A (Truly) Captive Audience: The Twilight Zone and Mid-Century American “Television Rooms”

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Notes

1. Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, 108.

2. Ibid., 1.

3. In addition to Spigel's canonical work, also relevant is Tichi's Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture.

4. See, for example, Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film and Stewart, “Negros Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” in Critical Inquiry.

5. Brummett, Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience, 1.

6. Ibid., 114.

7. Ibid., 41.

8. A homological approach thus strongly resonates with Kenneth Burke's ideas regarding symbolic form and “equipment for living,” a theoretical foundation that Brummett acknowledges. See Burke, Counter-statement and The Philosophy of Literary Form.

9. Winslow, “Rhetorical Homology and the Caveman Mythos: An(other) Way to Ridicule the Aggrieved,” 257–271.

10. Olson, “Detecting a Common Interpretive Framework for Impersonal Violence: The Homology in Participants' Rhetoric on Sport Hunting, ‘Hate Crimes,’ and Stranger Rape,” Southern Communication Journal.

11. Brummett, “What Popular Films Teach Us about Values: Locked Inside with the Rage Virus,” Journal of Popular Film and Television.

12. Brummett, Rhetorical Homologies, 40–41.

13. For relevant examples, see Brummett, “Electric Literature as Equipment for Living: Haunted House Films,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication; Olson, Detecting; Brummett, “Rhetorical Homologies in Walter Benjamin, The Ring, and Capital,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Winslow, Rhetorical Homology.

14. See Brummett, “The Homology Hypothesis: Pornography on the VCR,” in Critical Studies in Mass Communication; Black, “Extending the Rights of Personhood, Voice, and Life to Sensate Others: A Homology of Right to Life and Animal Rights Rhetoric,” in Communication Quarterly.

15. Macdonald, One Nation Under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV, 69.

16. Tichi, Electronic Hearth, 1–61.

17. Spigel, Make Room, 40.

18. Ibid., 106.

19. Ibid., 107–108.

20. Ibid., 111.

21. Tichi, Electronic Hearth, 19.

22. Spigel, Make Room, 49.

23. Tichi, Electronic Hearth, 85.

24. Spigel, Make Room, 120–126.

25. In doing so, I am not asserting intentionality on the part of The Twilight Zone's producers in the creation of this resonance, nor am I suggesting that the homologue explains the presence of isolating rooms on the program. Budget or production restrictions, for example, may also explain the prevalence of these images. I am only asserting that rooms on the program resemble contemporaneous discourses of the family room and home theatre, and that the resemblance alone has potential (rhetorical) effect.

26. Marc Scott Zicree, in the second edition of his book, The Twilight Zone Companion, notes that CBS cited low ratings when it decided not to renew the series for a sixth season (427–429). He suggests, however, that this claim is somewhat false and ultimately cites creative differences between series creator Rod Serling and then CBS President Jim Aubrey for the cancellation. Regardless of the actual cause, there is no doubt that the fourth and fifth seasons lacked “the thoughtfulness and innovation of the first three seasons,” which likely contributed to CBS's distaste (362).

27. Ibid., 421.

28. Presnell and McGee, A Critical History of Television's The Twilight Zone, 182.

29. I say “at least” 20 episodes of the series contain this form because of the rather difficult process of identifying how central the room must be to the narrative in order to qualify as truly “inescapable.” For example, I have omitted the first season episode “People Are Alike All Over” from the list. Although the end of this episode portrays an astronaut tricked into becoming the main attraction at an alien zoo, his final moments in a cage designed to look like a suburban home on earth—as suggestive as they are of the themes I discuss in this essay—were not enough to suggest the narrative as one driven by an insulating room. At the same time, I have included the very similar third season episode “To Serve Man” because its protagonist recounts the story as a flashback while housed in living quarters aboard an alien vessel, a “room” that viewers come to understand as a prison by the episode's end. I have also included entries like “What's in the Box” and the third season episode “Young Man's Fancy,” for while characters inhabit several different rooms in the course of these narratives, all rooms are interconnected in the same home, and one often stands as the dominant place of narrative action. Indeed, characters never leave these homes during the course of the episode, and the houses themselves function as (sometimes monstrous) “rooms.” Readers are free to disagree here, but I submit that for each dubious episode I have included, there are likely others that I have overlooked which one could argue as prime examples of this repetitive form. “At least 20,” then, will suffice.

30. In his discussion of the homology found between Spike Lee's film Get on the Bus (1996) and discourses of sitting, Brummett suggests that “a homology between a text and real experience suggests a strong rhetorical link, but when experience of the medium that carries the text participates in the same homology, the rhetorical effect is stronger” (Rhetorical Homologies, 115). Here, sitting through a film about the power of sitting makes the film that much more appealing. While it is safe to assume that many Twilight Zone viewers were familiar with the highly present discourses of television rooms by the time they encountered the program, it is impossible to know how many of them actually watched episodes within these environments. As a result, I only hint at the resonance of medium in this essay, focusing much more how identifiable program content is homologous to its preferred reception environment as construed in popular discourse of the time.

31. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 23.

32. Presnell and McGee, Critical History, 33.

33. Serling, The Twilight Zone: “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” Dir. Mitchell Leisen.

34. Presnell and McGee, 18.

35. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 211.

36. Ibid., 145.

37. Serling, The Twilight Zone: “Eye of the Beholder,” Dir. Douglas Heyes.

38. Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 214.

39. Serling, The Twilight Zone: “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” Dir. Lamont Johnson.

40. Ibid.

41. Presnell and McGee, Critical History, 113.

42. These episodes include the famous “thing-on-the-wing” airline thriller “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (starring William Shatner), the aforementioned “What's in the Box,” and four others: “The Long Morrow,” about space travel and suspended animation; “The Jeopardy Room,” about the world of espionage and a booby-trapped hotel room; “The Encounter,” a controversial episode about a Japanese American and a WWII veteran trapped in an attic; and “The Fear,” about two people barricaded in a small cottage by apparently giant aliens.

43. See Worland, “Sign-Posts Up Ahead: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and TV Political Fantasy, 1959–1965,” in Science Fiction Studies, and Hoppenstand, “Editorial: Television as Metaphor,” in Journal of Popular Culture.

44. Spigel, Make Room, 2.

45. Stewart, “Negros Laughing;” Weiss, Vampires and Violets.

46. Weiss, Vampires and Violets, 4.

47. Staiger, Media Reception Studies, 2.

48. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home, 50–51.