of view that comes from the spur of a single emotion, but a person who arrives at a philosophy and a point of view based on observation, a thought process, a collection of knowledge. This is what I learned at Antioch: that if something was wrong, and I could reason it out, and be secure in my own mind that it was wrong, that I could get up on my two feet and make comment on it…. That’s something that’s carried with me over the years, and has been, I think, fairly evident in my writing—that I do call the shots as I see them, and I don’t often do them just emotionally, irrationally, because of a spur of the moment thing. I do them because in my own mind, after the application of some logic, some knowledge, I feel right to speak out a point of view.1
The pilot episode of a proposed series, The Challenge (written with Reginald Rose), dramatizes the importance that Serling ascribed to this process of “arriving” at a point of view. The story involves a school bus driver, Bill Whitman, who has refused his employer’s demand that he sign a loyalty oath (declaring allegiance to the United States) to keep his job. Whitman is a relatively uneducated man, intelligent but not introspective, and he is initially unable to articulate the basis for his refusal. Requiring him to sign such an oath simply feels wrong. By the end of the story, after the issue has been debated and he has been forced to examine his beliefs, he is able to support this feeling in words. The story ends with his realization that “a man’s got no right to feel strongly about something until he’s taken the trouble to figure out why he feels that way.”
A similarly telling and easily unnoticed piece of dialogue occurs in Twilight Zone’s “I Am the Night—Color Me Black.” In the story, a condemned man, Jagger, sits in a jail cell awaiting execution. A reporter asks if he would like to make a statement, but Jagger scoffs at the idea, seeing no point in doing so. The reporter replies, “I believe no man should leave this earth without making a comment.”
This statement encapsulates the third piece of Serling’s core philosophy: Human beings must take positions. They must be able to rationally support those positions. And they must not only be unafraid to state those positions but also proceed from the idea that they have an obligation to do so. And for an artist, these prerequisites are even more essential: “I’m not suggesting that there has to be a message in everything you write,” Serling later said, “but I believe that if a person has an opinion, a point of view, then it’s incumbent upon him as an artist to so state it, to so produce it.”2 To Serling, art must, by definition, “say something about something.”3 In 1973, he said, “Art in all of its forms should follow a precept that George Bernard Shaw once wrote of drama. He said: ‘It is a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple to the ascent of man.’ This I would hope might be the slogan of all art.”4
The great, oft-noted irony of Rod Serling’s creative life is that his chosen medium of television did not easily permit the type of commentary that he believed was a basic part of the artist’s job, particularly in the early part of his career. And so, in his early work, his commentary was subtle by necessity. “Coogan’s Bluff” includes a succinct example of this. Immediately after George Abernathy is berated for failing to state an opinion, the public address announcer introduces a Dodgers’ player, who is greeted with applause. The same player is similarly introduced and greeted in two more of Serling’s early baseball-themed plays, “Old MacDonald Had a Curve” (Kraft Theatre, 1953) and “O’Toole from Moscow” (Matinee Theater, 1955). The player is Jackie Robinson.
If Serling saw a chance to state his position in support of civil rights, even in a seemingly insignificant manner, he took it. In his early work, Serling’s commentary may not always have been particularly weighty, but it was nonetheless often there.