XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.books   
   From: weberm@polaris.net   
      
   The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it   
   hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the   
   sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on, and the weather   
   forecast is "more of the same, only hotter." Despite the unbearable day-to-   
   reality of constant sweat, the total collapse of order and decency, and,   
   above all, the scarcity of water, Norma can't shake the feeling that one day   
   she'll wake up and find that this has all been a dream. And she's right.   
   Because the world isn't drifting toward the sun at all, it's drifting away   
   from it, and the paralytic cold has put Norma into a fever dream.   
      
   This is "The Midnight Sun," my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, and one   
   that has come to seem grimly familiar. I also wake up adrift, in a desperate   
   and unfamiliar reality, wondering if the last year in America has been a   
   dream-I too expect catastrophe, but it's impossible to know from which   
   direction it will come, whether I am right to trust my senses or if I'm   
   merely sleepwalking while the actual danger becomes ever-more present. One   
   thing I do know is that I'm not alone: since the election of Donald Trump,   
   it's become commonplace to compare the new normal to living in the Twilight   
   Zone, as Paul Krugman did in a 2017 New York Times op-ed titled "Living in   
   the Trump Zone," in which he compared the President to the all-powerful child   
   who terrorizes his Ohio hometown in "It's a Good Life," policing their   
   thoughts and arbitrarily striking out at the adults. But these comparisons do   
   The Twilight Zone a disservice. The show's articulate underlying philosophy   
   was never that life is topsy-turvy, things are horribly wrong, and misrule   
   will carry the day-it is instead a belief in a cosmic order, of social   
   justice and a benevolent irony that, in the end, will wake you from your   
   slumber and deliver you unto the truth.   
      
   The Twilight Zone has dwelt in the public imagination, since its cancellation   
   in 1964, as a synecdoche for the kind of neat-twist ending exemplified by "To   
   Serve Man" (it's a cookbook), "The After Hours" (surprise, you're a   
   mannequin), and "The Eye of the Beholder" (everyone has a pig-face but you).   
   It's probably impossible to feel the original impact of each show-stopping   
   revelation, as the twist ending has long since been institutionalized, clich   
   ‚d, and abused in everything from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects to   
   Twilight Zone-style anthology series like Black Mirror. Rewatching these   
   episodes with the benefit of Steven Jay Rubin's, 429-page book, The Twilight   
   Zone Encyclopedia, (a bathroom book if ever I saw one), I realized that the   
   punchlines are actually the least reason for the show's enduring hold over   
   the imagination. That appeal lies, rather, in its creator Rod Serling's   
   rejoinders to the prevalent anti-Communist panic that gripped the decade:   
   stories of witch-hunting paranoia tend to end badly for everyone, as in "The   
   Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which the population of a town turns on   
   each other in a panic to ferret out the alien among them, or in "Will the   
   Real Martian Please Stand Up?" which relocates the premise to a diner in   
   which the passengers of a bus are temporarily stranded and subject to   
   interrogation by a pair of state troopers.   
      
   The show's most prevalent themes are probably best distilled as "you are not   
   what you took yourself to be," "you are not where you thought you were," and   
   "beneath the fa‡ade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of   
   monsters, clones, and robots." Serling had served as a paratrooper in the   
   Philippines in 1945 and returned with PTSD; he and his eventual audience were   
   indeed caught between the familiar past and an unknown future. They stood   
   dazed in a no-longer-recognizable world, flooded with strange new   
   technologies, vastly expansionist corporate or federal jurisdictions, and   
   once-unfathomable ideologies. The culture was shifting from New Deal   
   egalitarianism to the exclusionary persecution and vigilantism of   
   McCarthyism, the "southern strategy" of Goldwater and Nixon, and the Cold   
   War-era emphasis on mandatory civilian conformity, reinforced across the   
   board in schools and the media. In "The Obsolete Man," a totalitarian court   
   tries a crusty, salt-of-the-earth librarian (played by frequent Twilight Zone   
   star Burgess Meredith, blacklisted since the 1950s, who breaks his glasses in   
   "Time Enough At Last" and plays the titular milquetoast in "Mr. Dingle, the   
   Strong"), who has outlived his bookish medium; but his obsolescence is   
   something every US veteran would have recognized given the gulf between the   
   country they defended and the one that had so recently taken root and was   
   beginning to resemble, in its insistence on purity and obedience to social   
   norms, the fascist states they had fought against in the war. From Serling's   
   opening narration:   
      
   You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not   
   a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is   
   simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself   
   after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on   
   the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements,   
   technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction   
   of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it   
   has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.   
      
   The show's subversive credentials -buoyed by semi-satirical "soft" science   
   fiction writers like Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, and Ray Bradbury-is one   
   of the secret threads running through Rubin's Encyclopedia, which logs each   
   episode's opening monologue, premise, and cast along with behind-the-scenes   
   production notes. The book is so absurdly comprehensive, you start to pick up   
   on the eerie synergy between the show and its personnel, who often come to   
   bad ends or survive by uncanny close-calls. A particularly savage case is   
   that of Gig Young, who played the advertising executive trapped in a bucolic   
   small town nightmare in "Walking Distance," and who in real life murdered his   
   wife before turning the gun on himself in 1978. Or Cliff Robertson, the   
   ventriloquist in 1962's "The Dummy," whose original flight to Hollywood to   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)