In Praise of the Individual
Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete.
—ROD SERLING, “THE OBSOLETE MAN,” THE TWILIGHT ZONE
In 1970, Rod Serling began work on an adaptation of Irving Wallace’s novel, The Man. It was the story of an African American senator who, through an incredible sequence of events, finds himself sworn in as president of the United States. The film was released in 1972 to overwhelmingly negative reviews. Serling later said that the experience taught him that “I don’t write particularly well about people who are bigger than life. I must write about people who go to the bathroom. And when you’re dealing with a king or a president, they don’t go to the bathroom.”1
Serling often made this point less crudely by noting that he had “a preoccupation with the underdog.” He dedicated his novelization of Requiem for a Heavyweight to “the has-beens, the never-weres, the also-rans.” These are the people Serling wrote about most often and most effectively. His work displays an unerring concern for the marginalized, the forgotten, the neglected: sidewalk peddlers, town drunks, struggling musicians, small-time crooks, poor shopkeepers, and all of his obsolete men. Despite Serling’s interest in these underdogs, he had no desire to indulge in a clichéd version of their success. If he had written a sequel to “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” there is no chance that it would have ended with Mountain McClintock being crowned Heavyweight Champion of the World. If Serling’s underdogs are recognized, remembered, cared for, they have succeeded.
Although he often told these stories sentimentally, his penchant for utilizing this character type was not driven solely by sentimentality. It also stemmed from a core belief in the value of the individual. While a president’s or a king’s individualism is sui generis, characters existing on the margins of society need to have their individual worth championed. In Serling’s work, such characters are not merely “ordinary”; they are, by prevailing standards, unsuccessful. As a result, they are liable to be ignored at best, degraded or vilified at worst. Lew Bookman, the sidewalk peddler of Twilight Zone’s “One for the Angels,” is described as “a fixture” of the neighborhood, “nondescript” and “commonplace,” seemingly as easy to overlook as a lamppost. Al Denton of “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” is bullied and degraded, treated as if “town drunk” represents the totality of his identity. In these cases, Serling’s characterizations argue against these biases. Bookman has big dreams and is beloved by children. Denton has inner dignity. The struggling musician is deeply sensitive; the small-time crooks display moral codes that they will not violate; the shopkeepers act charitably despite their poverty. Instilling and emphasizing these noble qualities in “ordinary” people is by no means unusual or unique to Rod Serling. Over his twenty-five-year career, however, Serling’s approach to characterization created a uniquely extended and consistent demand for recognition of the individual.
Some of Serling’s most passionate pleas for individual recognition appear in his military-themed plays. In Lux Video Theatre’s “The Hill,” a journalist explicitly makes Serling’s demand for individual recognition when she reports on one soldier’s sacrifice during combat:
The hero of this story must remain anonymous until next of kin have been notified. It’s always this way in a battle. The kids who die are anonymous. I wish I could give you this boy’s name. This is one of the tragedies of war. Men are units—or parts of units—and the individual soldier loses his identity. And it’s only much later that he can be singled out for praise due. That kid—one of fifty I saw die this morning—should get that praise due.
In the context of war, Serling repeatedly, dramatically, and rhetorically made the cautionary point that individual sacrifice must not be obscured by arithmetic.
He once chastised the media coverage of the Vietnam War, saying, “You can’t hide with euphemisms body counts. You can’t say that there are 50,000 American kids dead and plant flags and say that this should come with symphonic music. That’s not arithmetic—those are first and last names.” On another occasion, shortly after the 1966 midterm elections, he spread the blame for the prevalence of this mind-set: “This is what destroyed me in this election—the fact that Vietnam was not an issue, either pro or con. Here you’re losing a hundred men a week in what appears to be a gigantic disposal, and it now relates itself to arithmetic. We don’t think of loss of life, we think of it arithmetically.”2
In Studio One’s “The Strike,” a platoon commander must decide whether to sacrifice the lives of twenty men to save five hundred others. He rejects the suggestion that he base his decision on simple mathematics. In Kraft Theatre’s “Next of Kin,” an army captain wryly notes that his roster and casualty lists have begun to resemble accounting tables on which he can “add a few here, subtract a few there.” And in “The Trial in Paradise,” an episode of The Loner, a former Union soldier makes the same observation when discussing casualties at the Battle of Antietam. In all of these cases, Serling warns that abstraction tragically minimizes the individual human cost of war.
To view the individual soldier as an individual also lies at the heart of every Serling story concerning the definitions of bravery and cowardice. For Serling, these are not black-and-white terms but rather must be defined on the basis of each individual.
In one of his earliest forays into this area, “Ward 8,” set during the Korean War, an army sergeant’s inexplicable scream alerts the enemy to his platoon’s location, leading to a slaughter. While four of the platoon’s survivors recover in a hospital, they remain enraged by the sergeant’s action. They cannot understand why he screamed at that particular moment and attribute his actions to simple cowardice. An army doctor explains that just because they cannot fathom a reason, it does not mean that he is a coward. Their sergeant had more combat experience than any of them, and his scream was likely an involuntary release of this bottled-up trauma. In a later study of the same topic, “Twenty-Four Men to a Plane,” Serling finishes this argument, stating that to hold a soldier responsible for his actions at such a moment would be like condemning a man for “yelling when he has a finger cut off.” Serling is not only addressing the traumatic nature of combat but also cautioning that “bravery” and “cowardice” must not be determined solely on the basis of the action—these definitions must account for the nature of the actor, the individual.
In his best treatment of this subject, United States Steel Hour’s “The Rack,” Serling explicitly addresses this idea by presenting two soldiers who suffered identical mistreatment while being held in a Korean POW camp. One soldier cracked under torture and collaborated with the enemy, while the other did not. Even here, Serling argues, when the circumstances are identical, individuals cannot be expected to respond identically. It would not be justice to declare one man a coward simply because he has been hardwired with a breaking point different from another man’s. The individual’s nature must be considered along with the nature of the action.
Serling’s arguments for the strength of the individual extend far beyond the battlefield. In “Mr. Finchley vs. the Bomb” (written in 1951), the title character is an old man who lives in a shack in an otherwise uninhabited desert that the US military wants to use as a nuclear testing ground. Finchley refuses to abandon his home. Taking on the entire US Army, Finchley is described as “one old man who happens to dissent” and “an autonomy of one.” Despite its military setting, “Mr. Finchley” is a comedy that makes a simple case for the sanctity of individual rights and the importance of holding to personal principles, and argues that an individual can prevail on the strength of principle despite being outnumbered. “Some place in his lifetime a man has to draw a line,” Finchley says, explaining his stance. “Now, this is my home. It ain’t much of a home and the desert’s been screaming to claim it for a long, long time now. But it’s my home. I drew my line right here on the front porch.”
During a 1972 commencement speech at Ithaca College, Serling offered a somewhat more articulate version of Finchley’s position:
Cherish what you believe. Don’t job off a single value judgment because it swims upstream against what appears to be a majority. Respect your own logic, your own sense of morality…. Certainly listen to arguments; certainly ponder and respect the opinions of your peers. But there’s a point you compromise, and there’s a point all human beings draw a line and say, “Beyond this point it’s not right or just or honest, and beyond this point I don’t move.” … [G]ood men, courageous men, committed and caring men throughout the ages have stopped at that line and said to the critics of their time: “No, ladies and gentlemen. You are more than I, you are louder than I, you are stronger than I, but I am more right than you, or so I believe.”3
Not only is Finchley outnumbered, but like the anonymous soldier eulogized in “The Hill,” Finchley is vulnerable because he belongs to a neglected group—in this case, the elderly.
Rod Serling was twenty-one years old when he returned from having served in World War II. He died at age fifty. In the intervening years, he regularly referred to himself as an “old man” or even “ancient.” In “The Hill,” eighteen-year-old soldiers are described as “looking like old men.” The war prematurely aged Serling and likely every other man who served. Serling’s preoccupation with the aged began almost immediately upon his return. Finchley, Mordecai Muldoon of “The Muldoon Matter,” and Maxwell “Lefty” MacDonald of “Old MacDonald Had a Curve” are early examples of Serling’s frequently dramatized concern for the elderly.
In “Old MacDonald,” Lefty MacDonald is a former Major League pitcher who resides at Carterville Home for the Aged. He could qualify as one of Serling’s “obsolete men” by virtue of being a former athlete, but unlike Lefty O’Bannion of “Welcome Home, Lefty,” MacDonald is sixty-seven years old and harbors no illusions about still being able to pitch in the Major Leagues. His problem is the problem of the aged:
I look in my scrapbook and I see Lefty MacDonald, pitcher. Then I look in the mirror and I see an old man. I don’t wanna be one of the old men living in the past. I wanna be somebody today! I don’t wanna sit in a rocking chair dyin’ a little every day. Just one more time, I’d like to get cheered.
Though he pines for his glory days, he explicitly yearns to be recognized as somebody in the present. His desire to be cheered is a cry for recognition. He knows that he could “sit in a rocking chair dyin’ a little every day” without anyone taking notice. To Serling, such a fate would be a crime. He articulated this feeling in two early plays, “A Great Man Is Dying” (Modern Romances, January 31, 1955) and “Champion” (Climax!, March 13, 1955). In “A Great Man is Dying,” the man of the title is the not-so-great William Bock, a former politician who has made so many enemies and so few friends that not one person is at his bedside during the last few hours of his life. A reporter preparing Bock’s obituary stands in for Serling, offended by the idea that any man could die truly alone: “Who could believe that a man could die and not a single tear be shed?” In “Champion,” the title character is a boxer who has mistreated seemingly everyone he has ever met. When he dies from injuries sustained in the ring, he is not alone—he is surrounded by people whom he had abused. Seeing no emotional response from any of them, his brother asks, “Won’t somebody cry for him?” None of them can.
This observation surfaced again ten years later in “The Oath,” an episode of The Loner in which a young outlaw falls ill and dies soon after having taken hostage a woman, Maria, and her father. Despite his actions, Maria cries over his death. A doctor who had tended to the man tells her, “Do not weep over him. He isn’t worth it.” She responds, “Every man is worth it! To think otherwise would be to offend God.”
Serling often referenced John Donne’s poetic observation that “Every man’s death diminishes me.” For Serling, this principle was based not in unrealistic sentimentality but rather on the reasonable fear that to fail to view individuals as individuals, to fail to feel a loss at every person’s death, is to court the mentality of the Nazi commander in Playhouse 90’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” who claims that Holocaust victims will one day be remembered as “nothing more than mathematics.”