2
“The Prime Mover”
The Twilight Zone and Authorship
Like many of the television anthology dramas that preceded it, The Twilight Zone featured a host to “frame” episodes, introducing them to viewers and then returning at the end to wrap them up with some final comments. This was common practice for anthology drama series, as with, for example, Dick Powell’s Zane Gray Theater (CBS, 1956–61) and The David Niven Show (1959). Sometimes, as with The Barbara Stanwyck Show (NBC, 1960–61) and The Loretta Young Show (NBC, 1953–61), the star host also acted in some of the episodes. Whether they did or not, though, most of these hosts were movie stars who brought a familiar persona to the small screen, helping, like The Twilight Zone’s use of genre, to transition a generation of moviegoers to the relatively new medium of television as well as providing a sense of continuity from week to week.
Other similarly themed television shows to The Twilight Zone that also featured a host include the aforementioned Science Fiction Theatre, hosted by Truman Bradley, and the concurrent Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (ABC, 1959–61), hosted by John Newland. Treading in the occasionally overlapping genres of thriller, suspense, mystery, and the macabre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, 1955–60, 1962–64; NBC, 1960–62, 1964–65) brought household recognition to the director and his trademark droll sense of humor. Literally stepping into his caricatured profile at the beginning of each episode, Hitchcock on the weekly show that bore his name—despite his relative lack of involvement in the show’s production—was a vivid demonstration of the power of television’s recent but already primary place in the dynamics of celebrity culture, a benefit that Serling, too, would reap once he began to appear before the camera with his prologues beginning with the second-season opener, “King Nine Will Not Return” (2.1: September 30, 1960). Both Truman Bradley and John Newland were actors with a few small and unmemorable performances to their credit who became better known for their television hosting roles, yet even more than they, Serling became recognizable everywhere as the host of The Twilight Zone, a role he hadn’t initially planned on assuming but for which he was perfect. Zicree claims that “Rod Serling had become the most famous writer in America, if not the world” by the time the series finished its initial five-year run (204).
Several earlier horror and fantasy radio shows from the 1930s through the 1950s relied on the use of a host to provide an established format, beginning with Old Nancy and her cat Satan on The Witch’s Tale (1931–38) and including related shows such as Inner Sanctum Mystery (1941–52) and The Whistler (1941–55). Serling learned much from these and other radio shows written by Wyllis Cooper and Arch Oboler, such as Lights Out, first on radio (1934–47) and then television (NBC, 1949–52). (Serling liked to write with a Dictaphone, as did Oboler.) Media historians have established a link between these radio shows and the early television shows featuring celebrity hosts, one noting Robert Montgomery’s appearances as host within the sets on the show that bore his name Robert Montgomery Presents (NBC, 1950–57) as a precursor of Serling’s appearances on The Twilight Zone (Hey, 110–11).
Sardonic host Raymond Edward Johnson of Inner Sanctum was also a precursor to the wave of late-night horror hosts that accompanied the release in 1957 of a package of classic Columbia and Universal thrillers and horror films, including Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), known as Shock Theatre or Shock! A second package followed in 1959, the year The Twilight Zone began. Local stations airing the films were encouraged to have them introduced by “macabre masters of ceremonies,” helping create such popular campy hosts as Zacherle (Philadelphia, New York), Morgus the Magnificent (New Orleans), and Ghoulardi (Cleveland). The Shock Theatre hosts “lent films an additional frisson of terror or a comic splash of camp” (Jowett and Abbott, 86). The most obvious example is, of course, Boris Karloff’s Thriller (NBC, 1960–62), to which Karloff brought his considerable horror pedigree (he was the iconic Frankenstein’s monster, after all). Serling’s function as host must be understood within this tradition, although he was much too earnest to be campy, and his sartorial sharpness (with suits provided by Kuppenheimer and Eagle Clothes) seemed appropriate for The Twilight Zone and its focus on contemporary America.
For Sarah Kozloff, television hosts “serve to personalize the impersonal” (57). In the case of the speculative shows, though, the hosts served an additional function: like the anchors of news shows, these hosts “anchor” the speculations of their narrative in the real world, tethering them to the rational and the quotidian. Truman Bradley often said once he stepped before the camera, “Let me show you something interesting,” after which he would offer a simple demonstration or experiment and then extrapolate from that to the “theme” of that night’s episode. This anchoring function was important for both network executives and sponsors who, in the 1950s, were hesitant about prime-time shows that ventured into the fantastic.
The presentation of Rod Serling’s teleplay “The Time Element,” first broadcast on The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (CBS, 1958–60) on November 24, 1958, illustrates well this anchoring function of the host. The success of the “The Time Element” (the network received many letters praising the show) prompted CBS to begin serious discussions with Serling regarding his concept for The Twilight Zone (C. Serling 2009, 9). Serling later revisited the story’s time-travel premise and the question of whether changing the past is possible in the Twilight Zone episode “Back There,” in which a man (Russell Johnson) finds himself transported back to the evening when Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, a tragedy he is unable to prevent despite his foreknowledge—although his actions do alter the future in less profound ways.
As “The Time Element” begins, a disembodied narrator says, “Once upon a time there was a psychiatrist . . . ,” immediately signaling that the narrative to follow will depart from realism and delve into the fantastic. Peter Jenson (William Bendix) comes to the office of a psychiatrist, Dr. Gillespie (Martin Balsam), with a strange story. Jenson is experiencing a recurring dream in which he is at Pearl Harbor shortly before the attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, and he believes that he is not merely dreaming but is in fact somehow going back seventeen years in time so that he can warn people of what is to come. However, in his dream he fails to convince anyone, and he always wakes up just before the bombs begin to fall. After listening to Jenson, Gillespie patiently explains the conventional paradoxes of time travel, which logically dictate that Jenson is experiencing a dream not reality, and despite Jenson’s wish to discuss his problem “without dragging in Sigmund Freud,” Gillespie offers his patient the textbook psychoanalytic explanation (not very different from that critical perspective regarding fantasy stories) that dreaming about altering the past is really a wish about changing something in the present.
The narrative of “The Time Element” ends ambiguously, with a twist that was to become characteristic of Serling’s writing. While he is talking to Dr. Gillespie, Jenson finds himself at Pearl Harbor again, but now it is during the attack. As he looks out the windows of his hotel room, we hear the sound of low-flying aircraft, then the room explodes, followed by a cut to the psychiatrist, alone, with a disquieting feeling. Dr. Gillespie leaves his office and stops in for a drink at the local bar, where he sees a photograph of Jenson, who seems vaguely familiar to him. He asks the bartender (Jesse White) who the man is, and the bartender explains that Jenson was once also a bartender there but was killed at Pearl Harbor. Crucially, though, this episode of The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse doesn’t end here. After the story’s conclusion, the show’s host, Desi Arnaz, reappears and says he chooses a rational explanation over a fantastical one, that it was in fact all a dream on the part of the psychiatrist, who had seen the picture of Jenson on the wall in the bar some time previously. Serling’s script leaves open the possibility of a fantastic explanation of events, while the celebrity host, a mainstream entertainer iconic of normative society, closes it down, eliminating any ambiguity with his preferred, officially sanctioned reading.
Apart from CBS’s short-lived ’Way Out, an anthology show featuring noted writer of the macabre Roald Dahl as host, which lasted for only fourteen episodes, Rod Serling was the only host of a network television show who was a writer rather than an actor. Of course, Serling was already something of a celebrity figure on television, a very successful writer interviewed on several talk shows before he made his first appearance on The Twilight Zone. After World War II, Serling attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he majored in English and gained experience writing for several radio and later television stations as part of his co-op work-study program. He sold his first script in 1949 (Grams, 5), and within a few years he was working as a freelance writer for early live nationally broadcast anthology shows such as Kraft Television Theatre, Playhouse 90, and The Hallmark Hall of Fame (Hallmark Television Playhouse: NBC 1951–78; CBS, 1979–81, 1982–89, 1995–2011; PBS, 1981; ABC 1989–95, 2011–14; Hallmark Channel, 2014), becoming famous for one in particular, “Patterns,” a teleplay for Kraft Television Theatre about the power struggles and ethical dilemmas of several corporate executives. Broadcast on February 9, 1955, it became the first television drama to be repeated because of public demand, and because the original broadcast was live, the cast returned to perform the script again (Fiddy, 62). It won Serling the first of his six Emmy Awards, and a year later his script “Requiem for a Heavyweight” for Playhouse 90, about an over-the-hill boxer who is forced to compromise his integrity, earned him another as well as a Peabody Award, the first time this broadcasting award was given for writing (Zicree, 13). The first original ninety-minute show written specifically for television, “Requiem” also won Emmys for Best Direction, Best Performance, and Best Art Direction. Both of these scripts were subsequently adapted as feature films, Patterns in 1956 and Requiem in 1962.
A star writer, Serling was earning $10,000 per script for shows like Playhouse 90 when in 1957 he decided to look for something different. As the writers of TV’s “Golden Age” of live anthology drama—among them, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Alan Aurthur, Tad Mosel, Reginald Rose, and Gore Vidal—were making the move to Hollywood while network television was shifting to filmed series and sitcoms, Serling bucked the trend and decided to stay with television. A chain-smoking workaholic, he was very prolific, turning out more than twenty original scripts in 1955 alone (Wright, 284). In 1959 he managed to write a book of short stories, three teleplays for Playhouse 90, rewrite a Broadway play, and produce twenty scripts for The Twilight Zone as well as supervising production of the show—all leading him to be diagnosed with physical exhaustion (Engel 193). The Young & Rubicam advertising agency, hired to help promote The Twilight Zone, thought Serling “the star” of a show that otherwise would have no reoccurring actors (Kraszweski, 353).
Serling’s writing for The Twilight Zone, and sometimes elsewhere, follows a tradition of didactic fabulation that runs from Aesop to H. G. Wells, which he combined with a twist ending in the manner of O. Henry. Indeed, Serling, who earned a reputation as “O. Henry in Outer Space,” adapted the earlier writer’s story “Gift of the Magi” as a radio play while still in college (Engel, 187). The story tells of a husband and wife of modest means who independently sell something important to themselves in order to buy a Christmas present for the other, but both gifts turn out to be useless precisely because of what their spouse has sold. It concludes with the narrator suddenly announcing himself as such and drawing an explicit moral: “The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents . . . And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest . . . They are the magi” (7). O. Henry’s moral is that although neither gift turns out to have any practical value, both are beautiful expressions of the love the two have for each other—a sentiment Serling likely would have appreciated. Presnell and McGee see the episode “The Long Morrow” (5.15: January 10, 1964), in which an astronaut on an extended mission comes out of hibernation in order to be the same age as the woman he loves when he returns to Earth while unbeknownst to him she has placed herself in suspended animation, as an updating of O. Henry’s story (173). Although they tend to be more dire, moral lessons analogous to those of O. Henry are to be found in many episodes of The Twilight Zone, and Serling’s appearances, along with his opening and closing narrations, are similar to the sudden intrusion of O. Henry’s authorial voice in the story.
Like Wells, Serling used the fantastic genres to offer moral lessons to a world filled with people less perfect than they should or could be. Serling explicitly refers to the twist of his own “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” (2.24: April 21, 1961), in which four thieves rob a train from Fort Knox filled with gold bullion and then hide in suspended animation for a hundred years only to emerge and discover that gold is worthless because it can now be synthesized, as “tonight’s lesson—in the Twilight Zone.” Similarly, at the end of “Nothing in the Dark” (3.16: January 5, 1962), after the elderly Wanda Dunn (Gladys Cooper) learns to accept the inevitability of death, Serling frames the story as an “object lesson for the more frightened amongst us.” And the discovery by Professor Ellis Fowler (Donald Pleasence) of the important life lessons his teaching had brought his students over the years in “The Changing of the Guard” (3.37: June 1, 1962) Serling describes as “a very small scholastic lesson from the campus of the Twilight Zone.” In “Night Call” Elva Keene (Gladys Cooper again) is “sadder, but wiser, by dint of a rather painful lesson in responsibility”; “In Praise of Pip” offers the “lesson” that “man is not as wise as he thinks.” He concludes “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (5.30: April 24, 1964) by declaring that “the moral of what you’ve just seen is clear.”
Fables typically feature anthropomorphized animals that dramatize their moral points, as with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories featuring Br’er Rabbit or George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945, originally subtitled “A Fairy Story”); The Twilight Zone stories substitute aliens, machines, and human caricatures in place of talking fauna. Serling biographer Gordon Sander refers to Serling as a “video Aesop,” and Murray notes that “The Shelter” is a retelling in the atomic age of Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant (Murray). Serling himself refers to the whimsical episode “Cavender is Coming” (3.36: May 25, 1962) as a fable, as he does “Hocus Pocus and Frisby” (3.30: April 13, 1962), about an inveterate blowhard (Andy Devine) who is briefly abducted by aliens but whom no one will believe, comparing it to Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.
Serling wrote more than half the scripts for The Twilight Zone (he was contractually bound to write 80 percent of them, whether original or adaptations) and acted as the show’s executive producer. In June 1960, he also became the on-screen host, introducing the evening’s episode and at the end teasing the next (“In a moment Rod Serling will return to tell you about next week’s story”). In the first season Serling’s opening narrations were done off-camera, and viewers didn’t see him until the end of the episode, when he appeared to announce next week’s installment. Also, beginning in the second season Serling is identified by the network voice as “the creator” of The Twilight Zone. The importance of his on-screen presence as host was crucial to the show (according to Colbert, “he introduced a whole generation to science fiction and chain smoking”). A number of other possible hosts were initially considered, including Westbrook Van Voorhis, who had been the authoritative voice of newsreel series The March of Time (1935–51), and the stentorian Orson Welles (Zicree, 24), who was already indelibly associated with science fiction because of his infamous Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938.
Worland notes that Serling’s presence at the beginning and end of each episode, along with his purplish narration, “is a powerful determinant of how one should interpret the tale” (104). For television scholar William Boddy, Serling’s “stylized direct address and the frequently epigrammatic and moralistic closing voice-overs” emphasize his authorial signature, as does his sudden appearance in the space of the narrative (Boddy 1984, 107). This is true enough, although “the meaning” of Serling has been understood somewhat differently by different critics. On the one hand, Jon Kraszewski views Serling’s presence as “intellectual” (354), while Worland sees Serling’s “all-knowing grin” as signifying “the sage who comprehends more than the viewer but is willing to impart his wisdom to us if we only listen and observe” (104). Brian Murray writes that “He looked like a well-tailored young rabbi, upright but hip, delivering droll sermons through clenched teeth in a clipped and alliterative style” (Murray). According to the New York Times, on the other hand, Serling displayed “a facial expression of unusual intensity, combined with an anxiety to please, and just anxiety” (Grams, 95). CBS network executive and producer William Self thought Serling “brought to his hosting a kind of an ‘everyman quality’” (Grams, 37)—very different from Kraszewski’s and Worland view of him as an egghead. But apart from how we might read the nuances of Serling’s presence on camera, certainly his pinched smile, suggesting a hint of irony, made him a perfect spokesman for the cruel turns of fate and inevitable comeuppances often meted out in the show’s twist endings.
And, however we might understand the signification of Serling, his presence was so distinctive that he became inextricably associated with stranger things for the rest of his career. He edited several volumes of horror stories, including Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves (1963), Rod Serling’s Devils and Demons (1967), and Rod Serling’s Other Worlds (1978), his name always above the title. He introduced one episode of Night Gallery (NBC, 1969–1973), the show he hosted after The Twilight Zone, with “Good evening, sports fans. In discerning circles I’m known as the Howard Cosell of the crypt” (Murray). Western Publishing’s long-running series of Twilight Zone comic books featured Serling as “host,” his image superimposed over the cover art of each issue, for several years after his death, as if he were still hosting from the beyond.
In the denouement of the Western film Saddle the Wind (1958), scripted by Serling before The Twilight Zone launched, the town patriarch (Donald Crisp) tells the hero Steve Sinclair (Robert Taylor) that “I’m not going to moralize and tell you what happened is for the best.” But Serling himself did this regularly in his writing, both for The Twilight Zone and other projects. In addition to this penchant for preaching, in The Twilight Zone (at least for the half-hour episodes) he followed the dictum regarding short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, one of the major foundational figures of the fantastic. Poe’s emphasis on the unity of a single effect—“In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (Poe, 566)—clearly influenced Serling, as most Twilight Zone episodes build inexorably toward that narrative twist in the climax: the place of infinite abundance isn’t heaven, but hell (“A Nice Place to Visit”); a megalomaniac astronaut lording it over tiny aliens is himself crushed by aliens in turn larger than he (“The Little People” [3.28: March 30, 1962]); and so on.1
The distinctive emphasis on the twist’s moral lesson—submitted for our consideration—was characteristic of Serling’s work, in The Twilight Zone as well as in his other film scripts, stories, and teleplays. Serling wrote the first screenplay draft for the original Planet of the Apes film (1968), although subsequently it was heavily reworked by another writer, Michael Wilson, and the technologically advanced ape society Serling had envisioned was made more primitive at the suggestion of director Franklin J. Schaffner as a way to cut production costs. But the movie does retain Serling’s twist ending, certainly one of the most famous in film history, in which we follow the astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) as he travels along the shoreline of the Forbidden Zone and eventually comes upon the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and realizes, along with the audience, that he has been on Earth in the future all along and not on another planet. Pierre Boulle’s novel on which the film was based also has a twist ending, but a rather different one: in Boulle’s novel the narrative is a written document found floating in space by a vacationing astronaut couple who, we now learn, are chimpanzees who dismiss the entire account as preposterous before heading for home. (Interestingly, in the first-season Twilight Zone episode “People Are Alike All Over,” written by Serling, Roddy McDowall, who would star in four of the five original Apes movies as Cornelius, plays an astronaut who is treated kindly by aliens—only to discover that he is considered a lower form of life and so has been confined in a “natural habitat” like an animal in a zoo—the same way Taylor is treated in Planet of the Apes.)
Serling once explained that “I began producing so I could write for myself, have a hand in the casting, and meet sponsors on their own ground” (Grams, 18). This is true enough, but, of course, while Serling’s approach and vision profoundly shaped the show, he wasn’t solely responsible for its quality and achievements. Even with the scripts Serling wrote, not all were original; some were adapted from the work of established science-fiction writers such as Jerome Bixby (“It’s a Good Life”) and Damon Knight (“To Serve Man”). He adapted scripts from anthologies, mainstream magazines, the science-fiction pulps, and even from a radio play (“The Hitch-Hiker”). Ray Bradbury adapted his own story “I Sing the Body Electric” (3.35: May 18, 1962) and was supposed to have been more involved in writing for the show, but disputes with Serling over intellectual property seem to have prevented that from happening. (During the show’s run, plagiarism lawsuits were filed over six of Serling’s scripts, all of which were settled out of court.) For the scripts Serling didn’t write himself, he relied mostly on two writers who had attended a meeting and screening of the pilot episode, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. The two men were friends, and both were excited about the prospect of writing for The Twilight Zone.
Matheson, who would write fourteen episodes and had two others adapted from his stories by Serling, had established his reputation as a writer of horror and science fiction. Many of Matheson’s stories and novels have been adapted (mostly by himself) for film, among them The Shrinking Man (1956, filmed in 1959 as The Incredible Shrinking Man) and A Stir of Echoes (1958, film version 1999). His postapocalyptic novel I Am Legend (1954), a major influence on George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), has been adapted to film four times (The Last Man on Earth [1964], The Omega Man [1971], I Am Legend [2007], and I Am Omega [2007]). Beaumont, author of twenty-two episodes (two episodes credited to him were ghostwritten by others when he became too ill to write), more than any other writer after Serling, had published stories in Playboy magazine, published a collection of his fiction entitled The Hunger and Other Stories (1957), and had written the screenplay for Queen of Outer Space (1958) starring Zsa Zsa Gabor (intended, he claimed, as a parody but not quite filmed that way). While writing for The Twilight Zone, Beaumont, like Serling a prolific writer, was also writing scripts for a variety of other shows, such as Have Gun—Will Travel and Richard Diamond, Private Detective (CBS, 1957–59; NBC, 1959–60) as well as One Step Beyond and Thriller. By all accounts a man of extraordinary energy, Beaumont became ill at thirty-four with what was possibly Alzheimer’s or Pick’s disease or a combination of the two. He died four years later, his only other important contribution to the macabre being the screenplay for Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), regarded by many as the best movie by the prolific filmmaker known as the King of the Bs.
Buck Houghton, who had worked as a production assistant on several of Val Lewton’s classic horror films (The Curse of the Cat People [1944], The Body Snatcher [1945], Bedlam [1946]), served as producer for the first three seasons of the show, working harmoniously with Serling and director of photography George T. Clemens, a seasoned cinematographer for Paramount who shot more than half the episodes of The Twilight Zone. Houghton was hired to coproduce the show in order to give Serling more time to write. The producer readily acknowledges that “The Twilight Zone was shaped by Rod Serling” (Houghton, 10), yet, according to Zicree, Houghton was responsible for everything “from the purchasing of scripts (other than Serling’s) to casting to scoring to cutting” (30). His work ranged from approving budgets and contracts to approving shooting locations and sets, Houghton left after the third season, accepting another producing position because of the uncertainty over continued sponsorship for The Twilight Zone and a reluctance to work on the one-hour episodes, which he felt worked against the show (“I told them that Twilight Zone is based on a willing suspension of disbelief. You can’t ask people to do it for an hour” [qtd. in Engel, 232]).
How is it that these various and disparate people could produce a weekly show that had any consistency of style or vision? Bruce Kawin has offered a helpful modification of the classic conception of the auteur theory, which viewed the film director as artist solely responsible for the work we see on the screen, to take into account the collaborative realities of the production process in film and, by extension, television. Because movies and television shows are the result of many individuals working together, Kawin compares the director to an orchestra conductor: “The instrument that a conductor plays is, in fact, the orchestra. The orchestra members depend on the conductor to keep time and to let them know when and with what emphasis to play. The conductor organizes the performance, and it is therefore up to her or him how the composition will be realized” (Kawin, 190). Thus, Kawin argues, we may view auteurist works as the result not of top-down decisions on various production aspects imposed by the auteur (usually the director) but rather, of what he calls “collaboration as a system” in which the various individuals involved in a production work together toward a shared vision (197–99).
If, for example, individuals were working on a John Huston film, they sought to provide what they thought would be needed for a “Huston film,” a group concept rather than an individual one: “They each do their part, and the parts are coherent because they were each fashioned in relation to an ideal of the whole” (Kawin, 198). This seemed to be the way that The Twilight Zone was realized. Certainly, Beaumont and Matheson, both of whom tended to approach the fantastic by putting recognizable, everyday characters in strange situations, fit comfortably with Serling’s concern with the moral behavior of the average man. It is not surprising, therefore, that the show, as is uniformly agreed, suffered a decline in quality after the first three seasons, when Serling became less involved in production aspects and Houghton left and was replaced by Herbert Hirschman (and later Bert Granet), whose views of the fantastic did not quite sync with Serling’s (Grams, 124).
The choreography of the camera and actors in “Eye of the Beholder.”
In some cases we may hypothesize that a particular director was assigned to a specific episode because they had some affinity for the subject: Robert Florey with the noirish “Perchance to Dream” and the overheated “The Fever,” John Brahm with “Judgment Night” and “The Four of Us Are Dying,” Mitchell Leisen with “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1.4: October 23, 1959), Jacques Tourneur with “Night Call,” Ida Lupino with “The Masks,” veteran comedy director Norman Z. McLeod with “Once upon a Time.” Elsewhere I have read the “Uncle Simon” episode within the context of Don Siegel’s other films, especially Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Grant 2010, 43–49). But it is also the case that, as written, “Uncle Simon” is a typical Serling morality tale with a narrative twist at the end that suggests once again the irony of poetic justice for a venal and vindictive character. The plot involves an irascible, rancorous old man (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and his repressed and bitter niece Barbara Polk (Constance Ford), who tends slavishly to his excessive demands but is only waiting for him to die in order to inherit his ample estate as recompense for the constant abuse she has endured. After Uncle Simon suffers an accidental fall that breaks his back, Barbara offers no assistance when she realizes he is dying. And so she comes into his estate—with the proviso in his will that she must care for his last experiment. The experiment turns out to be a robot of himself invented by Uncle Simon, a slightly modified Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet but here with Uncle Simon’s grating voice and unctuous personality. Just as we might read something of Siegel’s concern with emotional alienation in “Uncle Simon,” so we may also understand it as a Serling morality tale. Here, as elsewhere, personal directorial touches or themes do not preclude reading an episode of the show as being consistent with expressing aspects of Serling’s overarching vision as well.
Undoubtedly, the episode most celebrated for its imaginative visuals is “Eye of the Beholder,” written by Serling and directed by Douglas Heyes. In the story, Janet Tyler (Maxine Stuart [under bandages] / Donna Douglas [after bandages removed]), whose face is horribly disfigured, is in the hospital awaiting the results of her final allowable attempt at corrective surgery. If the surgery is unsuccessful, by law she will become an outcast, exiled to an isolated community of similarly repulsive-looking people. The episode is shot in such a way (lighting and shadow, over-the-shoulder shots and subjective point-of-view shots, blocking, and framing) so that we never see the characters’ faces—until the twist climax, when Janet’s bandages are finally removed and we discover that the faces of the doctors and nurses are horribly distorted while the protagonist is, from our perspective, conventionally beautiful (Donna Douglas would go on to play Elly Mae Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies). Heyes and George Clemens worked together to choreograph the blocking of actors and camera movements “as meticulously as a ballet” (Zicree, 148) so that the design does not become obvious and give away the twist beforehand. The heavy reliance on shadows, appropriate to the dark and foreboding atmosphere of the story, and the canny high-angle shots looking down on Janet and the medical staff in her hospital room evoke, once again, film noir and seem to work as an expression of the entrapping nature of enforced conformity and thus “justify” its expressionist style. In addition to being another of Serling’s warnings about conformity, the episode’s moral lesson is that standards of beauty are socially determined, hence relative and subjective, so that we should not shun people who are different—again, consistent with the show’s emphasis, as discussed more fully in the next chapter, on the importance of and challenges to democratic individualism. Thus, even the most visually stylized of episodes still conforms to the show’s paradigmatic approach of moral fabulation tinged with irony.
Discussing the use of popular music in the show to enhance the sense of nostalgia in Serling’s scripts about attempts to return to the past, musicologist Reba Wissner observes that the same treatment informs those episodes about the past written by others and explains this as likely the result of Serling choosing the scripts that appealed to his own interests (60). This is probably so, but it is also the case that the regular production unit for The Twilight Zone was extraordinarily cohesive, encouraging that dynamic of “collaboration as a system.” According to CBS producer William Self, most of the crew working on the show, including cameraman Clemens and production manager Ralph W. Nelson, had worked together before for Meridian Productions’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (CBS, 1951–59) (Grams 51), so they already had an established working relationship when they came to The Twilight Zone. Many of the production personnel carried over from season to season.2
Of the several noted writers of television’s “Golden Age” of live television drama in the mid-1950s, only Serling maintained an important presence in television as the medium transitioned into the series format (Boddy 1984, 98). John Newland directed all the episodes of One Step Beyond as well as hosted the show, but Serling was the only writer to find true celebrity success as a series host. According to television scholar Jane M. Shattuc, “Applying the concept of the ‘author’ or ‘artist’ to television is always difficult, but it is particularly thorny when applied to American television” (143). Serling, though, clearly was a television auteur well before, say, Norman Lear or Steven Bochco or any of today’s lauded showrunners. Serling, who wrote or adapted ninety-two of the show’s 156 episodes, was undeniably “the creator” and auteur of The Twilight Zone.
But it was authorship with a difference from the classical notion of the auteur in cinema. In a foundational essay for what would become the auteur theory, French critic Alexandre Astruc imagined cinema developing as an art to the point that the camera would function like a pen (“la caméra stylo”) for a writer and that the image would “become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language” (18). Later, Gore Vidal argued that fellow television writer Paddy Chayefksy was an auteur who used different directors as his “pencil” (153), and something similar may be said about Serling, who used The Twilight Zone’s crew, directors, and writers like a box of crayons to provide various shadings to his basic vision. This worldview, essentially a conflicted view of bourgeois individualism, is explored in more detail in the next chapter.
Location photography in Death Valley enhances the arid atmosphere of “The Lonely.”