As I have long said, The Twilight Zone has formed the basis for modern storytelling. It is great that the New York Review of Books has decided to discuss its continuing legacy which has truly shaped the way we as modern human beings analyze and perceive many aspects of our own society.
As I have refined my thinking about the importance of The Twilight Zone over the years, I would describe its myriad of individual stories as boiling down to four general themes:
(1) Irony arising from justice: You get what you want...and it ends up being what you deserve;
(2) Irony arising from nostalgia: You finally get a chance to go back to when you were young where everything was simple...Except it was only simple to your youthful mind;
(3) Irony arising from technology...Where we thought technology would free us, but instead it enslaved us;
(4) Allegories which tend to boil down to...We have met the Enemy...and the Enemy is Us. And sometimes even the U.S.
There are also space age science fiction and alien invader stories, but they tend to fall into one or more of the above categories as well.
The Daughter used to scoff at me for liking that old black and white show, especially when I said that of the first forty or fifty years of television, before the rise of multi-network programming (i.e. HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Films/Prime, etc.), The Twilight Zone may be the greatest single and most influential show of them all. But after watching Black Mirror, she decided, on her own, to watch TTZ on Netflix, and came away much more respectful of the show. As I often said to her, when she was more likely to scoff at something she figured out and saw as a cliché: When you think something is a cliche in terms of narrative arc in a particular episode of The Twilight Zone, think back to what you know of other shows and films of the time, and ask if maybe that cliche was in fact relatively new at the time? Having said that, it is not like science fiction was invented through the show. We know it was not, and that its antecedents go back at least to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus, and runs through Jules Verne, and the pioneer science fiction writers in the 1920s, 1930s, and also through The Twilight Zone's entire run, from 1959 through 1964.
I said she should approach The Twilight Zone the way we may approach Jane Austen's work or Ann Radcliffe, which she intuitively already understood, but which I should say here: Read (or watch) it with a critical eye both negatively and positively, recognize its place in its time, and appreciate how readers of the time would have received and perceived it. For me, such a perspective adds to the enjoyment of the read, and allows one to mentally time travel.
We should also mention the brilliant structuring of the show, with Rod Serling, the main writer, opening and closing the show as our modern muse and speaking with ironic wit and thoughtfulness. We who know the show can picture him even now, standing often at the side of our television screen, in his dark suit, dark tie, and white or light dress shirt, sometimes with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. Serling's mantra at the start of each episode was that we were entering or have already entered...The Twilight Zone.
And now, when we think about the show's legacy nearly sixty years on, and we think about its impact in the way our current society recognizes levels of irony, how we view nostalgia, and how we perceive the very idea of the future, we can say, in perhaps an ironic twist, The Twilight Zone has entered us.
