Wisdom Straight from The Twilight Zone

I grew up watching a lot of television, which is probably true for many kids living in the 1970s and 80s. It’s reasonable to say that my sister and I were sort of raised in front of the TV, which back then was a rather large and substantial piece of furniture in the home.

My parents liked to watch reruns of shows from the 1950s and 60s, so I got a good taste of TV from that period of television show creation. One of the programs that resonated with me was The Twilight Zone, a program loved by my mother. Oddly enough, my mother was never into science fiction, mystery, the bizarre, or the macabre of any kind. Nevertheless, introduction to The Twilight Zone will always be one of the greatest gifts she has imparted to me.

Rod Serling was the creator of The Twilight Zone, which originally ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964. A number of subsequent creations resulted from the show including movies, other TV shows, and radio programs. The Twilight Zone’s influence in entertainment is evident and a tribute to the brilliantly written, stand-alone episodes that had a quality of theatre about them - undeniably different from anything we see on television today.

I have watched the entire original series over and over again as an adult and am constantly amazed at how relevant the show remains today, more than 60 years since its inception. Sixty years both does and does not seem like a great amount of time. However, in a world that has seen an incredible surge and evolution in technology since the 1950s, the fact remains that very little regarding society and the human condition has changed. The Twilight Zone addressed themes that are still present every single day in local and world news, and I wish to share a few examples describing how pervasive these themes remain.

The Second World War was still very fresh in the minds and hearts of the world back when the series began. Some episodes referenced not only World War II, but World War I and even the Civil War. There were stories about unnamed wars that displayed the fear and aftermath on a present-day Earth, or a future Earth, or another planet entirely. The threat of nuclear war was an enormous fear for the people of the time, and a fear that continues today despite the end of the Cold War.

Season 3, episode 9 - Death’s Head Revisited

A former Nazi officer revisits Dachau and ends up standing trial presided by the ghosts from his past. At the end of the episode a physician stands over his dead body. His remarks end the episode, and Rod Serling provides the final thoughts:

Physician: “Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?”

Rod Serling: “There is an answer to the Doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes, all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge. But worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance - then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in The Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”

Season 5, episode 7 - The Old Man in the Cave

Rod Serling: “What you are looking at is a legacy that man left to himself. A decade previous, he pushed his buttons and a nightmarish moment later woke up to find that he had set the clock back a thousand years. His engines, his medicines, his science, were buried in a mass tomb, covered over by the biggest gravedigger of them all, a bomb. And this is the Earth 10 years later, a fragment of what was once a whole…”

A group of people struggle to survive in a town 10 years after a nuclear war, where food and land is contaminated by radiation. Mr. Goldsmith is the leader of the town, and gets information about what is safe for the people to consume from an “old man in the cave.” Out of hunger and fear, the people end up destroying the “old man,” after being influenced by a group of visitors to their town, led by Major French. French claims there is nothing wrong with the food. In a starved frenzy the people gorge on the canned goods and other foods that were labeled as contaminated by the “old man.”

At the end of the episode Mr. Goldsmith looks around at all the people, now dead, and then looks at Major French, the prime instigator of the event.

Mr. Goldsmith: “When we talked about the ways that men could die, we forgot the chief method of execution. We forgot faithlessness, Major French. Maybe you’re not to blame. Maybe if it weren’t you, it would have been someone else. Maybe this has to be the destiny of man. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder. I guess I’ll never know…”

Rod Serling: “Mr. Goldsmith, survivor, an eyewitness to man’s imperfection, an observer of the very human trait of greed, and a chronicler of the last chapter, the one reading, ‘suicide.’ Not a prediction of what is to be, just a projection of what could be…"

No one can deny the racism, prejudice, bigotry, and hatred that continues to exist. The Twilight Zone addressed these concerns with a thoughtfulness and brevity that is astounding. Some may think Serling too “preachy” or “morally righteous,” but it is obvious he wanted to keep certain issues relevant within the human consciousness. Mr. Serling, to me, seemed insistent and often desperate that humanity not make the same mistakes it has made over and over again.

Season 3, episode 29 - Four O-Clock

In this episode we meet Oliver Crangle, a sort of man probably most of us are familiar with. He spends his time trying to ruin the lives of those he judges to be evil and corrupt - anyone who does not conform to what he feels is the right way to live. He decides to “use his will” to make all the people he deems evil only 2 feet tall. This transformation is to occur at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The climax of the episode shows us that Mr. Cringle is the only person to be transformed.

Rod Serling: “At 4 o’clock an evil man made his bed and lay in it, a pot called a kettle black, a stone thrower broke the windows of his glass house. You look for this one under ‘f’ for ‘fanatic’ and ‘j’ for ‘justice,’ in The Twilight Zone.”

Season 4, episode 4 - He’s Alive

This incredibly frightening and pertinent story is about the young leader of a Neo-Nazi movement, and how he gains more and more power after being schooled by the ghost of Adolf Hitler. We watch as he moves from an uncertain speaker of his ideology to an egomaniac who destroys those he cares about.

Rod Serling: “Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Florida, Vincennes, Indiana, Syracuse, New York, anyplace, every place where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things, we keep him alive.”

Season 2, episode 29 - The Obsolete Man

Rod Serling: “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 refinement, 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 story is about Romney Wordsworth, a librarian, judged to be obsolete by those in power. He fights this charge, claiming he is a human being with a mind, who has a right to have his own thoughts. Wordsworth is sentenced to a death of his choosing, which ends up being a bomb explosion in his room at midnight. His final hour, televised for the world, shows his interaction with the Chancellor, whom he asks to see in his room. The door unknowingly locked behind him, the Chancellor continues to declare Wordsworth’s love of books, his belief in God, to be obsolete, and unnecessary - but in the end the Chancellor begs Wordsworth, “in the name of God,” to release him from the room. The finale of the episode shows the same “court” sentencing the Chancellor to obsolescence.

Rod Serling: “The Chancellor…the late Chancellor was only partly correct. He was obsolete, but so is the state, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under ‘m’ for ‘mankind’ in the Twilight Zone.”

So many more episodes reveal stories of humankind’s need for love, our fear of death and the unknown, even how we treat our children, how we mete out justice and how we treat criminals. One of my favorite episodes is called, The Night of the Meek (Season 2, episode 11), about a poor alcoholic named Henry Corwin whose greatest Christmas wish is to be able to give to others. He dresses up to be Santa Clause for the local Department Store, arrives drunk, and is fired in front of all the customers by the manager, Mr. Dundee. The speech he makes as he leaves the store brings tears to my eyes every time:

Henry Corwin: “…All I know is, I’m an aging, purposeless relic of another time, and I live in a dirty rooming house on a street filled with hungry kids and shabby people, where the only thing that comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve is more poverty.”

Mr. Dundee: “Will you keep your voice down!”

Henry Corwin: “You know another reason why I drink, Mr. Dundee? So that when I walk down the tenements, I can really think it’s the North Pole, and the children are elves and that I’m really Santa Clause, bringing them a bag of wondrous gifts for all of them. I just wish, Mr. Dundee, on one Christmas, only one, that I could see some of the hopeless ones, and the dreamless ones. Just on one Christmas, I’d like to see the meek inherit the Earth. And that’s why I drink, Mr. Dundee. And that’s why I weep.”

Corwin ends up finding a magic bag, full of gifts, that he gives to others. At the end of the story, when the bag is empty and he is walking alone down the street, he comes across a sleigh with reindeer, and an elf. The elf asks him if he is ready to go to the North Pole and get ready for Christmas next year. Henry Corwin gets his wish.

I think it is reasonable to say that humanity has not changed in any fundamental way since the inception of the Twilight Zone. The world is smaller now - we have immediate access to people and places that were completely foreign and out of reach for the average person in the late 50s and early 60s. But has this immediacy changed anything of how we perceive others? War and societal/international conflict continue to disrupt the lives of everyday people. Prejudice in any form still divides us as human beings. A very simple, very humble TV program called the Twilight Zone provided stories of life that are not dissimilar from the stories we know today. I have obtained a kind of wisdom from this program that affected me from a very young age, and continues to remind me of how far we have to go to find unity, peace, and acceptance in our world.