“The TWILIGHT ZONE Zone”

Posted byStephen FuttererPosted inUncategorized

It’s almost trite to describe the turn of the new year as bitter-sweet. And yet it still rings true. That inner warmth you get reviewing last year’s highlight reel (“you wanna check tape?”). Heck, your iPhone compiles it for you. And then there’s the hopeful aspect of what’s to come in the next. Maybe a little travel. Finish writing that book, perhaps? But one also can’t help but look back with longing at another annum gone and all too quickly. It seems that the many gripes you heard as a kid from the oldsters were true. Unwanted and annoying details about time’s acceleration and missed opportunities and colon fiber, doctors and lack of sleep. It was all dead on. God love ’em. And also fuck them for being right! But I’m one of them now. As my 60th approaches and the choke of my engine grows a bit spongy, I find myself veering nostalgic. I know, I know. They say “nostalgia” is the longing for things as they never were. And with that I would mostly agree. But hear me out. It’s not exactly what you’d think or even what I would have thought as a younger self. The “Twilight Zone” will help me explain…

In “Eye of the Beholder” (1959), Donna Douglas gets the stink-eye before she loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.

You see, I was born during the last year of the making of the original series (1959-64). These episodes are not depicting the era of my youth. I didn’t come of age in under the pall of a post-atomic Cold War paranoia. And although they still blasted air-raid sirens with some regularity during grade school, I never was asked to hide under my desk, and my parents never discussed building a bomb shelter. Vietnam was but a vague notion to me even though one of my uncles had served. My earliest major memory is watching the 1969 Apollo-11 moonwalk with my mom on the TV in our den. I recall that it was in black and white and that it was excruciatingly boring. Politically, it was the 1972 election that stepped up. Still, it left me only wondering why we had a Nixon sign on our lawn when my best friend’s parents boosted McGovern. I mean, we were on the same street, right? Watergate was the true beginning for me. You couldn’t get away from it. Not in the DC area, anyway. My sister dressed up for Halloween one year as an insect — a Watergate bug. Ha-ha! And when they filmed a scene for “All the President’s Men” at a (rather undistinguished) house in the neighborhood, it got our attention. It was during this period that I first saw the “Twilight Zone” in syndication. Like most, we were accustomed to watching reruns, such as “Leave It to Beaver” and “Bewitched” and “Dragnet” and “Dark Shadows.” But there was something so alt-world arresting about Rod Serling’s twisted and spooky short-stories brought to life on TV. I think that’s true regardless of where or when you are first exposed. And therein lies the first component to my nuanced TZ nostalgia: firsts. First crush, first beer, first car, first love, first concert, etc. There are no do-overs for a first anything. Sorry, that’s life…

Before the days of “Soylent Green.” As Julia Child would say, “bon appetit!”

The second aspect of this nostalgia beast has to do with youth itself. Specifically, it is youth as it relates to potential energy. When you are young, most things are still in front of you, yet to be done. Sky’s the limit. You’ll study. You’ll date. You may or may not marry. Have kids, perhaps. You’ll get a job and then climb, climb, climb. Oh, the places you’ll go… a coiled spring… a human rocket… to boldly go where no man has gone before… just keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle… because I feel the need for speed! And so on like that. But in the context of this post, it means that we are seeing “Twilight Zone” for the first time when we are at/near our fullest potential. We are being shown secrets and given riddles to solve just when we are contemplating our first big steps into the world. And that is a powerful combination. That the actors are top-notch and that the lessons still fresh are major factors in the shows enduring appeal. That they reward repeated viewings is another testament, though I would emphasize that there remains an unrivaled impact of that first encounter with a great TZ episode… 

In “Time Enough to Last” (1959), Burgess Meredith was right about several things. We all should read more books and we all need far more time to do it, in addition to a spare set of reading glasses. Oh, and perhaps we also might need a manager… 

And that brings us to the third element. Call it magic. Call it a miracle. Either way, I’ll attest to it. Rod Serling made 156 episodes of his show, each one heavily dated and yet also timeless. And I’ve been watching them in syndication since my pre-teen years off-and-on for decades. More recently, I can’t help but fall into the rabbit hole of the “Twilight Zone” marathon on NYE and New Year’s Day. And yet somehow, someway, there are episodes that I have not seen! Still others I know I’ve seen but can only vaguely recall. Just yesterday, I saw three novel ones. This has me wondering if they’re using AI to craft “new” episodes from old actor footage. It boggles my mind. How can this be?! I watched “Probe 7, Over and Out” (1963). I thought it had Elizabeth Montgomery but it was Antoinette Bower (both lookers!). An Adam and Eve story set on another planet after a space crash. New beginnings. Seems there really is nothing new under the sun. Another was “Spur of the Moment” (1964) about a woman with middle life regrets. She rides horseback wearing all black and chasing her younger self wearing white, also on horseback, trying to warn her about an impending mistake. But it’s to no avail. If only. I could text message my younger self, but he wouldn’t get it either. The third was “The Old Man in the Cave” with James Coburn (1963). It’s a post-atomic tale about the tyranny of computers versus the hubris of man. Sounds pretty timely, right? Because it is. How can these shows be so old and yet also feel new and relevant?? 

In “The Hunt” (1962), Arthur Hunnicutt plays an old man whose dog Rip once saved his life. Ignoring his wife’s bad omens, he and Rip go night-hunting for racoons. When the dog chases one into a pond, the old man goes in after him. Unbeknown to us, they both die. That is, until we watch them witness their own burial. Ambling along Eternity Road together they encounter a man at a gate who offers him the Elysian Fields. But the old man balks when told his dog cannot enter. He states, “any place that’s too high-falutin’ for Rip is too fancy for me.” So they walk on until they find another gate where a true angel awaits to take them both to Heaven. The angel explains that the first gate was actually Hell. Rod Serling’s closing narration reads: “Travelers to unknown regions would be well advised to take along the family dog. He could just save you from entering the wrong gate. At least, it happened that way once—in a mountainous area of the Twilight Zone.”

I prefer to think of nostalgia as a transient emotion or fluid mental state that’s hard to pin down. It shifts and morphs, reversing polarity and changing valence states. At one moment warm and uplifting but then suddenly melancholy. We are happy to have had those days, those first-time shows, yet we know that they will never be quite the same again. I think it’s actually the frisson of surprise and possibility we want to relive rather than any specifics. When I ponder the nervous excitement of my first crush, Sally Duscha, in the third grade, it isn’t so much the details of her that I recall but that ziggy feeling she gave me. A true gift that I hope I had occasion to give to someone else. The butterflies I felt thinking of what might happen if I ran into her. It’s the electrical current, at least in my mind, that arced between us. That’s what we miss, I think, when looking back. It’s in the new and unknown. Both the uncertainty and the hope. All possibilities splayed out like a Tarot deck. Life, like the plot to any story, is ultimately a narrowing down of choices or potential outcomes (unless you have a dream sequence!). At these nostalgic moments, what we long for is the full pack of playing cards.

Barbara Nichols gets the frisson of recurring surprise in “Twenty Two” (1961). There must have been a swinger’s party wherein a woman dressed as a nurse greets guests with, “room for one more, honey!”

But there is one final element. It was there all along. It’s always there. And forever will be. Death. We all will die. You. Me. Everyone we love, have loved, and will ever love. We all must someday move on to another zone, Twilight or otherwise (ideally, the Calzone Zone!). When you see a young Jack Klugman or Burgess Meredith on the screen, you have a sort of transient time-travel experience. A portal. Almost like stumbling unexpectedly into an old friend and the automatic smile it triggers. But then, just as quickly, you realize that they are no longer with us. Their time, as ours will, has passed. And so it seems to me that this show deals with human frailty and mortality better than just about any other that I’ve seen. The positive feelings are balanced with a wistful, low-level mourning. An intuitive mourning for those no longer with us, and these now deceased or aged actors stand-in for our lost loved ones. We also grieve the loss of our own youth and, in a way, our own ultimate demise. We do this unconsciously, in anticipation, since we know we are no different; as there right before our eyes, on the signpost up ahead, is the unliving proof. Thus nudging us to make the most of our short time in this world. And in discovering episodes that I’ve never before seen, it makes me want to, almost, start to, once again, believe in God. And so, to whom this may concern, please keep them coming! 

Happy 2024!!  

Published by Stephen Futterer

Much of my career in radiology has been spent studying, with great fascination, the internal mechanisms of the human body. This blog is an effort to expand that view to the outside world and also to map my own experiences engaging with it.

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