directed by Robert Stevens
written by Rod Serling
starring Gig Young
with Frank Overton
music by Bernard Herrmann

Friday, October 30, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

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Watch it on Netflix.

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This keeps going through long draft after draft because I keep lapsing into “explaining” instead of “saying.” And explaining is a spiral, at least when there’s nobody in the room with you.

Bullet points are more like me than paragraphs. Let me alt-0149 my way through this. I’m just going to post my original notes (embellishing when it strikes me), and then I can be done with it and go on to the next episode, finally.

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• Something’s always amusing to me about the way Serling says “superstition” in the intro.

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• This is a very lovely episode that doesn’t stick the landing. I suppose it fits exactly in the mold I talked about with the first episode: we go to a true but uneasy place, and then come up with a scheme to tame it. This time the defensive scheme is asserted with more force than usual. It’s surely because the script was more loaded than usual for Rod. If ever an episode deserved the trademark ambiguous ending, it was this one. Instead, Serling makes a definite claim… and it’s the conservative authoritarian one.

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• It’s a dream. Sloan’s rational mind, his social self, is 36, but his memories are unaged. In a dream, this divide plays out as a crisis. That’s my basic reading.

• From the beginning it’s clear that the eventual anti-memory moralizing will be wrong. Sloan transitions into mysterious time travel from an outwardly totally customary grown-up distanced nostalgia. He hasn’t come here quixotically to specifically “recapture” anything. The pleasure he takes in the ice cream, or in talking to little Ronnie Howard about marbles, is not based on regression. It’s just a grown-up’s pleasure, and depicted as such. The sermon at the end might as well be anti-vacation.

• When he leaves the shop, and the camera lingers behind, and then the counterman goes to knock for Mr. Wilson, we know something spookier than usual is going on — this is for the audience, not the protagonist, even though this is his journey through subjectivity. The show is of two minds about how universal this story is.

• It’s a dream, but I don’t think Serling consciously understands that, so his script exhibits the same tensions and confusions as the character. Which half to endorse? Which half is “me”? Rod didn’t have a handle on it either, so this is all through a glass darkly.

• To me, this “Homewood” is just Main Street USA, Nifty Nineties Mickey, pre-packaged conventional “nostalgia” that has nothing to do with my personal past. But to Sloan, these are (purportedly) real memories! Hard to keep that fairly in mind. Is such “nostalgia” a good metonym for nostalgia? I think just the opposite. Well-established fantasy pasts are for people who are not at peace with their real pasts. So it’s a matter of audience taste as to whether this is an episode about memories or about “memories.” I experience it as mostly the former, until the ending, which is about the latter.

• “Dr. Bradbury.” This shout-out seems not to have been enough to appease Ray, who reportedly objected to Serling’s many near-plagiarisms, this episode among them.

• “Are you from around here?” asks the girl in the park. “No,” he says! Even the audience knows that this is the wrong answer. A weird wrong answer, indicative of emotional strictures. Even the audience intuits that his besuited adult “self” is only here as a symptom of repression. The natural dream would be one where he’s just a kid again, no problem. But he’s gotten too fervent about maintaining his artificial adult self to let that happen, even while dreaming. Even in his twilight zone he’s still fighting the fight.

• But after giving the wrong answer, he does then correct himself: “Well, what I mean is, I used to be, a long time ago.” This is a step toward reconciliation. It’s just after this that he notices his external “kid self” nearby. Again, if he were at ease, there would be no external kid self; he would just be himself in the dream. The kid self is an artifact of his alienation.

• His difficulty grasping that he shouldn’t bang on his parents’ door and shout “you mustn’t be frightened!” is unfortunate! But his difficulty grasping what’s going on is, I guess, exactly the nature of his internal split. He doesn’t understand the obvious, i.e., why his parents don’t know him, because he’s panicking. The gap between his intuition and his social knowledge is a kind of distrustful block that has accumulated. (His resistance also makes the pacing work out, albeit awkwardly. God knows why Serling put in two scenes about his parents not recognizing him.)

• Rod: “His resolve is to put in a claim to the past.” That’s just the problem. If he had no resolve or claim, this would all be his, because it already is. Does Rod know that? He almost knows it, I think. He knows enough to be skeptical of attempts to “put in a claim.” But he thinks it’s because the claims will always be denied. In fact it’s because they’re so superfluous that they create the problem in the first place.

• Much of this episode is actually an artistically satisfying depiction of my experience in semi-lucid dreams when the rational mind notices the irrational mind’s doings and starts making stupid simple-minded plans: “I ought to make the most of this, while I can!”

• Shouting at his own innocence: “I won’t hurt you! I won’t hurt you! I just want to tell you something!” until he injures both halves of himself. “Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it!” A purportedly honorable message to deliver but actually futile, panicky, meaningless. These are good, apt images of the rational mind, the struggle for struggle’s sake.

• And then the moment when his panic needs to recognize itself as a kind of emotion after all, the moment through which psychological reconciliation will flow, beautifully portrayed as a dimming of the light and movement of the previously blissful external world. Suddenly he flows into what’s outside him, and perceives a strange, heavy procession. That’s a good, emotionally real catharsis; impressive stuff for prime-time TV.

• “I only wanted to tell you that this is the wonderful time for you. That’s all I wanted to tell you. God help me. That’s all I wanted to tell you.” His commitment to this purposeless “positive thought,” instead of to his own actual feelings, winding down like the merry-go-round, as the energy flows out of it and he recognizes himself.

• If we could stop the show here this is almost a masterpiece…

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• But then NO!!!! Deus ex machina where none was needed. A somber lecture from “dad,” who, now that the spell is broken, both recognizes Martin and immediately gets back on the horse of pushing him away from his own past. Done up with all the standard pomp of TV moral education, very obviously our “good hard wise true thought” for the night. This is all artifice from a writer who doesn’t understand what he’s playing at. What he’s giving us here is actually a recipe for being the kind of person who has this dream in the first place.

• Now comes a lot of contrived reframing of his motivations over the whole episode. “I had to come back and get on the merry-go-round…” That’s a lie, and we should know, because we just watched it!

• “You’ve been looking behind you, Martin.” I firmly reject this. He’s been refusing to look behind him for years, at great cost to himself, and now, finally, just took a short walk to sample the ice cream while his car was getting serviced. And sure enough, next thing you know, it’s time for a sermon from “dad” and the wistful, stoic resolve not to do this so much.

• I hardly need to devote a bullet point to explaining why I, personally, at 36 and at where I am in my life, might be accused of projecting this. But I’m not; it’s right there on the screen. Just watch it twice in a row and you’ll feel how thoroughly the end sells out the beginning.

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• Where do TV morals come from? Why are we all watching and getting something out of stories that end with lessons learned? Because we all like lectures? Apparently, in fact, we do.

As though a half-hour TV show could possibly be a way of being changed, perfectly in sync with the drama. Ha! “Lessons learned” are satisfying exactly because we’re not changed; we’re just cyclical beings. A lesson-story is appealing because it’s a performance of a pattern that we already experience daily, over and over — a thought-narrative that purports to have “growth” built into it, because we want to reward ourselves with that good feeling of “maturing.”

In this case: “Ah, memories, so faraway and painfully sweet. … But, you know, we think about memories too damn much, and what good does it do? From now on we’ll be grown up and look toward the future.” Repeat ad infinitum.

It’s commitment to this pattern that makes the memories grow so faraway; it’s what makes sweetness grow painful.

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• Funny that his rearrival in The Present Day at the end is into a 50s jukebox wonderland that to us is just as thoroughly conventional a phony nostalgia as the place he just returned from. He’s as Back to the Future from Back to the Future as we are to Back to the Future II, if you follow.

• Speaking of which: the time-travel loop by which he injures his own past leg and now carries it with him in the present is, as “confirmers” go, a pretty cool device. Even though, as I said, I completely reject the moral implications.

• The final sum-up is bizarre, as Serling doubles back on himself yet again and attempts to articulate the full scope of his untenable position, and in the process gets further and further from describing anything we actually saw. It’s frankly hard for me to believe that anybody watching wouldn’t feel what I feel, as this episode winds down: that it is very obviously packing itself away dishonestly.

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Vice President in Charge of Media.
Successful in most things, but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives:
trying to go home again.
And also, like all men, perhaps there’ll be an occasion — maybe a summer night some time —
when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope…
and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past…
And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish:
That a man might not have to become old…
never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth.
And he’ll smile then, too, because he’ll know that it is just an errant wish…
Some wisp of memory — not too important really.
Some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind…
That are a part… of The Twilight Zone.

Yeesh. Rod, I get who this is about, and it’s not me after all.

You didn’t have to smoke yourself to death at 50. You were allowed to go back to Binghamton if you wanted. You were certainly allowed to stop being Vice President in Charge of Media, if it stressed you out, and reportedly it did. (And god knows Gig Young didn’t have to go where he went.)

Let’s try to remember that ice cream sundaes are a valid alternative.

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• Okay, I’ll admit it. I do have one glimmer of hope for ambiguity here. The phrase “not too important really” seems like it’s crying out to be doubted — why else is it in there? So is it possible to read this as skeptical? Is the seeming decisive tone intentionally hollow? I don’t know if we can get all the way there. Your thoughts are appreciated.

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• This is our second original score by Bernard Herrmann and another one that he knocks out of the park (so to speak). Really beautiful music in his Vertigo mode, but even more than that, an incredibly sensitive reading of the material. That moment when the lights go down and the baroque chords start processing gives me dramatic chills.

I get the impression of Herrmann as having understood what was going on here better than Serling did. In fact I find that listening to the score by itself, I can experience the catharsis as the “correct” one. I imagine the episode all the way up until the father arrives at the merry-go-round… then I have other stuff happen. Stuff that suits the situation and isn’t a good hard wise true thought. You can imagine the kind of thing. Anyway the music supports it just fine.

• I’d tell you what I imagine happening, but it’s for each of us to script our own pattern.

directed by Mitchell Leisen
written by Rod Serling
starring Ida Lupino
with Martin Balsam and Jerome Cowan
music by Franz Waxman

Friday, October 23, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

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Watch it on Netflix.

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The first of two consecutive memory-phobic episodes. This one starts out condemning nostalgia but in the end switches to granting it an eerie transcendence; the next episode will sell us the exact reverse. The reason they’re able to coexist inside the same writer (and audience) is because nervous ambivalence is the only real thing being expressed. The specific narratives just reshuffle the same mixed deck into different orders.

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But let me try to do the math the right way forward this time. What do we, the audience, experience?

Well, we know that we’re in The Twilight Zone, so from the very beginning we get that Barbara’s obsessive personality is ominous. We know the playbook: when people obsess too much, reality eventually buckles at the seams. So something psychotic is going to happen to the fabric of her world — it’s not hard to guess what — and we dread it… but we also look forward to it; it’s going to be the thrilling payoff.

Nobody wants to have a psychotic break, because it’s so intensely alienating (“Where Is Everybody?”), but nonetheless we feel a nervous eagerness to experience one vicariously, safe from any social consequence. Whenever a movie launches into a crazy dream sequence, that’s when our senses really light up. So we’re all rooting for Barbara to go nuts enough that we get to see something fantastical (-but-unfortunate).

Our public morality is represented onscreen by Martin Balsam as her supposedly constructive rationalist friend (and admirer?) Danny. “You do this every day. Honey, that’s sick; that is really sick,” he tells her, just to be helpful. When she happily announces, “it was a carefree world, Danny, and I’m gonna make it that way again!” he grabs her by the arm in a fit of horror: “You can’t! It’s nostalgic, it’s nice, but it’s not true — it’s phony!”

Jeez, what is he so worked up about? After all it’s not his sanity that’s on the line. Or is it? The producer, too, feels somehow threatened, such that he’s compelled to shout at her angrily, despite having the upper hand in every way. And Sally the maid seems downright terrified long before anything supernatural happens.

I think it’s because they all sense that their realities are vulnerable to buckling, too, just by their proximity to her. Rationality is constructed socially, and Barbara is fiercely determined to change everything she touches to suit her ideal. The people around her realize that they need to defend against her will because it is genuinely potent! And so do we, the audience. Our fear of being considered delusional is what’s being triggered here, and what’s scary is not projecting ourselves on to her, but on to a friend who has to hold up against her mental contagion. “Oh god, if we ever dared give in to her agenda of nostalgia, we’d be doomed! Doomed to a life of ostracism from sane society!”

But! In the end, after she’s done a magical vanishing act, Danny is suddenly relieved of all such phobia, and maybe so are we. Now that we’re no longer under the threat of her social influence, our suppressed sympathy is free to come out for a sentimental airing. Ah, don’t we all want what she wanted, deep down? “To wishes, Barbie.”

Oh, sure, now you’ll admit it. Who will help me eat the bread?

Her final gesture is, appropriately, a serenely contemptuous goodbye kiss, to all us naysayers, all the uptight scaredy-cats who weren’t willing to go along for the ride and fess up to our inner feelings: that time is an illusion, and romance isn’t.

Even Rod, who at the beginning of the episode said rather smarmily that she had been “struck down by hit-and-run years,” now jumps on the bandwagon:

To the wishes that come true.
To the strange mystic strength of the human animal, who can take a wishful dream and give it a dimension of its own.
…
It can happen… in The Twilight Zone.

But as always, each viewer gets to choose for himself how to take it. Is this toast to the sanity-bending power of the human will sincere, or is it haunted house irony, a toast to goblins and demons? The show works either way — you can be afraid of either half. Or a little bit afraid of both.

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Psychological ambivalence here also takes the specific form of ambivalence about movies and their appeal. In its own goofy way, the episode enacts the standard Hollywood soul-search arc: “What are we doing wasting our time with these stupid phony stories? … Hey y’know, in their crazy way, movies aren’t phony at all, they get at what’s best about people.” We all know that tune.

The episode is also about our tortured feelings specifically about actors. Barbara’s “sick” inclination to give voice to her fantasies is, after all, the life force that gives all actors their talent, their skill, their value. They have something to offer because of their willingness to be the source of their own emotional truth. The public loves and condemns its stars with such fervor because they’re professional personifications of the parts of ourselves that we strive so hard, and so painfully, to suppress.

I feel bad for the “aging diva” archetype exactly because she’s treated like an archetype. Even the sacramental adoration of drag queens et al. is a way of denying such people their essential normality. They’re just people; their desires and fears are perfectly ordinary.

The scarf appearing on the floor at the end of the episode is a classic “tangible confirmation,” even though its being there is really no more magical than her appearance on the screen (in fact it’s far less magical, since of course her scarf is in her house). But we need it as confirmation, because we’ve built up a suspicious bias against anything associated with movies. Only when Danny sees the scarf and realizes that she hasn’t just gone into “a film” (egad! how ghoulish!) but has in fact gone bodily into another reality where everything is great, only then does he realize that this might actually be a kind of happy ending.

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Yeah, I know, the obvious thing to talk about with this episode is of course image vs. reality, celluloid dreams and the flickering light of the projector and all that. Since that’s the centerpiece. But it seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Film fantasy is a mere image; when she chooses her private fantasy over the social reality, she becomes mere image to everyone else… and yet, as the scarf reminds us, the distinction between image and reality is perhaps itself an illusion… etc.

As for my game of clocking the moment of turnaround, in this case I’m going to say it comes when Barbara bids Danny goodbye — the calm authority of her new demeanor is, in a sense, the twist. That puts us at just around 22 of 25 minutes, or 88/12.

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In talking about stories like this one, I always want to refer to “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap,” a very short tale by Lord Dunsany, but it’s not as well known as I want it to be. To me it feels like the general archetype of which other such stories are subvariants (or inversions). So there’s the link; everyone go read it so that I can invoke it next time it applies. It applies most of the time on The Twilight Zone.

(You know, I may already have linked to this story some years ago and so maybe you’ve already read it. I’ve posted a lot of stuff here; I don’t remember it all.)

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The dialogue in the old movie she’s watching at the very beginning elegantly hints at an emotional parallel between the sublimation of the inner self into cinematic nostalgia — the theme of the episode — with the Hays Code sublimation of sex into lines like: “I shall have a memory of you for my eyes, thoughts of you for my mind, and the touch of you for all of me.” All while serving the immediate function of evoking the bygone sounds of 1933 schlock. This bit of pastiche is, I think, a high point for Rod Serling’s dialogue writing thus far.

While I’m on the subject of the movie she’s watching: the episode is built around the painful absoluteness, the bitter undeniability, of the fact that a 40-something is, alas, objectively another kind of being entirely from a 20-something … and yet of course it cheerfully gives us the same 41-year-old Ida Lupino playing “young Barbara,” too, looking basically the same at both ages. I didn’t really detect any winking about this meta- irony, but given that the episode ends with Barbara vindicated, there’s certainly room to imagine it there.

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“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” is a clunky title, but at least it’s better than Serling’s working title, “Shmunset Shmoulevard.”

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Extra credit: compare and contrast this ending with the ending of The Shining.

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This one has our second original score, by golden-age great Franz Waxman, who like Ida Lupino and director Mitchell Leisen was an authentic recruit from the Hollywood era under discussion — and perhaps more to the point, had composed the score for the actual Sunset Boulevard. Lest there be any doubt remaining about Rod’s intentions!

I love the bitonal effects Waxman uses to spook up the climax, when Barbara makes her ghostly appearance. There’s moderately uneasy music earlier when she’s announcing her plans to wish herself into the past, but he really saves up the true Twilight Zone dizziness for the big moment, and it’s very effective. Just the opposite of Bernard Herrmann’s usual approach, which is to subtly lay the groundwork at the beginning so that whatever arrives later feels inevitable. Both ways can work.

directed by Allen Reisner
written by Rod Serling
starring Dan Duryea
with Martin Landau, Jeanne Cooper, and Malcolm Atterbury

Friday, October 16, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

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Watch it on Netflix.

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That last one annoyed me so I’ve pushed straight on to this one, which is much better.

This is another sentimental fable, but this time the sentiment is something like idealism, rather than kitschy resignation, so it’s much more palatable to me even if it’s just as contrived and backward.

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Fate is on hand, in person, but unlike Mr. Death, he’s not really a full-fledged denizen of the story’s world — he’s sort of visiting from outside the story to prod it along, standing by silently, mostly unseen, occasionally nodding slightly. His relationship to the characters isn’t particularly one of an authority figure or an external power with its own agenda — he’s more like an embodiment of the unconscious.

From Denton’s point of view, Henry J. Fate is a personification of the involuntary part of Denton’s own self. He is the mysterious determiner of aspects of Denton that are beyond his power to will. Denton used to have perfect aim, now he finds that he doesn’t and can’t do anything about it, but Henry J. Fate can restore it to him, if he chooses. When Denton goes to test his aim, he’s not choosing to have bad aim, it’s just happening to him. The same way that the magical good aim just happens to him.

This is why in real life we sometimes have the intuition of a hovering other, some mysterious being who guides things for or against us, standing by silently, mostly unseen, occasionally nodding slightly. This other is really just the part of ourselves that doesn’t fall within the feeling of “I.” Calling it the “subconscious” is a little misleading because it suggests that it’s submerged below the conscious. I think a better image is to think of the sense of self as a flashlight casting about in a dark room — the illuminated part is always going to be just a tiny fragment of what’s there. And the machinery in the room is going to keep running whether or not it’s in the light.

If you had to put a face to the imaginary fellow who seems to be slinking around that room just outside the flashlight’s beam, this particular Henry J. Fate seems like he could be part of a pretty solid, healthy psychology. He’s mildly paternal, mildly trickster, mildly eerie, and ultimately an agent for confidence and positive self-esteem. That’s exactly how’d I’d like to think of my subconscious!

Henry J. Fate is modeled as a classic placebo salesman, and I was almost certain that this was going to turn out to be a “magic feather” parable, where apparently external magic is gradually revealed to have been internal magic. That never came to pass, but it’s still the subtext. Henry J. Fate is only there to draw out what’s latent in the characters, not to impose anything.

(The internet has called my attention to the fact that Malcolm Atterbury is best known for his role as “the rural man who exclaims ‘That plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops!'” Well so he is, now that you mention it!)

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Denton begins as a standard self-exiled hero, though in this case exiled only into degradation. (Nothing is more degrading than singing unaccompanied.) We eventually learn that he has allowed himself to fall this far only because his incredible skills kept making him a magnet for angry people, whom he was then compelled to kill (we’ll return to this) until he was overcome with self-disgust.

The resident maternal hooker pleads with him on behalf of his own dignity but he’s completely lost touch with it. The only thing that restores him to a sense that he is a being worthy of a haircut is the involuntary reemergence of his suppressed self, in the form of Fate’s magic gun. Once he’s reminded of the feeling of agency, suddenly his ego returns to life, and the first thing it does is strike out at the bully, which for the moment we are expected to applaud.

But as soon as we’re back from commercial, his combative worldview has already thrust him back into a world of meaningless duels. You’re either a drunk who doesn’t count as a person, or you’re a full-fledged person, in which case you have to constantly defend yourself against other people and their issues. “Didn’t take any time at all. Just time enough for one shave.”

Usually a hero returns from exile in order to get righteous revenge now that he’s steeled himself with wisdom. But this is a smarter story than that; the world of people is uncomfortable for him because he’s part of it, because they’re all like him and he’s like them. His compulsion to take all comers, and shoot to kill, is exactly what he hates in other people. The eventual twist is, quite literally, that they’ve all got their fear and their magic potions.

So kindly Fate arranges for him to shoot one of these alter egos, into a mirror as it were, with impossibly perfect aim. What does he do? Of course he gives himself a hostility-ectomy. The only thing he ever really wanted to kill was all this damn killing. When he realizes that the perfect symmetry of this therapy-by-gunplay has cleansed him of guns for ever, he’s elated. And even young Troy McClure, who has been through less, seems pretty quickly to realize that this is something that he wanted, deep down.

It’s really a lovely fantasy image: if we all had supernaturally perfect aim, we’d only ever shoot the guns out of each other’s hands; we’d shoot our way straight to peace. All the chaos in the world comes from the shakes.

Realized this way, on TV, with a sprinkling of fairy dust, this comes off as a sweet, optimistic fantasy. But it’s worth noting that it is exactly this aspiration to an infinitesimally perfect double-negative, the micro-targeted elimination of error, that fuels all real-world hostility, which never pans out that way. It is in fact the hostile fantasy, to think of error as something which, with enough precision, can be cleanly blown away. It doesn’t actually lead anywhere good, to believe this. That’s what I’ve learned from my time in the wilderness. So I’m not sure what we can learn from this particular show of “idealism.”

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The use of the word “Doomsday” in the title seems worth noting, since it doesn’t particularly suit the scenario. I wonder if it’s a hint for us to consider the whole thing as a metaphor for nuclear brinksmanship: a lot of magic guns purported to protect the world from everyone else’s magic guns, in a reality where everybody’s got the shakes real bad and Henry J. Fate isn’t guiding anyone’s hand. If you point your missile directly at someone else’s missile, clearly you’re not going to get world peace. So is the whole thing sardonic?

I don’t think so. I think it’s a sincere attempt at a pleasant dream about being cleansed of hostility, by and for people who still instinctively believe in the power of their hostility to do good. Since it’s portrayed in terms of obviously-impossible magic, I don’t think it does anyone any harm. The NRA isn’t going to endorse this. But I don’t think pacifists should either.

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The acting in this one is strong all around, I thought, but in particular Martin Landau (age 31 — I guessed even younger) does a terrific bully. He has that fanatical defensive quality that real bullies have; all the cruelty is part of some delusional bid for validation he’s got pumping in his head all the time. He makes the first half of this thing completely compelling.

The twist plays out in the 22nd minute, or at about the 87% mark.

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No original score. Library music by Lucien Moraweck, some Herrmann music left over from another unproduced pilot, and a cue by Dimitri Tiomkin apparently composed for use on Rawhide. All the harmonica and zither solos are uncredited, but the tune is apparently a Russian folk song, so I wonder if that also comes by way of Tiomkin.

I find this stuff fascinating! I wish I could just listen to a radio station that only played TV library music of the 50s and 60s.

directed by Robert Parrish
written by Rod Serling
starring Ed Wynn
with Murray Hamilton

Friday, October 9, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

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Watch it on Netflix.

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This episode is overtly an “old-fashioned storytelling” episode, based on traditional tales: it’s a soupy blend of the “trickster vs. death” and “pure-of-heart vs. the devil” prototypes. It’s also a weak attempt at what I would call “the wry style,” as per James Thurber or John Collier, where deliberate clichés are propped up like paper dolls while the author smirks satirically. (You could also call it “the conspiratorial style.”)

Frankly it’s not a very rewarding episode. Both the wry and the folksy aspects feel affected and unconvincing, especially if you’ve ever encountered other stories in the same vein, which you certainly have. But as I said in an earlier post, the more unoriginal and mediocre something is, the more purely it conveys whatever deep prerational meanings are embedded in its tropes.

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Unfortunately the meanings here are pretty retrograde.

Basically: we’re the sweet little guy, the innocent, and Death is the rigid authority that we resist. It’s played as comic that Mr. Death appears as a petty bureaucrat, but it’s also supposed to make intuitive sense. The emotional self dreads coming up against brute rationalism in any form; facing mortality and facing an inflexible customer service representative are both forms of the same exasperating subjugation.

My personal philosophical position — you can expect to hear a lot about this! — is that all rationalism is social. That’s up to and including the “objective fact” of the inevitability of death: the authentic self, the Ed Wynn in all of us, says it will just have to find out about that for itself, thank you very much! But in practice, everyone has some limit to their sense of independent doubt, beyond which they accept the consensus.

When Death is depicted as a mere suit-wearing pencil pusher, it’s comedic because we doubt the authority of men in suits so much more freely than we doubt the authority of Death — even though from the point of view of the childlike Mr. Bookman within, they’re both equally just external impositions of a foreign will. Seeing the similarity through the difference, and vice versa, creates the humor. “Hey, maybe we don’t have to feel so mortal after all. What are we so afraid of? Murray Hamilton?” Comedy is about the joyful escape of the irrational from arbitrary rational straitjackets.

But the initial implication that this is going to be a satire at the expense of authoritarianism is a lie. The thrust of the episode ultimately isn’t comedic, it’s the opposite: the rationalist bureaucracy triumphs, which the audience accepts with wistful resignation as “ah well, not so bad after all.” We love humorless bureaucrats! We love Big Brother!

The plot is that Mr. Bookman tries to sneak through a loophole in the system, appealing for an indefinite stay of execution on the grounds of his unfulfilled dream of glory: a real dream, but an insincere appeal. He only mentions it as a gambit to wile his way out of his fate. However it subsequently unfolds that not only has he failed to game the system, but that in fact the system has secretly arranged it so that he gets to achieve his dreams. It’s seen through his insincerity, taught him an important lesson about selfishness (namely: if you’re selfish we’ll kill a little girl), and then, seeing him duly chastened, staged an opportunity for him to get the homely little glory he envisioned in his homely little heart. Now he’s really and truly fulfilled, and ready to die — a win-win!

The moral is: even your deepest sentimental fantasies fit comfortably into the system’s spreadsheet, because it’s a damn good system. Even humoring your attempt to rebel, to play the part of the trickster hero, is just another standard operation from the employee manual for Mr. Death, who luckily isn’t such a bad guy after all. Every spanking he gives you is for your own good, and every trick you think you play on him is just a charade for your benefit, which just goes to show how much he loves you.

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… That is what happens here, right? Mr. Death smiles knowingly to himself as Bookman launches into his pitch, because this is his plan, right? And then, despite making a show of being hypnotically in thrall to the stupid pitch, and of being horrified at having missed his appointment, in the end his sudden calm reveals that it’s all been a performance for Bookman’s benefit. Yes? Right?

Yeah, probably, maybe, but it’s definitely a muddier point than it needs to be. It certainly doesn’t look like Mr. Death is acting. Frankly it feels like genuine confusion on Serling’s part. I think he contained both a “the little guy wins” and a “the little guy loses” impulse, and he just put them both in there, one after the other. This is a deep psychological ambivalence, and one I’m sympathetic to, but it’s the show’s job to take us on a guided tour of that kind of ambivalence; this just feels like a symptom of it.

I particularly don’t understand what goes on at the moment of crisis, at the climax of the pitch. Bookman proposes himself as a manservant to Mr. Death, to which Mr. Death says, ambiguously, only that he’s “a persuasive man.” Then Bookman seems to be right on the point of saying that he’s selling HIS SOUL … when he is saved by the bell. Or is he? Has a sale gone through?

His dream was to make a really big “pitch,” not a sale, and afterward they both comment on the quality of the “pitch,” the function of which seems after all to have been solely as a distraction. So has Mr. Death bought anything, or not? If not, what did it matter whether Bookman put his soul on the line? He’s already been told in so many words that he can’t offer up his life to take the little girl’s place, so whatever his sacrifice is, it’s something else.

Is it supposed to be like the binding of Isaac, where he only gets what he wants because he shows himself ready to give up anything, even to the point of horror?

How is his “soul,” or his “freedom,” or whatever he’s about to say, different from his life, in this context?

I don’t know. I’m befuddled by it. I think it might just be mud.

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(Is it possible that the whole thing is a kind of parody of The Seventh Seal?)

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Basically the episode is about wondering how considerately we’ll be treated by Death/fate/the bank/mom & dad/the government/any authority, and the answer is: “exactly as considerately as you deserve.” He knows if you’ve been good or not so be good for goodness sake. If you’re good enough, you’ll get to go “up there.”

The melancholy at the end is the melancholy of a child who subconsciously agrees that he deserves his punishment.

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To me the most telling aspect of this script is that it doesn’t blink at all when it introduces the idea that the Bureau of Death actually has sentimental accommodations built in: that “hardship,” “priority,” or “unfinished business of a major nature” are officially recognized as grounds for granting a delay. This detail isn’t treated as surprising; the audience is expected to find this a totally natural conceit within the death-as-taxman trope. Which means that the outcome is a fait accompli. If we already intuit the brutal authority to be “y’know, not totally inflexible,” that means we are completely in thrall to it.

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Rod’s sign-off is bullshit:

Lewis J. Bookman. Age: sixty-ish. Occupation: Pitchman.
Formerly a fixture of the summer. Formerly a rather minor component to a hot July.
But throughout his life, a man beloved by the children, and therefore, a most important man.
Couldn’t happen, you say?
Probably not in most places.
But it did happen… in The Twilight Zone.

“Beloved by the children and therefore a most important man” is completely insincere. That’s not what the story has really been about and YOU KNOW IT, Rod.

That he anticipates (and projects) our dubiousness says it all. Last time he said that the story could well be ours. This time he says: “Probably not in most places.”

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I feel this as a cowardly sort of script, which starts playing defense from the moment Rod announces that it’s going to be about Death. My claim is that each episode dares something that discomfits us, and then eventually retreats from it; within that framework, this one is almost all retreat.

I had thought I’d say that the shadow/light ratio wasn’t applicable to this one because there’s no twist — everything that happens is telegraphed far in advance. But I guess there is a big reveal, and it happens in the second minute, when we are informed that the ominous black-suited stranger is Mr. Death and he looks directly at us. The rest is conservative authoritarian conventionality. So I’ll say this one has a twilight ratio of 7/93.

I’m here for the shadow; I think we all are. So this doesn’t give us a lot to work with.

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No original score; the music all comes from the CBS library. But the majority of it is still by Bernard Herrmann, from suites of “Western” and “Outer Space” cues that he wrote in 1957. The shock chord for Mr. Death comes from an unaired pilot he scored earlier in the year. The dinky “street scene” music at the beginning is by one Willis Schaefer, not Herrmann. I know all this because a complete cue breakdown of every single episode is available online.

The ones with stock scores aren’t usually quite as musically satisfying, for obvious reasons, but the music editors generally do an impressive job of cobbling together something that feels cohesive.

If this episode has any emotional impact at all, I think it’s entirely attributable to the piece of music used at the very end, Herrmann’s “Starlight.”

I tend to really enjoy listening to library music; just as it carefully leaves room for any possible dramatic action, it leaves room for my thoughts.