Don’t Worry, It’s All in Your Head
When one remembers that Rod Serling got his big broadcast break from a show about a country doctor, Dr. Christian, it should not be too great of a surprise to learn that medicine would play a role in The Twilight Zone. It was mental, as opposed to physical, sickness that fascinated him, however, an interest that he first broached in what was originally intended to be The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, “The Time Element.” (See chapter eight.)
On several other occasions, however, psychological illness raised its glass to viewers of The Twilight Zone, and not always in a manner that could be considered complimentary to the profession.
No field of medicine, after all, is more misunderstood than the treatment of the mind, and while it is a well-documented fact that many so-called supernatural events of the past can be explained away in psychological terms, the opposite could be equally true.
“The Thirty-Fathom Grave” (First broadcast: January 10, 1963)
One of the first episodes to be prepared in readiness for season four’s hour-long format, even before it had been confirmed, “The Thirty Fathom Grave” was a Rod Serling teleplay inspired at least partially by a near-calamitous accident aboard the U.S. submarine Thresher in November 1961. The craft was still undergoing sea trials when its generator broke down and its nuclear reactor went critical.
There were no casualties, the vessel was easily evacuated, and the damage was repaired. Had the accident happened at sea, however, during active service, the scenario could have been very different, and the resultant difficulties lay at the heart of the possibility that Serling’s story explored. (In fact, Thresher would ultimately be lost, in April 1963, in 8,400 feet of water. None of her 129 strong crew survived).
One hundred miles off the coast of Guadalcanal, a U.S. naval destroyer on a routine patrol has picked up mysterious soundings from what appears to be a vessel on the seabed. The sound of banging, as though someone were striking a hammer against metal, has perplexed everybody, and a diver is about to be sent down to investigate.
Thirty fathoms, or about 180 feet down, the diver McClure comes across a U.S. submarine partially buried in the sand, but identifiable by the number on her hull. It is a casualty of conflict, sunk in 1942 during the Pacific War, which means its crew would be long, long dead by now.
So who is that hammering on the inside of the hull, in answer to McClure’s initial curious banging? And why, up on the surface, aboard the destroyer, is Chief Bell convinced that the submarine is filled with ghosts, calling him to join them?
Possibly because he believes that he should already be down there with him. Even as McClure returns to the surface carrying a set of dog tags that bear Bell’s name, the chief is telling his own story—how he was the sole survivor of this same submarine, and how he has spent the intervening two decades suffering the agonies of what modern psychology would call “survivor syndrome”—a surprisingly common mental condition arising when a person believes himself to have done wrong by living through a traumatic event where others were not so fortunate.
Now, returning to the scene of the disaster, he sees his opportunity to put an end to his suffering. Or perhaps he is simply drawn, unwillingly, to do so. With one final scream, he plunges into the ocean and down into the depths, to his death. His body is never found. But when the submarine is opened and its dead crew examined, McClure at least was not surprised to learn that one of them still clutched a hammer in his skeletal hand. A hammer with which he might have beaten on the hull of the submarine.
The decommissioned USS Edson, now a museum in 2015, kind host of the episode “The Thirty-Fathom Grace.”
ehrlif/Shutterstock.com
Much of the episode was shot aboard the U.S.S. Edson (DD-946), under Commander M. J. Carpenter. A Forrest Sherman-class destroyer of the U.S. Navy, the Edson was built by Bath Iron Works in Maine and launched, appropriately enough, almost five years to the day before this episode was screened—on January 4, 1958.
Destined for a decade-long career in the waters off Vietnam, up to and including the evacuations of Saigon and Phnom Penh, the Edson was decommissioned in 1988 and is now a museum ship at Bay City, Michigan. (Among the souvenirs and treasures still to be seen on board is a silver punchbowl presented to the ship by the crew of The Twilight Zone, as a thank-you.)
In 1963, however, it was very much a working craft, which brought the U.S. Navy into the episode’s production, both from a technical point of view (checking facts and details in the script) but also ensuring that there were no scenes that might somehow plunge the service itself into any kind of hot water.
This included several scenes involving the skeletal remains of the doomed submarine’s crew—a point that was made not solely for reasons of taste, but also because so many official naval war graves are themselves under water, and it was felt recreating such a site would be disrespectful to both the real dead and their relatives. There would be no drowned sailors abroad in the final episode; and sadly, again, little else to commend the one-hour format to the critics.
“The yarn was so thin,” growled Variety, “that the hour had to be heavily padded with inconsequential naval routine. There was less progression to the drama than repetition of incidents until the climatic suggestion that the banging might not have been made by men more than twenty years dead. The nervous breakdown of the mate was the pretext for some hokey psychologizing that piled artificiality onto incredibility.”
“What’s in the Box” (First broadcast: March 13, 1964)
Martin M. Goldsmith authored this portrait of cab driver Joe Britt and his nagging wife Phyllis, whose life together has essentially boiled down to a relationship based on mutual abuse. They fight nightly, and all the more so when the television breaks down. But the repairman who sparks it back to life has apparently installed a hidden extra, visible only to Joe.
Instead of the scheduled programming, he can see only his fights with Phyllis, past and future—including one terrible finale, in which a battle ends with him pushing her from the window, to her death.
His doctor diagnoses nothing more than stress, but Phyllis is at her wits’ end. She packs to leave, only for her husband to confront her—and set in motion the fateful events that will indeed end in her lurid death plunge.
“Sounds and Silences” (First broadcast: April 3, 1964)
Rod Serling may or may not have been plagued by noisy neighbors at different times in his life, but there can be few people watching The Twilight Zone who have not, at some point, been made aware of just how miserable life can become if the people upstairs, downstairs, next door or across the street believe that their lives are so important that they need to be lived out at maximum volume.
Roswell G. Flemington is one such man, a former naval officer who now owns a model ship company, and who loves nothing so much as listening to his collection of tape-recorded battleships at a volume that might make even battleships wince.
His wife can stand it no longer. When he ignores, or maybe simply doesn’t hear, her insistence that he choose between his amplifier and her, she leaves him—at the same time as Roswell notices something very strange.
His own hearing has become so remarkably acute that even the slightest sound threatens to deafen him. It’s nerves, of course—strangely (but not at all inaccurately), doctors in The Twilight Zone seemed to blame everything on nerves, or stress or the like; in the same way that modern physicians turn to “syndromes” that can corral up any number of mysterious symptoms, without actually explaining, or knowing, what they might be symptoms of. Irritable bowel syndrome is not a disease. It is a bucket.
Mind over matter! Roswell applies that most elementary form of psychiatry to himself, but with results he never dreamed possible.
Once, he was tormented by the deafening echo of even the slightest sound. Now he hears nothing at all. It’s a state that logic might well insist is the natural deafness that he deserves after spending so many years listening to everything at full volume. But further tests insist that his hearing is in full working order. It is mind over matter once again, and until Roswell learns to reestablish the balance—well, there’s a comfortable bed in a sanatorium with his name on a chart beside it.