August 16, 2005

SERLING

I've never seen a photograph of Rod Serling that wasn't black and white.
In fact, I seriously doubt that color photographs of Serling exist. Oh, there may have been family Kodachromes, but let me respectfully submit for your approval the notion that if one were to examine the Serling family albums one would discover standing amidst any number of bright-cheeked picnickers or beachgoers clad in Pop-Art-hued loungewear a lone figure in video grey and black, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee and a cigarette. Like Edward R. Murrow and Humphrey Bogart, fellow icons of narrow-lapelled masculinity, Serling just wouldn't register on color film.
Rod Serling was so many things, and many of them are now hard to keep entirely in focus: Master of a brief, much-lamented era of live plays on television, and paradigmatic figure of that monstrous new medium's potential and decline. Assimilated Jew whose vision of grey-flannel alienation helped define postwar American discontent, and a writer so distracted by celebrity he never mastered his craft to his own satisfaction. In the end, Serling, much like his big-screen model Orson Welles, was a polymath showboat whose instinct for hamming led him increasingly in front of the camera, to end his days sadly renting out his charisma as a game-show host, documentary narrator, and commercial pitchman for Schlitz Beer and Famous Writer's Correspondence School.
All these identities have been subsumed and forgotten, needless to say, behind Serling's one great and defining accomplishment, the one that begins: "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man..." I remember very clearly -- though perhaps "clearly" is not the word for a memory so freighted with fear, with intimations of an adult world I wasn't sure I wanted to discover -- my first glimpse of The Twilight Zone. In the 1970's Channel Eleven in New York would show an hour of Twilight Zone episodes at midnight. I must have been seven or eight and I was up alone watching television, I can't say why. The episode was "Mirror Image" -- which in lucid adult retrospect I know as one of Serling's most pure, stark and dreamlike. I had no such perspective at the time, no perspective of any kind.
In "Mirror Image" the jittery Vera Miles -- a favorite actress of Hitchcock's in the same period -- attempts to pick up her ticket and check her suitcase at a bus depot; she's informed by the ticket taker that she's already checked in. The situation is shrouded in night and gloom, in low-budget black and white as spare and rigorous as an X-ray. In the washroom mirror Miles glimpses her exact double, outside in the waiting room. She pursues her double, who vanishes. She seeks the advice of another traveller, a man who, first sympathetic, eventually betrays her to the authorities. Miles is dragged off to the nuthatch. By the remorseless paranoiac ethics of The Zone this betrayal seals the man's fate: his double appears to usurp him. Then Serling passes the magical hand of his narration over the affair: "Obscure metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon...call it parallel planes or just insanity..." My eight year-old self called it terror, and I remember fighting to push it out of mind. How could an image be so unresolved and yet so absolute? Of course my double waited somewhere to slip into the world and replace me! And what a dreadful mistake to have watched this television show which was like a missive in the night and by doing so to accidentally have learned the truth -- for now I'd have to live with the certainty of doom.
Later it got easier, and a bit more fun, to watch The Twilight Zone.

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