The ‘Twilight Zone’ New Year’s Day Marathon: Your Annual Moral Reckoning
If New Year’s Eve is a cause for celebration, New Year’s Day is about reflection. Binge-watching Rod Serling’s series will help you do just that
For nearly twenty years, I’ve spent at least part of my New Year’s Day beached on the couch in front of the TV to make a dent in the 24-hour Twilight Zone marathon. I always promise myself I’ll resist, but it’s futile: Whether I’m hungover or just tired, I click on the TV, mindlessly flip through the channels, and the next thing I know, I’m encountering a character about to be thrown into another dimension, being seduced by the coolly distant creator Rod Serling briefly breaking down the fourth wall to lay out the moral dilemma, and then totally done for by the time that circulating cone starts whirring around, hypnotizing me. Crash goes the window, that eerie music wholly entrancing me, pulling me in for hours and hours of tales from The Twilight Zone. This was binge-watching before we called it binge-watching, before there were DVD sets and Netflix streaming, when TV marathons were a special, semiannual event that we looked forward to, like the annual broadcast of The Sound of Music (the one with Julie Andrews, not that Carrie Underwood travesty) and The Wizard of Oz, and not something we succumbed to, like a weekly all-day Real Housewives of, I Dunno, Somewhere backdrop bender.
This New Year’s, there are special marathons aplenty on offer: Dr. Who, Happy Endings, The Walking Dead, The Mindy Project, NCIS, and, of course, Law & Order: SVU — there are so many episodes, if you lined them end to end, you’d worm your way to the end of the universe. If it weren’t for the fact that the Syfy Channel were offering The Twilight Zone, I’d probably get sucked in to a few hours of Dick Wolf’s procedural — Law & Order, and indeed the entire franchise, is a kind of Twilight Zone of our time: an anthology of moralistic tales punctuated with an eerie soundtrack, employing every actor working in the past three decades to play out stories that reflect how reprehensible we human beings are. But I can watch those any old day. I’d rather immerse myself in the paranoia of Serling’s post-war, A-bomb-and-Commie-fearing Cold War fatalistic world, where extra-terrestrials are indistinguishable from Homo sapiens; families attempt to flee dying, war-torn planets; beauty is deemed a monstrosity; and an overly indulged boy can terrorize an entire town by reading minds and exact his fantastic revenge. Why? Because sometimes those cynical, sci-fi allegories Serling spun a half-century ago feel dangerous close to realized omens.
Maybe that’s not how I felt when I initially watched them with my dad when I was a teenager. They were gripping and moving, at times overwrought and often campy, and cast with actors often before they broke into the big time: There’s a young, sweaty William Shatner, whom I knew better as Captain Kirk, panicking on a plane in flight, insisting to incredulous passengers and flight attendants that a monster is dismantling the wing, panel by panel. There’s a nerdy bespectacled Burgess Meredith, hiding in a bank vault, desperately seeking a quiet reading nook, which shelters him from a nuclear bomb attack, reemerging to find an obliterated landscape — which affords him all the time in the world to read, that is, until his glasses slip off his face and shatter. And there’s a young, gorgeous Robert Redford in the role of a cop — or so he initially appears — trying to charm his way into the home of an elderly shut-in terrified of her mortality, and earn her trust to lure her gently into that good night.
When I watched the episodes as a young person, I was riveted, at times terrified, by I was taking them or at face value and less so as allegorical tales of caution. Now, when my head is pounding from lack of sleep or maybe even a bit of a hangover after a late night consuming too much Champagne and martinis, and I get drawn in, it can feel like I’m facing my demons. Sure, at first it feels like nostalgia, being reacquainted with old favorites like the famous episode, “To Serve Man,” when seemingly benevolent aliens solve the woes of the Earth — defusing nuclear weapons, improving technology — and finally inviting Earthlings to their planet, until a U.N. cryptographer successfully decodes their manifesto entitled “To Serve Man,” which, it turns out, is a … cookbook! And I have a special fondness for Telly Savalas being taunted by his stepdaughter’s protective doll, who threatens, “My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you,” in “Living Doll.” I don’t know why, I just do.
And, in “The Masks,” a dying rich man bequeaths hideous masks to each of his family members that reflects their greedy souls, as they eagerly await his imminent demise so they can lay claim to his estate.
But then there are episodes that haunt me to this day because they seem nearly plausible, like “The Midnight Sun,” in which a painter has a fever dream that the Earth has spun out of its orbit, and is moving closer to the sun. We see the mercury burst through the thermometer and the painting of the waterfall on her canvas start to melt — an image that never fails to freak me out — indicating that her fever has broken, and she wakes up. A moment of relief: Except, we learn, the Earth is moving away from the sun.
And, because I’m a Park Slope parent who encounters more than a few overly indulged children, I am always unnerved by “It’s a Good Life,” where a six-year-old with godlike powers who has an entire town at his mercy: The few surviving inhabitants aren’t even sure if there is a world outside of town, because he very well might have destroyed it. He’s turned people into three-headed gophers and cast them out into cornfields. He controls the weather, he eliminates everything he hates — so you know there aren’t any vegetables. Or booze. Everything is subject to the whims of this little turdbucket. And everybody who has managed to elude his wrath has to tell him, “It’s good that you did that, Anthony, real good.” Makes you eye every first-grader with caution — it does.
So while I’ve bid adieu to the year the evening before, but before I can begin a new year, I enter this in between time, in what would appear to be zoning out in the twilight, basking in the blue glow. But really, I’d like to think I’m reflecting alongside Rod Serling on the state of humanity, as I step into … The Twilight Zone.
