Rod Serling: Viewed From Beyond The Twilight Zone
Written by Andrew Sarris (April 1985)

When and if the history of television is properly preserved and adequately chronicled, the late Rod Serling will be remembered, perhaps uniquely, as both a powerful force and a familiar face in the emergence of the medium as an outlet for imaginative drama. From 1959 through 1964 he literally embodied - or should we say disembodied - The Twilight Zone as the ruefully philosophical narrator of more than one hundred and fifty episodes - many written by Serling himself - in an unusually adventurous vein of fantasy and science fiction. Even before The Twilight Zone, he had seen over a hundred of his plays produced by television in little more than six years. Serling was nothing if not prolific, and to be prolific in a commercially popular medium is to be doubly damned by posterity.

Serling himself once delivered a cautionary epitaph for the largely forgotten predecessors in radio: "Radio drama, after twenty-odd years as king, left no lasting imprint of any importance. It left no legacy of particularly memorable moments in drama. It produced very few talents who could be remembered uniquely for their contributions to radio drama. From the point of view of the writer, there were no Chayefskys and no Roses and few anybody elses. Beyond Norman Corwin, Arch Oboler, and perhaps Wyllis Cooper, go back for a known name among radio writers...Radio dug its own grave. It had aimed downward, had become cheap and unbelievable, and had willingly settled for second best."

Drawing from his own bitter experiences with studio censors and sponsors, Serling applied the lesson drawn from radio to the new medium on the block: "It is quite conceivable that the television drama may well get stuck tighter and tighter into a mold of mediocrity. Creative people, particularly writers, can only be censored, sat on, and limited so much for so long. After a time, fighting back seems relatively unimportant. The sponsor may continue to sell his soap just as the radio soap operas did for him, but by then the television drama will be a dull, sloppy old man who site contemplating his widening paunch without interest, without energy, and with no horizon left at all..."

Serling, finding his own horizon in naturalistic television drama receding perceptibly during the increasing conformism of the Eisenhower years, tripped the light fantastic into the Fifth Dimension - it was originally the Sixth - of The Twilight Zone. "Things which couldn't be said by a Republican or Democrat could be said by a Martian," Serling once explained in an interview. And there were more than a few extraterrestrial editorialists on the premises during the six years of The Twilight Zone. It would be an oversimplification, however, to treat The Twilight Zone and Serling's writing generally as an unending exercise in devious allegory. What is of most lasting interest in Serling's long days and nights of chain-smoking productivity is not so much his plot gimmickry or liberal politics, but, rather, the lyrical, somber, downbeat notes he struck so surprisingly often for a supposedly escapist medium.

SERLING'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO

Much of the implacable seriousness of The Twilight Zone is seemingly keyed by the clipped, dour delivery of Serling himself an the interlocutor. He never encourages us to laugh, or even smile, even when the plot twist is at least darkly funny. For example, in Time Enough at Last (November 20, 1959), written by Rod Serling from a short story by Lynn Venable, a frustrated bookworm played by Burgess Meredith hides in a bank vault to finish David Copperfield in privacy. He emerges to find himself the only survivor in a nuclear holocaust, and looks forward to a lifetime of reading books. Unfortunately, his glasses slip off his nose and crash, leaving him forever unable to sample the literary treasures all around him. C'est a rire, n'est-ce pas? Well, not exactly. The H-bomb is still lurking in the background of the bookworm's "accident." The point is that the bomb could never have gone off on network television were the plot couched in a more realistic format.

Actually, doomsday scenarios were nothing new for Serling. As early as 1956 Serling had adapted Pat Frank's cold war novel, Forbidden Area, into a two-part Playhouse 90 Armageddon thriller. The plot and rhetoric were surprisingly anti-Russian for a writer of Serling's liberal inclinations, but the denouement saw the President exercise restraint rather than vindictiveness when the Russians were on the run, and this civilized nuance may have been Serling's contribution to an otherwise jingoistic entertainment. Unfortunately, sponsors were becoming increasingly squeamish about any "significant" subjects, whatever their ideological coloration. Hence, by the time that Serling teamed up with director John Frankenheimer (who had worked with Serling on Forbidden Area) it was with the coup d'etat-type apocalypse treated in Seven Days in May, a theatrical film of 1964, a year in which television was considerably more timid.

Toward the end of his tragically short-lived career - he died in 1975 at the age of fifty after an open-heart operation - Serling complained with some justice that the writer was caught in a buzz-saw between the sponsors and network executives, who gutted his scripts, and the television critics who then blamed the writers rather than the institutional pressures for the resulting vacuity. The critic's response has always been very simple. If you can't find creative fulfillment in television, retire to a New England cabin inhabited by Thoreau's ghost and write as freely as you wish. You may lose your audience, but you will have gained your soul. Serling had no truck with this highfalutin nonsense. Television was the biggest sociological game in town, and he was not abandoning it to the lowest-common denominator vultures without a struggle. He had not been cast in the radical absurdist mold. He was of that generation that had fought for their country in World War II. Serling himself had served as a combat paratrooper. From college days onward he had been at ease with people, as reflected in his rather brash suggestion that he himself narrate the Twilight Zone after the names of Westbrook Von Voorhis and Orson Welles had been tossed into the hat. This direct form of communication with millions of people would place Serling irrevocably in touch with the crowd rather than the coterie. With a touch of the crusader and the crank in his makeup, Serling turned out to be that most valuable of all entertainers, the one who tries to lift up the populace rather than talk down to it. If it did nothing else in its six years, The Twilight Zone helped jar the complacency of the mass audience.

STYLISTIC INFLUENCES

It should be noted, however, that much of Serling's fantasy and science fiction writing is somewhat genteel by today's scary, paranoid standards. Although he has acknowledged Hemingway as an early stylistic influence, there are echoes in his recurringly pastoral nostalgia of such wistful authors as Thornton Wilder, Christopher Morley, Robert Nathan, and James Hilton. Indeed Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips could have served as the model for The Changing of the Guard with Donald Pleasence cast in the role of Professor Ellis Fowler, an old crock who is being retired after fifty-one years of service. Convinced that his life's work has been a waste, his is reassured only by the testimony of ghosts of students past that his teachings have been applied and absorbed. This fantasy is so gentle, uncomplicated and sentimental that one is brought up short by the absence of a disquieting twist in the plot. Yet many of the episodes in The Twilight Zone dealt with the kind of befuddled dreamers with whom Serling identified at least in part. There is a great deal of "The Lonely Crowd" floating all through The Twilight Zone, as indeed all through the so-called Philco Playhouse school of television drama. A motley array of loners, losers, misfits, wanderers, aliens, ghosts, malcontents, and victims of every description is let loose on the shifting landscapes of the mind, and though the "problem" is seldom, if ever, "solved," some insight or other is gained as a consolation.

REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT AND PATTERNS

Serling and his colleagues were criticized at the time by high-brow critics of the medium of achieving easy pathos by indulging the humble dreams of pathetically little people. Paddy Chayefsky's Marty is, of course, the classical prototype of this kind of kitchen-sink drama involving little people lost in a big world of casual, thoughtless coldness. Serling's Marty was Requiem for a Heavyweight, a wailing meditation on the humiliating afterlife of a washed-up fighter. Jack Palance played part of the pathetic pug on television and Anthony Quinn on the screen, and a classical critic could complain in each instance that the protagonist was anti-Aristotelian to a fault. He was not brought down by any flaw in his nature, except possibly his gullibility in believing the people around him. So much time is spent demonstrating his seemingly limitless vulnerability to pain and suffering that the audience can only wince with each new blow to his pride and dignity. Curiously, Serling himself had been a fairly successful catchweight fighter until he was badly beaten up one night by a professional fighter. He was later wounded in the service as well. Hence, the writer was hardly a stranger to the pain of the fighter. Yet, if I ultimately prefer Patterns to Requiem for a Heavyweight in Serling's full-length dramatic works, it is because I sense that Patterns is more characteristic of the marginal morality with which Serling was involved during his career as a television and movie writer.

Staples, the main character in Patterns (Richard Kiley on television, Van Heflin on the screen), is caught in a brutal tug-of-war between Ramsie, the company president (Everett Sloane in both versions) and Sloane (Ed Begley in both versions), an aging holdover for whom Staples has been hired as a replacement. Staples is young, ambitious, and yet humane enough to understand Sloane's ghastly predicament. Too high up to be fired summarily, Sloane is sadistically pressured to resign through Ramsie's repeated slights, snubs, and insults. Serling writes very knowingly about all the protocols of power and status from the respective bosses down to their respective secretaries and wives. He does not take the easy way out with a Capra-Riskin speech on the spiritual glories to be gained by renouncing the often hard imperatives of the capitalistic system. The conventionally populist rhetoric and melodrama is lacking in this surprisingly sophisticated portrayal of a man trying to balance his power drive with his decent instincts. When Sloane is finally driven to a fatal heart attack, Staples has the choice of accepting greater responsibility under Ramsie, or retreating to a less challenging position in the industrial backwaters from which he has emerged. In an anti-cliche ending to end anti-cliche endings, Staples decides to stay on despite his moral misgivings, with the proviso that he will fight Ramsie tooth and nail all the way on the issues that divide them. For his part, Ramsie is no cardboard villain, but a clear-eyed industrialist without any sentimental misconceptions about the Darwinian jungle he, his competitors, and his subordinates share in perpetual insecurity.

SERLING AND THE INDUSTRY

The denouement of Patterns probably reflects heart-wrenching decisions Serling himself had to make dozens of times when confronted with the moral challenges of the television industry. Serling, like Staples, stayed on nonetheless, determined to fight tooth and nail for what he wanted, but prepared to retreat as well when the forces arrayed against him proved to be too powerful. Serling's own most traumatic conflict with the powers that be occurred in 1956 with the production of the aptly titled Noon on Doomsday on the United States Steel Hour. Serling had originally intended to tell the story of the shameful Emmett Till lynching in Mississippi. By the time the White Citizens Councils in the South had finished their intimidating hatemail campaigns against the network and sponsor, the locale of the play had been shifted to New England and the victim changed from a black to an unspecified "foreigner." Shades of the "aliens" in The Twilight Zone.

Serling himself damned the final result of this tampering in his 1968 essay entitled "About Writing for Television": "Noon on Doomsday was, in the final analysis, an overwritten play. It was often tractlike, much too direct, and had a bad habit of overstatement. What destroyed it as a piece of writing was the fact that when it was ultimately produced, its thesis had been diluted and my characters had mounted a soap box to shout something that had become too vague to warrant any shouting. The incident of violence that that play talked about should have been representative and symbolic of a social evil. It should have been treated as if a specific incident was symptomatic of a more general problem. But by the time Noon on Doomsday went in front of the camera, the only problem recognizable was that of a tv writer having to succumb to the ritual of track covering so characteristic of the medium he wrote for. It was the impossible task of allegorically striking out at a social evil with a feather duster because the available symbols for allegory were too few, too far between, and too totally dissimilar to what was actually needed."

SYMBOLISM AND THE TWILIGHT ZONE

In a sense, The Twilight Zone provided many more "symbols for allegory" than were available to realistic dramatists on television at the time. It was not just McCarthyism, Red Channels, the Citizens Councils, and other such repressive organisms in the body politic that were to blame, but primarily the unreasoning fear of controversy in the executive suites of the networks and the agencies. It was an ugly time in which boycotts were organized against the Ford Motor Company for allowing blacks to work alongside whites on the assembly line, and against Philip Morris for sponsoring a beauty contest in Chicago where one of the winners was a black girl. One wonders how many of these bigots are still around to see pictures of the First Lady Nancy Reagan sitting on the lap of Mr. T in the role of a black Santa Claus, or of a black Miss America. How times have changed! And how television videotapes provide a graphic history of the very painful periods of transition.

This then finally is the rationale for Rod Serling's television career, and our continuing interest in all that he has accomplished. He stayed the course, and fought to keep the medium from sinking into a completely cynical mediocrity. He provided an image of dissent and disquiet in an age of sunny conformity. In The Obsolete Man he went in the direction of Kafka, Orwell, and Bradbury by imagining a futuristic state in which books would have been banned. Having failed to confront racism directly in Noon on Doomsday, he confronted it obliquely in his many parables of aliens and extraterrestrials on The Twilight Zone.

The Eye of the Beholder (November 11, 1960) is peculiarly evocative in that it serves as a blueprint for his later script adaptation of Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin Shaffner. In Beholder, the trick is to keep the audience in the dark as long as possible on what the "normal" people actually look like. Ultimately, we discover that the normal people look like very close relatives of Miss Piggy, whereas the "freaks" all look like beautiful movie stars. Our first impulse is to laugh at this nervy, simplistic gimmickry, but gradually an after effect of terror sweeps across the screen as we realize that the pig-faced "normals" actually consider themselves compassionate in even tolerating the existence of the "freaks." We begin to enter their world, their consciousness, their perverted sense of aesthetics. The "joke" is thus not so much on racist bigots, as on "tolerant" liberals.

Rod Serling worked hard in a popular medium for twenty-five years, was married to the same woman, Carolyn Louise Kramer for twenty-seven. His paths crossed those of many of the writers, directors, players, and technicians who gave shape and color to the popular arts from the Fifties through the Seventies. Very often, it is this criss-cross effect that provides much of the fascination in his dramas. Who cannot be moved by the haunting strains of the late Bernard Herrmann on The Twilight Zone, the same Bernard Herrmann who provided the scores for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo?

The late James Dean appeared in Serling's A Long Time Till Dawn on the Kraft Television Theatre of November 11, 1953. The young actor who was to electrify the world two years later in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause was already in place as a charismatic personality and a vibrant talent, but Serling's script is very unsympathetic to his restlessness. One could feel that the writer was not at home with the New Punk Breed. Serling's own life, for all its anxiety and ambition, had been much more firmly structured. A small-town boy from Binghamtom, New York, Serling returned metaphorically to his roots in Walking Distance, one of his most nostalgic contributions to The Twilight Zone. Gig Young plays the ad agency executive who returns to his own childhood and even to himself as a child, and then realizes as so many Serling heroes and heroines do, that he can live his life only once, and then only by looking forward as he gets older. It is this note of wistful resignation that seems to evoke Serling now that he has, alas, taken permanent residence in his own Twilight Zone.