Patterns of Violence
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “In the dark night of the soul, it’s always three o’clock in the morning.” Well, in Ithaca, New York, on the first day of August of 1968, it’s three o’clock in the morning. And in Los Angeles, in Cleveland, in Danang, in Czechoslovakia, everywhere—it’s three o’clock in the morning. And it’s time for the dawn. It’s time for some light … and some enlightenment.
—ROD SERLING, 1968
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 1957
Lou, a meek, kind-hearted salesman, lies sprawled on a street, floored by a punch from his brother, Vinnie. Vinnie works for a small-time mobster who ordered him to “rough up the pitchman,” unaware that the two men are brothers. Lou is unsurprised that his brother followed orders. “I saw this coming,” he says. “You work for monsters, you become one.”
Lou’s response (from “The Pitch,” first performed on The Storm in 1951) is Rod Serling’s variation on Nietzsche’s cautionary observation, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”1
Can a man fight with (against or alongside) monsters without becoming a monster? Can a man be surrounded by darkness without this darkness infecting him? No less than a dozen of Serling’s scripts deal with these questions. That the answer might be in the negative was one of his greatest fears.
These questions and fears were almost certainly spawned by his military service. Reintegration into civilian life required Serling, like most combat veterans, to cope with what he had witnessed and experienced and to confront how these experiences had changed him. He obliquely addressed this fear of having been irrevocably changed in “A Long Time till Dawn,” first performed on Kraft Theatre on November 11, 1953.
“A Long Time till Dawn” starred James Dean as Joe Harris, an ex-convict who returns to his childhood home after several years away, including six months spent in prison. His father warily greets him and reluctantly welcomes him to stay. When Joe sees that his childhood bedroom is exactly the way he had left it, he is overcome by feelings of nostalgia. He flops onto his old bed and wistfully tells his father that being home brings back comforting memories. But his father disagrees: “They’re not memories. They’re remnants. They’re fragments. They’re all that’s left of Joe Harris as a little kid.” When Joe asks, “So what am I now, huh?” his father responds, “God knows what you are now.”
Like Joe Harris’s return to his hometown Flemingsburg, New Jersey, when Rod Serling returned to Binghamton after his military service, his own identity seemed uncertain. He needed to reconcile the person he had been before the war (that “little kid”) with the man who came back. He had gazed into an abyss for much of three years. How much of the abyss had gazed into him?
One of the earliest works of fiction that Serling completed after the war was his 1947 term paper, “A Transcript of the Proceedings in the Case of the Universe versus War.” In this mock trial transcript, War is personified and charged with murder. Julius Caesar serves as counsel for the defense, Euripides handles the prosecution, God is the presiding judge, and twelve angels comprise the jury. The verdict: War is convicted of “legalized murder.” The punishment: banishment from the universe. God, however, declares that it is not his place to impose this sentence—if War is to be banished from the universe, the sentence will need to be delivered by humanity.
Despite this stark antiwar statement, it is difficult to say whether Serling’s military service had transformed him into a pacifist. There is first a question of definition, of whether one can be personally pacifistic and yet support the idea that war between nations is sometimes a necessary evil. In 1971, Serling spoke to the personal side of this definition: “When I came back from the war I made a fairly severe promise: I would never, ever again, knowingly maim or hurt or indeed kill another living thing.”2
Serling not only renounced violence but was often repulsed by depictions of it. In the early 1970s, the proliferation of violence in cinema troubled him. During a speech in East Lansing, Michigan, he critically noted, “Through the good offices of films like Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, French Connection, Godfather, and Clockwork Orange, we’re getting a picturesque view of the variety of ways that man can wreak havoc on other men. Bullet, claymore mine, garrote, homicidal rape and kicking to death.” He wondered why violent films did not generate the same level of moral outrage as that generated by pornographic movies, ruefully noting that acts of violence seem to be excused as “a sort of ‘boys will be boys’ syndrome.”3 While teaching at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in 1975, he admitted to having such a “terrible hang-up” about violence that he suggested, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that “all cartoons should be banned from now until the end of time” because of their violent content.4
Whether his pacifistic tendencies extended to his views on war, however, Serling said, “I don’t disapprove of all wars in principle. In World War II, I went and I felt that, damn it, I had to go. We had no choice. It was our survival versus their wanting to usurp that right to survive.… I’m not pure pacifistic in my attitudes.” In May 1971, however, his increasing dismay over the course of the Vietnam War led him to suggest an absolutist position on the matter: “I don’t think we dare succumb to violence. I don’t know of any social progress to be born out of the rubble of a bombed building or the ashes of a burned out street or the body count of men, however impassioned and however martyred.”5
In his work and his rhetoric, Serling consistently argued that war is preventable and ultimately counterproductive, that violence is not only physically but also spiritually destructive, and that while violence obviously damages those on the receiving end, it also has reciprocal costs for its perpetrators.
According to Anne Serling, her father once angrily interrupted a debate about the pros and cons of capital punishment to point out that he believed the participants were missing a crucial point: “Some part of the executioner died with each execution.”6
To Serling, carrying out an execution is a form of violence that must have a reciprocal effect. He dramatized this concept in “Keeper of the Chair,” a 1951 episode of The Storm that involved a guard on death row who is haunted by the knowledge of having executed an innocent man. In “One of the Wounded,” a 1965 episode of The Loner, a former officer in the Union army reiterates this idea in the context of war, saying, “I sometimes think a man can die from killing as well as from being killed.” In Serling’s work, violence is the abyss. It is the lowest level to which a human being can sink before he forfeits his humanity and, to stretch the Nietzschean parallel, becomes a monster.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Rod Serling spent increasing time on the lecture circuit, speaking at colleges across the country and delivering commencement addresses at high schools and universities. In this role, his protestations against violence tended to be made in the context of the US civil rights movement. Serling was a great admirer of Martin Luther King Jr. and of his advocacy of nonviolent resistance, and parallels can be found between Serling’s language and King’s. As King wrote, “Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I’m not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails.”7 Serling echoed King’s reference to “level” in a 1965 episode of The Loner, “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove.” The story involves a former slave who intends to take vengeance on the men who lynched his father. When Serling’s hero, Bill Colton, tries to convince Stove to seek justice through the law, Stove lifts his rifle and says, “This is all the law that I need.” Colton responds, “You want equality, Mr. Stove? Well, you’ve got it. You’re in a pit, eye-level with snakes. And that’s an awfully low height for a man.”
Acts of violence distressed Serling, but he was equally concerned with the tendency to view such acts as spontaneous phenomena and stressed that to address the effects of violent acts while ignoring the cause of such acts only perpetuates a cycle of violence. In Serling’s view, “violence does not spring from a vacuum. It’s born out of other men’s violence. It gets nurtured and it grows in a soil of prejudice and of hate and of bigotry.” It is “a symptom of an illness. The germ, the social bacilli, is a deep-rooted infection. Violence is simply its fever.” Violent acts, Serling argued, must be viewed as “the physical extensions of the mental attitudes” that bear responsibility for the violence.8
He illustrated this concept most directly in Twilight Zone’s “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” in which the illnesses of hatred and prejudice find physical extension in a killing, literally shrouding a town—and soon the world—in eternal darkness. In his closing narration, Serling intones, “A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ. Highly contagious. Deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone. Look for it in the mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”
While Serling most frequently addressed racial prejudice, in “I Am the Night,” the murder victim is a “cross burner” who “handled the whipping of some poor, scared, colored guy,” the killer is a white man who sees himself as his brother’s keeper, and the priest who ultimately condemns the killer is a black man. Serling deplored all violence,
whether it comes out of the guise of retribution or poetic justice, or even the understandable impatience of the dispossessed, I think it’s still the ultimate destroyer of civilization. Whether it comes from the KKK, the American Nazi Party, the White Citizens Councils, the Jewish Defense League or the Irish Republican Army. When we so cheapen the concept of human life that we can be permissive to the occasional bomb or bullet, I think we’ve taken a giant step back into the Dark Ages. And I don’t think there’s a light at the end of that tunnel.9
“I Am the Night” was first broadcast on March 27, 1964. During its climax, a radio broadcast reports locations where this inexplicable darkness has filled the sky. The first place mentioned is Dallas, Texas. This was not a random selection. Although Serling’s script is not explicit, the darkness in the Dallas sky was born the day that President Kennedy was assassinated four months earlier. Serling had admired and supported Kennedy, and despite admitting that his recollections might be distorted by the circumstances of Kennedy’s death, Serling subsequently recalled Kennedy as “a gracious man, and a wise man, and a temperate man.… And I think potentially this might have been the great American president. I’m not sure. But I rather think so.”10
Serling, like much of the country, saw Kennedy’s assassination as more than the murder of a president. Serling wrote afterward, “What is to be mourned now is an ideal. What has been assassinated is a faith in ourselves. What has been murdered is our own decency, our capacity to love, our sense of order and logic and civilized decorum.”11 Using a passive voice and ascribing a shared quality to these sentiments suggests a deliberate attempt to distance himself from the emotion of the moment. I mourn the death of my ideals and My faith in mankind has been assassinated would have been more honest reflections. These are the sentiments that fueled “I Am the Night” and inspired its suggestion that “the light could go out altogether.”
Likely the most convincing evidence that Rod Serling was not a complete pacifist is the fact that he did not reflexively oppose the US involvement in Vietnam. While speaking to students at UCLA in November 1966, he hesitated to criticize President Lyndon Johnson for his role in expanding the country’s role in the war. When Serling was asked whether he favored the immediate withdrawal of all troops, he answered,
I swear to God, I’m hung up on that one. I just don’t know. I think in principle we shouldn’t be there. My problem here is a more realistic one: How do we get out? That’s the question.… I just don’t know what would be the result of an immediate pullout? What, for example, would the North Vietnamese do to the South Vietnamese? I’m not supporting either side at the moment. My feeling is that it’s a civil war, plain and simple, and our presence there was erroneous to begin with.12
Serling believed that the reasons for war had received insufficient scrutiny, insufficient public debate had occurred before the United States became involved, and the rationale for continued involvement had been insufficiently explored. And despite the increasing casualties that were occurring in the mid-1960s,
nobody gets up and protests really on a high level.… The American people don’t respond in some way and say, “Wait a minute, hold on a second. All right, we will die, because we’re quite accustomed to that. We’ve had eleven major wars in a relatively brief span of history. But why are we dying? To what end? Who wants us there? Who beckons to us to remain there? And who indeed is the enemy?” I think if we answered those questions, and if the populace asked those questions, I’d feel a little bit better about it.13
Privately, he admitted to having a “sneaking hunch, and a most unpleasant one, that these may be the real Dark Ages; a kind of time when men forgot caring.”14 Even more disturbing to him than violence and war was the mentality that facilitated violence, his feeling that people no longer cared.
By 1971, Serling’s position had changed: the war had devolved into “an abomination,” and he advocated for the United States to withdraw “by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, earlier if possible.”15
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down while standing on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Four days later, Serling expressed his “bitter sadness” in a letter to the Los Angeles Times.
Quickly, and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise—the ritual dirge so time honored and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric. In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life.
In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.
Now we acknowledge his compassion—but we exercised no compassion of our own. When he asked us to understand that men take to the streets out of anguish and hopelessness and a vision of that dream dying, we bought guns and speculated about roving agitators and subversive conspiracies and demanded law and order.
We felt anger at the effects, but did little to acknowledge the causes.
… We must look beyond the riots in the streets to the essential righteousness of what he asked of us. To do less would make his dying as senseless as our own living would be inconsequential.16
Barely two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was killed. Later in the summer, Serling unleashed his accumulated bitterness in a speech delivered to a “youth conference” in Ithaca, New York.
When three little black girls are torn to pieces in a Birmingham church, when Medgar Evers gets his spine shot out, when the voice of Martin Luther King is stilled forever by a sniper bullet, when two incredible young men named Kennedy are shoveled into the earth in a spasm of senseless cruelty, and when fifteen thousand young men die in a civil war ten thousand miles away and a hundred thousand are maimed … then by God you better involve yourselves.
The acts of horror we’ve been living with the past ten years are nightmarish in themselves. But when we examine the motives to these horrors and backgrounds, there’s greater cause for worry. On the street in Dallas the day of John Kennedy’s assassination, the John Birch Society displayed signs reading: Wanted for treason—John F. Kennedy. And when a mixed white-black group of Chicago residents paraded on the street asking for better houses for negroes—a charming group of white supremacists threw bricks into their ranks, hitting two nuns, sending them bleeding to the pavement.
… Here’s what I’m saying. So long as we hate, so long as we scratch the back of a monster called “race prejudice,” so long as we listen to the poison-makers—the Klan, the Birch Society, the Minute Men, and the Black Nationalists—then ladies and gentlemen, we’ve bought it. We’re dead. We’ve created a garbage dump of a society hardly worth the effort of an appraisal let alone a salvation.17
In an otherwise negative review of a 1972 Serling-scripted movie, The Man, George Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praised the film’s “firm, moral stand in favor of non-violence.”18 In a closing speech, President Douglass Dilman (James Earl Jones) articulates this moral stand:
We live in a time when violence is offered up as the panacea. The bullet seems to be the final instrument of political discourse. Men die violently, we bury them, we mourn for them, and we seek retribution. It’s a deadly pattern. From Abraham Lincoln to McKinley, John F. Kennedy to Robert Kennedy to Medgar Evers to Martin Luther King. The list grows. Violence, burial, and retribution. It simply must not go on. It can’t go on.
Throughout his career, Serling’s message was consistent and simple: To succumb to the darkness of hatred and prejudice is to become an enabler to a continuing cycle—a deadly pattern—of violence.