In the Zone

The Word of Rod

As many readers know, I am greatly indebted to Rod Serling's classic TV series The Twilight Zone, and not only for the chills the show has given me for most of my life. Much more than this, I should not have had my wonderful daughters had I not, soon after marrying Carol, viewed the 1980s episode "Monsters," in which Ralph Bellamy (remember him from the Wolf Man? And I think some other movies?) plays an aged vampire returning to a California town, his birthplace, tired of wandering the earth and willing at last to throw in the blood-stained towel. He knows, once he stays in one place for a decent length of time, a dormant gene will awaken in his human neighbors, turning them into apish vampire-killers who will not even remember they have dispatched him, which they eventually do. But n the meantime he makes the acquaintance of an adolescent lad, a neighbor, who is a nerdish monster and sci-fi fan. An opening scene depicts this boy, Toby, trading monster movie trivia with his young dad. They share a collection of Castle of Frankenstein and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines. It didn't take much of this for me to repent of an unwillingness, long declared, to have any kids. I had thought it would drive me mad. But now I realized there were great possibilities. I said to myself, "Y'know, it might be pretty neat to have a little pal to share all this stuff with!" So the very next moment I called out to Carol, "Hey Carol, let's have kids!" And it has worked out great! Thanks, Rod! Thanks, Carol!

These days Carol and I always look forward to thee semi-annual Twilight Zone Marathons on the otherwise pretty near worthless SyFy Channel. When you watch a mess of episodes back to back, you start picking up certain themes. Many of the episodes are morality plays, teaching a lesson about life, using the supernatural as a tool–you know, just like the Bible does. The Christmas episode, Night of the Meek, defines the spirit of Christmas as the selfless joy of giving by showing how the greatest gift of all would be to become Santa Claus himself, giving gifts every year. A piece of adoptionist Christology, as I see it. The repercussions of narcissism are on display in the great Burgess Meredith episode "Time Enough at Last," where Henry Bemis, though viciously persecuted by a harridan wife and a tyrannical boss and a whole mundane, cloddish populace, finds a post-nuclear wasteland pretty palatable after all, once he sees it is as full of books as it is empty of human companionship. And then he breaks his glasses. Somewhere in there, I think, is a statement about the futility of having a world unto oneself, shunning human contact (even if one has ample reason for shunning it). The episode with the annoying bigmouth McNulty getting a stop watch that freezes time shares this theme: his conceited, blowhard ways isolate him, and the final breaking of the watch, leaving him in a world of mannequins, is but a parable of his life before he got the watch.

Another Meredith classic is "Printer's Devil" (I think it's called) in which a disguised Satan comes to the aid of a failing small town newspaper, increasing sales by literally creating the news: he sets the type for a disaster headline, and people die, buildings burn, cars crash. This is a parable of journalistic ethics to rival Paddy Chaeyefsky's Network.

There are plenty of "deal with the devil" episodes, and the point of them is, of course, "Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it." And it might not be what you thought because you couldn't have anticipated certain ramifications. Fate doesn't deceive you, much less the devil (Miss Devlin, Mr. Cadwalader, etc.). No, you were just foolish to take the plunge, for sheer self-advancement, into a future you could not control.

The many space ship crash episodes share the motif of Lena Wertmüller's Swept Away: human nature stands revealed when people are ripped out of the context of civilization that has hitherto defined their options and their boundaries. All bets are off. If a Martian were to come to earth and see what we do, what would he think?" In these episodes, we get to be the Martians and take a look at ourselves. As Roddy McDowell laments as he looks through his zoo cage bars on an alien world, "You were right, Markesan! People are the same everywhere." The same jerks. (Perhaps the greatest Twilight Zone of them all, Rod Serling's movie Planet of the Apes, underscores this bitter lesson. The cynical misanthrope Taylor discovers to his everlasting chagrin not that people are no better than apes, but that apes are no better than people.)

The one where Ross Martin, Jack Klugman, and some other guy land on a planet and discover a doppelganger of their own ship, crashed, and their own seeming corpses ("supernumerary corpses," in Clark Ashton Smith's parlance) is a classic statement about denial, specifically Ernst Becker's "denial of death."

One of my absolute favorites, "The Howling Man," has a well-meaning intellectual scoff at the claims of Central European monks to have captured Satan himself. The wise fool sets him free, unable to see clear signs that he really is the devil. Reality just can't be that weird! But his rationality makes him naïve, and he unleashes terrible evil into the world. Is there a devil? You bet! It is the smug arrogance of people who believe everyone else is as enlightened as they are and simply cannot believe steps must be taken to confine an evil they don't believe in.

Twilight Zone loves the theme of "remembrance of things past," in which someone longs for the good old days and in the process discovers they were only good in their time, which is past. The most drastic case would be "Deathshead Revisited" in which a Dachau commandant returns to the rusting, rotting compound for a nostalgia pilgrimage but finds the ghosts of the past are there waiting for him. (This one seems a bit naïve to me. I only wish the past would catch up with the wicked, but there seems to be no Rod Serling in charge of the universe to make sure it happens.) When Gig Young, with hours to kill while his sports car is repaired, wanders into his old hometown (transparently named "Homewood"), he learns that the past must remain the past, but that the good things he pines for may have survived along with him if he will only take the time to look beyond the rat race. A very similar episode is "Willoughby," in which a harried business man with a thuggish boss and a cold bitch of a social-climbing wife dreams of escaping into a simpler time and place, the quaint nineteenth-century train stop called Willoughby. Stepping off the (moving!) train as he sleepwalks, he finds solace in death. Here I detect a parallel to Denis de Rougement's classic book Love in the Western World which develops the theme that when we yearn for a life better than this mundane one with its Sisyphean obligations, we are really dreaming of death, the only actual alternative to life.

Many Twilight Zone episodes have no particular moral lesson. They are instead attempts to achieve what H.P. Lovecraft said he was trying to achieve in his stories: inducing in the reader (or viewer) the momentary illusion of a suspension of the laws of time and space which gallingly bind and blind us. Indeed, I believe this is the central theme and goal of The Twilight Zone. What if you could go back into your past, or meet alien races? What if you woke up in a world that has become completely alien? The speculation, the day dream, the nightmare comes true! And you experience it vicariously. To me, that is enough. That is plenty edifying. I don't need the moral lessons, though I am glad enough to have them. They are wise. But the premise and goal of the show are to sweep the reader into this realm of wonder. It is not merely a teaching vehicle.

The Todorov Zone

I said that when the show does teach us something it uses the supernatural the same way the Bible does, to highlight a too-familiar or else less than obvious truth by using ultra-vivid colors. Now I want to expand on this for a moment. Let me suggest that none of this would work, or work as well, if the reader/viewer were somehow unaware of the fictitious nature of the whole business. Lovecraft (I can never stray far from him, can I?) was wise when he pointed out how it is the rationalist, the naturalist, the materialist who is the real audience for fantastic fiction, for no one else will be shocked at the manifestation of the supernatural. It should not exist! Yet there it is! The supernaturalist reader (usually the religious believer) would not be nearly as flabbergasted, since even a demonic manifestation would ultimately tend to confirm his beliefs about the world. For the atheist, the naturalist, it is his worldview, not just his world, that is daunted by the appearance of the devil or the vampire or Cthulhu.

The great Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov wrote a terrific book about this, called The Fantastic. I would prefer different nomenclature, but here goes. Todorov posited three sorts of tales dealing with the supernatural. He calls "the Marvellous" those fictions in which the supernatural is taken for granted as part and parcel of the narrative universe. Nobody in Tolkien's Middle Earth is surprised that magic works, that elves, dwarves, and ogres are real. Just part of the furniture. So these stories never aim to surprise the reader with the fact that they really exist. The supernatural has become the natural in stories of the Marvellous.

But then there are tales of "the Uncanny." These are fictions like the adventures of Doc Savage, or the old Weird Menace pulps, or the stupid Scoobie Doo cartoons (I still cannot abide watching a single one): there first appears to be something supernatural afoot, but it is at length revealed as a hoax. The naturalistic mundane is confirmed and reinforced. Whew! Here the supernatural defaults to the mundane.

Third are stories of "the Fantastic" in which we are left wondering if the supernatural exists and may have been manifested, though we can never be sure. Our hair stands up at the possibility. And we are thus left with a lingering tingling spine once the story is done. Sure, a naturalistic explanation may be possible, but one cannot help suspecting it is just a whistling in the dark. A sense of wonder depends on having to wonder, on never knowing. Because if, as in a ghost story, we finally find out that, yeah, there is a supernatural reality, the thing falls flat (at least ghost stories tend to, unless you're in it for the carefully conjured atmosphere); the air goes out of the tire. The Uncanny collapses into the Marvellous. There is no more unearthly shiver. No, like a fantasy gamer calculating "sanity points," or Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you learn to take it all for granted and to "deal with it" as if you were a police detective stalking a murderer. A formidable threat, sure, but no numinous chill.

The Trick

Your vulnerability to being spooked in a tale of the Fantastic is a prime case of what Coleridge called "the temporary willing suspension of disbelief." It's all in the imagination, that twilight zone where you can try on or try out alternative realities to see what perspective they might add to your mundane existence. But the literalist religious believer is permanently stuck in a mire of the Marvellous. He or she dwells in a world of Trinitarian gods, angels, resurrected saints and saviors, demons and miracles. Again, for the believer, the supernatural has become the natural!  You believe in all these things, but life goes on without real evidence of them, and so the beliefs guarantee nothing beyond the schema of the mundane, and the Technicolor fades. There is no more numinous chill even to angels and gods, any more that there is to the government or the military or the labor unions. I believe we can maintain the sacredness, the numinous awe of the sacred, by not believing it is factual. Only by entertaining these counter-realities in the twilight zone of the fantastic imagination can we do it justice.

Tolkien was once chided by a blue-nosed reporter who asked him why he wrote "escapist" fiction. He answered that he did not know why it should be required of a prisoner that he never think of anything but his cell! But for the supernaturalist believer, the wide and golden universe of the Fantastic has shrunk down to the proportions of a cell. If that describes you, I urge you to venture an escape.

So says Zarathustra.