This IS your father's TWILIGHT ZONE: Your favorite Episode - Page 2

Jed M wrote (post #30):


"The Whole Truth", first aired January 20, 1961, written by Rod Serling, and directed by James Sheldon, it was one of the six second-season episodes that were shot on tape, rather than film, that season, so the show could finish out the season on budget.

Jack Briggs wrote (post #29):


Yes, but the difference is that Data knows of given human concepts, even if he doesn't understand those concepts. He's heard of "love", whether or not he personally knows what it is. The Martian in our TZ episode (presumably) has the entire base vocabulary at his disposal, yet is missing, not an abstract and culture-sensitive concept (such as "love")---although he may be missing that, too, we don't find out---, but a totally essential and concrete one on which turns species survival itself (which is what I meant by "basic obligatory human concepts"). The word is, literally, not in his vocabulary.



You're probably right on the former, however, I think on the latter, we go separate ways. In any event, that's one that should never have been produced, in my opinion. It's a major embarrassment for the series.

(post #25):


Sorry, they're a little too "quaint" for my tastes. Nobody could reasonably expect "state-of-the-art" special effects on a show like that, but what we get here is just weird art, distorted lenses, funny camera angles, and smoke (a.k.a., "smoke and mirrors"). I've seen good "articifial" and bad "artificial", and this is bad. Not for a moment do I, a member of the viewing audience, believe they are anywhere but in a studio. For the same reason, I wouldn't want to go see a "science-fiction" stage play.


Well, here again we part. I don't really get all the tension you mention. Let's face it: in a 1960's-era television drama, what were the chances that the producers would leave a 5- or 6-year-old little girl stranded forever in a spooky place? To me it's like a Star Trek plot in that you, the audience member, know the protagonists are going to get out of whatever "peril" they're in, it's just a matter of how and how soon.

The other problem I have with the episode is, as I say above, the depiction of the nature of the fifth(?) dimension. If the humans' senses are impaired there, why not also the dog's? The dialog hints at problems seeing there, but how would light, sound waves, odor molecules, etc.---in short, all of the physical "cues" needed to stimulate and enable animals' (including humans') senses act in five-dimensional space? Would the perceptions of living beings be distorted by the extra dimensions to the point of totally disorienting or incapacitating them, or not? And, if so, for how long?

So, since I don't get a sense of any real danger to the protagonists---it'd be different if there were something in there chasing them (that would make it a substantially different story, of course)---nor of the real physical weirdness of their new surroundings, I can't get all that excited about their being trapped there. For all one knows, if they were trapped there long enough, their senses might adjust and they might find edible food and live out the rest of their lives there, discontent but reasonably well off.

It's an "okay" episode with a stillborn realization, as far as I'm concerned.

Finally, I'd like to put forward a candidate that will probably appear on no one's "favorites" list or anyone's list of great TZ:

"Come Wander with Me" (#154)

Criticized in Marc Zicree's Twilight Zone Companion by production insiders, including both the producer and the director (one Richard Donner, of Superman fame), as being "too soft", it's an episode forgotten by many fans of the program.

Instead of just dismissing it as "fluff", I look at it the way I look at the legendary, long inaccessible film, The Wicker Man, which, despite its label as "horror film", I have found to be not the least bit scary. Like that film, "Come Wander with Me" is, for all intents and purposes, a serious "musical". Wicker Man takes some nice music and fills the scenes with it in its tale of pagan religious belief. "Come Wander", on the other hand, takes a single piece of haunting music with weirdly delivered, disconcerting lyrics and, with variations on a theme, goes on for most of the 20-some minutes of the story. (The DVD "Easter egg" lets you listen to the music in isolation.)

This episode's all about direction, photography, props, and music, not really about the story. One either likes it for those things, or one doesn't like it at all.


Plot gist: Floyd Burney, the "Rock-A-Billy Kid" (with such hit songs as "Your Tears Ain't Enough", "My Honey Tree", and "Don't Hang On" to his credit) comes to a backwoods community in search of a hit folk song. He doesn't care how he gets it, either. He meets local girl Mary Rachel and does he ever find more than what he bargains for!

The central conceit: The song "Come Wander with Me" is the story "Come Wander with Me", and the story "Come Wander with Me" is the song "Come Wander with Me". The lyrics of Mary Rachel's song recapitulate in "real time", or they predict, the happenings in the story, even as they are sung.


characterizations:

The dramatis personae are Floyd Burney, Mary Rachel, Billy Rayford, and the Old Man.

(1) Floyd Burney, the "Wandering Man", is a little too facilely obnoxious, pig-headed, and clueless from beginning till end. He's almost the stereotype of the big-city, carpet-bagging, up-North, know-it-all seeker and exploiter, seen first of all in his disrespect for the locals, but foremost in his naked and unabashed venality:

Mary Rachel tells Floyd the song she sings "belongs to somebody else". To his concrete offers of money, she says, "It can't be bought. Not that way." Floyd (with a smug sneer and a condescending tone of voice) retorts, "Honey, anything can be bought. It's a buyer's market with a pricetag on everything. All you gotta know is just how to find the tag."

And he shows that he's willing to snooker her with promises of escape, of material things, and, of course, of "love".

Mary Rachel: "And you'd love only me?"
Floyd Burney: "You, Mary Rachel. Only you."

Her professions of eternal love are met with overt expressions on his part of his prospects for commercial success: "Yes, sir, I'm 'on' really run with this one."

(2) Mary Rachel:

Asked to narrate what the song means to her, Mary Rachel declares: "It's the story of my love. I love you. I've always loved you", which goes to show that "Mary Rachel" actually has no real character, and is defined only by blind love for the "Wandering Man".

Simply put, the song belongs to somebody else. The girl likewise. Burney tries to take the former for his own commercial purposes, but can only it get it through expropriating the latter as well. Hence, the conflict of the story.

The other two characters share a non-personality, in that they do little more than stare and mouth words mechanically, as if doing so only because they're supposed to do so.

(3) The old man (portrayed by Hank Patterson, impersonator of Mr. Ziffel (pre-Green Acres), Arnold's pa), who owns the shop to which Floyd Burney has been directed, stares blankly at him and merely repeats that he has nothing for Burney, and nothing anyone would want. (In point of fact, his is quite an unrealistic shop, located in, as Burney puts it, "Sticksville", and loaded with all manner of musical instruments and gadgets. Who would be the consumer base for such an establishment in such a locale, one wonders.)

(4) Billy Rayford:

Floyd Burney kills the youngest Rayford brother, Billy, to whom Mary Rachel is promised ("bespoke") (presumably in marriage), when the latter threatens him with a rifle for trying to "spirit her away" to Norfolk. Key to the scene is that the brother talks mechanically, almost in rote, and never seems to look directly at Burney through his blinkless eyes.

direction, photography, and cinematography:

[I am not a connoisseur of the technical aspects of film, so I'm not really the one to talk about this proficiently. I have mushed the three categories together, though they most surely shouldn't be, simply because I do not know properly where one aspect of filmmaking ends and the other(s) begin(s).]

Mr. Donner speaks in interviews about how difficult it was to shoot a story where essentially the two main characters lie or sit around in one site listening to or playing music the whole time.

Presumably to compensate for the fact that, for a large portion of the story, the characters aren't moving anywhere, it is left to the camera to create a sense of motion and dramatic dynamism in the episode. Hence, the camera pans and zooms in and out from overhead and through a lot of (fake) vegetation to reach or leave the characters, which has the effect of not only conferring to the audience a sense of motion, but also of giving them a sort of a bug's-eye view of the characters.

Other "tricks" in direction/camera work, which are criticized by Zicree (unjustifiably, in my opinion), are (1) the recurrent move to Mary Rachel's alter ego dressed in widow's weeds and (2) the pan to Floyd Burney's gravestone, which dubs him the "Wandering Man".

Why doesn't Burney see these things, if the audience can? Well, he's not supposed to! He's not in control of his own destiny! That's the whole point! (See below.)

The shooting of the end scene is where mastery of direction and photography makes itself manifest:

As Burney stumbles his way to the rear of the establishment, the player pianos, mechanical chimes, and other musical instruments start up in a deafening, cacophonous symphony that expresses the inner tension and panic fear building inside of the character.

The remaining Rayford brothers, whose hounds can be heard nearing, are never shown, only the shadows of three men with rifles as they approach and close in on Burney in the store. Finally, at the back of the store, Burney is backed into a corner crouching on the floor. The camera zooms in on his distressed and sweaty face. And, as the brothers come ever closer, the camera zooms further in until their shadows cover his form which goes fuzzy and the photographic image becomes a complete blur. Then is heard the blast of a single powerful, loud rifle shot and we are transported with a fade-in to the scene of Burney's gravestone, set off in fog and filtered sunlight in a small woodland clearing, where the theme song of the story plays softly behind Rod Serling's closing narrative.

How's that for salvaging a whole lot from "nothing"?


props/scenery: Unlike in, for example, "Little Girl Lost", where the artificial always looks and feels artificial, here the artificial settings probably enhance the look and feel, and therefore the mood, of the story. Use of studio sets with fake gray overcast skies and fog effects and the play of the gray scales with the (mostly artificial?) sunlight are excellent in promoting and supporting the lugubrious mood of the piece. The fake forest mixes well with the few real outdoor shots that the story begins with.


music: Unlike in a normal piece of narrative film, the music not only makes the episode, it is the episode in this instance, and everything else must service it. Of course, one has to hear this melody for oneself to truly appreciate it, but the lyrics basically are:


The loveliest rendition of the song occurs in the interlude where the two "lovers" listen to and record the story and the song, while the camera transports the viewer, as if flying, over the vegetation to a not far away place where the alternate Mary Rachel awaits, pale, mournful, and dressed in widow's weeds.

(female voice-over (presumably Mary Rachel singing) to the accompaniment of flutes)


The lyrics and melody work in perfect concert to promote and sustain the sad, even melancholic, mood of the episode.


More generally, there is throughout the episode the suggestion

---that the events unfolding are part of an endless cycle (maybe recorded on a 45rpm?),

---that Burney has been condemned to experience this whole story over and over and over again, an everlasting repetition without memory:

Mary Rachel: "It's always happened that way."
Floyd Burney: "Always? What is this? Some kind of con game? What are you talkin' about? How many other guys you hook into this?"
Mary Rachel: "No one else. Only you."

Mary Rachel (passim): "I've always loved you." "Don't run. You know if you run, they'll catch you." "Stay with me this time. This time stay with me."

---and that Burney is, indeed, a prisoner of his fate:

Mary Rachel: ". . . it's our song. It belongs to us and we belong to it."
Burney (become aware of the final verse of the song): "Then take it back! I don't want it! Take it back!"
Mary Rachel: "I can't. It's been used."


The ending: There is no "surprise ending" here, since the lyrics have throughout the prior scenes fully prepared the audience for what eventuates. This episode leaves some people---Marc Scott Zicree, for one---very frustated in that it is never explicitly spelled out for the audience what the basis of the story is, as it is, for example, at the end of "Five Characters in Search of an Exit". Nevertheless, I think the story gives one enough clues to figure out sufficiently for oneself what is going on.

And, if the central conceit of the story (see above) isn't enough, Rod Serling's final voice-over narrative seems to finish off the job quite well: "In retrospect, it may be said of Mr. Floyd Burney that he achieved that final dream of the performer: eternal top-name billing, not on the fleeting billboard of the entertainment world, but forever recorded among the folksongs of . . . . The Twilight Zone."

Oooooooooooo!

DeeF wrote (post #38):


Uh, just to be clear, that would be "The Trade-Ins" (#96).

Jack Briggs wrote (post #9):


Sometimes, yes; sometimes, no. His writing can be quite ham-fisted at times. At times, it sets just the right tone.


(post #29):



Actually, out of 156 episodes, I find he didn't really harp on it. The relevant episodes given over directly to the topic, so far as I can find, number only one:

"Death's Head Revisited" (#74): A former SS-commander is haunted by ghosts of his victims when he returns to the site of his wartime death-camp command.

Problem is, why does he return to "the scene of the crime" in the first place? To gloat to himself? To ghosts? The character seems otherwise like a good (i.e., appropriate) Nazi, but this aspect of his behavior is not credible. (But a good episode nonetheless.)

Related episodes that deal with Nazis during the war or afterwards are:

"Judgment Night" (#10): This episode presents the "Flying Dutchman" hell of a Nazi U-Boot captain condemned to fulfill the roles of both his own victim and his own victimizer in submarine warfare for eternity.

This one is totally unsentimental, the least preachy and, not coïncidentally, the most effective of the lot.

and

"He's Alive" (#106): The spirit of Hitler still lurks and wanders around the world to stir up anti-Jewish and racial fervor.

This might've worked as a half-hour episode with a credible lead character, which Mr. Peter Vollmer is assuredly not, and without the protagonist's not so coïncidental Jewish connexion. (Schmaltzy! Schmaltzy! Schmaltzy!) However, the Neo-Nazis are depicted there as too weak and incoherent to present a credible threat. Again, this episode could have succeeded, but only as a nonsentimental piece, and this one is awash in pathos, in my opinion.

Except for a couple of episodes where characters are put back in time to Nazi-era Germany ("No Time Like the Past" (#112), "The Man in the Bottle" (#38)), I don't see where he said a whole lot about it at all.

Rod Serling's take on the philosophical aspects of Nazism/totalitarianism is no doubt to be found in episode #65, "The Obsolete Man": In a futuristic state that has replaced God with itself and where the "individual" loses all status except through decreed "function", a lone individualist sacrifices himself in order to preserve himself.

Okay, the message is little controverted, but the weakness here, for the nonreligious among us, is that it is essentially replacing one artificial (a.k.a., bogus) belief-control system with another. And the "State" of the story has a "retro"-feel and -look to it ("1984 = 1948") and its officials come off as weak ---"the clothes (uniform?) make the man"?---and not too smart.

Why would such a state allow the condemned to choose the manner of his own extermination? Why a bomb? A bullet to the head on live tv would work just as well, I'd think, and endanger no one and nothing else besides the intended victim. "The state is not afraid . . . ." comes off more than a bit unconvincing a reason for allowing all this, especially since the state is obviously afraid to keep around a "harmless" librarian and---[gasp!]---books. It's a good episode, but it frays around the edges.

Jack Briggs wrote (post #43):


Well, that's one of the two remaining episodes I was going to try to say something about, but I can't think of any original angle to take on it. It's one of my favorites, of course. However, I feel about it somewhat as I do about "Eye of the Beholder" and "The Invaders": the punchline is so strong as to make the whole a little less rewatchable than episodes with "softer", less "grabby" dénouements.

It's theme seems to be mankind's adaptability, plain and simple. As Rod Serling's narrative coda states: ". . . the evolution of man. The cycle of going from dust to dessert. The metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone's soup."

How will they "adapt" once they learn that they are no longer at the top of the "food chain" after how many hundreds of thousands of years?


And I have to take issue about the scientific-plausibility claim. It suffers there, too (although that doesn't seem to have taken away any of its entertainment value, at least not for me).

At least one of the following issues is brought up in Zicree's section on the episode. Maybe both of the first two are; I can't remember.

(1) The motivations of the Kanamits: an intelligent extragalactic species is in search of more "higher protein" (or whatever)???? Sorry, this doesn't wash. If they were that desperate for protein back over there where they came from and had the technology to jump from galaxy to galaxy in a few weeks (? months?) per trip, it seems to me they would've found already a home source to meet that vital need and have put it into some kind of efficient technological production. Going to other galaxies just to get food, given the distances involved, the inherent danger, and the expenditures of resources, comes across as neither plausible nor probable. And transporting the food all the way back . . . . Think about it for a moment: with what are the Kanamits "fattening up" their human cattle as they ferry them intergalactically to slaughter(? or breeding? or both?)? Couldn't they just feed themselves on that and grow their own protein internally? If not, why not? Also, why can't their nutritional needs be met by herd animals, fish, or the like? That point is never mentioned or discussed in the episode. (For maximal enjoyment of the episode, these kinds of questions are better left unpondered and unposed.)

Now the televised story needn't have made the Kanamits extragalactic, which would've made the distances less prohibitive and costly to them, but it did . . . .


(2) Scientific plausibility of coïncidental homonymy: The other issue is incorporated into the very title of the episode, as well as that of the original story by Damon Knight. Mr. Knight says in a interview that he tried to cover himself---I don't remember the details---although the Rod Serling adaptation doesn't make any effort to incorporate this end-around to the problem. And that problem is the unlikelihood that modern English and "Kanamitese" would both have a homonym (a single lexeme ("word") with divergent meanings but with grammatical "fit" in similar syntactic structures) serve that can mean (1) 'to make obeisance/offering to', on the one hand, and (2) 'to use as course in a meal', on the other. No, even most European languages---and I'd dare say "human languages"---don't do that (e.g., German), so that the whole coïncidence comes across as a writer's gimmick to facilitate a shock ending. ("You like me. You really, really like me!" Yeah, uh-huh! Yum-yum!)

(3) Decipherment issues: Worse, for those of us who know something about translation and decipherment, is the way they seem to "crack the code". Well, it doesn't work that way, and, in fact, can't work that way (not even with the Enterprise-D's superduper mainframe computer). I believe the term "Rosetta Stone" is used in the episode with regard to the abandoned book. Well, let me tell ya, the real Rosetta Stone held a bilingual text in ancient Greek, a by then well-known language and script, and Egytian hieroglyphic writing, which was, for all purposes, totally unknown by the time (even forgotten by the Egyptian Copts for everyday use, who had been Arabized and (partially) Islamicized during the Middle Ages).

The key to decipherment there was, and is, universal:

(a) In the absence of native speakers of the unknown language to interview, the latter has to be already translated into a known language.
(b) There has to be enough of a translated text (here, Greek) and an original text (here, Egyptian) whereby decipherers can isolate repetitions so as to tell what part of the writing in the unknown language corresponds exactly to which parts of the known language. That's how we positively identify both lexemes ("words") and the grammatical and syntactic structures they inhabit in their language.


One has to carefully distinguish decipherment from actual translation, of course. For instance, much of the Mayan hieroglyphic text corpus has been deciphered (as in "we know what they're trying to say"), but only nowadays with the marshalling of independent linguistic evidence from colonial-era Mayan texts (written in modified Roman alphabet) and modern Mayan languages are we getting a picture of what---or I should say "how"---the ancient texts are saying their accounts (as in "we can now in some cases, not just decipher (interpret the meaning of) but read (in the original sense of citing outloud phonetically) the texts of Mayan hieroglyphs"). Of course, in the case of Egyptian, the vowels are never written, so all "spoken Egyptian" (in movies, classrooms, etc.) is based on linguistic and philological guesswork gleaned from later known forms of the language (Coptic, Demotic).


In the story, the decipherers seemingly start with the (dangerous) presupposition that the writing is "alphabetic" (that is, the individual symbols of the writing system correspond to discrete, contrastively meaningful phonetic sounds within the represented language system that, when put together according to certain rules, make up "words"). There's some talk in the episode about majuscles ("capital letters") being different from miniscules (noncapitals), just as in our writing system, for example. Problem is, not all human writings systems are alphabetic. Some systems are syllabic (characters represent phonetic syllables (consonant + vowel, vowel + consonant, vel sim.; e.g., Semitic scripts, Devanagari (for Hindi, ancient Sanskrit)), while some are logographic (symbols ("signs") represent specific whole "words"), some pictographic (symbols represent things depicted), etc. Many systems, like the Chinese, ancient Near Eastern cuneiform, and the Mayan hieroglyphic system, as well, are mixtures of some or all of these. Why not "Kanamitese", as well? It's so much more complicated than a half-hour or hourlong filmed entertainment makes it out to be, but that kind of base knowledge about how writing systems actually work and those kinds of data from any given language that is to be deciphered are essential in coming up with a "translation". And it takes years, not a couple of hours or (usually) a couple of days, as on the entertainment screen.

Assuming you could neatly isolate "words" from each other in the flow of the written discourse (e.g., because of regular spacing, for example), how would you ever know what any given isolated block of text meant? (The assumption also seems to be made here that what constitutes a "word" in Kanamitese would correspond to English word-formation and word-structure. Also dangerous and quite probably erroneous.) The answer is: you could never ever know or find out on that basis alone. You can't interpolate meaning from nothing (i.e., an unknown source). Not even a computer can do that. You'd need to already know so much more of the language to come up with even the "title of the book", that this, viewed linguistically, is really a big (unintended) joke. There's just no way they could translate even a single word of the title without an interpretation from a native informant---[ahem!] a Kanamit. Only the native speaker knows what he or his language means, so you, the linguist or translator, have to ask him. With that in mind, one can see that the episode is totally wrong in terms of the "science" of translation.

In the scientific investigation of language, you have to already know the speaker's or writer's meaning (intent)---which is to say that only the source can provide the genuine "interpretation"---before you can do a valid analysis. It's one of those paradoxes ("Catch-22"), but that's the way the world works. There's no way around it. There are monolingual inscriptions (e.g., the so-called Rongorongo from Easter Island, and the inscriptions from the ancient Harrapan civilization of southern India, just to name the most famous) sitting undeciphered and untranslated in museums around the world as proof of this. Lots of ink has been spilt over them, yet we still don't know what they say or what they mean, and we never will, barring the availability of other, bilingual inscriptional evidence or the use of a way-back machine to go back and ask living speakers who actually wrote their language's inscriptions.

"To Serve Man" is still a great, great episode. (The moral here: What the lay viewer doesn't know won't hurt 'im.)

Ric Easton wrote (post #45):


One could add:

"Opening Day"
"Need to Know"
"The Shadow Man"

and several others to the list of exceptional episodes (almost all from the first season).

Please raise this issue with Mr. Blythe in some other venue. I assume Paramount HV will now or very soon have control of this material from CBS Home Video.

Jack Briggs wrote (post #49):


Thank you so much for saying so. You might want to read it again. In the process of catching errors I didn't catch in the first place, I couldn't resist augmenting the text slightly with other arguments (not major).

Angelo.M wrote (post #53):


"Nick of Time" (#43)



"The After Hours" (#34)



You're probably remembering "The Midnight Sun" (#75).


You might want to acquaint yourself with the Web page I gave a link to in my introductory post.

Twilight Zone episodes that question the separation between dreams and reality include, among others, "A Stop at Willoughby" (#30), "King Nine Will Not Return"(#37), "Twenty-Two" (#53), "The Arrival" (#67), and "The Midnight Sun" (#75).

My two favorite of such episodes deal with meta-reality: what is dream and what reality? Are there multiple levels of reality? And, if so, how could one ever tell? The two episodes in question are "Shadow Play" (#62) and "Perchance to Dream" (#09).


"Shadow Play" (#62) (by Charles Beaumont)

plot gist: Death-row prisoner Adam Grant (Dennis Weaver) claims that the world is destroyed and reconstructed with his each day's awakening and each night's sleep. He's tired of dying over and over again each night.

Is Grant a convicted murderer dreaming over and over of the final hours leading up to his execution, with an endless cycle of events presenting the same cast of characters and faces, but in different roles?

This an old, old (and, in my opinion, highly reusable) theme. (Does it trace its patrimony at least as far back as Edmond Hamilton's "Isle of the Sleeper" (1937) (which I believe I read in the early '70s from an anthology I used to own)?)


"Perchance to Dream" (#09) (by Rod Serling)

plot gist: Edward Hall (Richard Conte) is a man with a severe heart-condition who's afraid to fall asleep because, as he tells his psychiatrist, he fears his dreams---his nightmares---are trying to kill him.


commonalities of the two stories:

---each focusses on a dream or dreams in which at least one of the characters knows and acknowledges that he (or she) is inhabiting someone's dream (or nightmare).

---temptation to lose inhibition:

Maya the Catgirl admits to the dream state and tells Hall, this being so, he has nothing to fear, that he can do "all the things you can't do when you're awake" (such as taking an exhilarating rollercoaster ride).

D.A. Ritchie asks Adam Grant why he doesn't just "enjoy the dream instead of being afraid", if he knows the events are not real?

For him, it is the "reality" of the torment of being put to death night after night that's too great. Grant has the same old dream every night, with exact details that he remembers during each recursion, while Hall experiences---or so he claims---serialized installments ("episodes") of the same dream each night, and he knows how it must end.

The structure of "Shadow" is relatively simple: EXACT SAME SEQUENCE OF IDENTICAL EVENTS LEADING TO INEVITABLE CONCLUSION (Grant's execution) to FADE-OUT to "[RESET]"---and [wham!]---all over again.

Before giving it any deep thought, I had considered "Shadow Play" the more interesting of the two stories, but, after comparing and contrasting them, I don't know any more.

"Perchance to Dream" seems to contain at least three levels of reality:

It would seem that "reality" (Level 1) here bookends the episode. Level 1 is the level of "reality" shared between the viewing audience and a (presumed) omniscient narrator. It sandwiches two other, embedded levels of reality.

An unanswered (unanswerable?) question: Does Hall ever wake up or does he not? There seems to be an internal contradiction in the story on this point.

One can, of course, take the story at face value. The straightforward interpretation of the tale is: man has dreams; cannot separate dreams from reality; simply dies in his sleep from heart failure while dreaming of experiencing a suicidal fall out of a skyscraper window. Psychiatrist and receptionist have final discussion about the deceased. We, the audience, are thereby made "omnisciently" privy to these "events". The audience is supposed to be at level 1. But is it? (This is The Twilight Zone, y'know.)

Naturally, one needs to re-examine the moment in the story where an "explanation" (of sorts) of the story's events is given.

Hall explains that his mother told him, when he was young, that, if he stared at a picture long enough, he could make the scene in the picture move. Problem is, once he got the picture to move for him, he lost control of the visual motion and, ever since, his imagination has quite often gotten the better of him, often to the detriment of his heart condition. In the struggle between his intellect and his imagination, the former is losing out. Hence, the psychiatric visit.

"The mind is everything," Hall relates to the psychiatrist. "If you think you've got a pain in your arm and there's no physical reason for it, it hurts just the same as if it were real, doesn't it?"

This explanation alone, however, is not enough to elevate the story to "preternatural", "paranormal", or, more appropriately speaking, Twilight Zone-level.


possibilities:

(a) this is an "omniscient narration" from the "objective" point of view of the narrator, not the protagonist; the narrative states without distortion that x-events are happening to persons A, B, and C. Under this interpretation [REALITY²] and [REALITY³] are, naturally, subjective experiences of the protagonist, as told by him, but ones which the audience is given to know that he does, in fact, experience as "dreams", per se.

(b) the whole narration unfolds from the "subjective" view point of a single individual, the protagonist. This would mean that the framing narrative as well as the related dreams are all part of the protagonist's "imagination".


Under an alternate interpretation, on the other hand, all-important weirdness is retained (though remaining unexplained).

In this regard, there is one major special effect in the production, which needs to be considered, and that is what I'll call a "gloaming"-phenomenon when Hall first lies down on the psychiatrist's couch and a "gleaming"-phenomenon when he finishes giving his account of the rollercoaster incident with Maya. Why is the special effect for this phenomenon necessary? Is it presented "just for show"?

I think not. I take it to signal to the audience the transitions from, respectively, [REALITY¹] to [REALITY²] and [REALITY²] to [REALITY¹]. The light-to-dark ("gloaming") effect occurs when Edward Hall lies down on psychiatrist Eliot Rathmann's couch and lighting immediately changes to show darkness and shadow sweeping over his countenance (to the accompaniment of weird music); he shuts his eyes for a few seconds; then he (seemingly) shakes himself awake and bounds up off the couch to begin telling his story of life and death.

Likewise, the converse happens: dark-to-light ("gleaming") passes over his countenance---he opens his eyes again standing with face right up in front of the camera---as he concludes his tale of Maya the Catgirl and the rollercoaster ride from hell (the deadly conclusion of which---"Jump, Edward! Jump!"---he is trying to forestall by staying awake the "last 87 hours and counting").

The dreams-within-a-dream featuring Maya the Catgirl that constitute for me [REALITY³] are set off cinematographically by the haze-effects around the edges of those scenes. Hall recounts his dreams to the psychiatrist. We do not see him fall asleep or awaken at those points in the story.

As I see it, the story is structured as follows:

[REALITY¹]Edward Hall is found on the street below a huge Los Angeles skyscraper, anxious and about to collapse. He recovers enough to get himself up to psychiatrist Eliot Rathmann's fourteenth-floor office suite, where he has an appointment. He enters into the psychiatrist's presence, where he immediately lies recumbent on the counseling couch. ||[GLOAMING]|| [REALITY²] Hall recounts his story . . . . including the childhood origin of his ability(?) to "re-imagine" reality; incidents from his past, distant and recent (e.g., .[REALITY³]*the eyes seen in the rearview mirror of his car staring at him out of the darkness of the backseat that cause him to crash his car*) . . .[REALITY²] . . more conversation with the psychiatrist . .[REALITY³] . . relation of the carnival events with Maya the Catgirl, her taunting, alluring dance, and the funhouse episode . .[REALITY²] . . more conversation with the psychiatrist . .[REALITY³] . . Maya and the rollercoaster . . . ||[GLEAMING]|| [REALITY²] . . more conversation with the psychiatrist accompanied by departure and view of the receptionist; Hall's subsequent suicide jump . .[REALITY¹] . . psychiatrist Rathmann and receptionist Miss Thomas view the dead body and speculate on Hall's fate . . . [narrator's closing].

[*While not technically a "dream" in the straight sense, it constitutes a "waking dream" conditioned by the same factors
(e.g., the protagonist's runaway imagination) as, and occasioned by the same special camera effects used for, the other "dream-within-dream" sequences in the story.]

The implication seems to be that Hall is merely falling asleep when the "gloaming" sets in, while, conversely, he is awakening when the "gleaming" does the same, later in the episode. (These would ultimately represent the protagonist's jumping from one reality-level to the next.)

But is it so? The answer to that would appear to be "no", since it is "established" by the end(?) of the story, in the exchange between the psychiatrist and his receptionist, that Hall never awakens from the sleep we have seen him fall into near the beginning of the story. ("I mustn't go to sleep, because, if I do, I'll never wake up.")

Is there a hole in the plot or does this indicate some unfathomable form of narrative complexity . . . .?

If Hall never awakens that should mean either

(1) we have before us a poor man's narrative technique known as shifting the narrative point of view, from the "omniscient narrator" to the protagonist. In this case, the "gleaming"-event remains totally unexplainable, as far as I can tell, and, without it, what good is the prior "gloaming"-event in the story? (I strongly resist this interpretation; Rod Serling was too good and professional a storyteller for those kinds of shenanigans.)

(2) there is no "level-1 reality" in the narrative in the first place; the whole story is a "dream reality" from beginning to end with other "levels" of reality embedded into each other like a Chinese puzzle box. That is, the audience never gets to see Hall in his waking state, quite unlike the narrative would have one believe. The audience would, consequently, have no "independent level of reality" totally distanced from the protagonist-experiencer's.

The further inference I take from such a scenario is that all levels of reality are actually equal to all others.

And, if the latter is valid, this puts "Perchance to Dream" basically into the same boat as "Shadow Play". In the case of neither episode is the audience allowed the "privilege" of an "omniscient narration". In each case we are solely dependent on the perception of the protagonist of the piece.

Which, then, is the reality, and how does one test for it?

Alas, there seems to be no test for this in either episode. "Pinch me" won't cut it. You could be dreaming you're pinching yourself.

[Just before posting this, I took one last look at the "Perchance" again, just to be safe. Although I'm pretty sure it's there, there is also the possibility that the "gleaming"-effect that I thought I saw (and see) is just a lamp being shined in the actor's face at the moment of transition from the rollercoaster story. Even though I don't see why they'd do it, if not for the converse effect, if that, in fact, turned out to be the case, arguments for a "hole in the plot" would vanish. See the video or tv cablecast of the episode and judge for yourself.]

Edited by Rex Bachmann - 5/15/11 at 12:29pm

Re: This IS your father's TWILIGHT ZONE: Your favorite Episode

(post #44):

The other: "The Howling Man: An Analysis"

Twilight Zone episode #41, "The Howling Man", Charles Beaumont (wr.); Douglas Heyes (dir.)

As I've mentioned on occasion elsewhere, my favorite genre is supernatural horror fiction, but, as scarce as good filmed sf is, good filmed supernatural horror is even scarcer (almost as scarce as "hen's teeth" these days).

One of the keys to the perennial success of the TZ, as many have pointed out over the years, was/is its flexibility. Despite how it's often been labelled in the literature and the press, the series was never meant as a "science-fiction" program, strictly speaking, as Mr. Serling himself emphasized on numerous occasions. In fact, its anthological format allowed for tales based upon science (however flawed), the supernatural, plain fantasy---whatever that is---, the thoroughly ambiguous (e.g., "Nick of Time"), and sometimes just plain Hitchcockian suspense (e.g., "The Jeopardy Room" (#149)), or even plain irony (such as in the case of "The Silence" (#61)), with nothing "weird" involved.

Among the nonhorror preternatural tales are the wistful/nostalgic or sentimental episodes, among which number tales that are considered some of the series's finest:


"Walking Distance" (#5)
"A Stop at Willoughby" (#30)
"Dust" (#48)
"Static" (#56)
"Kick the Can" (#86)
"The Trade-Ins" (#96)
"I Sing the Body Electric" (#100)
"Miniature" (#110)
"Ninety Years Without Slumbering" (#132)


(Although a strict fine line can't really be drawn in these things, I consider stories such as the well remembered "Time Enough at Last" (#8) or the less well esteemed "Long Morrow" (#135), neither wistful nor sentimental, but merely sad.)



"They're creepy and they're spooky, | mysterious and kooky . . ."

TZ's attempts at actual horror are few. Most episodes of this type fall into that gray area between the spooky and the creepy.

spooky

"The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" (#4)
"Perchance to Dream" (#9)
"Judgment Night" (#10) ("Hell is repetition.")
"And When the Sky Was Opened" (#11)
"The Hitch-Hiker" (#16)
"The Fever" (#17)
"Twenty-Two" (#53)
"Long Distance Call" (#58)
"The Grave" (#72)
"The Dummy" (#98)
"Night Call" (oh, if they'd only kept the original ending from the short story!) (#139)
"The Fear" (#155)

creepy

"The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" (#4)
"Mirror Image" (#21)
"Nightmare as a Child" (#29)
"The After Hours" (#34)
"The Eye of the Beholder" (#42)
"Nick of Time" (#43)
"Death Ship" (#108)
"Young Man's Fancy" (#99)
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (#142)
"I Am the Night - Color Me Black" (existentially weird) (#146)
"Come Wander with Me" (#154) ("Hell is repetition.")

I categorize unambiguously into "horror" (whether or not "supernatural") the following:

"The Howling Man" (#41)
"The Invaders" (#51)
"It's a Good Life" (#73)
"The Jungle" (#77)
"To Serve Man" (#89)
"Jess-Belle" (#109)
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (#123)
"Living Doll" (#126) ("My name is Talkie Tina™, and I'm going to kiiillll you.")

As should be immediately obvious, some stories it is impossible to "cleanly" assign only to one or the other category.

Stories of the weird can partake of an interpolative or an extrapolative nature, which fact finds "The Howling Man" at the opposite end of the parameter from the other famous "horror" story of TZ, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet":

extrapolation: an "everyman" American Joe is cast into "alien" (here, Gothic) surroundings,

versus

interpolation: a creature (here, a "gremlin") from another world is introduced into modern, everyday surroundings.

It is, of course, a matter of personal taste which kind one prefers, but as a general rule I've always loved to (vicariously) visit other worlds, so, consequently, I prefer extrapolation in my fantastic fiction.

plot gist: An American travelling through "Central Europe" (i.e., Germany) after the First World War comes upon a castle inhabited by a strange sect whose prisoner may or may not be what they claim, or yet what he seems.


dramatis personæ:

(a) Brother Jerome (John Carradine): a stentorian-voiced, Moses-like figure, with his Shakespearean enunciation, hooked wooden staff, and appropriate hamminess, who leads the nonreligious order calling itself the "Brothers of Truth".
(b) David Ellington (H.M. Wynant): the skeptical traveller turned "true believer".
(c) The prisoner (Robin Hughes): a (seemingly) mild-mannered man in tatters, to be believed or not believed?


If, as I have long maintained, good "science fiction" (or "sci-fi", "sf", or whatever---I don't quibble over the variants of the label, as some have) reflects the search for the rational, then quality supernatural horror literature at its most essential should represent the power of the irrational . . .

The TZ itself, though it has often erroneously been cast into the sf-category, was never about rationality anyway. This left it with the freedom and the flexibility to hop genres of fantastic narrative from week to week, which it did. "The Howling Man" is a prime episode where the "irresistible force" of irrationality meets the "immovable object" of rationality, and the former prevails on all fronts.

Although "The Howling Man" is a second-season episode, the version of Rod Serling's introductory voice-over from season 1 fits it most appropriately:



stylistics:

Two highly marked stylistic features distinguish this episode:

(1) Visually, Douglas Heyes's tilty camera steeps the narrative in subjectivity, simulating for the audience, as it does, the protagonist's fevered, woozy state of mind.
(2) The flashback narrative structure, as the story is told almost entirely and solely from the protagonist's point of view (at least until the last scene), establishes this utter dependence in the first place.


The downside:

The episode's one significant drawback is the the final transformation of man to devil, which looks---[ahem!]---not so effective. The exaggerated horns look more silly than menacing and, as far as can be seen from his gait, the prisoner transforms from bare (human) feet to no cloven-hooved trotter. Nor are we, the audience, at liberty to see the Devil in his traditional color(s): green (as in Rosemary's Baby(???) or Prince of Darkness) or red, due partially, no doubt, to the black and white of the film medium of the time, but probably also because the producers had not the time, money, or inclination to go into such folkloric details for this half-hour show. [Addendum: although those colors are associated with the Devil, as a traditional figure he is as often as not depicted as black. Hence, the medieval accounts of the Black Man ( = Satan) of the witches' cult gatherings.]

The result of the metamorphosis presents us with a thin, semicomic, solemn, but hardly menacing-looking, figure dressed in a black leotard and shoulder-cape, a figure thoroughly desexualized for early '60s tv-consumption; more than a bit of an anti-climax, horror-wise.

Another seeming weak point of the episode is it lack of "logicalness", its yielding to irrationality. But this is a specious "flaw", in my opinion. Characteristic of the irrational, are the logical holes---questions raised and left unanswered, questions (some of which) should never have had to be asked---which riddle the story:

—Why does Brother Jerome allow Mr. Ellington to return to his room unattended, at least at first?
—Why is the story called "The Howling Man"? Why does the Devil howl? (I've read Charles Beaumont's original short story and I don't remember its being explained there, either.) The motif of the devil as dog or wolf is not unknown, but certainly not so common as to go casually unexplicated.
—Why does Mr. Ellington never ask the prisoner his name? If one were saving a person's---a stranger's---life one might at least wonder aloud at some point: "Who, sir, are you?"

Not that having gotten an answer to such a question would have done David Ellington any good, for, like God, the Devil has many, many names (Brother Jerome: "Otherwise known as the Dark Angel, Ahriman, Asmodeus, Belial, Diabolus . . . the Devil."), many of which are tabuïstic (e.g., old Nick, cf. episode #43, "Nick of Time"). Like God's name, the Archfiend's true name is unknown.

For the Divine, see, for example, the naming-mystery in Exodus, Chapter 3:



—Was there a 'staff of truth' at the window of the prisoner's cell, as well as at the door? What about under the floor? In each side wall? In the ceiling? Even Satan lives in (at least) three dimensions (cf. Prince of Darkness (1987)). Of course, the answer to this question is "no".



However, whereäs in an "ordinary" tale with an "ordinary" setting, these and other such logical gaps might well burden down and detract from the story, here they, instead, reïnforce the inherent irrational nature of the supernatural goings-on in the narrative and deepen the mystery, so to speak.

And, the last question in particular, amidst the prisoner's other claims as to who and what the Brothers of Truth may be, the whys and wherefores of his own imprisonment in the Hermitage, and Brother Jerome's real motivations, surrounds the central act of the drama: the freeïng of the prisoner. For the question and inquiry here bring forth the one unambiguously truthful statement given by an entity, one of whose most famous epithets is the "the Prince of Lies".

themes:

As a story, its chief theme seems to be that of the dichotomy between belief and "truth". When belief---or, more religiously put, faith---falters the lie wins.

Mr. Ellington attends and believes the lies, but ignores the one, pivotal fact ("truth") the prisoner relates to him, to his everlasting regret.


If not having faith in the face of "glaring truth" is man's weakness, what, then, is man's strength and what the Devil's weakness? Man's strength seems to be, as has been proposed in many a religious or philosophic circle over the centuries, that he has power over himself and his own destiny (some call it "free will", but the definition of that term is subject to much debate). The Devil, it seems, cannot win, nor even progress, without man's coöperation. He has influence over man, but no true power.

David Ellington, the protagonist of the story, goes from rationalistic skepticism to a paracognitive certainty to cognitive knowledge and thence to paracognitive revelation (the line between cognition and paracognition being razor-thin and often virtually nonexistent), becoming a victim of his own rationalism and accompanying skepticism. The "truth" comes to him only with the restoration of his faith, faith in Jerome and the Brotherhood of Truth and their mission.

(the "cognitives")
IGNORANCE KNOWLEDGE

(the "paracognitives")
THE LIE DOUBT/SKEPTICISM BELIEF/FAITH CERTAINTY THE TRUTH


Finally, curious and interesting to note is that it is through temptation that each side's weakness is evoked. The prisoner, of course, tempts Ellington with pleadings and words of "rationale" as to why Jerome and the Brothers must be (potentially dangerous) mad perpetrators of false imprisonment, but also Brother Jerome relates how it was only Satan's giving-in to his own temptation to corrupt the prized, "pure-hearted" people of the village of Schwarzau and then Jerome himself that led him to fall victim to capture in the Hermitage in the first place.

It's these kinds of details that complement the atmosphere and spooky aura of the story and that make it so well remembered and one of the two scariest of all TZ episodes.

All in all, The Twilight Zone was never served by a better or darker mood or a more outré setting as an outlet for its themes and theätrics.

Re: This IS your father's TWILIGHT ZONE: Your favorite Episode

DiCaprio Mulls New Twilight


[ugh!!!]