J. P. Telotte
Today we often take for granted the operation of what Henry Jenkins describes as “convergence media,” that is, the ready “fl ow of content across multiple media platforms” (2) such as fi lm, television, the internet, and increasingly our cell phones, with an attendant blurring of distinctions between the media forms. It is, after all, part of our daily experience, something offered—and sold—to us at every turn in what Paul Virilio describes as the “media neb-ula” of postmodern society (Landscape 69). Yet in the early days of Ameri-can television, particularly as the new medium sought to establish its own identity, “convergence” was hardly considered. Rather, the fi lm industry for quite practical reasons repeatedly trumpeted its difference from the upstart television while offering various technological enhancements that television could not match, such as widescreen formats, stereophonic sound, Techni-color and other Techni-color systems, and 3-D imagery. At the same time, television seemed rather similarly intent on distinguishing itself from its older rival. As John Ellis has shown, it very quickly “developed distinctive aesthetic forms to suit the circumstances” (111) of broadcast presentation: an emphasis on short, discrete narrative segments; a greater reliance upon dialogue than in the cinema; a kind of dislocated viewer gaze (or what, by way of contrast, he terms a “glance”);1 and an image that Ellis argues “is characteristically pared down” (112). It is this emphasis on—or rather, deemphasis of—the image, particularly in favor of a reliance on dialogue, that I want to address here in the context of one of television’s golden age shows and most impor-tant science fi ction entries, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. By focusing on its often-overlooked image qualities, particularly what we might for conve-nience simply term its cinematic nature, we might better appreciate the con-tribution this sf series made to the eventual convergence of fi lm and television and, in the process, more accurately sketch a signifi cant part of early fi lm and television dynamics.
Catherine Johnson argues that such sf and fantasy television programs often challenged the “dominant notions of the aesthetics of television,” and she suggests that, for this reason, they have frequently been understood not as part of a simultaneous line of development but “as exceptional in television history” (12). As a consequence, critical discussion has typically
The Cinematic Zone of The Twilight Zone 21 treated them in a “reductive” manner; the “issues raised” by telefantasy programs, particularly their challenges to the cultural status quo, have never been fully examined, and the series have not been properly accounted for in our television histories (12). Instead, commentary on telefantasy shows has tended to “overgeneralize” them (11), that is, to submerge them into broader generic categories that dissipate their subversive impact on both thematic and stylistic levels and result in a miswriting of television history—one that fundamentally mistakes or downplays the early contri-butions of sf and fantasy programming.
As a partial corrective I want to situate The Twilight Zone in terms of an opposition between those paradigms of convergence and difference that have, at different times, infl uenced our views of television history, including telefantasy. Again we might take Johnson’s commentary as a lead, particu-larly as she, paraphrasing Ellis, describes the commonplace “opposition of television as a medium of dialogue/talk against the visual spectacle of the cinema” (11). That opposition is rooted partly in the common conception of sf as a genre fundamentally bound to spectacle—a point made in most early discussions of sf cinema, but especially in Susan Sontag’s seminal essay wherein she attributes the form’s popularity to its exploitation of “the imagery of destruction” depicted “on a colossally magnifi ed scale” (216).
The notion of television’s “pared down” image fi eld would obviously seem to confl ict with such a characterization, and the early space operas, with their practically nonexistent effects and dialogue in place of action, only support that distinction. That sense of opposition also owes to the very power of other types of shows, other dominant genres, particularly the live-action drama that many critics view as the signal accomplishment of early television, at least in America. Powered by well-written scripts, focused on psychological revelation rather than physical action, and graced with the imprimatur of “legitimate” theater, these shows have provided a powerful
“dialogue/talk” model of difference that has obscured signs of convergence, even in the area of telefantasy.
Unsurprisingly, then, most discussions of The Twilight Zone quickly acknowledge its indebtedness to other television shows, particularly to those popular dramatic anthology programs of the 1950s—shows like Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theater, General Electric Theater, and others, all of which were indeed “dialogue/talk” dependent, as well as to earlier radio the-ater, which necessarily shared that same dependency. Yet Keith Booker offers a lead in another direction, for as he discusses standout series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, he notes what he terms a strik-ing “plurality” in them, a curiously “multigeneric and multimedia” emphasis (50–51). So while acknowledging that The Twilight Zone, in a concerted effort to follow the general theatrical television model, “consciously strove for a literary texture” (52), he also observes how often it also foregrounded and commented on the “boundaries between different levels of reality” (62), including different media forms—a notion obviously signaled by the very
22 J. P. Telotte
in-between realm or “Zone” that its title designates. Among those explo-rations we might especially note the series’ frequent treatment of fi lm and television as subjects in episodes like “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (23 October 1959), “A World of Difference” (11 March 1960), and “Showdown with Rance McGrew” (2 February 1962), episodes that blur the boundaries between fi lm and everyday life or television and reality. In fact, all these epi-sodes similarly compare the illusionism of the movies and television with the very unreality that was coming to characterize their audience’s lives in this period—lives lived within the thoroughly mediatized landscape of a post-modern society. If in such instances The Twilight Zone resembled, as Jeffrey Sconce describes it, a kind of “perverse ‘unconscious’ of television” (134), it no less began to suggest a cultural unconscious as well, pointing up the media-haunted nature of the contemporary US.2
Of course, the very generic character of The Twilight Zone is partly responsible for this refl exive dimension, for as critics have often noted, sf, at least as it developed in fi lm and television, is among the most self-conscious of forms. Thus Annette Kuhn suggests that “the most obvious difference between science fi ction as literature and science fi ction as fi lm lies in the latter’s mobilization of the visible” (6). We can glimpse that mobilization at work in its pervasive emphasis on viewing devices, scanners, screens, and technologies of replication, including its enormous variety of replicated human fi gures3—elements that have led Garrett Stewart to describe cin-ematic sf as “the fi ctional or fi ctive science of the cinema itself, the future feats it may achieve scanned in line with the technical feat that conceives them right now and before our eyes” (159), as video technology “is not merely recruited . . . its purposes are critically scrutinized” (161). And given the genre’s larger investment in satisfying—and exploring—what Michele Pierson describes as “a cultural demand for the aesthetic experience of wonder” (168), we could hardly expect television efforts like The Twilight Zone to be immune to this tendency.
Also contributing signifi cantly to that interrogation were the very con-ditions of production for the series because, in contrast to many television shows of the late 1950s and early 1960s, The Twilight Zone drew on a broad variety of distinctly cinematic resources. For instance, the cinematographer for much of the show’s run (117 of the total 156 episodes) was George T.
Clemens, already a twenty-year veteran of the fi lm industry, who brought a thoroughly engrained sense of traditional cinematic practice to the new medium. Among the directors signed to the series were such distinguished fi lmmakers as John Brahm, Richard Donner, Mitch Leisen, Norman Z.
McLeod, Don Siegel, and Jacques Tourneur. A number of the series’ writers, perhaps most notably Richard Matheson, already had a good deal of experi-ence writing for the movies. Most of the series was shot on fi lm rather than done live or on videotape.4 And it was for the most part shot at the MGM studio, whose back lot and stages permitted a greater sense of space and more attention to mise-en-scène than are typically found in television series of the
The Cinematic Zone of The Twilight Zone 23 era. In fact, Richard Donner, director of six episodes, recalls how doing the series at MGM resulted in an atmosphere that was conducive to a cinematic approach: “It was extraordinary; they treated every little television show like a feature” (Stanyard 98). Moreover, although the series did not have a gener-ous budget—despite the pilot costing an exorbitant $75,000 (Presnell and McGee 14)—shooting at MGM provided a wealth of physical resources that would show to advantage, even on the small screen; thus director Richard Bare remembers how “with access to their [MGM’s] fantastic scene dock, [they] were able to provide a rich look” even on the typically restricted epi-sode budgets (Stanyard 71). The cumulative effect is a show that, in appear-ance, often seems closer to fi lm than to television of the time, that points to more of a stylistic convergence between fi lm and television in the late 1950s than our histories have usually recognized, and that underscores the sf series’
impact on—even shaping of—the new medium.
As a starting point for such an examination, I will focus on the styling of three of the better-known episodes, ones that I would argue are typical of the series as a whole and that together suggest a range of its visual possibili-ties. I want to begin by considering an early entry, “Time Enough at Last”
(20 November 1959), a story about a literature-obsessed bank clerk, Henry Bemis. This fi rst-season episode provides a particularly fi tting start because its fi rst half demonstrates precisely the sort of interior, dramatic sensibility for which The Twilight Zone has so often been praised, whereas its sec-ond half is decidedly different as it provides an unusually open, even spa-cious and visually rich mise-en-scène of the sort that we generally associate with feature fi lms. We can compare that show with one of the series’ later and most famous entries, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (11 October 1963), an episode that, in its investigation of a troubled former mental patient, works with the claustrophobic set of an airliner whose restricted spaces clearly challenged a cinematic emphasis—a challenge that was met in part by mobilizing the fi lmic emphasis on the gaze. And as a fi nal contrast, I will consider an episode that operates under a very different spatial imperative,
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (4 March 1960). Shot entirely outdoors, it illustrates a different sort of visual challenge, one of openness rather than interiority. By looking at this combination of episodes, each of which involves a different visual style and a different set of spatial pos-sibilities, even a rather different approach to what Ellis terms the “glance”
emphasis of televisual narrative, we can better gauge the sort of aesthetic combination that marks the series’ top episodes.
“Time Enough at Last” opens on a conventional interior, that of the lobby of the bank where Henry Bemis works, but it introduces its subject in a visually complex way. A high-angle boom shot follows seemingly random characters as they move through the lobby, and it culminates in a close-up introduction of Bemis, “a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers,” as Rod Serling’s voice-over terms him. Of course, we already visually gather as much because a cut to a reverse-angle shot, from behind Bemis, directs our
24 J. P. Telotte
gaze to reveal that he is reading a novel rather than attending to his duties, as a short-changed customer’s complaint quickly underscores. It is an effective introduction for what is essentially a character study, developed through a subsequent series of rather conventional dialogue exchanges between Henry and the bank president in the president’s offi ce, then between Henry and his shrewish wife Helen in their small apartment, all done in two-shots and tightly framed interior sets. Following an atomic explosion that spares Henry (who had been reading in the bank vault) but apparently destroys everyone else, the claustrophobic interior spaces give way to “an eight-hour tour of a graveyard,” as Henry characterizes his wanderings: a montage of track-ing shots through a landscape of total destruction, punctuated by Henry’s close-up reaction shots. The exterior images increasingly render Henry a smaller and smaller fi gure, an effect that is particularly vivid when he fi nally comes upon the monumental images of a devastated library, its pillars stretched out amid the rubble, its reading tables fl ung about like toys, books strewn up and down its long steps. Visually rendered almost insignifi cant by high-angle shots and the scale of the detritus, Henry still fi nds an element of hope, even pleasure in having books all around him and “time enough at last” to read all he wants. But in the sort of twist ending that would become a hallmark of the series, he bends forward to retrieve a book, drops his glasses, and breaks them, leaving him, as Serling’s voice-over offers, “just a piece of a smashed landscape, just a part of the rubble”—commentary that is punctu-ated by a visually arresting track-back to an extreme long shot of him in this hopeless, devastated world.
In describing the complex long-take approach he took to the start of another episode, “A World of Difference,” Ted Post, who directed four of the shows, recalls that The Twilight Zone directors were consistently encouraged to be inventive and to help “visualize the concept the story is rooted in” (Stanyard 106). It is an approach we clearly see at work in “Time Enough at Last.” Although the episode relies heavily on language in its fi rst half as Bemis’s love of reading comes out in his efforts to discuss books, poetry, and even advertisements with a bank customer, the president, and his wife, the story’s texture ultimately derives from its visualizations. The tracking camera of the opening suggests a freedom that Bemis, as a result of his job and his unhappy personal life, simply does not share—a circum-stance emphasized when the president at one point orders him back to his
“cage.” Yet after the atomic explosion, the show opens up to emphasize how easily that constraining modern life—embodied in its structures and institutions—might be blasted aside, reduced to rubble. The open frames and again a freely tracking camera initially suggest Bemis’s release from his “cage,” only to then revert to a diminishing of the character through the long and high-angle shots I have noted. Presented as a human “part of the rubble” this world has become, Bemis is fi nally seen—bereft of his glasses, alone, and with a look of terror—as still little more than a prisoner, although now in an open but quite empty world.
The Cinematic Zone of The Twilight Zone 25
Perhaps a more telling challenge to an effective cinematic styling shows up in those episodes that, because of their limited sets, are more spatially constrained and, consequently, seem far more like dramatic chamber plays.
And here we need only think of various efforts wherein the action is con-fi ned to a small interior space, such as the stark metal room of “Five Char-acters in Search of an Exit” (22 December 1961), the barren apartment of
“Nothing in the Dark” (5 January 1962), or especially the airliner interiors of such episodes as “The Odyssey of Flight 33” (24 February 1961) or the more famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” “The Odyssey of Flight 33” par-ticularly suggests the diffi culty of opening up such confi ned spaces because the location for almost all the action is the airliner’s cramped cockpit where the crew gradually realizes—and struggles to explain in dialogue—that they have, inexplicably, fl own back in time. A primary counter strategy here is the cutaway to fi le footage of a contemporary jet airliner in fl ight in order to open up the narrative and to contrast with the dominant medium shots and choker close-ups of the crew. However, their repeated reaction shots and commentary would probably only have frustrated audiences without the payback of shots showing that they had indeed traveled in time—shots exploiting the possibilities and even pleasures of the cinematic gaze. That Figure 2.1 Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) as part of the rubble in the postapoca-lyptic world of “Time Enough at Last” on The Twilight Zone (1959). Copyright CBS Video.
26 J. P. Telotte
satisfaction came from inserted aerial shots of the 1939 New York World’s Fair and, more importantly, from the surprising images of a prehistoric New York complete with a grazing brontosaurus. The stop-motion dino-saur scene was an unusual addition and, in fact, “the most expensive such clip ever shot” for the show (Presnell and McGee 87). It is also a scene that demonstrates the sort of creative geography on which fi lm has always depended for much of its impact: the combination of shots and reaction shots effectively construct the dramatic space of the narrative, suture the audience into that world of changing times and spaces, as the cinematic gaze typically does, and even provide a degree of spectacle to correspond to the psychological terror this strange event has visited upon the crew.
With the more famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” the combination of interior and exterior spaces takes on an added weight, particularly because the plot concerns a recently released inmate of a sanitarium, Bob Wilson, for whom the very prospect of an airline fl ight already represents a confron-tation with his own fragile inner self, previously unable to deal with such claustrophobic situations, and even now, as he readily recognizes, leaving him “not acting much like a cured man.” As the plane fl ies through a dark and stormy night—effects that limit our view and give further reason to the narrative’s interior focus—Bob suddenly sees on the plane’s wing a mys-terious creature that he can only describe as a “gremlin.” That strange, even illogical appearance effectively externalizes his internal confl ict while it also reframes the question of his sanity. Every subsequent shot of the gremlin implicates his—and our—gaze, as either a subjective shot or one from his seat perspective, and because no one else witnesses the creature’s appearance, we—as well as Wilson—are left to wonder for much of the narrative, and in a long tradition of such restricted points of view in fi lm, if he is simply projecting that nightmarish image, giving external shape to
With the more famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” the combination of interior and exterior spaces takes on an added weight, particularly because the plot concerns a recently released inmate of a sanitarium, Bob Wilson, for whom the very prospect of an airline fl ight already represents a confron-tation with his own fragile inner self, previously unable to deal with such claustrophobic situations, and even now, as he readily recognizes, leaving him “not acting much like a cured man.” As the plane fl ies through a dark and stormy night—effects that limit our view and give further reason to the narrative’s interior focus—Bob suddenly sees on the plane’s wing a mys-terious creature that he can only describe as a “gremlin.” That strange, even illogical appearance effectively externalizes his internal confl ict while it also reframes the question of his sanity. Every subsequent shot of the gremlin implicates his—and our—gaze, as either a subjective shot or one from his seat perspective, and because no one else witnesses the creature’s appearance, we—as well as Wilson—are left to wonder for much of the narrative, and in a long tradition of such restricted points of view in fi lm, if he is simply projecting that nightmarish image, giving external shape to