I’ve been watching The Twilight Zone (original series) recently. I’ve seen episodes here and there, but had never seen enough to see the patterns of storytelling and the themes that executive writer and narrator Rod Serling created.
The philosophical questions in the scripts are still hugely relevant to today: identity, morality, success, greed, happiness, love. I highly recommend watching or re-watching some of the episodes if you have the time. Jordan Peele’s newly revived version launched in April 2019, but I haven’t caught any of it yet; I don’t have cable. I’m sure he’s expertly bringing today’s issues to the screen.
Challenging Racist Tropes
It was the 1960 episode “Big Tall Wish” that got me curious and sent me down a rabbit hole into Serling and the history of The Twilight Zone. The the plot centers around an aging boxer, whose young friend wishes for him to win an upcoming fight. What’s extraordinary for the time period is that the episode — which aired in the midst of the Jim Crow era and the heart of the Civil Rights movement — features a majority African-American cast, and is done respectfully and without racist tropes or stereotypes.
Rod Serling seems to have been somewhat an anomaly in the that age: he was a white man who recognized not only the social and racial injustice at the time, but also his own power and influence to change it. Before beginning The Twilight Zone project, he sought to create a television showabout Emmett Till, a black teen brutally murdered in Mississippi by two white men in 1955. The perpetrators were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
The powers that be wouldn’t allow Serling to execute the show he wanted, leading him to conceive The Twilight Zone, where he could explore socially controversial issues like race and prejudice through a veil of science fiction.
In the episode “The Monsters on Maple Street”, for example, Serling narrates:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.
Check out this 20-minute interview with Serling, who speaks about Emmett Till, capitalism and the influence of money on what stories are told, and the power the audience wields. It’s worth a watch.
And if you’re interested, a few links to explore more: As I Knew Him (memoir published by Serling’s daughter a few years ago); a much longer analysis of Serling’s life, creativity, and The Twilight Zone, from The Atlantis; . The Twilight Zone is currently on Netflix.