ROD SERLING, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

ROD SERLING, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

By John Pietaro

ROD SERLING FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

In the annals of film and television history, the name Rod Serling usually conjures up visions of fantastic realities and unsettling characters from within “The Twilight Zone”. But a glimpse beneath the surface of the man, let alone his masterful writings, exposes the depth of social consciousness, of political commentary and a bold outspokenness rarely seen at the height of the Cold War. The ultra-serious, cigarette wielding image of the writer in the black suit and skinny tie emerging from the shadows to offer a story for our consideration is but one tiny segment of this revolutionary author’s make-up.

Rodman Serling was born on December 25, 1924, and raised in the northern reaches of New York State. By all accounts, his was a rather unspectacular early life, living in the country quietude and summering at Cayuga Lake with his family. Short in stature, the teenage Serling gravitated towards the unlikely sport of boxing before joining the military during the Second World War. Apparently as a means to test his own machismo, he served as a paratrooper and was later awarded both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for bravery. Regardless of the pomp and medals, Serling saw the ugliness of war, the brutality, firsthand. His experiences overseas would later manifest in the fantasy-related writing he’d become most famous for, yet such endeavors were not enough to exorcise the demons of battle from his mind. Serling suffered from nightmares decades after VE Day.

Following graduation from Antioch College (Class of ’50), Serling brandished a literature degree, seeking work almost immediately in the expanding medium of television. After some initial successes outside of the major networks, he became a staff writer with CBS TV in New York, quickly proving his mettle. The teleplays he authored contained numerous layers of probing, intelligent content; always, the ingredient of irony spoke loudest. His protagonists were subjected to trying expositions and challenged on psychological or sociological levels, often both, frequently simultaneously. A common theme for Serling, who’d later become a member of the Universalist Unitarian order, was one’s aloneness in the throes of struggle. Throughout his career, his tales reflected growth through strife and were guided by a deep artistry and powerful morality.

Serling’s scripts for the live TV drama anthologies Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre, Lux Video Theatre and Studio One, among others, produced some of his greatest writings. His conversational approach to dialogue, his expansive imagery, were immediately evident and the teleplays were masterful, even in the company of the most important writers of the era in the same medium, such as the legendary Paddy Chayefsky. The power inherent in these Serling pieces easily revealed both the artist and the progressive of the author.

His plots often centered around the plight of “the little guy”--the proletariat in any case, regardless of social standing--in the face of an oppressive power. The Emmy-winning script for Patterns told the story of a young upcoming business executive who moves rapidly up the corporate ladder, relocating from a suburban Ohio branch office into Wall Street’s limelight. Quickly he learns that even valuable, successful executives are just so much chattel for the insatiable greed of the corporate structure; they are used up then discarded when deemed too old to produce, and simply, coldly replaced. Possibly, Serling never did read Marx, but one wouldn’t know that from the brash anti-capitalist opinion expressed in this brilliant piece. The manipulations of the company CEO, the utter disregard of the elder partner and the depiction of a brutal business ethic stand out in stark contrast to the white bread storylines associated with 1950s living room entertainment.

Patterns was first produced for television in 1955, as the Korean War was concluding and shortly after the televised Army-McCarthy hearings put an end to the infamous senator. Still, few writers would have ventured into such territory. Most Left-wing writers were victims of the blacklist as early as 1948, so such topics were scarce. Yet, Patterns was so highly acclaimed that it was also made into a feature film one year later, securing legendary status for Serling, now hot property in the business of both TV and film.

Of note is Serling’s 1956 Noon on Doomsday which was openly inspired by the racist murder of Emmet Till. Though his story depicts the murder victim not as a young African American man but an elderly Jewish pawn shop owner in the Deep South, Serling maintained the vital aspect of the community’s closed-mindedness which resulted in their refusal to acknowledge the guilt of one of their own. As it occurred in the all-too real Till case, the murderers are never convicted. The writer was later to state that, “the antagonist was not just a killer, but a regional idea” (Serling, Introduction to paperback edition of Patterns, 1957, Bantam Books). Thousands of letters of protest from White Citizens Councils and other conservative and racist groups were sent into the network prior to the play’s airing and Serling’s script was forcibly doctored. Countless threats of boycott by southern-based organizations had the network executives fly into a frenzy and the ultimate show, airing months late, was barely recognizable. No allusions to anywhere near the south could be made (thus it became a New England locale) and the Jewish victim became a faceless immigrant. It took all of Serling’s fortitude to prevent the network brass from transforming the murderer into a good boy caught up in one wrong moment. Still somehow, his literary brilliance showed through and allowed him to conquer new ground.

Serling’s next offerings included teleplays The Rack (about the torture of a Korean War vet) and his most famous story from this period, Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956). Requiem stands out as a heart wrenching masterwork starring Jack Palance as a boxer who experiences a career-breaking injury just before he has the chance to achieve his dream of heavyweight championship.  This piece viscerally moves the viewer into the sad, short career of our nation’s gladiators and one is moved to tears as the lead character, ‘Mountain’ McClintock, is torn down and cast aside before taking steps forward into another chapter of his life. 

Requiem won a prestigious Peabody award and was also realized in television productions in the UK (starring Sean Connery) and Holland. This teleplay was also given a second life in a full-length film version starring Anthony Quinn and a uniquely vicious Jackie Gleason. The expanded script redoubles Serling’s imagery of the main character’s inner loneliness and the industry’s greed. In it, there was no room for another chance; Serling’s film script was a tragedy in the classic sense. In addition to masterful craftsmanship, the author’s plea for the proletarian is clear. And to further enhance this, both versions call for the use of real boxers in walk-on parts. Always, Serling’s genius saw not only his characters’ place on the edge, but he spent much time there himself.

In order to finally secure creative control of his work, Serling successfully pitched his idea for The Twilight Zone to CBS brass. With this show, which debuted in 1959 and ran through 1964, Serling served as executive producer and head writer as well as host. What made The Twilight Zone so uniquely memorable was the element of fantasy, science-fiction and horror that allowed him to present progressive, even controversial ideas masked just enough to avoid the furor of reactionaries. Though he still needed to contend with an anxious corporate establishment, and several of his pieces would never be realized as originally written, The Twilight Zone gave Serling room for a wide swath of statements enmeshed in thrilling and thoughtful takes. While not every episode had connections to a socio-political issue, most did, even if clouded by opaque symbolism.

The program featured a wealth of both noted and new faces from stage, television, and film, apparently clamoring for a part on this hip, intelligent show. A few of the stand-out names are Burgess Meredith, Jack Klugman, Ida Lupino, Ed Wynn, Agnes Morehead, Dana Andrews, Robert Duvall, Joan Blondell, Art Carney, Ivan Dixon, Elizabeth Montgomery, Lee Marvin, Cliff Robertson, Ann Blyth, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Robert Redford, Claude Akins, Jack Albertson, Martin Balsam and Dennis Hopper.

Serling was also sure to bring in the type of directors he saw as talented enough to realize his visions. These included Jacques Tourneur, Ida Lupino, Robert Florey and Abner Biberman. The show also hired some of Hollywood’s greatest composers including Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and Franz Waxman. Clearly, a certain artfulness was demanded in all aspects of The Twilight Zone. And as a busy producer now, Serling needed to bring in other authors to handle some of the teleplay work, so he sought out some that would prove to become celebrated giants in their own right: Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont among them.

While Serling’s writings contained parables and symbols from which we can derive an almost Marxian message in, outstanding progressive statements in “The Twilight Zone” include:

1) I Am the Night, Color Me Black, the story of an unjust execution scheduled for a dawn which never arrives. Sober acting, tense direction and a ravenous, bloodthirsty town make for a powerful statement on violence, lynchings and xenophobia. Serling’s original script featured an African American prisoner awaiting the gallows, but the final version included a white man condemned to die and a Black preacher caught in a crisis of conscience, tearfully standing with the lynch mob in view of his own precarious status in this otherwise homogenous one-horse town.

2) The Big Tall Wish: a Black cast stars in this moving drama about an aging boxer (Ivan Dixon) who loses faith. The symbolism of the young boy who ultimately loses hope in the future and especially in his power to change his destiny is startling in light of the fledgling civil rights movement of the time. The child inevitably stands for the fragility of the hope in all of us as much as it does for the fight against institutionalized racism.

3) Night of the Meek, starring Art Carney as a Bowery dweller who experiences the hardship of despair, poverty and alcoholism on Christmas Eve, before realizing the possibility of giving to the poorest in his community as a real-life Santa Claus. Serling’s scripting for some of Carney’s speeches are nothing short of revolutionary.

4) The Obsolete Man features Burgess Meredith as a former librarian condemned to die as “obsolete” in an Orwellian society. Here, the power of literature and the liberation of the mind take center stage as the mild protagonist turns the tables on the state prosecutor who so coldly sought his termination and laughed at his lack of usefulness.

5) The Shelter tells of a close-knit community torn asunder by the perceived threat of a nuclear assault. The kindly doctor who refuses to let his neighbors into his bomb shelter at the height of hysteria is as glaring in this tale as is the phalanx of friends who turn on the doc and break down his lead-lined door with a battering ram. In the process, one of the cardigan-wearing suburbanites turns into an arrogant America Firster as he assaults another neighbor, an immigrant.

6) A Quality of Mercy is a morality play about the demonization of the enemy during wartime. Here we see an obnoxious young officer (Dean Stockwell) brutally leading an exhausted World War 2 platoon into battle against a Japanese enclave, even as the war is fading to a close. His merciless view of the Japanese becomes his own fate as the story fantastically transforms him into a Japanese officer looking out at a bloodthirsty American platoon intent on killing him. Serling was to use this type of vehicle several times over the years, but always to a powerful end.

7) Four O’Clock features none other than Theodore Bikel as Oliver Crangle, a paranoiac reactionary who’s a perfect depiction of what the editor to Red Channels or some other red-baiting periodical must have been like. His character keeps files on hundreds of people he classifies as “evil” and engages in a tireless campaign to harass them, ruining careers and lives. Serling’s opening monologue described the antagonist as “poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice”, but Crangle falls victim to the power of his own hate by story’s end.

8) The Gift also symbolizes a right-wing assault on reason, albeit in the form of a small, impoverished Mexican town reacting to “a stranger” in their midst. Said stranger tries to offer them a gift he brought them, from either his home planet or perhaps a more spiritual place, but they reject it out of ignorance and enhanced xenophobia. The man they try to mark as a devil quite possibly may have represented the second coming and the gift was a cure for cancer.

9) He’s Alive was plagued by Serling’s occasional use of preachy morality but needs to be cited here for its clear anti-fascist imagery (the “he” in the title is Hitler). It tells of a young man (Dennis Hopper) who becomes entangled in a neo-Nazi movement even as it belies the many years he spent under the protective wing of an older Jewish neighbor. Classic Serling was evidenced in the closing narration which stated:

“Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive”.

10) The Brain Center at Whipple’s offered Serling’s most clear-cut statement on behalf of the working class of any Zone story. It concerned a business in an unnamed factory town coldly installing robotics and dismissively laying off hundreds of workers without notice. Factory foreman Dickerson (Ted De Corsia) offers an impassioned speech where he shouts back at the silver-spoon exec (Richard Deacon): “I’ve worked here for thirty years, and I’ve been a foreman for seventeen of ‘em! In my book that gives me some rights…Men have to eat and work! I’m a man and that makes me better than that hunk of metal!!”.

11) The Encounter is a startling tale of two men trapped in an attic who engage in a grudge match, not only with each other, but their inner-most ghosts. One man is a bitter racist and World War 2 veteran (Neville Brand), the other a Japanese American (George Takei), each of which have lost a piece of their souls during the attack on Pearl Harbor some twenty years earlier. Another amazing irony in this drama is the lead actor’s status as the fourth most decorated US Army soldier of the Second World War

12) The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street remains Serling’s finest moment in presenting a progressive, even radical message during a Red Scare period. Here’s the perfect small-town street on a calm summery weekend afternoon, where neighbors enjoy a warm relationship. However, soon into the story, fear of other plagues them and the close-knit community devolves into hysteria. Taken as metaphor, the tale of a strange power-outage accompanied by isolation reveals much about the human condition. The vision of neighbor turning on neighbor in response to a perceived alien threat could only have been a Milleresque symbol. All of the trappings of McCarthyism are fit into one 30-minute drama. The final scene’s inclusion of space aliens structuring the manipulation of the people notwithstanding, Serling was sure to tell us how easily we as a society fall prey to the machinations of power. His closing statement was so strong, that I’d like to conclude this with its entirety:

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own; for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.”

THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN ‘POLITICAL AFFAIRS’ MAGAZINE, JAN 2009