The Twilight Zone season 1, episode 3: “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” (Allen Reisner, 1959).
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by the benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.
—J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come
Rod Serling cuts a striking figure in American iconography. A handsome, shadowy silhouette in a stark suit and tie with a cigarette perched between two fingers, Serling would rhapsodize dark legends from the depths of the nation’s fractured postwar psyche every week on The Twilight Zone (1959–64). Born in Syracuse, New York, Serling maintained his quintessentially East Coast everyman aesthetic even after moving to Los Angeles, following the major players in the television industry. Dark brows furrowed, mouth set in a stern, straight line—Serling wasn’t a vain man, but he was conscious that his image projected this persona and always ensured that he was framed within a simple medium shot. Serling’s own likeness set against the classic Twilight Zone black-and-white backdrop has more recently become something of a visual shorthand on social media to convey that our current political reality has grown as implausible as an episode of his most famous series. In his narration bookending each episode, Serling would directly address audiences with the same dramatic gravitas as a presidential fireside chat, though with none of the warmth.
For a figure so easily identifiable, and for the creator of a show so visually distinct, Serling was first and foremost a writer. Shortly after he returned from the war, he moved to Cincinnati and attended Antioch College on the GI Bill. He went on to work for WLW-AM, a local station, cutting his teeth on scripts far from the kind of high-concept subject matter that would become his signature. Serling had spent his most formative years listening to the radio; the medium’s accessibility informed his later thematic emphasis on the plight of the ordinary man, as well as the straightforward nature of his signature clipped cadence. By the 1930s, the majority of American households owned a radio, and over the course of the decade, the medium became increasingly vital as a centralized source of news, delivering current events with a newfound immediacy. Radio quickly adapted the theatrical drama for a new medium; with no visual component, greater emphasis was placed on audio production and quality of writing, as well as the fledgling art of sound design.
Requiem for a Heavyweight, season 1, episode 2 (Ralph Nelson, 1956).
A 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, directed and narrated by Orson Welles for The Mercury Theatre on the Air and broadcast on CBS affiliates across the nation, had caused great uproar. Scripted to simulate an as-it-happens news broadcast, the program managed to convince some listeners that an alien invasion was, in fact, unfolding on American soil. “Listeners embraced radio news not just because it was fast, but because it was riveting,” writes the historian A. Brad Schwartz,1 Welles’s performance itself especially so; his booming voice was called “an instrument of pathos and terror, of infinite delicacy and brutally devastating power” by the adaptation’s producer, John Houseman. At the time of the broadcast, only a month after Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, tensions were already high. One confused audience member in Maine wrote to the FCC to complain: “During the recent war scare especially we came to depend on our radio to interrupt regular programs for the most recent news.”2 The broadcast proved to be a watershed moment for the radio drama, which would continue to innovate through the basic components of sound and rhetoric and draw on politically acute themes to appeal to broad audiences.
“I learned ‘time,’” Serling once said, of his experience working in radio, “writing for a medium that is measured in seconds.”3 In the 1950s, Serling began to turn toward television just in time for its first Golden Age. He was among those eager to push television forward, past “the nadir of its mediocrity,”4 and primed to develop what would become his best-known work. As he worked to perfect an economy of language suited to the time constraints of a television episode, Serling wrote stories that were roughly autobiographical and generally crowd-pleasing, drawing on his own experience as an amateur boxer for the earliest versions of “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” which first premiered on the broadly accessible Playhouse 90 (1956–60). Even then, his scripts were self-contained morality plays, relying on the effectiveness of script and performance rather than any impressive special effects. As Serling’s career progressed, he carefully trod back and forth between science fiction and reality, turning more and more frequently toward overtly political themes. The high-concept scenarios of alien invasions and interplanetary travel were exchanged for alternate realities, only a shade away from our own. Much of the drama plays out in rooms, between characters: dystopian futures rendered not as dynamic action set pieces, but as intimate conversations in recognizable settings.
Top: The Twilight Zone, season 1, episode 15: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (Stuart Rosenberg, 1960). Bottom: Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968).
The Twilight Zone’s first season showcases Serling at his most cynical. “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” which borrows its title from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, begins with a brief interlude in the control room of a space center, tracking the launch of the Arrow 1 spacecraft. Much of the episode plays out across a barren land of rock and sand, as three members of the spacecraft’s crew survive a crash landing onto an asteroid and are faced with the cold reality of their survival. There is the cool-headed Colonel; the panicking, pugnacious Corey; and the mediator between the two, the medic Pierson. The men begin to fight amongst themselves over limited resources in terra incognita, and Corey eventually emerges as the mission’s sole survivor, having brutally eliminated his companions. Serling breaks the series’s structural convention to speak, in voice-over, directly to his character, who trudges forward alone: “You scrabble up rock hills and feel hot sand underneath your feet,” Serling drones, his voice cold and low and even. “Every now and then, take a look over your shoulder at a giant sun, suspended in a dead and motionless sky, like an unblinking eye that probes at the back of your head in a prolonged accusation.” Serling, usually the unflinching observer, adopts a rare tone of sure, seething fury, making palpable his contempt for such a Darwinian attitude with classic lyrical prose. As Corey scrambles up the nearest crest of rock, he sees a sign for Reno, a series of telephone poles, moving cars; he falls to his knees, sobbing.
The episode was based on an idea by Madelon Champion, about whom little is known other than that, one night at a cocktail party, shortly after the announcement of NASA’s manned Project Mercury missions, she relayed to Serling a premise so intriguing that he paid her $500 on the spot for the rights to it: what if a group of astronauts landed in the middle of the Mojave Desert, believing it was a different planet? Serling gave Champion a story credit for the episode, demonstrating the importance he placed on a good idea, a basic premise; the challenge, then, was how to take a single thread and spin it into a yarn of increasing intricacy and scope, imbuing a concept with a distinct political charge.
As Serling began to develop feature-length scripts, it was his signature to present society with alternative futures that seemed plausible in light of modern inventions and anxieties. In 1968, nearly ten years after his conversation with Champion, Serling submitted a script for 20th Century Fox’s Planet of the Apes that offered several changes to Pierre Boulle’s original novel, the most significant being the ending: Charlton Heston’s character, who believes—and attempts to convince his simian captors—that he is from a different planet, finally realizes that he has never left Earth, which has only been transformed by time. Falling to his knees before a ruined Statue of Liberty, waves lapping against the shore of an otherwise idyllic beach, Taylor cries out to the heavens—a moment etched into the history of cinema. Despite the visual flair boasted by Rise of the…, Dawn of the…, War for the…, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, there is no moment in any of these films which manages to capture the singular horror of Serling’s ending. Within the final reveal of both “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air” and Planet of the Apes is the true horror that the dystopia we most fear is just over the nearest ridge, out of frame but well within the borders of our knowable world.
Playhouse 90, season 2, episode 38: “A Town Has Turned to Dust” (John Frankenheimer, 1958).
In an early draft of a teleplay Serling wrote for Playhouse 90, “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” the main character, a classic Serling everyman, builds a chemical plant that produces a fine dust, the inhalation of which makes so-called “mortal enemies'' forget their own hatred. Eventually, the protagonist dies in an accident at the plant, but he succeeds in proving to his community that this idea, worth dying for, is more important than any petty squabbles. The broad strokes of the story gesture toward the high-concept rendering of societal conflict that would characterize later Twilight Zone episodes; the original script, which Serling had written after the horrific lynching of Emmett Till, served as a more direct allegory for racial hatred. However, it would languish for years in developmental purgatory after facing backlash from CBS’s corporate censors. Where the earlier version offered a softer rumination on those who hope to better society, its final form was more pessimistic; suddenly, what was subtextual became overt.
What eventually aired as “A Town Has Turned to Dust” on Playhouse 90 displaces the story from the present-day American South to a frontier town in the late 19th century, substituting the Black characters for Mexicans. “The phrase ‘twenty men in hoods’ became ‘twenty men in homemade masks,’” Serling later said of the script: the network “chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.” Serling had always bristled against the restrictions of corporate censorship; on The Twilight Zone and later Night Gallery (1970–73), he was able to maintain a degree of artistic integrity, serving as both the primary creative force and the face of the programs he created. In an oft-cited 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace which aired on the eve of The Twilight Zone’s first episode, Serling was candid about the fact that he relied on television as a way to make a living, though he also conveyed a true faith in the medium. “I stay in television because I think it’s very possible to perform a function of providing adult, meaningful, exciting, challenging drama without dealing in controversy necessarily,” Serling said. “I think it’s criminal that we’re not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist, of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society.”5 Serling’s most prolific years were spent as a freelance television writer, beholden to no studio, and The Twilight Zone was the result of a long and contentious relationship with CBS; despite its critical success, Serling’s incarnation of the show would be canceled after four seasons amid declining ratings and mutual resentment between creator and network However, Serling would find that working in film often put him under even more scrutiny.
Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964).
“A Town Has Turned to Dust,” which aired on June 19, 1958, was directed by John Frankenheimer, years before Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate (both 1962). The two had a good rapport; Frankenheimer directed many of Serling’s scripts for Playhouse 90, and it was Frankenheimer who would recruit Serling to write the script for Seven Days in May (1964), which chronicles an attempted military coup of the United States government. The original novel was a pulpy political thriller, written by two political columnists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, and adored by John F. Kennedy; the administration was happy to cooperate when the filmmakers requested the White House as a filming location.6 If as a novel, Seven Days in May represented the immediacy of Cold War paranoia, then Serling’s interpretation offered a counterpoint, something broader in scale, universal in scope, and with an enduring resonance; the more recent adaptation, The Enemy Within (1994), updates the setting but keeps much of Serling’s original script intact. Dry, complicated military jargon from the novel was streamlined; heavy-handed exposition was sublimated into taut political tension. In the end, Serling was proud to have produced a script that was more than a simple, perfunctory adaptation of the source material; “I think it’s some of the best writing I’ve done in seven or eight years,” he said in 1962.7 It was a disappointment to Serling, then, when his work on the script received little attention from major awards bodies.
The themes of Seven Days in May certainly would have drawn Serling to the material, with or without Frankenheimer’s personal request. Both the novel and the script serve as refutations of the military-industrial complex, with the protagonist (Kirk Douglas) ultimately triumphing over a military coup which would assert the interests of the few over the will of a democratic majority. Serling’s work was frequently influenced by his time as a soldier in World War II; by the account of his commanding officer, he was not a particularly good one. He resented being stationed in the Pacific rather than in Europe, and defied the chain of command in order to wander around the island where he was stationed, sometimes getting lost. His writing outside of the science-fiction genre reflects a former soldier’s awareness of the otherworldly brutality of war; during the war, he learned that the actions taken while in peril are suddenly no longer justified, a sentiment which gives bearing to the morality-play endings of Twilight Zone episodes such as “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air,” as well as Seven Days in May.
The home front, and suburbia in particular, was frequently under Serling’s microscope, which is evident in “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” but also in Twilight Zone episodes like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” In the latter, an idyllic, close-knit community witnesses what might be a UFO; shortly afterward, their stoves won’t light, their cars won’t start, their radios don’t turn on. Despite a child’s suggestion that aliens might be behind the attack, the community soon descends into chaos and hysteria; everyone becomes a suspect and a traitor; violence erupts. It is revealed in the episode’s final scene that this paranoia was manufactured, created by humanoid aliens as a weapon to destroy humanity. Serling spent his entire career trying to reconcile the tendency of man to turn against their fellow man, a condition of the Cold War and a country fractured by fear. Serling was always more interested in examining the violence we commit against our own neighbors under a façade of civility or domesticity; the enduring nature of Serling’s work speaks to such evergreen anxieties. Despite such cynicism, there is a bleeding heart at the center of Serling’s work; he expresses his love of humanity through his contempt for structures of authority. In the final interview he gave before his death, Serling explained, “I think before I die, just for the hell of it, one night I’ll spend an entire night weeping.… I’m now weeping for the following reasons: chronologically, for all the shit that’s out there that I should have wept at and didn’t.”8
- A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (Hill and Wang, 2015), 14. ↩
- Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria, 27. ↩
- Martin Grams Jr., The Twilight Zones: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (OTR Publishing, 2008). From an excerpt, “The Radio Career of Rod Serling,” Audio Classics Archive. ↩
- “Rod Serling,” The Mike Wallace Show (ABC, September 22, 1959). ↩
- “Rod Serling,” The Mike Wallace Show. ↩
- Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV’s Last Angry Man (Cornell University Press, 1992), 188. ↩
- Los Angeles Times (March 6, 1962), in Sander, Serling, 188. ↩
- Linda Brevelle, “Rod Serling: The Facts of Life,” Writer’s Digest (March 1976). ↩