Beside MacGyver, Dynasty, and Family Ties, CBS had put Rod Serling’s famous Twilight Zone series up online as a “TV Classics.” A smart move, in my book, as Serling’s world of aliens, alternate reality, atomic anxiety and suburban housewives is definitely one of the best shows most of us aren’t watching anymore.
But I can remember the first episode I ever saw, at age seven, up past bedtime: “Eye of the Beholder.” One of Serling’s most critically-acclaimed episodes for artful cinematography and sheer creepiness, “Eye of the Beholder” holds a more subtler message than a grade-school audience might recognize—like all good science fiction, The Twilight Zone doesn’t predict the future: it takes a closer look at the present.
For Serling’s original set of viewers, that was 1950s America, and the order of the day, culture-wise, was conformity. And in both this episode and another of similar theme—“Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” which spawned a rock band in the 1990s, oddly enough—that 1950s conformity was much more than a matter of social etiquette: it was an issue of mental health.
Notably, both episodes focus primarily on young women—in particular, young women who deviate from the ideals espoused by parents, friends, and culture. When Marilyn, the heroine of “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” refuses to pick a pattern and asks whether “Being like everyone—isn’t that like being nobody?”, she challenges the assumption that assimilation is the only way to get along in her society.
But while the vaunted “transformation” is ostensibly physical—everyone looks like a dozen or so physical ideals—the ultimate purpose is psychological. This is revealed in the opening scene, when Marilyn argues with her mother. Though already transformed into the beautiful Number 12 (in a highly futuristic metallic leotard and leggings, no less—this is the year 2000 after all), Lana still attends “culture class,” indicating that the true mental transformation is never finished, and must be continually reinforced. Similarly, Serling briefly touches on the use of psychiatric drugs as a quick fix, particularly for women, in Lana’s constant exhortations to her daughter to have a glass of “instant smile,” possibly the Prozac of the future.
The nature of the transformation as a psychological one is further explored at a telling location—a government-run hospital. Questioned by a Professor Sigmund Franz (a thinly-disguised Sigmund Freud), Marilyn is told that “the transformation must be performed young”—the point when the mind is most malleable.
This seems to be supported by Dr. Rex’s (who looks like her father and Uncle Rick, which makes a view thankful for nametags) eagerness to take a brain scan of Marilyn. While possibly used to determine her intelligence level, as he claims, his and Lana’s conspiratorial looks suggest otherwise: the ultimate transformation, after all, is more than just physical. The horror of the episode for the viewers is in the complete turnaround of Marilyn’s personality and ideals. While before she had read Shakespeare, Shelley, Aristotle and Keats, in the end she echoes her friend Val in simple superficiality—“Life is pretty, life is fun. All is good, and all is one.”
Tragic.
Like Marilyn, Janet Tyler in “Eye of the Beholder” finds herself not only in a world where she doesn’t fit in—but in another government-supported hospital, where her differences are to be fixed, or if not that, hidden away.
Conformity is once again the ideal: like Marilyn was pushed to “pick a pattern” in the form of a number, Janet throughout is called by the nurses and doctors “Patient 307.” And like Marilyn as well, Janet questions the right of the state to make choices for her—in this case the decision to send her to a special area she identifies correctly as a “ghetto.” “Who are you people anyway?” she asks; “What is the State? The State is not God!”
But in Janet’s world, the government is indeed nearly as omnipotent and omnipresent as God—large screens of “the Leader” drop down into the corridors Janet desperately runs through, trying vainly to escape, the leader shouting about “glorious conformity” and “our unified society.” The State is almost omniscient as well, as “treason” recalls the thoughtcrime of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Janet’s empathetic doctor is warned to be careful when he has the heretical thought, “Why shouldn’t people be allowed to be different?”
The need for conformity of thought as well as appearance parallels this same idea in “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”—that the psychological change is more important than the physical one. When Janet Tyler is simply deformed, she is permitted to remain in a public hospital with bandages on her face, allotted a certain number of government-subsidized surgeries and experiments; it’s the moment she starts question the state’s power to do this, however, that she is held down by nurses and forcibly sedated.
Most significant, perhaps, is the focus both episodes put on female conformity. Marilyn’s mother Lana and friend Val seem to presage the Stepford Wives stereotype—perfectly coiffed and always smiling; the use of medications such as Prozac among depressed suburban housewives in the 1950s has nearly become a cliché today as well.
The message is hardly subtle, re-watching the episodes now, but science fiction’s come a long way in terms of credibility. In Serling’s 1950s, TV shows that didn’t conform had to hide behind the mask of “fantasy.”
Well, they got the cultural values right—the leotards, not so much.
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Isabela Morales is a History and American Studies student who rabidly reviews indie science fiction at http://thescattering.wordpress.com/