Elizabeth Allen and her mannequin double in “The After Hours,” 1960

The Twilight Zone has dwelt in the public imagination, since its cancellation in 1964, as a synecdoche for the kind of neat-twist ending exemplified by “To Serve Man” (it’s a cookbook), “The After Hours” (surprise, you’re a mannequin), and “The Eye of the Beholder” (everyone has a pig-face but you). It’s probably impossible to feel the original impact of each show-stopping revelation, as the twist ending has long since been institutionalized, clichéd, and abused in everything from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects to Twilight Zone-style anthology series like Black Mirror.Rewatching these episodes with the benefit of Steven Jay Rubin’s new 429-page book, The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia, (a bathroom book if ever I saw one), the punchlines are actually the least of the show’s enduring hold over the imagination; rather its creator Rod Serling’s rejoinders to the prevalent anti-Communist panic that gripped the decade: stories of witch-hunting paranoia tend to end badly for everyone, as in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which the population of a town turns on each other in a panic to ferret out the alien among them, or in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” which relocates the premise to a diner in which the passengers of a bus are temporarily stranded and subject to interrogation by a pair of state troopers.

Leah Waggner and Barry Atwater in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street ,” 1960

The show’s most prevalent themes are probably best distilled as “you are not what you took yourself to be,” “you are not where you thought you were,” and “beneath the façade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of monsters, clones, and robots.” Serling had served as a paratrooper in the Philippines in 1945 and returned with PTSD; he and his eventual audience were indeed caught between the familiar past and an unknown future.

[Read the full story here, at The New York Review of Books]

They stood dazed in a no-longer-recognizable world, flooded with strange new technologies, vastly expansionist corporate or federal jurisdictions, and once-unfathomable ideologies. The culture was shifting from New Deal egalitarianism to the exclusionary persecution and vigilantism of McCarthyism, the “southern strategy” of Goldwater and Nixon, and the Cold War-era emphasis on mandatory civilian conformity, reinforced across the board in schools and the media. In “The Obsolete Man,” a totalitarian court tries a crusty, salt-of-the-earth librarian (played by frequent Twilight Zone star Burgess Meredith, blacklisted since the 1950s, who breaks his glasses in “Time Enough At Last” and plays the titular milquetoast in “Mr. Dingle, the Strong”), who has outlived his bookish medium; but his obsolescence is something every US veteran would have recognized given the gulf between the country they defended and the one that had so recently taken root and was beginning to resemble, in its insistence on purity and abeyance to social norms, the fascist states they had fought against in the war. From Serling’s opening narration:

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. 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 advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human 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.

The show’s subversive credentials —buoyed by semi-satirical “soft” science fiction writers like Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, and Ray Bradbury—is one of the secret threads running through Rubin’s Encyclopedia, which logs each episode’s opening monologue, premise, and cast along with behind-the-scenes production notes.

Absurdly comprehensive, you start to pick up on the eerie synergy between the show and its personnel, who often come to bad ends or survive by uncanny close-calls. A particularly savage case is that of Gig Young, who played the advertising executive trapped in a bucolic small town nightmare in “Walking Distance,” and who in real life murdered his wife before turning the gun on himself in 1978. Or Cliff Robertson, the ventriloquist in 1962’s “The Dummy,” whose original flight to Hollywood … (read more)

Source: The New York Review of Books