The first episode I can remember seeing of The Twilight Zone was “Eye of the Beholder,” which was broadcast on November 11, 1960. I would turn nine on the 25th. I remember seeing it with my mother and sister in Marks, Mississippi. We had just moved from New Jersey, and the culture shock from living up north to that of the deep south was about as shocking as a Twilight Zone episode. “Eye of the Beholder” was the episode where everyone had pig faces, and a beautiful girl by our standards thought she looked ugly because she didn’t look like everyone else. That show was from the second season.
I have no memory of seeing anything from the first season when it premiered, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. I would have been seven when the show began, and I don’t remember much about being seven.
I bring all this up because for The Twilight Zone to work, the audience had to suspend belief. My perception of the show at 72 is much different from my perception of the show at eight. I can’t say for sure, but The Twilight Zone might have been my introduction to science fiction, although I didn’t know the term at that time.
Growing up with The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a trip. I was a gullible kid and easily fooled. Rod Serling and his stories were spooky, eerie, strange, and sometimes scary. I’d love to observe my eight-year old mind when I watched that TV show. How many unrealistic fantastic themes did I believe back then?
I bring all this up because watching “And When the Sky Was Opened” you have to wonder about what Rod Serling expected of his audience. Serling introduces the episode while we look at a rocket in a hanger under a tarp:
Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours.
The story begins with Lt. Colonel Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor) visiting Maj. William Gart (Jim Hutton) in the hospital. Forbes is a nervous wreck. Gart wants to know what’s going on. Forbes tells him yesterday that three of them came back from this mission, but today they are only two of them, and no one remembers Col. Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman). When Gart tells Forbes he’s never heard of Harrington, Forbes starts breaks down. He tells his version of the previous day, and how he loses Harrington. At one point, Harrington tells Forbes that he thinks that some one doesn’t want them there anymore. Eventually, Forbes disappears, and Gart goes crazy, because no one remembers him. Then, we see Gart disappearing, and then a doctor and nurse discussing an empty hospital room. Finally, we are shown the hanger where the X-20 was in the first scene. It’s no longer there, the tarp folded up on the floor.
On my Blu-ray edition, there’s an extra for this episode where we hear Serling giving a speech to college students about writing. He says the core of this story is accepting the idea that someone doesn’t want those men to be here anymore. Serling says if you can’t suspend your belief for that one point, the story won’t work.
That might be the essence of The Twilight Zone. Let’s pretend that one impossible thing is possible. That just Mr. Serling and we the audience know the full truth about reality. That we see what the characters never know. In other words, this is a game of pretend for grownups. (Even though a lot of children like myself watched The Twilight Zone, I can’t help but feel that the show was aimed at adults.)
The show never expects us to believe any of this. But us kids, we wanted to believe, and so did all the nutballs of the 1950s, the ones who believed in flying saucers, Bridey Murphy, Chris Costner Sizemore, Edgar Cayce, and science fiction. Those people Philip K. Dick called crap artists in his novel Confessions of a Crap Artist. The people who wanted reality to be a lot further out than its already far out existence.
If Philip K. Dick had been the host and main writer of The Twilight Zone the episodes would have been a lot edgier, with a lot more paranoia. He would ask us to believe that there were gods or beings capable of making us disappear from reality. You might think Dick’s work up until Valis was just for fun like Serling’s The Twilight Zone. But once you read Valis, you realize PKD believed strange things were possible. That there is a hidden reality behind ours.
When watching this episode I realized we had a unique perspective as the viewer. We get to see a larger reality, one that the characters in the show don’t get to see. This is the basis of gnosticism. It’s also the basis of stories by Philip K. Dick. Most science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers don’t use this perspective. In their stories, there’s one reality. I need to keep an eye out for gnostic fiction. Some science fiction and fantasy have always played around with it.
“And When the Sky Was Opened” is about astronauts before NASA’s Mercury Seven. Was Serling really thinking something might not want us to travel in space? I know my grandmother believed that. Just before we landed on the Moon, my grandmother told me that God would strike down the Apollo astronauts. She was born in 1881, and had seen a lot of stuff, but going to the Moon was too much.
Since the Internet has revealed that billions think crazy things I have to wonder what Serling really thought. He was socialy conscious guy. Many of his Twilight Zone episodes have morals. But was he weird like PKD?
When we watch The Twilight Zone, at least back in 1959, was Serling really saying that it’s all just a bit of fun, or did he ever believe that things sometimes do go bump in the night? And what’s the difference between believing in weird possibilities, and pretending to believe in them? Isn’t pretending close to wanting to believe in them?
James Wallace Harris, 10/31/24 (weird topic for Holloween)
Classics of Science Fiction 