3 “What’s in the Box”

The Twilight Zone and the Real World

Rod Serling touted The Twilight Zone as a vehicle for prospective advertisers to sell their products, yet at the same time he complained about artistic compromise, “which in essence is what the television writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes” (qtd. in Zicree, 96). In a 1974 speech to the American Advertising Federation, Serling mused that “You wonder how to put on a meaningful drama that is adult, incisive probing when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper” (Murray). Yet, according to Murray, five years earlier, in the two years 1968 and 1969 alone, Serling himself appeared in ads selling an astonishing array of goods and services, among them Crest toothpaste, Goodrich radial tires, Westinghouse appliances, Anacin, Samsonite luggage, and Volkswagens. Already in the first season of The Twilight Zone Kimberly-Clark, a paper-products company, wanted to insert a product ad in the corner of the screen during the closing credits (Grams, 59)—a wish Serling and Buck Houghton successfully resisted, at least temporarily. In the fifth and last season of the show, the images of Pall Mall cigarettes or Lilt hair shampoo did appear alongside the credits, a graphic statement of the show’s balance of art and commerce and the middle ground (“between light and shadow”?) that Serling as executive producer inevitably accepted.

In the episode “Static,” written by Charles Beaumont, Ed Lindsay (Dean Jagger) flees the modern horrors of television for old broadcasts on his antique radio. One of the annoying commercials he hears on television is for “Green” cigarettes: “Green, cool grass, the touch, the smell of green, cool grass, now brought to you for the first time in Green, the new chlorophyll cigarette, the smoke that doesn’t smell like tobacco, but smells good, green, cool, like grass . . .” At the end of a few episodes, at the prodding of Liggett & Myers, Serling, a heavy smoker in real life, appears to tell us about next week’s episode while holding a cigarette, once or twice even plugging Chesterfield or Oasis cigarettes, two of L&M’s brands. He was perhaps choking on the smoke literally as well as metaphorically as he displayed a pack in the palm of his hand and said, “Here’s an item we forgot. You see this? It holds a promise for anyone who smokes. It’s Oasis. And as its name implies, it promises you the most refreshing, softest taste of all. Try Oasis—I think you’ll like it.”

In the show’s first season, General Foods signed on as primary sponsor, and Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of such brands as Kleenex, Kotex, and Scotties among others, agreed to be alternate sponsor. After the initial sponsorship of twenty-six episodes, General Foods hesitantly renewed its sponsorship, but Kimberly-Clark did not, and CBS eventually signed on Colgate-Palmolive for the second season. In the third season Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company replaced General Foods, in turn followed later by Procter & Gamble. During the hour-long episodes of the fourth season, which allowed for more advertising, additional sponsorship was provided by Johnson & Johnson, US Royal tires, and Pepsi-Cola. By the time The Twilight Zone had finished its five-year run, the panoply of other products that had sponsored it included Sanka coffee; Crest toothpaste, Rise Shave Cream, and Arrid roll-on deodorant; Contac decongestant and Bufferin aspirin; Prell and Halo shampoos; and Tareyton, Oasis, and Chesterfield cigarettes.

In the fall of the second season, six episodes of The Twilight Zone were shot on videotape rather than on film as a cost-saving measure, a budgetary decision that compromised the look of the show significantly. The videotaped episodes saved 10 percent of production costs because videotape could be edited directly, without waiting for dailies. But this production method precluded the possibility of location shooting.1 Before then, shooting on location in, for example, Death Valley had contributed substantially to the arid atmosphere and feeling of desperation in “The Lonely” and “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (1.15: January 15, 1960), while both “A Hundred Yards over the Rim” and “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” were filmed in Lone Pine, California, the areas’ open horizons, sand dunes, and distinctive light central to all. By contrast, the sets in the videotaped episodes look mostly—unsurprisingly—like uninspired sets. The desultory used-car lot in “The Whole Truth,” for example, is clearly an interior set without a whiff of the outdoors about it. Also, the videotaped episodes were transferred to 16 mm film for broadcast, inevitably losing definition in the process. Serling himself felt that the videotape experiment was a “disastrous” compromise because it was “neither fish nor fowl. You’re bound to the same kind of natural laws as in live TV, but they try to mix it with certain qualities of film” (Zicree, 194).

Other small commercial concessions and changes found their way into episodes. For example, in his original script for the episode “Judgment Night,” Serling had the ship’s first officer ask for tea to be brought to the bridge, but General Foods, makers of Sanka coffee, took exception, and so the line was changed to ordering “a tray” (Zicree, 52). Concerns from the network required Serling to make some changes to the script for “He’s Alive” as well, altering the fascist group’s logo from a swastika to a hand gripping a torch accompanied by a lightning bolt (Presnell and McGee, 142). In Serling’s original teleplay for “Uncle Simon,” the odious uncle was depicted as a pipe smoker, a habit carried over in the robot replacement, but the sponsor at the time, the American Tobacco Company, had it deleted and replaced by hot chocolate (Zicree, 312). More importantly, the network also imposed a scheduling change in the fourth season that forced it to expand from its original half-hour slot on Friday nights from 10:00 to 10:30 p.m. to an hour slot on Thursdays from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. before moving back again. During the summer of 1960, when Serling was filling in as a temporary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, he responded to a reader’s question “Are writers’ complaints about TV censorship and sponsorship interference valid?” by writing, “Censorship and intrusion are more the rule in television than the exception” (Grams, 82).

In a television interview Mike Wallace conducted with Serling in 1959, just days before the debut of The Twilight Zone, Serling explained that he was tired of stupid fights with sponsors, such as when the line “Got a match?” in his “Requiem for a Heavyweight” script was struck because the sponsor of Playhouse 90 was Ronson, a manufacturer of cigarette lighters (Grams, 18; Zicree, 14). Serling vented these frustrations in several Twilight Zone episodes, none more explicitly than in “The Bard,” an hour-long episode devoted almost wholly to comic swipes at commercial television that barely hide the bitterness toward what he called the “Mount Sinai of Advertisers Row” (qtd. in Hunt, 10). The story’s main character, the boorish and untalented Julius Moomer (Jack Weston), is a former streetcar conductor and now aspiring writer (his dream of winning the “Wurlitzer Prize” reveals how little he knows about literature) who, researching black magic for the pilot for a new horror/fantasy series (“black magic, conjuring, that sort of thing”), manages to conjure the ghost of William Shakespeare (British actor John Williams) as his literal ghostwriter. Before the distinguished playwright’s arrival, we get a sense of Moomer’s writing abilities when he pitches absurd formula stories (with twists!) to his agent, who unenthusiastically tells him, “I’ve never heard so many varieties of the same story.” Fred Steiner’s music for the episode associates Moomer and formula television with carnival barkers, and in a seemingly digressive bit of comic business, Burt Reynolds’s mildly funny parody of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire anticipates the media-studies concept that television’s continual flow, as initially formulated by media scholar Raymond Williams, manages to turn even once-shocking realism into triviality.

Moomer decides not to waste Shakespeare on a mere pilot and instead has him write a dramatic teleplay, portentously entitled “The Tragic Cycle,” that network executives think they like (“it has imagery,” concedes one) and want to produce for “Shannon Playhouse.” They are a little hesitant because the language, for some reason they cannot fathom, tends toward the archaic, like Elizabethan English, so “sponsor-wise, the thing requires some noodling.” Soon the sponsors and network executives make wholesale changes to the script, completely altering it (“like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer”), the changes determined by the principle that television needs to speak to the hypothetical “lady in Dubuque.” Moomer nervously agrees to all of them (including deleting the big love scene on the balcony because people don’t have balconies anymore). When he sucks up to the boorish Mr. Shannon (John McGiver), president of the show’s sponsoring company, by telling him that he loves Shannon’s onion soup, the latter angrily insists that they don’t make it because onion soup is French and Shannon Foods is a proud, wholly American company (such comic business seems less absurd after the post-9/11 idea of “Freedom Fries”).

Serling’s feelings about the rat race of commercialism is also clear in two earlier episodes, among the series’ best, “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby,” both original teleplays by Serling in the first season featuring advertising executives in their thirties (roughly the same age as the author at the time) who are disillusioned with the pressures of modern urban life and who long for an idyllic pastoral past. Unlike the acerbic “The Bard,” both episodes are infused with a deep sense of nostalgia. Others have noted the autobiographical connection in these stories in that the towns depicted evoke those of the Finger Lakes district of Serling’s own boyhood. (In his final interview, in response to a question regarding what time period he would prefer to live in, he said “Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer” [Brevelle].) Serling nodded to the area with the name of his production company, Cayuga Productions, and upstate New York explicitly figures as a location in several episodes. In “Walking Distance” Martin Sloan (Gig Young)—“vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media,” Serling informs us in his introduction—while out for a drive in the country finds he has somehow gone back in time to the town of his youth. He rushes to see his parents, who reject him as crazy, although his father (Frank Overton) eventually believes him and convinces the grown-up Martin to return to his own time because that past belongs to his boyhood self whom he sees happily playing in a park. Martin assents to his father’s wisdom and returns the way he arrived, realizing that one cannot dwell in the past.

In the darker “Willoughby” the pressures of advertising and all the commercialism it entails prove too much for Gart Williams (James Daly), a man, as Serling tells us, “protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt” that is about to be removed. The pressures of his job together with an unsupportive and materialistic wife and a gnawing ulcer nudge Williams to fall asleep on his nightly train commute home and to dream about a charming, archetypal nineteenth-century American town (“July, midsummer, 1888,” Serling tells us at the beginning) that apparently does not exist on the route. Reaching the breaking point, Williams decides that next time the town appears he will get off in Willoughby, a place, the train conductor explains, “where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure.” In the twist ending, after Williams departs the train when it next stops at Willoughby, there is a cut to the conductor and a trainman standing outside the stopped train in a snowstorm discussing the fact that Williams had suddenly jumped off the moving train and was killed instantly. The authorities have been contacted, Williams’s body is loaded into a hearse, and as the door is closed, we see in close-up the sign on it: “Willoughby Funeral Home.”

Directed by experienced Hollywood director, editor, and actor Robert Parrish, who also directed Saddle the Wind, “Willoughby” features several noteworthy visual touches. The imaginary town, which Williams dreams about three times, is photographed in bright, inviting sunlight, offering a bold contrast to the snowy blackness enveloping the train car before Williams falls asleep. The first time the train “arrives” in Willoughby, the town is shown in long shot with its American flag on the pole, a man riding by on a penny-farthing bicycle, and two boys in straw hats with fishing poles like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. The second time, we see also a classic bandstand in the town park. Williams tells his wife that the town looks like a Currier and Ives painting—to which she coldly responds by complaining that she married a man whose big dream is to be Huckleberry Finn. (The reference is evoked again in the final episode of the show, “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” in which two children escape their stern, bickering parents by discovering a wonderfully harmonious world at the bottom of the family swimming pool—in their imaginations, “floating down a raft like Tom Sawyer.”)

The episode’s other visual contrast involves a bold use of the close-up, emphasized in television style generally but here, as often in The Twilight Zone, given special expressive significance. During an executive meeting early on, Williams’s feeling of the mounting pressure on him is summed up in the big close-ups of the mouth of his boss, Mr. Misrell (Howard Smith), a cigar jammed in it as he bellows “Push, push, push. All the way. All the time.” Shots alternate between Misrell’s bellowing and Williams wincing in pain from his ulcer, each of the three successive shots of Misrell’s face tighter until the screen is filled with just his barking mouth. The episode also uses close-ups, this time of Williams’s face, to signal the transitions from wintry modern train car to old-fashioned one in summer. The slight discontinuity in the cuts between the close-ups of each transition suggests the radical shift from quotidian reality to the imaginary world of Willoughby.

Before taking his last, fateful train ride, Williams finally cracks in the office while calls on two different telephones and his secretary all demand his attention at the same time, perhaps mirroring Serling’s feelings about the competing demands of art and commerce in the medium of television. Serling told Mike Wallace that he thinks it is possible still to produce adult drama on television, that television can be “commercial” and meaningful at the same time, that it can attain both public acceptance and artistic merit. But it was a difficult balancing act, and it took a toll on him. “Walking Distance” and “Willoughby” are similar on a narrative level, as both protagonists desire to escape the demands of the present by fleeing to a happier time in the past. But while the protagonist of “Walking Distance,” although wistfully nostalgic, accepts that it is impossible to return to the time of one’s youth, that of “Willoughby” is unable to come to terms with his present life, and for him the only resolution is through death. This striking difference between the two episodes, both coming in the first season, mirrors Serling’s own ambivalence about television and his work in it.2

On another level, Misrell’s “Push, push” also may be understood to refer to the dynamics of capitalist competition more generally, not just to the advertising business that fuels its desire. Douglas Brode points out that in “Walking Distance” Martin’s last name, Sloan, evokes that of Sloan Wilson, author of the 1955 best-seller The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, about another corporate executive and conflicted commuter (5). To be sure, in addressing contemporary issues at all, The Twilight Zone moved away from the juvenile nature of such earlier television science-fiction shows as Captain Video and His Video Rangers (DuMont, 1949–54), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (all four networks, 1950–55), Space Patrol (ABC, 1950–55), and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954), but ultimately, it cannot be said that the show offered any sustained critique of capitalism. Indeed, overall the show’s political messages were conflicted, a conflict that was itself symptomatic of the capitalist system of which it was a part.

The late episode “I Am the Night—Color Me Black” (5.26: March 27, 1964), written by Serling, is one of the show’s most overt message episodes. The story takes place in an unnamed American town—so vaguely depicted as to be Anywhere, USA—where a man named Jagger (Terry Becker) is about to be executed for murder after a rigged trial (elements of the Emmett Till story resurfacing here). That morning the sun does not rise, and an inexplicable blackness descends upon the town. There is no twist ending to this episode—indeed, no narrative closure at all—just the darkness closing in on the town and, as we learn, elsewhere around the world in other, real places where hate is also happening: Birmingham, the Berlin Wall, and Vietnam. The episode hints toward a racial theme: the victim is described as a “cross-burning, psychopathic bully,” and the method of execution is public hanging, although in this case the person to be hung is white. In the episode “pretentious writing overwhelms fine acting” (Zicree, 409) as the story turns entirely on one obvious and belabored metaphor. Serling punches home his point in his final comment by observing that this phenomenon is to be found in the real world, not in The Twilight Zone: “A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ—but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.” Perhaps because the show was shortly to be going off the air, Serling felt sufficiently emboldened to abandon the protective mantle of fantasy almost completely to offer this most pointed screed regarding his fellow Americans.

“I Am the Night” was first telecast at a time not only when civil-rights demonstrations were gaining momentum but also when substantial escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict was occurring (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the act that provided the legal basis for American escalation, was passed by Congress in August 1964, just three months after “I Am the Night” was telecast), although most Americans were still unaware of the country’s dangerously increasing entanglement in that remote South Asian country. Just six months earlier, in the September 1963 episode “In Praise of Pip” a title card tells us that the opening location is a jungle in Vietnam, after which a soldier’s father (Jack Klugman) proclaims, “My kid is dying. In a place called South Vietnam . . . There isn’t even supposed to be a war going on there, and my son is dying.” Some writers have suggested that this is the first mention of the Vietnam War in a television drama (Grams, 607). Still, despite these references, with few exceptions The Twilight Zone only infrequently addressed the particulars of then-current events directly.

Historical events sometimes informed specific episodes: the assassination of Lincoln (“Back There”), Nazi Germany (“The Obsolete Man”). The Holocaust is confronted in “Death’s-Head Revisited” (3.9: November 10, 1961) by a former SS captain (Oscar Beregi) visiting Dachau who is driven insane by the ghosts of those he killed. Serling concludes the episode telling us that the concentration camps “must remain standing” because “the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.” In “The Chaser” an embarrassed Roger Shackleforth, avoiding the real reason for his visit to the alchemist A. Daemon (John McIntire), observes that the current situation in China is “ugly”—to which the alchemist replies “You don’t look so good yourself,” a joke that points to the show’s preference for the politics of the personal.

One episode, though, did unambiguously respond to contemporary events—“The Mirror,” featuring Peter Falk as Ramos Clemente, a rebel who seizes power in an unnamed Central American country. The leader he deposes tells Clemente that a magical mirror in the palace office will show him the face of his assassins. Ramos soon sees some of his fellow rebels in the glass, grows increasingly paranoid, and begins a wave of executions, ultimately becoming like the tyrant he had deposed. In the end, Clemente, who is made up to look unmistakably like Fidel Castro with military fatigues, beard, and cigar, sees his own reflection in the mirror and kills himself. The episode’s moral is basically that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that Castro is a perfect example. The Cuban leader’s visit to New York in September 1960, and his speech at the UN General Assembly in which he denounced imperialism and colonialism, was widely covered in the press at the time, just a year before the episode was aired in October 1961. But in case we have missed the portrait, Serling closes the episode by remarking that “any resemblance to tyrants living or dead is hardly coincidental.” The episode promises some complexity in its portrait of Ramos because, as Worland notes, he begins as a sympathetic character with an idealistic cause (107–8), but quickly its depiction of Clemente reduces the revolutionary Marxism Castro represents to personal psychopathology. Presnell and McGee’s assessment that any viewer knowing Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) would find it difficult to watch “The Mirror” without laughing may be somewhat harsh, but like other episodes that share with it the aim of examining the dictatorial impulse—“The Obsolete Man,” “The Little People,” “Four O’Clock” (3.29: April 6, 1962)—it reduces ideology to the inevitable corruption of one man’s will to power while at the same time stripping a Marxist alternative to capitalism of any serious ideological basis.

A slightly more nuanced political lesson is offered in the comic fantasy episode “The Whole Truth,” also written by Serling. In this episode sleazy car salesman Harvey Hunnicut (Jack Carson) finds himself, after hustling a customer for his antique Model A for much less than its value, with a cursed vehicle that forces its owner to tell the truth. As a consequence, Hunnicut is unable to sell a single vehicle because he admits everything that is wrong with each of them to potential buyers. In the whimsical conclusion he manages to sell the car to Nikita Khrushchev to use as a propaganda tool to display the poor state of American technology and lifestyle to his own people. The final shot shows the barely glimpsed face of an actor resembling the Soviet premier smiling with that peculiarly capitalist pride of ownership as he is driven off the lot in the cursed car. The viewer may chuckle with the realization that now Khrushchev will have to tell the truth, meaning there will be no more Communist propaganda and that the Iron Curtain will eventually crumble. The episode acknowledges the ideological tensions between the world’s two superpowers but then reassuringly dismisses the threat of Communism as nothing but a lie and the butt of the episode’s joke while endorsing the American entrepreneurial ethic. Still, one might be left uneasy with the implication that it will take nothing less than magic to win the Cold War.

Cold War fears loom over The Twilight Zone, the threat of the atomic bomb informing specific episodes as well as the show’s overall feeling of anxiety. J. Hoberman points out that the episode “The Midnight Sun” (3.10: November 17, 1961), about two women waiting to die as the Earth has left its orbit and is heading toward the sun, was broadcast on the same day that the US successfully launched its first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); in this context, Serling’s opening narration (“Even at midnight, it’s high noon—the hottest day in history”) takes on an immediate ominousness (51). “The Shelter,” an episode that, like “I Am the Night,” shows Serling’s writing at its most strident—“Rod in one of his messianic moods,” observed the episode’s director, Lamont Johnson (Zicree, 227)—was aired between the Bay of Pigs disaster in August and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October (Mortenson, 72). The story begins with a group of neighbors gathered to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Stockton (Larry Gates), a physician who has tended to their families over the years, even delivering some of their children. Good cheer exudes all around—until a radio message (the contemporaneous CONELRAD warning system is mentioned specifically) announces that radar has picked up some unidentified incoming objects that could be missiles. The group disperses as the families leave to prepare for the attack, but they all return shortly thereafter because the Stocktons are the only family on the block with the foresight to have built a fallout shelter. They all plead with Dr. Stockton to let them in, but he refuses because the shelter only has supplies and air sufficient for his own family. As the time ticks down until the missiles arrive, the other families become increasingly desperate and hysterical, attacking each other and in their frenzy breaking down the door of the shelter to get in, thus making it unusable for anyone. As they storm through the broken door, an announcement comes over the radio indicating that the mysterious objects have now been identified as satellites and that there is no danger. The neighbors then try to regain their civilized demeanor, but Dr. Stockton ascends the basement staircase so that, lecturing down to his embarrassed friends (and the audience), he delivers the episode’s ironic point: “We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.”

The episode perhaps most frequently discussed by critics for its politics is “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” another cautionary Cold War tale in which aliens conquer humankind by manipulating average Americans’ innate fear of the Other to the point that they destroy themselves. Maple Street at first seems like suburban bliss in another Anytown, USA: as the episode begins, men are washing cars and pruning bushes in their front yards, kids are playing baseball and buying ice cream. Suddenly something passes overhead accompanied by an electronic hum and flash of light. When the power on the street goes out and the neighbors gather, young Tommy (Jan Handzlik), his imagination spurred by the SF pulps he reads, suggests that aliens are invading and that in all the stories he’s read there are advance scouts hidden among humankind. The idea planted, people become increasingly suspicious of each other while the level-headed Steve (Claude Akins) tries to keep everyone calm; but the impulsive Charlie Farnsworth (Jack Weston) grabs a rifle and shoots at an approaching sound that turns out to be a neighbor, Pete Van Horn (Ben Erway), returning in the dark from the next street, killing him. Panic quickly overflows—the rate of cutting predictably increasing, the angles tilting to either side to suggest the gathering collective madness—as the lights in different houses and cars begin to flash on and off.

J. P. Telotte describes the change in the neighborhood “as if the normal world of Andy Hardy’s town had suddenly become a scene from a film noir” (12)—a most appropriate description given that Maple Street is actually the old set for Andy Hardy’s Midwestern town of Carvel. Serling’s writing for the episode was clearly influenced by Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which we also see an archetypal American town turned into a noirish nightmare when the guardian angel Clarence shows our hero George Bailey (James Stewart) what life would be like if he hadn’t existed. (It’s a Wonderful Life is invoked by a number of other Twilight Zone episodes including “A Passage for Trumpet” [1.32: May 20, 1960], “Mr. Bevis” [1.33: June 6, 1960], and “A Hundred Yards over the Rim.”) At the end of “Maple Street” there is a cut to an extreme long shot as we see the two aliens who have engineered the strange events looking down from a high vantage point on the street, where the neighbors have turned into a self-destructive mob. One alien explains to the other that humans are “their worst enemy” when frightened. “Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then, sit back and watch the pattern,” the alien concludes; it’s always the same because “the world is full of Maple Streets.”

Presnell and McGee are relatively charitable in their assessment of “Maple Street,” seeing it as nothing less than a “capsule 1950s American history lesson” (55) of Cold War anxieties. Rick Worland, though, views the episode as ideologically conflicted. For him, the problem is the twist ending, where it is revealed that the aliens are real, not just the paranoid imagination of the average folk of Maple Street. Therefore, he argues that the story initially shows a typically pleasant American community that is only a thin veneer hiding paranoia and hatred, and it seemingly condemns these attitudes but then “pulls back to re-establish ‘normality’ for the viewer as the Cold War status quo, the implacable enemy at our doorstep against whom we must unite before it’s too late” (106).

Ferris (we learn his name only at the end) wanders about the town of Oakwood, his panic growing as he tries to find other people and figure out what’s going on. The doors to all the shops on Main Street are open but no one is to be seen anywhere. Talking to himself, Ferris finally remembers that he is in the Air Force but little more. He begins to go mad, the blankly staring eye of an optometrist’s sign seeming to signal a godless or at least an indifferent world, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). With quick cuts the shots alternate between close-ups of Ferris and of blinking traffic lights, the blinking and rapid editing indicative of the man’s rising panic, the tilted angles expressing his loss of mental stability. In the end of “Where Is Everybody?” it is revealed that what we are seeing is actually Ferris’s nightmarish mental breakdown while being tested in extended isolation by the military in preparation for enduring the psychological demands that future space travel will involve.

In his nightmare, Ferris wonders “Did they drop the bomb?” The dialogue requires no exposition about which bomb he is referring to or what its dropping might mean, for the audience already knows full well. The space race was on: in the same month that “Where Is Everybody?” aired, the first ICBMs with nuclear warheads were deployed by the US military and the Russian Lunik 3 probe took the first pictures of the far side of the moon. With its uninhabited town, the episode taps into fantasies of nuclear apocalypse (in the “Oakwood” drugstore, all the paperbacks in the display rack are filled with the same book, The Last Man on Earth) exploited in such postwar science-fiction movies as Five (1951), Robot Monster (1953), Day the World Ended (1955) and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the latter released the same year as The Twilight Zone began with this episode.

Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn (1957), conspicuously announced on the marquee and on lobby posters at the “Oakwood” cinema, is perhaps a deliberate choice for the sake of contrast, for if Sirk’s film presents idealized images in ravishing Technicolor (however ironic critics subsequently may have found them to be),3 The Twilight Zone, although equally expressionistic in black and white with tight, sweaty close-ups of Ferris’s face, stands in stark visual opposition to it. (Surely some of Serling’s own experiences as a paratrooper in World War II, where he suffered a shrapnel wound and likely PTSD as well, informed his writing for this opening episode and for several others featuring combat-related situations.) Nevertheless, as Mortenson argues, “Where Is Everybody?” ultimately comes down fully in support of America’s space efforts. As Ferris is being carried out of the lab on a stretcher and is asked what happened to him, he says, understandably, that he was in “a place I don’t want to go again.” Still, the general in charge (James Gregory) insists that the experiment was a success, a small step for man but a giant step for mankind. Even Ferris, supine on his stretcher, despite his previous remark about not wanting to return, is quickly able to regain his senses before being placed in the ambulance, look skyward, and ask the moon to wait for him because, like General MacArthur, he’ll be back (“Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare, next time it’ll be for real”), after which the moon dissolves into the stars of the familiar Twilight Zone title graphic as the episode ends.

Telotte sees the series’ typical ending, as in “Maple Street,” in which the camera pulls away to a more distant vantage point (eventually, usually, back to the sky where the episode began) as articulating a sense of viewers “recoiling” from an uncomfortable world “to regain the distance at which they began their narrative experience” (Telotte, 14). He argues that this brings comfortable closure to otherwise disturbing material, but it may also be argued that it is precisely this “withdrawal” that allows viewers to consider with greater knowledge the follies and mistakes of the characters they have been watching—to, as it were, recollect in relative tranquility. Plantinga makes a similar argument regarding those “frame shifter” endings. This dynamic recalls Scholes’s argument, noted earlier, regarding speculative fiction, echoed by Darko Suvin’s famous understanding of science fiction as working by providing us with an experience of “cognitive estrangement.”

This effect is literalized in the end of “Maple Street” as we watch the aliens watching what they have wrought from a distance. In those final shots the panicked humans running madly in the street look like insects in a controlled experiment—not unlike the way the commander of the rescue ship describes Benteen’s isolated society in “On Thursday We Leave for Home.” But crucially, in “Maple Street,” when the camera pulls back, we see not only the frightened denizens of Maple Street as they destroy each other, but also, we observe the alien observers from behind. Thus, we see more than both the average people of Maple Street and even more than the alien invaders do. The viewer’s identification with the townspeople is ruptured even earlier: before Charlie shoots at the unknown intruder, a close-up shows the hammer in the approaching figure’s tool belt, revealing it to be Pete, who was shown doing carpentry at the beginning. Hence, we are positioned to judge Charlie’s actions as rash, dangerous, wrong. At the end, the first line of alien dialogue as the camera positions itself behind them is “Understand the procedure now?”—which might just as well be addressed to the episode’s more enlightened viewers now that they have witnessed the debacle unfolding on Main Street.

David Melbye notes that not all episodes of The Twilight Zone have twist endings, but “any Twilight Zone episode’s narrative resolution is less necessarily oriented around shock and surprise than correcting moral imbalances” (192). This moral emphasis is key to the show and might be described as a vague humanism characterized by lofty social ideals that individual behavior usually belied. Perhaps the worst sin for Serling is a disdain for other people, for not considering the common good, as manifest in the extreme by the likes of Oliver Crangle (Theodore Bikel) in “Four O’Clock” or the Chancellor (Fritz Weaver) in “The Obsolete Man.” We know that Franklin Gibbs (Everett Sloan) is gripped by “the fever” in the eponymous episode when he snaps at his wife (Vivi Janiss), “The devil with people. I’m not concerned with people.” At the same time, the state, for Serling, must respect and accommodate the needs of the individuals of which it is comprised. At the end of “The Obsolete Man,” written by Serling, when the chancellor of a future totalitarian society in which religion and books have been deemed “obsolete” and banned is himself judged obsolete and sentenced to death, Serling seems momentarily to step out of his wry persona and to speak from his heart when he asserts that “any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under ‘M’ for mankind—in the Twilight Zone.”

One political science professor has offered an extended exegesis subtitled “The Political Theory of Rod Serling,” arguing that Serling’s predominantly negative view of human nature derives from political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous account of the social world as one of “war of all against all” (Feldman). Thus, as Dr. Stockton observes at the end of “The Shelter,” his neighbors had become like “naked, wild animals” fighting for their own survival. The scene of the card game in “The Trade-Ins” (3.31: April 20, 1962) in which the gambler Farraday (Theo Marcuse) folds a winning hand and allows the desperate John Holt (Joseph Schildkraut), an obviously easy mark, to leave with his own money is so poignant precisely because it is an act of selfless kindness quite different from the way people usually behave on The Twilight Zone. Serling emphasizes the singular nature of Farraday’s generous gesture in his final remark that the episode is offered as “a reminder from all the sentimentalists in the Twilight Zone.”

In that final interview before his death, Serling described his relationship with producers as a Hobbesian one of “adversaries”: “When all the smoke clears and the ozone lifts, your enemy is the producer, that’s the guy you’re competing with, and you have to battle him, just as if you were an adversary” (Brevelle). Boxing, which figures in “The Big Tall Wish” and “Steel” (as well as providing the setting for Requiem for a Heavyweight), offers a fundamental Hobbesian metaphor of man against man. The episodes in which men in the desert turn on and kill each other (“I Shot an Arrow,” “The Rip Van Winkle Caper”) also are, like the famous Death Valley climax in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), elemental visualizations of this dark view of human nature. In “I Shot an Arrow,” the commander of the crashed ship, Col. Donlin (Edward Binns), tries—unsuccessfully—to maintain “protocol” and to operate “by the book,” but the inherent selfishness of men in the struggle to survive makes that impossible.

There is, certainly, an “individualist ideology that permeates the series” (Booker, 58). “On Thursday We Leave for Home” makes clear Serling’s preference for individualism over collectivism: “Now it’s time to be what God meant you to be . . . individuals,” the ship’s commander tells Benteen, who wants to maintain a group lifestyle for his fellow colonists after their return to Earth. But, at the same time, individualism needs constant containment and regulation because people (men, mostly) on The Twilight Zone tend to succumb to individual needs and drives, forgetting the common good. Hence, demagogues rear up regularly in the Zone, as in “The Obsolete Man,” “He’s Alive,” and “Four O’Clock.” In “The Little People” astronaut Peter Craig (Joe Maross) transforms, as he says, from “a slob with a slide rule to—a God” when he discovers a miniature society on an alien world that as a giant by comparison he can rule with absolute power.

How, then, to keep this will to power in check? In “The Man in the Bottle” (2.2: October 7, 1960) a modest shopkeeper, Arthur Castle (Luther Adler), discovers a genie (Joseph Ruskin) in one of his curios. Initially content in life, the prospect of having four (!) wishes soon sparks his egomania. When Castle wishes for power, he finds himself as Hitler in his Führerbunker before committing suicide. He gets the point and so uses his final wish to be himself again, learning from the experience to be more accepting of his place in life. The episode ends with him and his wife laughing, with everything back to the way it was (down to the crack in the shop display case that was repaired with the first wish), as in a traditional sitcom. “You take what you get, and you live with it,” as the jazz musician Joey Crown (Jack Klugman) observes in “A Passage for Trumpet.” Serling tells us explicitly at the end of “Once upon a Time” “that there is much wisdom” in the phrase ‘Stay in your own backyard.’ To which it might be added, ‘and if possible, assist others to stay in theirs.’

Whether the result of divine order, supernatural agency, alien intervention, or happenstance, the status quo is often reinstated on The Twilight Zone, the state of affairs literally returning to the way things were before. In “The Prime Mover” (2.21: March 24, 1961), for example, a cook in a dinner, Jimbo Cobb (Buddy Ebsen), possesses the power of telekinesis. His partner, Ace Larsen (Dane Clark), discovers his secret and takes the reluctant Jimbo to Las Vegas, where they go on a winning gambling spree using his mental ability to turn the dice in their favor. But because he regards using his power as cheating, hence unethical, Jimbo opts to forego the temptations of wealth and return to his dreary blue-collar job even as Ace is increasingly blinded by visions of wealth and its material benefits. Similarly, in the future envisioned in “The Trade-Ins” an elderly couple, John and Marie Holt (Alma Platt), look to avail themselves of a commercial service whereby they can transplant their minds into young, healthy bodies. They only have enough money for one of them to have the procedure, which John reluctantly agrees to do because he is seriously ill and in constant pain. Afterward, he revels in his new body’s physical abilities, but in the end the couple decides that the new age difference between them is too wide a gap, and John opts to return to his original body so that they may spend their remaining time together as they would naturally.

Jimbo Cobb and John Holt choose to return to their previous existences, but all those Twilight Zone characters with the moral flaws of greed, selfishness, and cynicism who try to get ahead dishonestly in the end receive, like George Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), their comeuppance. As Serling says at the end of “Sounds and Silences” of the pompous Roswell G. Flemington (John McGiver), a tyrannical armchair sea captain now hoisted on his own yardarm, “All Mr. Flemington is suffering from is a case of poetic justice.” At the end of “A Kind of a Stopwatch,” in which boorish loudmouth Patrick McNulty ends up in a world frozen in time with no one to talk to, Serling pronounces that “now he’s just been handed the bill.” Just as justice, even if it is sometimes particularly cruel (“That’s not fair!” cries Bemis correctly at the end of “Time Enough at Last”), grim (“Elegy”), or ironic (“Escape Clause”), the implication is that the universe eventually sets things aright. At the end of “Execution,” in which the nineteenth-century murderous cowboy is murdered in the present and his killer dies in the noose meant for him in the past, Serling observes that the story demonstrates that “justice can span years. Retribution is not subject to a calendar.” He quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the end of “The Last Flight” (1.18: February 5, 1960) to the effect that there is more to the universe than imagined by our philosophy; nevertheless, the order of things as designed by the divine watchmaker is very much like a familiar combination of the American legal system and standard institutional bureaucracy.

Meting out this divine justice consistently on The Twilight Zone is a regulated and finely tuned network with its own rules and regulations. In “One for the Angels” when we first see Mr. Death (Murray Hamilton) he is busily jotting information in a notepad, keeping his records in order. Pip (Sebastian Cabot), Rocky Valentine’s guide to “the other place” after he dies in “A Nice Place to Visit,” also keeps information on his assignee in a notepad. Later Valentine goes to check his personal file in the “Hall of Records,” which is a supernatural-looking stairway with rows of mundane filing cabinets on it. Mr. Death in “One for the Angels” is eager to get down to “business” because “we have to keep these things efficient” and keep to the “timetable.” Explaining to Bookman (Ed Wynne) that he should prepare for his “departure” that evening, Mr. Death provides details on the three main categories of appeals: hardship cases (surviving spouse or children), priority cases (the person is on the verge of an important discovery, for example), and “unfinished business of a major nature,” which Bookman invokes as a stalling tactic. Similarly, in “Escape Clause” the devil, Mr. Cadwallader (Thomas Gomez) explains that the titular escape clause is article 99 in his contract, which must be invoked for requesting “departure.” In “A Game of Pool” the best billiards player waits in limbo until being called to meet a challenge over a loudspeaker, implying a heavenly headquarters with electricians and dispatcher.

Toward the end of “Cavender Is Coming” the camera pans up from the hapless Agnes Grepp (Carol Burnett) to her guardian angel (Jesse White) through the very same painted star-filled sky that appears in the show’s opening to a heavenly office door marked “Third Celestial Division, Angel Placement.” In the show, most of the characters who encounter this bureaucracy from the beyond seek to finesse its rules but ultimately accept its determinations, even unto death, like Bookman in “One for the Angels.” At the end of that episode, as the old salesman now goes off willingly with Mr. Death, Bookman pauses to wonder where he’s going: “Up there?” he nervously asks. “You made it!” Mr. Death reassures this exceedingly nice fellow (and viewers as well) that he will be justly rewarded in the afterlife for his behavior in this one. Noël Carroll identifies what he calls “Tales of Dread” in The Twilight Zone, those episodes in which there seems to be a guiding force or intelligence in the universe, arguing that they are indicative of paranoid thinking and that they induce anxiety and dread because we fear retribution from beyond if we morally transgress in some way (31–33). But one might equally argue the opposite, that such a vision is comforting rather than unsettling because it mirrored postwar American society and implied a system continuous with it even in the afterlife.

Often, Serling’s closing comments reinforced this sense of an efficient celestial force policing the universe by referring to the Zone’s elaborate information archive: “You might check under ‘B’ for baseball in the Twilight Zone” (“The Mighty Casey”), “Look for it filed under ‘M’ for machines . . . in the Twilight Zone” (“A Thing about Machines” [2.4: October 28, 1960]), “A case to be filed under ‘M’ for mankind . . . in the Twilight Zone” (“The Obsolete Man”), and so on. At the end of “A Game of Pool” Serling acknowledges that there are “ground rules” even in the Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone thus provoked and reassured audiences at the same time, disturbing viewers with revelations of forces beyond human understanding but also reassuring them with their quotidian familiarity, a tangled and complex but usually fair bureaucracy duplicating that of postwar America. A show that challenged viewers to open themselves to new possibilities and alternatives to the way things are, it also depicted those alternatives in familiar ways that endorsed and naturalized the status quo. By “taming” the fantastic in this way, The Twilight Zone was able to present socially conscious drama without alienating “the lady in Dubuque”—precisely the “mass taste” Serling had thought possible to achieve.

Along with this tension between the fantastic and the familiar in The Twilight Zone is the political tension or paradox that informs its moral vision. A show that espoused liberal sentiments regarding democracy and individualism, The Twilight Zone, as already indicated, also viewed human nature as dangerous, driven largely by greed, self-interest, and a will to power. This thematic tension at the heart of the show places it squarely within the debates that have informed American culture and political thought from the nation’s beginning. The work of Thomas Hobbes was influential on the political thinking of the Founding Fathers. John Adams, quoting Machiavelli, wrote, for example, “That whoever would found a state and make proper laws for the government of it must presume that all men are bad by nature: that they will not fail to show that natural depravity of heart whenever they have a fair opportunity” (IV: 408). Political philosophers who followed Hobbes, even if they disagreed with his view of human nature as primally brutal and selfish, nonetheless conceded that there was a difference between the individual man as he would be in the hypothetical state of nature and as he actually existed in society and, moreover, that his “innate depravity” was encouraged by a democratic political system. As Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the most perceptive of Europeans to visit the nascent American republic, famously observed, “Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link” (II: 478). Ever since Hobbes, political thinkers espousing democratic principles have theorized how to bind those links for the good of both individuals and society at large. With The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling joined the ranks of such otherwise very different American artists as Walt Whitman, Frank Capra, and Frederick Wiseman, all of whom have sought in their work to find ways to integrate the individual within the great democratic project of the nation.

1 The six episodes were “The Lateness of the Hour,” “Static,” “The Whole Truth,” “Night of the Meek,” “Twenty-Two,” and “Long-Distance Call.”

2 One of Serling’s scripts for Playhouse 90, “The Velvet Alley,” which was broadcast in January the same year The Twilight Zone debuted, is a semiautobiographical drama about the seductiveness of Hollywood (“the velvet alley”) and a television writer (Art Carney) who gets his big break.

3 See, for example, Laura Mulvey and John Halliday, eds., Douglas Sirk (London: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972), and Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).