twilight

For my birthday my mother bought me two books: Volumes One and Two of a short collection entitled Richard Matheson's The Twilight Zone Scripts. I felt it was probably the best gift I received for my birthday this year, which is saying a lot because overall this year's proceedings went well.

I always forget how much I love The Twilight Zone. I loved it as a kid and I still love it as an adult. It has a timeless quality, a classic tableau of iconography and imagery attached to its fame and legacy.

A little known fact: Rod Serling, as well as other TZ writers like Charles Beaumont and the aforementioned Matheson, was a huge inspiration on my writing. Rod Serling was an excellent wordsmith whose imagination was rivaled only by those he handpicked to write on his show, like Beaumont and Matheson. His public image (dapper attire, pinched voice, cigarette in hand) overshadows his talent as one of the few Golden Age of Television "teleplaywrights" that ever became prominent.

What is a "teleplaywright", you may be asking yourself? It is exactly what it sounds like: a playwright whose works were written specifically for television. The word "teleplay" is still in use, only nowadays the people who create these teleplays are merely referred to as writers. But in the '50s Rod Serling elevated the art of the teleplay to such a level that he could accurately be labeled a teleplaywright.

Times were much, much different back then: Television was a brand new frontier, and the potential for TV to offer audiences more than just mindless programming was still there. Can you believe during those years, when Serling was cutting his teeth on shows like CBS' Playhouse 90, that once upon a time plays of a theatrical caliber were being broadcast on live television?

How far we have fallen as a race of humans that we cannot conceive of anything like that happening today. Watching a play on TV? Sounds boring, especially to anyone under the age of 40. Plus, with all the fucking commercials blaring at us from our TiVo-powered HDTV sets, who could even enjoy a play being shown on the air anyway? A play is far too intimate for the narrow confines of today's prime-time TV mentality.

If Serling had a drawback, it was his tendency to polemicize. He could get too wordy with his dialogue, and had a tendency to hit people over the head with his messages, whether they were cultural, social or political. Indeed, even his best teleplays for TZ are hopelessly dated and peppered with references to McCarthyism and Castro... not that those points of reference mar the beauty of his words or the potency of his finest creation, a show that lasted for five seasons, won many awards, showcased dozens of talented actors and writers, and has endured throughout the ages thanks to its loyal fan base, of which I am a proud member.


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We all have our favorites, don't we?

The episode that scared the living hell out of you as a youngster, the one that made you laugh, the one you didn't understand fully until you came of age, or the one that mesmerized you because of its surreal set design and lighting...

Yes, we all have our favorites.

Mine is "Eye Of The Beholder": "No change! No change at all!"

A show like TZ is so famous and recognizable that all I have to do is quote one line from the episode and you know which one I'm talking about.

How about "To Serve Man"? "It's a cookbook!"

And of course, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" starring pre-Star Trek William Shatner: "There's a man out there!"

Then there's the lesser known favorites of mine, the most outstanding in my mind being "The Obsolete Man", a terrific political fable that condemned totalitarianism and fascism with a moral authority that I wish to God still existed in this day and age, when we need it most.

To quote from Serling's introduction to that episode:

"This is not a new world-- it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."

Does that ring a bell? Almost sounds like he's talking about our current political climate, doesn't it?

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.



I loved "The Obsolete Man" when I first saw it because it was very Kafka-esque, evoking a claustrophobic vision of a future far more frightening than pig-nosed doctors or gremlins on the wing. Whenever I have the extreme pleasure of watching this episode again, I am moved not only by the gravity of the performances (Fritz Weaver as The Chancellor and Burgess Meredith, better known as the hapless bookworm from the classic TZ episode "Time Enough At Last", playing The Obsolete Man) but also the eloquence of the dialogue. It was written as a teleplay but could easily be performed by two actors on a bare stage anywhere in the free-thinking world.

Ultimately, this episode only revolves around the dynamic between Weaver's cruel autocrat and Meredith's humane librarian, and the episode's resolution remains a strong and searing rebuke of the nihilism that poisons the minds of so many people living in the world today. Unlike other episodes, where the O. Henry-style twist knocks everyone off their feet in the third act, the reversal of fortunes in "The Obsolete Man" hammer home one of the few political statements that Serling ever made that is more relevant today than it was when he first made them.



When The Chancellor realizes that he has been rendered "obsolete" by the very panel he was once a part of, his denials fall upon callous, indifferent ears. As he meets his fate, Serling steps in and delivers the final word:

"The late Chancellor was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. 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."

Where are people like Rod Serling now when we really, really need them?




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I just found out today, while doing some pre-blog research, that Rod Serling suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his life following his tour of duty in the military near the end of WWII.

In other words, Rod Serling lived in his own Twilight Zone.

So did Richard Matheson, for that matter. As evidenced by the two volumes my parents bought me for my birthday, Matheson (in his own words) was an imaginative weirdo, always looking for the strangest angle on everyday things we all take for granted. What would happen if you looked out the window of an airplane and saw a man on the wing? What if a WWI flying ace traveled through time and landed at a modern-day Air Force base? How would you feel if one day you were alone in your office at work and suddenly you heard a man yell out "Cut!" and you turned around and realized that you were right in the middle of a movie set?

Matheson was the creative genius of the three main writers. If Serling was the The Twilight Zone's superego and Charles Beaumont its tortured id, then Matheson was the confident ego, an extremely visceral storyteller with a gift for finding the most far-out concept and making it seem plausible.

And speaking of Beaumont, let's not forget about the dark star of this sci-fi fantasy triumvirate. Beaumont was easily the most fucked-up of the three main writers whose scripts provided the basic structure for the series. Raised by an abusive mother who punished him in bizarre ways such as killing his pets and forcing him to dress up like a girl, Beaumont was a twisted talent whose contributions to the show were populated by world-weary, desperate characters who had already gone to the brink and back, sometimes on some chimerical quest to try and make things right again.

More often than not, Beaumont's characters wanted to die, although sometimes (as in the case of Kevin McCarthy in "Long Live Walter Jameson") they wanted to cheat death as well. Either way, man's mortality was the main focus of Beaumont's best TZ teleplays.

Beaumont not only lived in The Twilight Zone with Serling and Matheson, but he wanted to escape, perhaps more than the others did. When he died in 1967 at the age of 38, due to complications brought on by either Alzheimer's Disease or a continuation of the meningitis he suffered as a young boy, perhaps he finally made that escape.

All this confirms for me that the maxim about writing what you know is not only true, but applies to even the unlikeliest authors in regards to their work. One might be tempted to ask how a science fiction or fantasy writer could possibly write about what he or she knows when what they are writing about is not even real sometimes, but it is plain to see that the personality of a writer automatically injects itself into his work whether he knows it or not. Therefore, even if a writer is inventing imaginary worlds or creating characters that could never exist realistically, it is still a part of them because it sprang from their minds and from their hearts.

Maybe that's why I like The Twilight Zone so much: because I live in The Twilight Zone as well, but only I live on a different block and my rent is much cheaper.

And now, as an added bonus: The final episode that ever aired during the original run of The Twilight Zone, which in actuality was a French short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrrence At Owl Creek Bridge"...