Below is the lecture script for a lecture from my series 'The World of Pop Culture With Thomas Carruthers'... The article was also published previously on; Left Brain Media
“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fear and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... The Twilight Zone”
On October 2, 1959, Rod Serling spoke these timeless words and changed the television landscape forever. Known frequently by those in the industry and out of it as the “Angry Young Man” of Hollywood; playwright, screenwriter, author, narrator, actor and producer – Rod Serling may very well have been the greatest writer of his generation.
Serling’s greatest achievement of course was that of The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone never really lost its touch to powerfully deliver episodes filled with horror, science, always suspense, sometimes great fear and sometimes great humour. The show truly did stand aside from its contemporaries in regards to pure quality. The relatively simple half hour program (one hour in its fourth season) would take us into the world of The Twilight Zone, a place that inhabits the darkest stories known to man. Stories were written largely by three of the greatest writers of the time, in any medium; Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and the creator and narrator himself, Rod Serling. These three would write 127 of the 156 episodes of the show’s five season run, with Serling penning 92, albeit sometimes adapting others short stories. The series was a true smash with critics, however never found its footing with general viewers in its time. By the end of its run, the show only had moderate ratings and was twice cancelled. In 1964, Serling decided he would not attempt to oppose the show’s third and ultimately final cancellation. In their article What The Twilight Zone reveals about Today’s Prestige TV, Colin Marshall in 2022 described Serling as exactly what he was, an auteur. “The auteur of The Twilight Zone was Rod Serling, whose onscreen persona – dark suit, lowered cigarette, introductory words delivered from one side of his month – remains so oft-parodied as to be more recognizable than the content of the show itself”. I would like, if I may to elaborate one key point that I think makes all this legacy that bit more important. One can’t really emphasise to what extent TV was quite the disposable medium at the time. Sure, some shows went into syndication, but those earliest episodes of Twilight Zone were being made with the full care, craft and brilliance that they were in the possible knowledge that they would have no second life at all. When I watch my limited edition Blu-rays in pristine high definition of the show it’s hard to recreate in my head the context of watching the show on a blurry, shoddy small TV knowing that I may never see these episodes ever again. Rod Serling was born in Syracuse, New York to a Jewish family. Esther and Samuel Lawrence Serling. Samuel Serling built for his children a stage for their basement, where a young Rod Serling would often be found mounting his plays, sometimes with neighbourhood children, sometimes simply by himself. Even in his earliest years Serling was a wordsmith and performer. One particular two hour trip from Binghamton to Syracuse, his family remained wholly silent for the whole journey, why? As a test to see if Rod would ever notice. He passed their test and talked non-stop the whole journey. Serling enlisted in the U.S army just after his High school graduation, along with his brother Robert. He knew that would be fighting against the Japanese, which disappointed him in a way as for him as a young Jewish man he had a hope to help in some way to fight Hitler. Serling was eventually transferred to the 511th’s demolition platoon, known as “The Dead Squad” for its intensely high casualty rate.
 |
| Credit |
Two war episodes that stand out from Twilight Zone in particular for me are The Purple Testament (Episode 19 of the 1st season), and A Quality of Mercy (Episode 15 of the 3rd season). Not only do they both take their names from Shakespeare plays, but also they both do what the show did best, highlight the horrors and truths of a matter, through a twisted supernatural angle. Testament works on many levels; as a ghost story in war-time, as a profound comment on the fear of the death, but also as the closet thing we got to a written piece from Serling about his experience within the second world war, which no doubted affected him as profoundly as it affected every other service man. This episode directed by Richard L. Bare features William Reynolds as a U.S army lieutenant with the haunting ability to see a glowing white light upon the faces of the men in his platoon who will die next. Two words are spoken later in the episode; “War stinks”, which it of course does, but Serling offers a more haunting commentary throughout the episode, with the ability of Reynolds not just being that of a cheap supernatural gimmick, but the albatross of a man already close to breaking. From the opening and closing narration from Serling, these concepts are cemented for the audience. “These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear—yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.” Then from the closing, Serling reiterates. “From William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, a small excerpt. The line reads, 'He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.' And for Lieutenant William Fitzgerald, A Company, First Platoon, the testament is closed. Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone”. In actuality the quote is from Richard the 2nd, not third. Dean Stockwell, the star of A Quality of Mercy was actually set to star in The Purple Testament, linking the episodes once more. A Quality of Mercy mirrors Serling’s war experience further, setting itself in the Philippine islands where Serling spent his time as a paratrooper. The episode concerns an American soldier dropping his binoculars, only to pick them back up to find he is now a Japanese man on the other side of the fight. Like many of the later episodes of the show, the metaphor isn’t exactly subtle, but the performances and writing do make the conceit grounded for its running time, despite its undoubtedly problematic nature with its use of yellow-face. The episode concludes with Serling quoting Shakespeare once more. 'The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.' Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, but applicable to any moment in time, to any group of soldiery, to any nation on the face of the Earth—or, as in this case, to the Twilight Zone”. Another not so subtle Serling penned episode was that of The Shelter (Episode 3 from Season 3), a show rushed into production during the Berlin crisis of 1961 – an episode in which a group of amicable friends grow savage as they attempt to make their way into the nuclear shelter of a doctor friend of theirs. Serling ends the episode in a terribly dry manner by stating first in an unintentional rhyme “no moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact”, before then immediately stating a moral and message, “for civilisation to survive, the human race has to remain civilised”. On the nose, but certainly to the point.
 |
| Credit |
A memory that stuck with Serling all his life was that of the freak death of another Jewish Private during his military service, Martin Levy. Levy was delivering a comedic monologue for his fellow troops, when a food crate was dropped from an above plane, decapitating him instantly. Serling led the funeral himself and placed a Star of David upon his grave. This constant haunting from his war years perhaps undoubtedly effected most everything he wrote, even in the most seemingly light-hearted of episodes, glimpses of death and the afterlife frequently creep in. Private Rod Serling during his service was awarded the purple heart, the bronze star and the Philippine Liberation medal. These awards were no consolation for the nightmares and PTSD flashbacks that plagued me, like so many men, for the rest of his life. Serling commented once that he “was bitter about everything at a loose ends when I got out of the service, I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest”. With the money from his disability payments and GI bill’s educational benefits, Serling enrolled in the P.E program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, before eventually changing his major in to literature, earning him in the end a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950. His writing continued, as well as directing and acting, mainly in radio programs. It was here in college that he would meet Carol Kramer, a fellow student who would become his wife, after her initial resistance to date him changed. This resistance was due his reputation on campus as being quite the Ladies man. They married in 1948 and went on to have two daughters Jodi and Anne. In his earliest years as a writer Serling was rejected for a litany of reasons as broad as “heavy competition”, “not what our audience prefers to listen to” and “this script lacks professional quality”. Carol Serling in a Los Angeles times interview from 1990 commented on her husband’s timing when getting into the world of writing; “I think Rod would have been one of the first to say he hit the new industry, television, at exactly the right time… It was a very propitious time to be graduating from school and getting ready to find a profession”. Serling commented once in his full-time free lance days that “writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it, I succumbed to it”.
 |
| Credit |
Serling’s first major successes as a writer were with two feature length play’s for television. Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, both earning rave reviews from critics and major popularity with audiences. Jack Gould of The New York Times as a matter of fact called Patterns, the story of a hierarchical change in a corporate business between a veteran and a young up-start, “one of the high-points in the TV medium’s evolution”. The world of television that Serling made his name in was one, not unlike today, where advertisers and sponsors ran the whole thing more or less. The biggest difference between then and today was the level of influence that these integral sponsors could have on the writing and actual production of the scripts. These ranged from the most small and seemingly inane changes such as in Heavyweight where the line “Gotta match?” was removed due a sponsor being that of Ronson Lighters, to larger and more societally focussed changes. In 1956 the initial storyline of Serling’s teleplay Noon on Doomsday concerned the lynching of a Jewish stockbroker, influenced greatly by the real events and violent racism that led to the lynching murder of Emmett Till. Following a radio interview where Serling cited these Till based influences changes were requested and made. By the time the studio were threw noting the piece it had become the tale of the murder of a completely unknown foreigner, with no religion or race attributed and much of the grit of the text removed too. Talking to Mike Wallace Serling said “I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want to have to battle sponsors and agencies. I don’t want to push for something that I want and have to settle for second best. I don’t want to compromise all the time, which in essence is what a television writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes”. Even in his final interview Serling was commenting on censorship, in particular with words such as ‘hell’ and ‘damn’. Serling stated in 1975 that “it’s going to reach a point where you’re going to do a travelogue on Holland and you’ll say ‘well, here we have Rottergosh and Amsterdarn!’”Colin Marshall wrote of another Serling censorship tale regarding a senate floor drama in which all references to actual political parties and issues were requested to be removed. Marshall quotes Serling commenting “In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and people the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive”. In so many words Serling was in effect pitching Twilight Zone. Serling submitted The Time Element to CBS, intending it to be a pilot for his new weekly show, The Twilight Zone. Element was an hour long sci-fi time travel piece focussed around Pearl Harbour. The show was such an immense success as a production on the Desilu Playhouse that CBS commissioned Twilight Zone and on October 2, 1959 the first episode, Where is Everybody premiered to immediate rave critical reviews.
 |
| Credit |
Despite its immense acclaim and legacy status in the world of television, when The Twilight Zone was in its initial run, it’s quite fair to say that the audiences just weren’t there. Nowadays we can list the achievements; with episodes like To Serve Man (Episode 24 of Season3) and It’s a Good Life (Episode 8 of Season 3) being ranked at 11 and 31 in TV Guide’s 100 greatest episodes of all time, amongst so many others awards of note. The acclaims and endless awards and recognitions are indeed just that, endless, but back then, many saw it as simply another anthology show churning out a new tale a week, almost blissfully ignoring the craft and talent setting it distinctly aside from the other shows of the time. There was critical acclaim at the time, however just not the audiences. For instance Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote at the time “Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I actually look forward to seeing”. With Daily Variety cutting more to the chase stating it is “the best that has ever been accomplished in half hour filmed television”. Even from the first series Serling was creating indelible and timeless classic episodes of his show, whether it be with The After Hours (Episode 34 of Season 1), with a woman finding herself in an abandoned non-existent top floor of a department store, only to find the horrid truth has something to do with the mannequins. Or with The Monsters are Due on Maple Street (Episode 22 of Season 1), with a suburban street falling into chaos following the possibility of alien life corrupting the town, of course they find the truth to be that man is the greatest enemy of all. Or of course with Burgess Meredith in his first of four appearances in Time Enough At Last, (Episode 8 of Season 1), the story of a sight-troubled veracious reader who finds himself in the aftermath of nuclear disaster as the only person in the world, on the brink of suicide when he finds a library, finally giving him all the time in the world to read all he’d ever want. Only for his glasses to break.
 |
| Credit |
Even in its first season Serling won a then unprecedented fourth Emmy award for dramatic writing, a producers guild award for Serling’s creative partner Buck Houghton and a Director’s Guild of America Award for John Brahm. Over its run the list of guest stars is in many ways wholly incomparable. Charles Bronson, Carol Burnett, Robert Duvall, Peter Falk, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Ron Howard, Jack Klugman, Cloris Leachman, Julie Newmar, Art Carney, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, Jack Warden, Dean Stockwell, George Takei, Burt Reynolds and Robert Redford. To quite literally only name a few. Mathew Weiner, creator and head-writer on Mad Men, described Twilight Zone as “the most cutting edge, socially relevant, subversive show ever”. When presenting two of his favourite episodes of all time for the Austin Film Festival, It’s a Good Life (Epsiode 8 of Season 3) and A Stop At Willoughby (Episode 30 of Season 1), Weiner commented on the differences between a fantastical show like Serling’s and the other more quote-un-quote realistic TV fare of the time, “No one thought Leave it to beaver was a real family, people thought it was hilarious”. Whereas the realism instated into the science fiction and fantasy of Serling’s show ended up creating more truth than the most ‘realistic’ fare of the time ever did. For every Twilight Zone fan there is their favourite episode, I am in the very fortuitous and common position of sharing my favourite episode of all time with none other than Serling himself. Walking Distance (Episode 5 of Season 1) follows Martin Sloan. Martin finds himself around 20 years in the past, walking into his hometown as if nothing has ever changed. Nobody recognises him naturally and as Sloan grows to realise the truth of his current situation he becomes obsessed with taking advantage of it and relaying to his younger self all that he has always wished he could have the chance to say. Gig Young as Martin Sloan is playing 36 here, but was actually 46 in real life. I have always wondered why Serling didn’t simply change the number, for I’ve always thought that having Sloan be older would enrich the pathos of the piece further. However I think that Serling was more clearly using Young and Sloan as a conduit for himself, who would have been 35 at the time of airing, a few months off his own 36th birthday on Christmas day of 1959.
 |
| Credit |
Whereas it is with most episodes of the show that the twist is the final chord, I find that in some of the best episodes the twist comes around five minutes before the end and we do spend some time after, remaining in it, instead of cutting straight to Serling’s final narration. Eye of the Beholder (Episode 6 of Season 2) remains after the bandages are revealed for instance. Walking Distance is another prime example, allowing us to then move into a scene between Martin and his father and a return to the present. Serling’s inspiration for the episode was his own home town of Binghamton, New York. The episode was written during a stretch of his life where his workloads were extensive and he was knocking out scripts for the show, along with other television scripts, aswell as writing for novels, and so for one to correlate Martin Sloan’s weariness to Serling would not be too inappropriate. It was around this time in his script process that Serling would dictate the scripts into a tape recorder by his pool, before a secretary would transcribe them and he would then make notes and additions based on those pages. And although the town of Homewood where the film is set is wholly fictitious, all of the other locations that are referred to are real places from Serling’s home state of New York. The park from the episode is in fact directly inspired by Recreation Park in Binghamton, which has a similar Carousel and bandstand. Censorship of ideas was something that plagued Serling an immense amount prior to Twilight Zone and you can see in many cases his earliest rejected ideas influencing his work when he had more creative freedom. An idea submitted by Serling for a weekly radio show with a plot regarding the ghosts of a young boy and young girl killed in the second World War, looking through train windows and commenting on everyday human life as they moved country to country. In perhaps the earliest example of major censorship in Serling’s career, the story was adapted almost entirely into the child-friendly drama that was produced from 1950-1951 for Adventure Express, as instead now the story of a girl and boy who travel by train with their uncle, each week with a new town as the focus. Long gone were the elements of ghoulish deceased child war victims. The ghosts of war were ever-present in Twilight Zone. In the episode The Passerby (Episode 4 of Season 3) Serling locates us in the ruins of a plantation as a sergeant and a southern belle watch as ghostly figures from the Civil War pass by her ruined house. In his opening narration Serling describes “This road is the afterwards of the Civil War. It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomatox. It's littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams”. One of the more haunting and horror based episodes that Serling ever wrote, whilst being simultaneously imbued with the spirit of a nation in-between wars lamenting and contemplating the wars that they have ventured before and will venture soon after. The episode was in actuality first aired one hundred years after the beginning of the American Civil war that offers it’s bleak and horrific landscape as it’s setting for this tale of the afterlife and ghosts walking the plain. Serling’s final reveal of the final passerby, that of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, could be met with laughter or comments of absurdity, however the power of Serling’s writing is that such a moment which could be perceived as ridiculous is filled with as much pathos and sadness as any of the other moments in this beautifully elegiac episode. One needn’t state the obvious that the concept of war dead is timeless, but the episode was adapted and remade for the 2002 revival of the show, now named Homecoming and focussing on the Iraq war.
 |
| Credit |
However the ghosts of
war are never more present on the show than in arguably one of the show’s most
poignant episodes Deathshead Revisited
(Episode 9 of Season 3). Deaths-head Revisited is
a powerful piece on the holocaust from a Jewish writer, Serling, exploring the
plague of intolerance and murder that will haunt us a species until the end of
the time. On its base level this is an exceptional two hander episode between
the ghost of an executed Jew, played extraordinarily well by Joseph
Schildkraut, and Oscar Beregi Jr, who is frighteningly gleeful in the beginning
of the story and torn apart excruciatingly by the pains of an entire nation by
the end, as a Nazi who returns to Dachau to reminisce only the be haunted. Serling
here is demonstrating an ungodly talent and aptitude for exploring the darkest
of themes with the most precise and thoughtful of touches. The episode ends
with a doctor character commenting on the ruins of Dachau, “Why does it still
stand? Why do we keep it standing?” Answering his own question and concluding
his work, Serling answers the doctor.
“There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain
standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because
they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason,
their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And 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 to remember, not only
in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.”
This article containing the script of my lecture will continue next week.
- Thomas Carruthers
0 Comments