   

 

 

 

 

 

LIBRARY

Michigan State
University

 

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

“SIGNPOST UP AHEAD”?: INTERSECTIONS OF PRINT
AND THE TELEVISUAL, NARRATIVE AND THE ARCHIVE

M.A.

IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

presented by

MICHELE ASHLEY COSTELLO

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

degree in ENGLISH

 

 

 

major ProWure

324660?

Date

MSU is an affinnative-action, equal-opportunity employer

i—u—.—-n—.-o---o—--—-n--a-o-o-u-u-1-o-o--a—o-o-v—-—I-I~.—-—.—

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/07 p:/ClRC/DateDue.indd-p.1

 

 

“SIGNPOST UP AHEAD”?: INTERSECTIONS OF PRINT AND THE TELEVISUAL,
NARRATIVE AND THE ARCHIVE IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

By

Michele Ashley Costello

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2007

ABSTRACT

“SIGNPOST UP AHEAD”?: INTERSECTIONS OF PRINT AND THE TELEVISUAL,
NARRATIVE AND THE ARCHIVE IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

By

Michele Ashley Costello

Originally airing 1959-1964, The Twilight Zone series has become a syndicated
staple of American television, long outliving its founder and iconic narrator, Rod Serling.
Given its popularity, surprisingly few critics write about the show, and they often
surround the show (with episode guides, photo archives, and interviews with its creators)
rather than analyze it. Through The Twilight Zone series, this project considers the
complicated relationship between the televisual and its associated print materials,
especially as these converge in expanding narratives from one medium to the next and
diverge in their assumptions about the limits of these media to do the work of
preservation and representation. This thesis casts The Twilight Zone with and against
television and cultural studies’ theories of time and narration, including works by

Raymond Williams, John Ellis, Mary Ann Doane, and Jacques Derrida.

Copyright by
Michele Ashley Costello
2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I must express my considerable gratitude to Ellen McCallum, whose support has
guided (and in many ways, made possible) this thesis and whose encouragement has

come at the times it was most needed.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

THESIS
INTRODUCTION: “AN AREA WE CALL ‘THE TWILIGHT ZONE’” ................... 1
I. WATCHING THE CAMERAS WATCH: THE TWILIGHT ZONE ON
TELEVISION ............................................................................................................... 4
II. READING (/) TELEVISION: NARRATIVE IN MULTIPLE MEDIA ................ 19
III. BOUND TO REMEMBER: TZ MAGAZINE AND THE ARCHIVAL
PROJECT .................................................................................................................... 30
IV. (RE)PETITION: A TIME AND PLACE FOR/IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE ....... 4O
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 57

Introduction: “An Area We Call ‘The Twilight Zone’”

In the ﬁrst issue of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” Mm, Carol Serling
opens her “A Personal Message” with both an “invitation to re-enter the Twilight Zone”
and an explication of what, exactly, “the Twilight Zone” might be. Serling draws on a
Random House Dictiongy deﬁnition of the term as well as popular usage to conclude,
“as familiar as the phrase is, the meaning is elusive” (3). What was true as Serling wrote
that statement, more than 15 years after the last episode of the show left the air, remains
true to this day. The Twilight Zone has continued to beckon readers and viewers to enter
its realm while remaining oblique about what borders that realm might be contained by.
The “enigma” represented by The Twilight Zone has been left to more than just television
viewers. For such an oft-cited and popular show, The Twilight Zone has received little
critical attention beyond detailed episode guides and behind-the-scenes archiving.l

The Twilight Zone and its associated print materials make a number of important
interventions in television studies’ theories about the relationship(s) between the print

and televisual media.2 The trend in these studies has been to focus on a tight temporal

 

' Presnell and McGee note this too, in their preface to A Critical Histog of Television’s “The Twilight

Zone.” 1959-1964. Like other works, however, their book offers a short introduction to the production of
the series with an extended episode guide. For the most part, this book is offered as a corrective to Zicree’s
pular “The Twilight Zone” Companion.

This paper covers a range of television studies criticism from both American and British television.
Understanding that there are important differences between the two and working with the limited resources
available on the subject that I am addressing, 1 have tried to pull the most relevant theories from each body
of work while still remaining aware that what I am laying out might be limited only to American television
and texts. The differences between American and British television have been laid out in several texts and
continue to be of relevance for those working in television studies. John Ellis, one of the main theorists I
am working with, refers to his own experience with British television, but spends the bulk of Visible
Fictions discussing Hollywood cinema to construct his concept of the “narrative image” (5). Another
theorist of concern to this paper, Raymond Williams, delineates between American and British television
(mostly in the citing multiple possibilities for the ways that airwaves might be owned and operated) (see
especially Chapter 2 in Television). The differences between the two have even contributed to television
studies in unexpected ways; Williams developed his concept of “ﬂow” after the disorientation of watching
American (as opposed to British) television and attempting to reckon with the considerably greater number
of commercial breaks (Williams 85). Some additional essays that complicate and further explicate the
relationship between British and American television (and discuss “national” connections to television)

 

connection between the broadcast of a television show and the production of
supplemental material, often to illustrate how these materials do the work of “selling” the
show. While the relationship between television shows and their associated print
materials has often been cited as a productive, economic relationship, a closer analysis of
these materials reveals that they do more than just promote television viewing or
encourage the consumption of advertisers’ products. These materials can reveal a
potential desire to open access to the televisual media or respond to its unavailability.
They look to be included in television’s storytelling, either by participating in its
narratives or by creating alternate narratives that go backstage to “know” television and
the production process. The Twilight Zone offers both well-known televisual material
and a number of associated print materials that make claims to “belonging” with or to the
show; with these factors, the show provides ample material from which to work. Because
many of these materials were created later than the show (even more than a decade later,
in the case of TZ Magazine), they resist the analysis of being purely promotional and
point to larger projects of narrative and preservation.

In describing the relationship between print and televisual material, television
studies oﬁen employs the concept of an “expanded narrative.” Starting with Raymond
Williams, writers have considered the boundary of the televisual text ﬂuid. This ﬂuidity
(or “ﬂow” in Williams’s formation) means that while TV Guide lists a television show as
running between 7:00 and 7:30, the show exists within a variety of contexts that exceed

or precede these times and that thereby expand the show’s story. Writers such as

 

include: John Caughie’s “Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics,” Michael Curtin’s “Media
Capitals: Cultural Geographies of Global TV,” and Charlotte Brunsdon’s “Lifestyling Britian: The 8-9 Slot
on British Television.” Created in America for American television, The Twilight Zone is also cited as a
“worldwide television favorite” and its reception in other countries may differ from what I lay out here
(Presnell 26).

Charlotte Brundson, Phillip Drummond, John Ellis, and Jeffrey Sconce take this concept
further in considering how a range of materials, including Web sites, toys, regular print
publications such as comic books or magazines, and one-time print publications like
novels or episode guides forms a particular narrative cohesion.3 These theories primarily
imagine or describe one constantly expanding narrative that moves to include all of the
materials associated with a show (in part because critics are unsure where to “draw the
line” between the televisual text and the print text). While the materials connected with
The Twilight Zone initially conﬁrm theories that print expands the narrative world of a
show, they also suggest at least a second narrative (if not more narratives) that does not
easily overlap with the narrative introduced by the show. Where the comic book series
and T2 Magazine start by making ties to the show’s narrative world, TZ Magazine also
begins the work of casting back to create narrative about the show itself. This second
narrative reveals another “dimension” to the relationship between print and televisual
media, one that questions these media’s relationships to history (both ﬁctive and “real”
histories portrayed by the show, as well as the history of the show itself) and challenges
the position of either medium in “doing” the work of the archive. Where print narratives
can be considered spatial expansions of the narrative worlds introduced by television, a

focus on archive illustrates how these narratives can also be productively thought as

 

3 The Twilight Zone is no exception to a trend of multiple non-print or televisual “tie-ins,” including a
Twilight Zone board game, a pinball machine, action ﬁgures, boxer shorts, and even a Disney ride called
“Tower of Terror.” Though these materials offer more ways of theorizing the relationship between a
television show and that which carries its name, the primary focus of my paper is the work between
traditional print projects (books, comic books, magazines, etc.) and television. Though the toys, theme
park ride, etc. created under The Twilight Zone name are also symptomatic of a signiﬁcant delay between
the creation of the show and “spin-oft” materials, I believe that they do not illustrate as clearly m
Twilight Zone’s intervention in considerations of narrative and archive. The binders featured in E
Magazine illustrate how these products can be enmeshed in the larger projects of archive and narrative that
the print products craft. Where the “tie-in” connects to the print project in this way, I consider them in my
project.

temporal expansions or as introducing alternatives to television’s narrative temporality.
On the one hand, a project like TZ Magazine attempts to keep open the time of lh_e
Twilight Zone by offering the opportunity for writers to continue contributing to its
narrative world. On the other hand, TZ Magazine primarily looks to the past and back at
the glory of the original series, while the series itself heavily considers the future.
Wrapped into these larger theoretical positions, particularly in the study of m
Tm Zone, is the question of how television and print situate the persons they claim
to represent. In other words, how do both lived persons and/or their television personas
play into the projects of expanding narratives or the work of remembrance and
preservation implied in the archive? John Ellis’s concept of “star power” provides a
starting place for understanding the insistence on and development of Twilign Zone
narrative(s) that integrates the body and image of Rod Serling. This repetitious return to
Serling’s life story and his “death story” reveal the projects of remembrance, loss, and

preservation integrated into these narratives.

1. Watching the Cameras Watch: The Twilight Zone on Television

Many of the anxieties about the televisual medium that circulate in the original
Twilight Zone series are strangely and complexly presented by the episode “The Obsolete
Man.” Indicative of the show’s self-awareness and its fascination with dictatorial
regimes, this episode forces viewers to consider the production of television by
“exposing” the camera and by presenting television as a necessary but potentially
dangerous medium. This episode illustrates that the future is at stake in the control of the

television screen, and it is on the screen, rather than in print, that representation is

“deadly” serious. The Twilight Zone’s declaration of the importance of television runs
counter to later attempts by print work to control the show’s narrative and narrative of the
show, and this tension is the primary concern of my project.

“The Obsolete Man” opens with the scene of a room representative “not [of] a
future that will be but one that might be” (R. Serling “Obsolete”).4 In this room,
Romney Wordsworth, a librarian, is judged “obsolete” by a State that has eliminated the
need for books (and as Serling implies, “ﬂesh and mind” men). After insisting on his
position as librarian and thereby “choosing” death, Wordsworth chooses his method of
death (by bomb and in front of an audience—a request that the State interprets as in front
of a television audience, though this is never made clear by Wordsworth).

As Wordsworth awaits his impending death at midnight, a State ofﬁcial known as
“The Chancellor” visits him in his home.5 Wordsworth introduces the recently-installed
television camera and lights to both The Chancellor and the audience. These become the
tools that will allow him to turn the “episode” around on The Chancellor by trapping him
in his apartment and forcing those who have tuned in to see Wordsworth’s death see
instead the reaction of a State ofﬁcial under the State’s force. In this moment, the show
collapses the home audience with the suggested, but never portrayed, State audience.

The Twilight Zone asks audiences to consider both its role as a viewing audience and the
ﬁctive and representative work of television. The show also asks the home audience to
consider the “silence” of the State audience, a “silence” that haunts the episode until its

end.

 

’ For a full, written copy of Serling’s “intro” and “outro” for each episode, see Marc Zicree’s “The Twilight
Zone” Companion. “The Obsolete Man” translations are on pgs. 207-10.

5 The decision to place this scene at midnight is signiﬁcant considering the show’s interests in portraying
the collapsed time of the past and present. Midnight is a virtually-absent time, located between yesterday
and today (or today and tomorrow).

Approaching death (represented here by the time of midnight), Wordsworth holds
his “most valuable possession,” the Bible, while the increasingly anxious Chancellor
smokes a cigarette. Finally pushed to his limit and scared of death, The Chancellor
requests that Wordsworth dismiss him from the room “For the love of God.”
Wordsworth amicably agrees to do so under that condition, and The Chancellor escapes
just as the room is destroyed. In a typical Twilight Zone spin, the next screen shows The
Chancellor stepping into the room from the beginning of the episode, faced with his own
title of obsolescence due to his cowardly behavior and belief in God. The episode closes
with a shot of Serling, who leaves viewers with the analysis: “Any state, any entity, any
ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is
obsolete. A case to be ﬁled under 'M' for mankind.”

In considering what it means for this episode to represent and engage with the
concept of the televisual, I enter The Twilight Zone into a larger realm of television
studies, particularly where these studies theorize the time and space of television.
Raymond Williams, widely recognized as the ﬁrst television scholar, sketches out the
fundamental problems and possibilities of the television text in Television and in his
concept of televisual “ﬂow.” In starting with Williams, I recognize that my work runs
the all-too-necessary risk of following television scholarship cliché. Few texts proceed
without acknowledging Williams’s groundbreaking and enabling concept of “ﬂow,” a
word which continues to challenge theorists trying to stake claims for television as a
medium which must be thought fundamentally different from ﬁlm or print media. This
need to “begin again” with Williams ﬁts television scholarship perfectly, creating a body

of research and theory caught in the very patterns of repetition and sitcom-like restaging

that it so often comments on.6 But where sitcoms inevitably pit their characters back at
the starting scenario week after week without the beneﬁt of learning from the turmoil of
last week’s episode, television studies has constantly returned to Williams’s work with
new insight and purpose.

As Raymond Williams suggests in Television, pinning down the “televisual” text
can be complicated for casual viewers and critics writing for print7. Williams uses
Television to encourage new ways of thinking about and reading television that shift
focus from a view of television as an accidental or sudden technology that has wreaked
havoc (primarily through its portrayal and supposed encouragement of violence) on an
otherwise “innocent” society to a View of television and its programming as products of
and participants in ideologies (116, 121).8 In doing so, he encourages viewers and critics
to rethink the “simplistic” and self-evident “nature” of television, including the very
pattern and reception of television broadcasting. Williams is useful here for articulating
what The Twilight Zone episode only hints at. The television screen and its violence are
neither independent of the State or Wordsworth nor are they located in an isolated period
or space. Serling’s suggestion that this episode is one of many possible futures alludes to
an entire branch of decisions and circumstances that have developed as important context

to this one particular point. By “exposing” the television cameras, the episode also asks

 

‘5 Television scholarship also lives on primarily through anthologies and journals rather than in texts fully
written by primary authors, perhaps yet another example of the way that the scholarship has grown to
match the medium.

7 Though television studies contains critiques about whether the intellectual can/does speak for the
“everyday” viewer, I do not have the space to argue for that division here. In the case of Twilight Zone
print projects, most are done by fans and creators of the show rather than seasoned academics (though some
of them also appear here). For a good discussion of the position of “knowing” television taken on by those
“in the ﬁeld,” see John Caughie’s“PIaying at Being American.”

8 John Ellis works at a similar argument in Visible Fictions, dispelling the “myth” that televisions and
cinema are “neutral mechanism that convey a truth from the world beyond” to claim that they “work very
hard and very subtly to convey an impression of truth” (62).

audiences to consider the televisual as coordinated and controlled, revealing the State’s
interest in the scene of the death and the multiplicities of work those cameras can do (as
Wordsworth takes over their content). The audience is given theoretical access to the
mechanisms of television and must think through the complicity of both the supposed
audience of the State and its own complicity in what is portrayed on that screen.

In Television, Williams further questions the common assumption that the
individual television program is “interrupted” by commercials or news breaks, reminding
readers that rarely does the television viewing experience consist of a viewer tuning in at
one time in order to catch a single program. He draws on the phrase “watching
television” to instead suggest that viewers are actually offered “a planned ﬂow, in which
the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence
transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences
together compose the real ﬂow, the real ‘broadcasting’” (84, 88). In this conﬁguration,
“ﬂow” more accurately represents the experience of television as the viewer is caught in
an entire series of programming that is complexly related and ultimately manipulated by
the network to encourage continuous and extended viewership. “Flow” offers one way of
thinking the temporality of television, particularly as Williams focuses on the time of the
narrative presented to the viewer by the network. “The Obsolete Man” both works from
and with this concept of ﬂow, referring to the series of executions the State has
performed for “educational” value and necessarily entering this episode in a larger project
of the State’s design. In addition to participating in this other ﬁctional programming
schedule, the show would have aired in relation to other shows on CBS’s schedule and

the metatextual analysis of the televisual performed in this episode carries over into

considerations of other work. Serling’s discussion of the future(s) also proposes a wide
range of factors that must be thought in connection with and as contributing to the
televisual, including not only that which is shown but also that which might be shown.
Importantly, all of these suggest ways in which the show imagines itself operating within
an expanded narrative both in and out of its control.

The episode does not discuss whether the State’s audience’s viewing of the
execution is mandatory or voluntary, but certainly the CBS’s audience’s participation
must be thought as voluntary. Where Williams uncovers power and potential in the
concept of ﬂow, later writers in television studies criticize Williams’s focus on the one-
sided construction of this power. As Lynn Spigel writes in the introduction to Williams’s
work, “[His] method assumed a viewer who was watching in a chair all night, perceiving
this ﬂow of image... It didn’t address the fact that people often move in and out of
television” (xxvi). Spigel’s comment exposes a limit to Williams’s theory of the
temporality of television, especially as the viewer’s time fails to coincide with the
narrative time presented by the network or television series, a gap that print can
productively mine and ﬁll in (with the viewer/reader’s own control). Even without
suggesting an active viewership, however, Williams does anticipate the range of texts that
these viewers would encounter and need to negotiate, providing a glimpse of the many
cautions viewers and writers should take in making claims about the television text and
experience. By situating the program in the midst of other scheduled ﬁctional and
“news” programs, commercials, in- and out-of-text advertisements, and unscheduled
interruptions, Williams hints at the planned and unplanned multiplicity of connections,

relationships, and valences that viewers might productively navigate and consider. This

effectively expands the narrative of any one previously-conceived “individual” program
to include any number of other coexisting narratives, laying the groundwork for
television’s displacement—be it within its own medium or in other media as well.
Williams work suggests at least two possibilities for this expansion, neither of which he
comments on (almost understandably, as the implications become overwhelming and
potentially incomprehensible): either the whole of television programming must be
thought of and written about as one cohesive narrative spanning the time of television,
since it would be next to impossible to claim that any of this programming is written out
the context of any other programming; or segments might be thought of as their own
narratives with recognized intersections to the narratives of other segments (a more
manageable schematic, but one that places considerably more emphasis on the critic’s
ability to “correctly” delineate “text”).9

While Williams’s concept of the inﬁnitely-expanding televisual text borders on
the unmanageable, it also presents nearly inﬁnite possibility that Williams does not
discuss. Each repetition of a television show places it in new context and conﬁgurations
with other televisual materials. In the case of The Twilight Zone, a show run in constant
syndication, television proliferation provides an opportunity for work created nearly 50
years ago to reach new audiences and experience different connections to other televisual

material. In addition to receiving its own new context, the show provides an added

 

9 Which approach to take continues to be a subject of debate in television studies. Whereas most critics tend
to adopt the second method, Jane F euer’s important essay “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as
Ideology” provides critique to Williams’s construction of the ﬁrst method, encouraging others to rethink its
applicability. Feuer notes that Williams does not dismiss fully with the “segment,” but rather that the
“segment” is a property of the television text and that “ﬂow” is really “segmentation without closure” (16).
She focuses on the manipulation of segmentation and fragmentation in television through her analysis of
“live” programming to claim that “an ideology of ‘liveness’ overcom[es] fragmentation” (17). For
examples of Williams’s work as a television critic (and how he handles the “overwhelming” text of
television in his own work), see Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings.

10

temporal context to the material it joins—a dimension of the “past” in television’s
otherwise constant “present,” a reminder of the present’s immediate becoming past, or an
opportunity for the past to become present.

“The Obsolete Man” draws attention to these considerations of multiple audiences
and temporalities. Collapsing the home CBS audience with the suggested, but never
portrayed, State audience, the show leaves both as witness to Wordsworth’s death. The
CBS audience is introduced to the machines that make the show possible (Wordsworth’s
show and The Twilight Zone itself) and must occupy the “impossible” position of seeing
the cameras and then viewing images through their lenses. The show also suggestively
aligns this audience with the audience of another time and space. This episode alludes to
the “pastness” of the present CBS audience, as they watch with the members of a possible
future’s audience the outrageous scene of Wordsworth’s death. The show exists
temporally in both present and (future’s) past and implies relationships to those two
contexts.

Given The Twith Zone series’ emphasis on the necessity of sociability
(characters are often either indicative or responsible for their worlds, and characters who
remain at the ﬁ'inges are punished), it would not be surprising that the work of television
is intended for more than one person. 10 Perhaps rather than one interpretation at any one

given point in time, television beckons multiple viewers and interpretations at many

 

'0 An example of the show’s willingness to punish characters for not being social is seen in “Time Enough
at Last.” Another bookish character played by Meredith Burgess (Wordsworth in “The Obsolete Man”)
spends the bulk of the episode in a bank vault so that he can read in peace. When a nuclear bomb destroys
the world, he is the only one left standing. Whereas he is seemingly given all the time in the world to read
alone, his glasses soon break, rendering him alone without the ability to continue reading and sufficiently
punishing him for withdrawing from the world.

11

points in time. What would be impossible work for one actually requires a community,
just as a community must be recognized as responsible for the creation of television.

The end of Williams’s Television does much in exposing the reasoning behind
Williams’s desire to write such a book and engage with such a medium. Heavily
concerned with the social change that television might allow for, Williams offers in his
ﬁnal pages a preview of the new technologies that he anticipates will develop from and in
response to the technology that allowed for television in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth-
century. Though he still imagines promise for television as a “people’s medium,” he also
recognizes that corporations and nations have been able to take control of the medium for
their own purposes and suggests that readers need to take control of these emerging
media, as these media “are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an
educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in
complex urban and industrial societies” (Williams 138, 145).

This episode of The Twiliﬂrt Zone also engages in a similar concern about the
power and control of and through television. Routinely, The Twilight Zone characters
adapt to surprising situations and work within the logic of the episode to the best of their
ability. Fonnulaically, the show introduces “ordinary” characters whose lives are turned
around in the course of an “ordinary” day, as something “extraordinary” happens to them
(they are transported to the past or future, for example). In “The Obsolete Man,”
Wordsworth follows through on his part of this established pattern, coping with the
situation by adapting to the logic of the State. He turns his televised execution on the
State itself, humiliating its ofﬁcial with the use of its own camera. Wordsworth

participates in the creation of televisual material, restaging the show albeit through the

12

equipment of the State. Wordsworth succeeds in a sense (one that the audience enjoys),
even as the episode ends on an ironic, rather than redemptive, note. Wordsworth still dies
and the overall structure of the State remains relatively intact. With enough
exaggeration, one might assume that the entire State could be collapsed in such a way
(one ofﬁcial at a time), but more realistically, it is another man who suffers for the name
of the State and the television meant for his fellow men. Wordsworth perhaps most
closely embodies Williams’s belief that television can be both a socially progressive
medium and one used by the people rather than large controlling bodies (be they states or
companies). Like Williams, The Twilight Zone calls for control of this medium
immediately, threatening possible future uses and control of television.

Wordsworth dies at end of the episode, but the options for a different ending are
limited by the show. Instead of ﬁghting the State through the medium of television, his
primary alternative is to use the “obsolete” medium of books. Through an analysis of this
dichotomy, The Twilight Zone lays out what is at stake in a relationship between print
and televisual media. In a number of ways, Serling unabashedly aligns Wordsworth with
print media in the episode. Along with the obvious implications of his allegorical name,
Wordsworth’s status as a “ﬂesh and mind” man is tied to his status as a man of books; his
insistence on God ties him back to that most obsolete book of all. Wordsworth’s
“messiness” develops into a larger thread over the episode as well. He both doesn’t “ﬁt”
into the ultimate logic of the State and doesn’t maintain the appropriate order for a State
so highly wrapped up in classiﬁcations, clariﬁcations, and labels; Wordsworth tells The

Chancellor, “I don’t ﬁt your formulae.” When cameras meet Wordsworth at his home,

13

the viewer sees books sprawled haphazardly on bookshelves and covering almost every
surface of the home.

The episode and more unusually, Serling’s intro, does not as obviously insist on
the State’s alignment with television.ll Along with The Chancellor’s intrusion into
Wordsworth’s home space comes the intrusion of the television camera. Though
Wordsworth requests an audience for his death, the State insists that this audience be a
televised one (it claims that the condemned should be isolated, providing yet another
reason that no one comes to The Chancellor’s aid when he is endangered). The episode
repeats again the State’s use of television for executions, creating educational (and no
doubt, useful,) programming for the presumably silent “masses.” While the opening
sequence of the episode features a crowd standing around and waiting for The
Chancellor’s judgment, the ﬁnal sequence features this crowd moaning and absorbing
The Chancellor’s body (it is unclear what the crowd plans to do with him once they have
covered him).12 This crowd has been give voice only after Wordsworth has regained
control of the television cameras. The implied passivity (or later, activity) of the
audience is most dangerous in this episode—the audience at home is called to feel
uncomfortable with both its silence and its ﬁrst attempts to speak. At best, the episode
closes with the grim satisfaction that the crowd has been turned against The Chancellor.

The link between the state and television is undoubtedly present but not

allegorically referenced by Serling in this episode; here, Serling seems determined to let

 

” Additionally, both Zicree’s and Presnell and McGee’s episode guides (the two most highly regarded
guides in Twilight Zone scholarship) gloss over the show’s portrayal of television in this episode. They do
not even mention the television cameras, on omission characteristic of their focus on the production of the
show rather than an analysis of the show itself.

‘2 The controversy surrounding the director’s decision to include this “moaning” crowd is covered in E
Twili t Zone” Com anion’s summary of this episode.

14

the viewer sort out the “trouble” of television the show introduces, without simplifying
the matter in his opening and closing narration. This omission can also be read as
Serling’s encouragement of searching beyond the boundary of the title screen for
resolution or further consideration of the episode’s complexities. Other episodes within
the series offered this opportunity by confronting the connection between dictatorships
and the televisual medium. Importantly, one such episode aired earlier in the same
season as “The Obsolete Man.” In allowing for the chance to “read backward” into the
series, Serling and the writers behind The Twilight Zone suggest a literacy of television
that privileges a disorder of time (one also referenced in the multiple futures of “The
Obsolete Man”). “The Eye of the Beholder,” one of the show’s most frequently parodied
episodes, questions strongly the audience’s conception of and emphasis on beauty when a
twist at the end of the show reveals that the woman the audience would ﬁnd attractive is
deemed unattractive by the world in which she lives. Beauty is not only measured by a
different standard but also is necessary for life in the episode’s world. Importantly, as the
woman runs out of the room and down a hospital corridor (horriﬁed by the failure of her
surgery and her life of condemned ugliness), she runs past multiple television screens, all
featuring the face of the dictator, all harassing her.

In these episodes, the extensive control of the State and its heavy inﬂuence on the
worlds that the episodes portray is expressed through the image of the television camera
or screen. '3 At the same time, the series does recognize some “legitimate” educational

value in those screens and cameras, using the medium of television to warn against its

 

'3 F amously, this is an Orwellian representation of the power of television. Anna McCarthy works against
this concept in her photography projects, which she argues “exposes the inapplicability of the Orwellian
irnaginings of the public TV screen as a technology of control that standardizes places and subjects” (188).
See her argument in “Rhythms of the Reception Area.”

15

potential misuses and what would seem to be some totalitarian potential (echoing
Williams’s concern about the power and inﬂuence of ﬂow in Television). In
Dimensions Behind The Twilight Zone, Stewart T. Stanyard and those he interviews in
connection to the show make continuous reference to the show’s respect of the viewer’s
intelligence (2-3, 258 are only two examples). Both the show and its surrounding
materials implicitly acknowledge some of television criticism’s discussions of the
struggle over and representation of television. The Twilight Zone portrays television in
a way that suggests the masses can be manipulated, as they passively await the next
lesson from the ruling body. But the individual is called in contradiction to this—
Wordsworth must do what the masses will not. He must break the ranks of the crowd to
save it and give it voice (employing individuality for the potential of sociability). In “The
Obsolete Man,” television also stands in for the perception of a false “order”; the State
(and implicitly television) contrast Wordsworth’s messiness, providing public execution
in the routine of a daily television viewing schedule. The episode, in casting a television
audience that is never seen, further makes messy the distinction between the television
audience on television and the television audience at home.

During the “Golden Age” of television in which The Twilight Zone aired, that
“science ﬁction” show was not only the format for expressing concerns about the place
and use of television. As Lynn Spigel writes in “Television in the Family Circle,” “The
idea of [television as] ‘technology out of control’ was constantly repeated as the language
of horror and science ﬁction invaded discussions of everyday life” (81). Spigel notes
that these discussions took place in men’s magazines, print advertisements for television

sets, in addition to the expected format of print science ﬁction. Even Serling’s one-time

16

friend and contributor to The Twilight Zone, Ray Bradbury, expressed doubts about any
positivity stemming from this new technology in stories such as, “The Veldt.”

With others speculating about the role of television, it is unsurprising that I_h§
Twilight Zone would want to comment on its own medium. Based on his own expression
through this medium, however, it is surprising that Serling would continue to link
“regimes” to television’s extended use. Television is undoubtedly a complicated and
powerful medium in this formation, a medium that must be considered repeatedly and
with caution. Given that the The Twilight Zone often presents the death of “bookish”
characters, the show suggests there is no return to a “happy” day of print. While
Serling’s monologue is careful to speculate that “The Obsolete Man” shows only one
possible future, the by-then familiar pattern of new technology replacing “obsolete”
technology seems especially poignant when print and televisual material are at stake and
given the remarkable destruction of WWII. Not only does Wordsworth die on television,
but he dies by bomb (a connection the show and its viewers cannot ignore). Indeed, in
“The Obsolete Man,” television has an undeniable link to death (and a repetition of that
death, as it has been used for that purpose before). With that same medium, however,
Wordsworth takes advantage of the witnessing and call to remembrance television can
simultaneously offer. The episode touches many audiences at once, including an
audience that is always “before” and potentially the cause or cure to this future. With the
show’s syndication, many audiences are called to remember both Wordsworth and the
victims of other regimes.

The State (or a similar ﬁction) appears many times in The Twilight Zone in

slightly different conﬁgurations, revealing yet another investment the show has in

17

prescribing the use of the television medium. Collapsing totalitarianism and
dictatorships and oﬁen the various details of the perceived communist threat of the 505
and 605 with the then recently-lived Nazi threat of WWII, the show repetitively features a
controlling regime that is undoubtedly condemned by the show (and implicitly by its
audience as well). Though “out of this world” staples such as aliens, magical powers,
and spaceships regularly played a role in the series, it is the return to the condition and
condemnation of war (and WWII in particular) that characterizes the show so strongly.
Interviewed for a book about the production of The Twilight Zone, show writer Earl
Hammer Jr., described both Serling and the show as “mak[ing] statements about social
injustice, and [Serling] was particularly fond of bringing the Nazis to their knees. And
often these scripts would have an anti-Nazi ﬂavor” (Stanyard 156).

While the regular appearance of Nazis and other war criminals help support
allegations that the show presents its tales in too-strict of “black and white” terms, they
also arrive seriously as specters from an all-too—recent past.14 And this helps illustrate
one of The Twilight Zone’s positions on the use and role of television. Television, a
medium characterized as for “children and morons” (in the show’s words), is also a
medium that can respond in part with and to the repetition of history. It considers how
audiences are asked to “see” history (as always represented and never “as is or was”) and

use technology, and how new technologies reframe or expose “old” problems. Along

 

'4 In “He’s Alive,” an episode in which a young uniformed man preaches hate of minorities in the streets
and lecture halls, The Twilight Zone resurrects Hitler from the “darkness” as the inﬂuence for the young
man at the center of the episode (Other episodes which enact or reenact scenes and characters from WWII
include “Judgment Night,” “The Purple Testament,” “King Nine Will Not Return,” “Deaths-Head
Revisited,” “A Quality of Mercy,” and “The Encounter.”). The episode deals centrally concerns the
repetition of history with the literal repetition of Hitler’s image and ideas. Against the characters’
insistence that “it can’t happen again,” Serling closes his ﬁnal narration with the phrase, “We keep him
alive.” And aside from keeping him alive to knock him down again in another piece, Serling and the other
writers of the show seem interested in using the show to consider alternate histories; the shadows of _T_'h_e
Twilight Zone become the very shadows that harbor both Hitler and history.

18

with this, television seems uniquely capable of “thinking” temporality—past as present,
present as ﬂeeting, science ﬁction future as present, repetition in which to cycle again.
With the show’s assurance that television is suited for these tasks, what work might be
left for print? How do the variety of materials surrounding the show contribute to the
show’s concerns? What relationship do these materials claim to the show aﬁer the

show’s relative dismissal of their medium?

11. Reading (I) Television: Narrative in Multiple Media

The necessity (and necessary danger) of television that The Twilight Zone
presents in its episodes and themes runs counter to a productive establishment of
narrative congruity between print and televisual materials suggested by television studies
and the print materials surrounding The Twilight Zone. Where Williams successfully
troubled the narrative cohesion of any one individual program by noting that programs
are inextricably linked to other televisual “texts,” other television critics have wondered
what to do with the print materials that obviously connect to television but exceed the
boundaries of the television screen. Anthologies such as Regarding Television address
these materials primarily as a way of further describing the “target audience” of a show
(cookbooks, for example, point to an actively courted female audience) or claiming these
texts were a way to supplement the television experience, already both temporally and

spatially fragmented. But though the anthology brieﬂy considers these materials, they

19

often remain at the “margins” of the text, relegated to footnotes or without an in-depth
analysis.15

John Ellis’s description of the “narrative image” in Visible Fictions establishes
precedent for such an analysis between print and televisual materials, though Ellis goes to
great lengths to write “narrative image” as a uniquely ﬁlmic concept.” “Narrative
image” provides a theoretical structure for moving between print and visual media that
occupy the same “narrative world” and lays out a temporality for this type movement that
other critics in television studies have ﬂirted with (but rarely acknowledge debt to Ellis
for creating).17

Ellis’s conﬁguration of “narrative image” is a marketing term. He writes, “An
idea of the ﬁlm is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the
‘narrative image’ of the ﬁlm, the cinema industry’s anticipatory reply to the question
‘what is this ﬁlm like?’ If anything is bought at the box ofﬁce that is already known by
the audience, it is this narrative image” (30). The narrative image “occurs in a number of

media” and circulates primarily outside of cinemas (31, 36). Ellis insists on the

“incompleteness” of this narrative image, as its enigma entices the viewer to see the ﬁlm

 

'5 Three chapters in particular stand out in relation to this topic. See Charlotte Brunsdon’s “Crossroads:
Notes on a Soap Opera,” Tanya Modleski’s “The Rhythms of Reception” and Robert C. Allen’s “On
Reading Soaps: A Semiotic Primer.”

'6 Like Ellis, many writers go to great and necessary lengths separating ﬁlm studies from television studies
for a variety of purposes and reasons. For some excellent writing on the differences between the two, see
Lynne Joyrich’s Re-ViewingReception. especially pg. 14-39 (deals with the split between a female-
gendered television audience and a male-gendered ﬁhn audience) or Ann Kaplan’s Introduction to
Regarding Television (deals with the necessity of a non-communications approach to television and
necessary considerations for developing a ﬁeld of television studies).

'7 Ellis returned to these concepts in the later work Seeing Things. Though this book focuses more heavily
on television, it does so more to discuss the historical nature of programming decisions and to identify eras
of television rather than to focus on the narrative work of television. When he does discuss narrative, many
of his positions remain the same, including the claim that television favors a program’s “newness”—
articulating in another formation television’s ﬂeeting presence as negative (163). Ellis considers “spin-off"
materials, but unsurprisingly as products to sell the brand of a show (166-7). Ellis defends in that book
many of the claims I am arguing against.

20

for completion—a completion that the ﬁlm will never really can or will provide.18 While
Ellis stresses cinema’s inability to complete the “narrative image,” he overlooks the
potential for the viewer to gain narrative conclusion through other means. He also
overlooks the potential uses of narrative image outside of generating the type of interest
in a ﬁlm that directly results in ticket sales.

Though The Twmht Zone show does not itself comment on the type of
television studies that Ellis lays out here, the print materials surrounding the show
respond to some of the limits of his theory. Ellis claims that television comes closest to
the “narrative image” in its title sequence, which provides the “enigma” that each
successive episode will purport to solve. When Ellis brushes aside television’s
participation in this system, he ignores the broad ways in which television’s narrative
image can extend to print. The Twilight Zone Magazine was not only able to provide the
type of narrative image Ellis discusses here for the show, but was able to produce a
narrative image years after the show was originally aired. This delay between publication
and broadcast challenges any assumption that this narrative image is solely for
promotional purposes. It also cements the connection between Serling and the show that
Ellis’s theory would be prone to dismiss. With no show left to promote (especially as
those involved with the magazine had no ﬁnancial interest in the success of the show’s
syndication), TZ Magazine attempted to offer a way to hold on to the show and get
behind its success, shifting focus from the diegesis of the show to its literal narration. By

crafting it own narrative in which the show was achieved against all odds (or could

 

'8 Ellis writes that “each ﬁlm is in some way unable to provide a full resolution of its basic enigma,
although each works as a satisfying narrative,” in part because the ﬁhn is unwilling to move away from a
safe ideological position or attitude (Visible 79, 81). An additional reason behind cinema’s inability or
unwillingness to complete the narrative image is that its “enigma” is often the concern about or
inaccessibility of women’s sexuality from a male perspective (67).

21

accomplish what no other show could) and by focusing on the person and story of Rod
Serling, TZ Magazine begins a story that the series itself must answer to or complete. The
magazine worked to provide new enjoyment and appreciation of a television show from
the past—in the then present form of print publication.

Ellis reveals a vexed relationship to his own concept of the narrative image,
perhaps most clearly expressed in his discussion of “star power” as a common feature of
a ﬁlmic narrative image. Like narrative images, “Stars are incomplete images outside the
cinema: the performance of the ﬁlm is the moment of completion of images in subsidiary
circulation, in newspapers, fanzines, etc.” (91). In some ways, stars develop their own
narrative potential through this structure, where the ﬁlm again provides the opportunity
for completion when viewers can see the star “as a whole,” as opposed to the
discontinuous form of exposure that audiences otherwise become introduced to star
through (as they learn small bits about the stars from interviews, see the star’s image but
not voice in a magazine, or hear the star’s voice but without image on radio, for example)
(99).19 With The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling has become as much a part of the “success”
of the show as any particular episode, mostly because of the work done in print in the
years following the show and because of his inﬂuence in the backstage work of the show
(as head writer and in charge of many hiring decisions). Deliberately, the print materials
around the show have emphasized his role, attributing to him much of the show’s
“brilliance.”

Ellis claims that television presents the television personality (instead of a star), or

someone “who is famous for being famous” (107). These “personalities” are the opposite

 

‘9 The effects of the star’s ﬁlmic performance can have different effects depending on the gender of the
star, as female stars are more likely to become objects of desire or be plagued with additional narratives of
“enigma” (99-102).

22

3

of “stars”—“agreeable voids rather than sites of conﬂicting meanings.” The “opposition’
between television and cinema also become apparent in the “simplistic” form of
television’s narrative image; the closest television comes to achieving this in Ellis’s
words is through the title sequence, which “integrates shots from the individual
programme in a highly enigmatic or incoherent way” (120). What little “enigma”
television does provide is not discussed widely in “other” media. Though a newspaper or
radio show might feature a television show the day before or of the day that it airs, Ellis
claims that this discussion drops immediately after the show is seen—no thought is given
to it again (123).

The Twilight Zone illustrates several failures of Ellis’s theory. While Serling was
not featured in the title sequence of the show, his narrated introductions and conclusions
are just as emblematic (if not more than) the show’s theme song and special-effects-laden
beginning (the multiple parodies of Serling’s “character” can attest to this). Because he
and these title sequences were the consecutively repeated features of the show, it would
be difﬁcult to separate one from the other. The print projects which have undoubtedly
swayed many viewers’ considerations of the show have inextricably linked the show’s
success to Serling’s own triumph over the television medium.

Ellis clearly privileges the “complexity” (and seemingly, the difﬁculty) of ﬁlm in
comparison to the “simplicity” of television. Whereas he imagines stars as integral parts
of cinema’s “enigma,” television is too simple to accommodate “enigma” fruitfully—
problems/complexities instead become “incoherent” when handled in this medium. Ellis
further discounts television’s potential to generate stars with any level of narrative

complexity; they are either “voids” or too tied to any one role. Revealed in Ellis’s

23

discussion of star image is a telling explication of the relationship between print and
visual media. Though Ellis does not frame his discussion directly as such, he more
deeply considers the role of print in creating “stars” than in creating “narrative images.”
Ellis again emphasizes the “incompleteness” of the star’s presence in print, writing that
the star image constructing the paradox (revealed more clearly in print) that the star is
both ordinary and extraordinary (96).

Motivating Ellis throughout this text is the assumption that the novel has been
replaced by cinema and that television will probably be the next meditun for this familiar
structuring of characters and story (64). Though he claims not to subscribe to this belief,
he does insist that cinema has adopted certain aspects of the novel. Ellis further
privileges cinema’s relationship to print by framing print as now a supplement to cinema,
albeit a necessary and important one. By cutting off television’s access to print (and
ignoring that what he claims is true of cinema can also be applied to television), Ellis
seems to ensure (and reassure) that television is not the true heir to narrative strategies
and “complexities” enjoyed by cinema and the novel. In “The Obsolete Man” episode,
The Twilight Zone suggests both the dangers and potential gains from such a model of
“succession” (though clearly an exaggerated version of that model), illustrating the
absurdity of clean break between print and television (or another other media) and the
simultaneous absurdity of a strict adherence to print for all time. At the same time, the
episode privileges the complexity of Wordsworth’s situation and the enigmatic nature of
television itself.

Aside from what becomes an obvious bias against television in the text (including

Ellis’s need to reassure the reader that television has not replaced cinema, despite popular

24

rumor), Ellis does introduce useful theories of temporality associated with narrative
image in cinema and, more Iimitedly, in television that afford readers the chance to
reconsider the initial structure and description of narrative image. In setting up narrative
image as the “selling point,” Ellis has to focus on the narrative image’s construction prior
to or during the period in which the ﬁlm is shown at theatres. Ellis acknowledges that
viewers do not “purchase” television in the same way that they “purchase” ﬁlm and
accordingly, his description of the “wor ” of narrative image drOps off when he discusses
ﬁlm on television. He does not address what happens to or what might be made of the
narrative image aﬁer the ﬁlm has left theatres (what role, for example, does viewer-
initiated discussion of the ﬁlm serve when the ﬁlm is no longer available for
consumption?) One of Ellis’s stumbling blocks in adapting his concept of the narrative
image for television is that the constant production of television does not allow for the
same “prior to” and television, offering only a “during”: “[T]he television performer
appears in subsidiary forms of circulation (newspapers, magazines) mostly during the
time that the series of performances is being broadcast” (106). Ellis seems uninterested in
what might be made of television’s “casting back” or engagement with other genres,
enigmas, or star narratives, noting only that television is caught in its own patterns of
repetition that seem to trap it in a continuous present that cuts off any closure, certainly a
negative feature to Ellis.

Television studies, in discussing the range of materials that is developed or
proliferated in connection to a whole, often adopts Ellis’s approach of focusing on these

materials as “simultaneous” enhancements or expansions to a series. In the recent

anthology Television After TV. several essays discuss these materials in new and

25

complicated ways.20 For example, Jeffrey Sconce’s essay “What If?” points to the
expanded narrative worlds of television and the chances that audiences have to inhabit
the same narrative spaces as the characters they watch and learn so much about. Sconce
writes that this seems to be a particularly recent trend, claiming that in the last two
decades, television “has discovered that the cultivation of its story worlds (diegesis) is as
crucial an element in its success as storytelling. What television lacks in spectacle and
narrative constraints, it makes up for in depth and duration of character relations, diegetic
expansion and audience investment” (95). While television viewers are just catching on,
Sconce points out that readers of comic books have been involved this level of dedication
and participation for decades. As the narrative world of television shows expands, series
tend to become increasingly complex, a complexity made possible by the “other media”
of Web sites, books, fanzines, etc. and more targeted audience-bases (95-6). Rather than
just read this as evidence of the “complexity” of later television texts, this might be a
response to the recognition that television as a medium is particularly complex and
evidence of a literacy of television that requires the participation of many viewers in

analyzing the text.

 

2° In one essay, John Caldwell considers the importance of audience interaction in conceptions of new
shows and plans for syndication, charting out new “visions” of television. He is concerned with “rhetorical
shift from talking about productions as ‘programs’ to talking about them as ‘content’,” seemingly another
re-formation of Williams’s push “outward” (Caldwell 49). Though Caldwell takes Ellis’s approach in
discussing these from a consumerist perspective, he does so with new technologies. Using Dawson’s Creek
as an example of an effective “repackaging” of content, Caldwell highlights the show’s ofﬁcial Web site
(Dawsonscreekcom) and its use of “backstory elaboration” to further involve viewers/readers in the “off-
air time” (52).20 The ability to sort through the “private lives” of characters gives viewers/readers an
“augmentation [that] thereby enables viewers to live vicariously in a constructed diegetic world and space
outside of the show” (52). Caldwell discusses this site as extending the narrative world beyond the scope
of the individual episode, but he does not talk about how this merchandising works outside of the viewer’s
purchase of it or what happens to the narrative world supported and extended by the merchandise once the
series itself goes “off-air.” Like Ellis, Caldwell also approaches this issue from the level of control
producers of the “product” exert over the fan base, imagining a model for expansion that effectively allows
for expanded opportunity to purchase.

26

Sconce points to one of the earliest examples of a dedicated fandom, the by-now-
notorious “trekkers” of the Star Trek series, as an example of fans who have
“appropriated the raw materials of the original series and elaborated them into a more
extensive narrative universe” (99). While the trekkers have been doing this work for
decades, they have also had the beneﬁt of long-running and successful sequels to the
original Star Trek. In fact, much of the success of these shows is owed to Trekkers’
participation in keeping the multiple series on the air and their contribution of original
teleplays encouraged and aired by the series’ creators.2| By comparison, The Twilight
m has been remade twice, and these remakes have failed within the ﬁrst few seasons.
The Twilight Zone fans have not rallied to support the continuation of the series in the
same way that trekkers have, and they have quite possibly even contributed to the failure
of these shows by quickly dismissing them (citing a lack of the “magic” of the original
series). These fans continue to return to the original series for inspiration (never did 1;
Magazine feature scripts from a new show), and their work is often accordingly oriented
toward the preservation of this past rather than the creation of a future for the show.

Characterized as an “anthology” television show, the original Twilight Zone
series had little continuity between episodes and featured individual episodes that
established their own “insular narratives.” Though a few actors and actresses played more
than one character over the course of the entire series, the characters from one episode

never interacted with the characters from another episode. On the surface the show does

 

2’ Just as notorious as the trekkers themselves are the forms of fan ﬁction they have created, including
“slash” ﬁction that sexually features the Star Trek characters. To the extent that The Twilight Zone fans
have extended the narrative world of the show, they have resisted portraying the “character” of Rod Serling
in this way, perhaps because of their inability to separate the “character” of Rod Serling from the lived
person. For two chapters that consider the trend of Star Trek fan ﬁction, see Henry Jenkins’s Egg;
Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

27

not demonstrate the same level of complexity (between episodes) that is characteristic of
the contemporary series that Sconce discusses (often deﬁned in terms of the “sitcom”),
though The Twilight Zone made for a great ﬁt with the comic book format. By the
second aired season of The Twilight Zone in 1961, the show had already successfully
crossed over from the televisual medium to comic books in a print series that lasted for
over two decades (well beyond the original airing of the series) and over 90 issues
(Presnell 18, “Comic Vine”). The comic stuck to a strange connection with the original
show, featuring adaptations of some episodes and entirely original issues based on stories
outside of the series’ scope. Though not all of the issues made a direct claim to the show
in terms of their content, the comic book did share a title with the show in addition to a
claim of Serling’s approval (evidenced by the black and white photographs of Serling
which graced each cover).22 This would be the ﬁrst of at least two print projects to make
appeals to the image and name of Rod Serling in order to “legitimize” their connection to
the show. As the show’s narrative expanded in these print projects, so too did a narrative
of Rod Serling—creating texts in which the two were virtually one and the same (or even
where Serling’s image and name would subordinate that of the show).

As an anthology show, The Twilight Zone had a main narrative thread of
narrative itself. Scholars Presnell and McGee remind readers of their guide to the show,
“The story was the thing” (7). And that main “story” consisted of Rod Serling sharing
tales from “another dimension” with the audience. The show’s narrator and central
ﬁgure, Rod Serling became the point of access that the audience necessarily had to pass

through in order to get to the show (and to the comics, and later, to the magazine). With

 

22 The comic book series was originally published by Dell Comics, but after only a few issues, publication
was taken over by Gold Key comics (Shaw par. 3). For a comprehensive image gallery of the Dell and
Gold Key covers, see “Grand Comic Book Database.”

28

this premise, the narrative world of The Twilight Zone could seemingly be inﬁnitely
expanded, a possibility realized by the early introduction of the “spin-oft” comic book.
By sharing the “title” sequence of the original show and prominently featuring Serling’s
image as a type of “key” that provided access to the world of The Twilight Zone
(recognized and discussed now as a form of branding or “tie-in”), the comic book could
lay claim to the same “world” as the series. Though Ellis’s dismisses the complexity of
(a portion of) the narrative image of the title sequence, The Twilight Zone’s title
sequence provided enough fodder to allow for other stories. In this way, the show did
seem to invite a print expansion of its narrative world.

The thread of storytelling was the only cohesion between the episodes (or issues,
or episodes and issues, depending on how viewers/readers imagined the links between the
show and the comic book at this time) formally introduced by the television show. The
show’s viewers (and to some extent, the show’s creators) played a large role in expanding
its narrative world and were willing to participate in any way they could. Just as the
comic book developed early in the show’s airing, so too did stories ﬂood in from viewers
eager to develop the show. When Serling solicited submissions and writers for the ﬁrst
season, the Twilight Zone staff received 14,000 scripted entries within a period of ﬁve
days (16). While none of these submissions ultimately made it to air, it became clear to
both CBS (who held 50 percent stake in the show) and Serling (who held the other 50
percent stake) that the public was both highly interested in the show and willing to play a
part in its creation. This level of viewer interaction lasted well into the ﬁrst season,

where at one point, CBS received 6,000 pieces of fan mail in 18 hours (17).

29

These early attempts by viewers and writers to become participants in the show’s
creation are only some of many examples of such eagerness during both the original run
of the show and its life in syndication. The number of submissions and CBS’s rejection
of them all expose the limitations of print and televisual media. While these writers all
had access to print, they expressed desire to create the show from the televisual side. At
the same time, this medium was closed off from them because television production is
owned by a few companies. In this sense, print is a more egalitarian medium, but not
necessarily the meditun of choice by those willing and desirous of contributing to the
show’s narrative world. In giving Wordsworth the only option of television (and closing
down the option of altering his world through print), the series tells viewers that

television is the effective medium of change.

[11. Bound to Remember: TZ Magazine and the Archival Project

Much of the “expanded narrative” that has occurred in print work on The Twilight
_Z__on_e has been an attempt to craft a story about the production of the show. This story, as
a second narrative, does not easily overlap with the narrative world created by the show.
Texts such as The Twilight Zone Companion. A Critical History of Television’s The
Twilight Zone, and Dimensions Behind The Twilight Zone have “stalled” at the show and
crafted their own narrative through the meticulous listing of actor’s appearances (and
later successes), cross-referencing episodes by director, actor, and writer, offering new
interviews with largely the same cast of people associated with the show and Rod’s life,

and organizing episodes by themes and social issues.23 Taken together, this information

 

2’ Even the story of ﬁlming Twilight Zone: The Movie has it own adherents and narrators, as the ﬁlm was
notoriously plagued by the accidental death of three cast members during the ﬁlming and the director was
charged with homicide. For accounts, see, “The Twilight Zone of Contemporary Hollywood Production”

30

becomes a tantalizing and somewhat exaggerated story with the somewhat exaggerated
person and character of Rod Serling at its center. In presenting this story as such, I
separate that which claims to criticize or analyze the show and that which participates in
developing its mythology.24

In brief, the story crafted and repeated by these Twilight Zone guides is the
following: Rod Serling wins a writing contest that sends him to New York and allows
him to fully believe in his potential as a writer. His ability to write quickly propels his
success, as he is one of the only television anthology writers in the 505 who is supported
by his television writing work. Serling, already with some notoriety for his work on
Playhouse 90 and popular teleplays, pitches the concept of The Twilight Zone to CBS
executives, who put Serling in charge of the project. Serling, though not the original
choice for narrator, is thrown into that role as well, solidifying the connection between
his image and the show. Serling exacts creative control over the series with a core group
of writers and producers and with the ability to attract up-and-coming talent such as
Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, and most famously, William Shatner. When the series is
expanded to one-hour episodes from the “regular” half-hour episodes of the ﬁrst three
seasons, Serling becomes worn out and the show is never the same again. Serling and
crew are somewhat relieved when the show is not picked up for sixth season, as the

“magic” has been lost (the “magic” that remains inexplicable in all of these supplemental

 

by Charles S. Tashiro, Specfgl Effects: Disaster at Twilight Zone : The Tragedy and the Trial by Ron
Labrecque, and Outrggeous Conduct: Art. Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case by Stephen F arber and Marc
Green.

2" In separating the “story” as such, I do not claim that it is any less important to thinking about 113
Twilight Zone’s place in televisual or print media. I merely point to a tendency in Twilight Zone
scholarship to rely on this story of lieu of criticism. An example of this can be seen in Peter Wolfe’s In The
Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling. In the Introduction to his book (a project described as “a
thematic, artistic, and technical analysis” of the show), he writes, “Justifying the analysis is the truth that
The Twilight Zone was the best art-directed show in TV history and one of the most inﬂuential” (l).

31

texts but is often attributed to the black and white medium of the show, its excellent
writing, and the presence of Rod Serling). In retrospect, the show is praised for its
originality, creativity, and social activism. The lost “magic” cannot be (and presumably
will never be) captured by later attempts to revive the show, in part (perhaps) because the
show’s founder dies on an operating table at the young age of 50. In this legend, the
show is Rod’s and Rod belongs to television (he has even been dubbed “television’s last
angry man”). He never achieved much writing success outside of that medium.

Of the variety of print materials that has been built around (and in) The Twilight
_Zo_ne, one of the most curious and challenging of these has been Rod Serling’gsThe
Twilight Zone Magazine. Not as well-preserved as The Twiligm Zone comic books,
TZMagazine is often mentioned but hardly discussed in what scholarship does surround
the television show.25 The magazine began its run in April 1981 with monthly
publication and eventually ceased in 1989 after spending several years publishing
bimonthly. The title of the magazine is itself revealing of its investment in Rod Serling—
there would have been no other Twilight Zone with which to confuse Rod Serling’s when
the magazine chose this title. Both the Twilight Zone: The Movie and the second
incarnation of The Twilight Zone series would be realized during the magazine’s run.
The inclusion of Rod Serling’s name was further odd in that Serling was not alive to
grant permission for the magazine (this was assumed by his wife). Additionally, the
magazine included relics of The Twilight Zone television series (such as original scripts
by the show’s writers), but it was primarily organized around ﬁction from writers who

had little connection to the show or Rod Serling.

 

2’ Though my interest in the magazine in its relationship to the show and the “story” that has grown to
circulate around it, the nearly decade of TZMagazine issues are surrounded by such a derth of information
that they would be deserving of their own project.

32

In her “Personal Message,” Carol Serling frames the magazine as an extension of
the “dimension” introduced by the television series. She invites readers to journey back
into its “wondrous land” and claims the stories that are introduced in the magazine as
following the tradition of “high standards” established by her husband for the series (C.
Serling 3). While new stories ﬁlled the “void” of the Twilight Zone, W
continued to also draw on the original show and Rod Serling’s life. TZ Magazine
contributes to and imagines the narrative space of the television series, especially as it
casts the series backward while simultaneously aiming to “preserve it.” This print
material negotiates the presence of Rod Serling in this project of preservation, as
nostalgia for the show becomes nostalgia for the person of Rod Serling. In both
instances, the magazine looks to handle loss through early attempts at a printed and
ongoing archive, which seem to depart from its initial intent to expand the narrative
world of the show.

Although Rod Serling was the only continuous “personality” on The Twilight
m, more than just his opening and closing narrations have been included in the story
of his participation. TZ Mggazine draws on that story of his life and the memory of his
person as an almost compulsive necessity. Because Serling had sold the rights to the
show back to CBS before the show reached any regular syndication, when Rod died,
Carol Serling had no control over how CBS handled or licensed the show. As Associate
Publisher of the magazine, however, she was able to lend his name (which at that point
was also her name) “personally.” And, the inclusion in that title, Rod Serling: “The
Twilight Zone” Magazine, was one method of reclaiming the show from CBS, at least in

the trajectory of memory the magazine offered readers.

33

Rod Serling appeared many times in even the ﬁrst issue of TZ Magazine,
including in Carol’s opening message (and implicitly in her blessing the magazine with
her approval, involvement, and access to Rod’s scripts), in a collage article about Rod
written by Carol and Marc Scott Zicree, in the inclusion of an original script from an
episode written by Rod (“Time Enough at Last”), and even in an advertisement for a
writing contest sponsored by TZ Magazine. The advertisement is the most curious of
these pieces as it is laden with the prospect of memory and the association of Rod
Serling’s life as central to the “story” of The Twilight Zone.26 Underneath the title
“Announcing TZ’s $2000 Story Contest” is a short summary laying out Rod Serling’s
history as a writer in considerably lengthy detail, given its placement on the page (and
that it interrupts the title and the speciﬁcs of the contest) (52). The advertisement goes on
to announce that “In Rod Serling’s memory,” Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone”
Magazine will award three prizes for work by a previously unpublished writer.
Additionally, this work will be published in “TZ’s First Anniversary Issue—April 1982”
(52). It is not necessarin odd that the magazine would sponsor a contest in Rod’s name,
but the inclusion of Serling’s life story on the announcement and the suggestion that this
contest stems from his encouragement of other writers creates an odd invitation to both
be ([the winner] as) Rod (was), be a writer contributing to The Twilight Zone (as Rod

also was), and support his memory.

 

26 Though the writing contest was announced in the ﬁrst issue (April), the winners would not be published
for a year, so that the winners could be published in the anniversary issue of the magazine. Both assuming
the success of the magazine through a year and implicitly suggesting the ﬁrst of many anniversaries, the
decision to publish these pieces in an “anniversary” issue after the advertisement has already been heavily
saturated with Serling’s memory seems another way to tie in a remembrance of his life. This move also
heavily suggests Carol Serling’s involvement, as “anniversary” has that all-too-common association of
wedding anniversary; this new anniversary suggests already an anniversary of remembrance rather than the
celebration of a new formation.

34

In this framing the contest in this way, the magazine suggests that the completion
of Serling’s (narrative) image might exist off screen rather than on screen (as Ellis’s
description of “star power” would suggest). The print material here supplements
Serling’s on-screen image with narrative details that interest the reader (and therefore do
the work that that the narrative image is supposed to do), but it also directs the potential
viewer away from the screen. Getting closest to Serling does not involve watching
television to see the unity of his face and voice, but rather one approaches Serling and the
story crafted around him most completely by participating in his “real-life” success.
Serling is actually taken out of the diegetic world of the show in this conﬁguration. With
the magazine veering back into print rather than toward television, I see at least two ways
of reading this trajectory along Ellis’s terms. On the one hand, it could be that the
magazine crafts a different type of narrative in this moment, one that exceeds the work of
Ellis’s narrative image in its promotion of Serling’s image. Because Ellis has focused so
heavily on the narrative image as coinciding with the broadcast of a show, his theory
seems incapable of understanding the “star power” of a deceased star. As more than
narrative image, the advertisement longs for a completion that even print would
ultimately fail to provide (the winning writer could never truly be Serling, of course). On
the other hand, this page in the magazine further reinforces suspicion that Ellis’s concern
in his construction of star power and narrative image is truly print (more than print’s
supplementation to either cinema or television). In promoting Serling (under the guise of
promoting both the magazine and the show), the advertisement turns back to print
because this is where the completion of the narrative image truly exists in Ellis’s theory.

If cinema can have narrative image whereas television cannot (according to Ellis), it is

35

because cinema has successfully adopted techniques of print where television has not
(again, according to Ellis), which is only exposed in Ellis’s conception of star power.

Because this star power is generated for the interest of the reader/viewer, it is
logical that the reader/viewer would be interested in developing it. In the October 1981
issue of TZ Magazine, Carol Serling uses the space of the “Publisher’s Note” to include
some letters from the magazine’s readers (as there was not at that time a regular column
for responses from the public). Of the four excerpts from different readers, two of them
are about Rod Serling and the other two are about the show more than the magazine. In
one, a reader writes, “Thank you for bringing back the memory of your late husband...
Mr. Serling’s memory deserves nothing less” (C. Serling “Publisher’s” 5). Importantly,
though the magazine’s stated primary goals were to expand the imaginative world of the
Twilight Zone, it was also structured in such a way that readers responded to it as a
project for keeping alive Rod Serling and his “story”/involvement.

The announcement for the ﬁction contest is only one of several advertisements
and features that speaks to the “archival” work of T2 Magazine. In addition to
preserving Rod’s memory and “story,” the magazine also attempts to preserve the
production of The Twilight Zone show. The magazine provided readers access to the
show’s writers and actors through interviews and publication of their new pieces of
ﬁction. Carol Serling offered the magazine the opportunity to print Rod’s original
teleplays from the show, the ﬁrst time she had granted such access to any publisher.27 At

least one of these scripts closed each magazine.

 

’7 Though the original scripts from the show had not been published at this time, Rod Serling had sold
several print adaptations of his television work. He also adapted his television writing for theatre, but his
adaptations were ultimately never performed at the time he had intended. For the history behind and
analysis of television anthology writers’ tradition of adapting their work, see, “Adapting Scripts in the

36

Over the course of several years, TZ Magazine ran advertisements for its
magazine and products associated with it, including back issues of the magazine, binders
intended for storing previous issues, and Night Cry. a T2 Magazine spinoff focused on
publishing more ﬁction. Again, while the presence of these types of advertisements is
not itself unusual, their presentation locates the magazine’s relationship to the television
show and reveals “investment” in constructing a suggestive temporality of the show’s
past and future.

The magazine did not wait until it had its own history to start promoting nostalgia.
As early as October 1981 (still the ﬁrst year of the magazine), an advertisement asks
readers, “Dreaming of the past?” This is followed by the text, “Some say it’s gone for
good. But you can recapture part of it by sending for the issues you missed... You’ll
want to collect them all” (“Dreaming” 101).28 Given the short publication history of the
magazine, it is more likely this “past” referred to the past of the show rather than the past
of the magazine. In recalling the past, the advertisement also takes advantage of the
present moment and the future anterior tense, naming a future in which you will have
anticipated your desire for the magazine and will have taken advantage of opportunities
offered to you (before it was too late). In this one page, the advertisement writes itself

into the “history” of the show, augmenting it with the history of the magazine—at once

 

19503: The Economic and Political Incentives for Television Anthology Writers” by Jon Kraszewski.
Because this article mostly focuses on the period before The Twilight Zone aired, it contains history of
Serling’s earlier television work, including the teleplays Noon on Doomsdgay and Patterns. Many of _Tl_re_
Twilight Zone scripts were published under Serling’s name in the 19605 and 19705. Currently, these are
being republished under the lO-volume title As Timeless as Inﬁnig: The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts
of Rod Serling with the help and approval of Carol Serling. Unfortunately, though the series will soon be
publishing the ﬁfth volume, the ﬁrst volume is already out-of-print.

8 The image on this advertisement is also worth noting. It features a cat wearing glasses and smoking a
cigar, undoubtedly a reference to Rod Serling’s opening narrations, in which he would often smoke a
cigarette. With this image, the advertisement alludes to Serling as part of a past the reader should be
nostalgic for.

 

37

casting back and creating anew. The advertisement suggests that readers begin the work
of the archive in more than one way. The reader is called to collect and store magazines
(as a supplement to his/her own memories of the show, and to keep the magazine in its
totality) and to think the temporality of an archive, at once oriented toward the past and
the future.

Several years later (in 1984), another advertisement uses the same collapsed
temporality to sell binders “designed expressly for the magazine” (“Preserve” 71).
Rather than questioning the reader’s desire for the past, this advertisement assumes it,
Opening with the command “Preserve the Past.” (complete with an enunciating period).
On the surface, this command simulates the effect of an “open letter,” as the addressee is
left implicit and could be understood as a future person. More likely, this advertisement
is speaking to a present addressee, one with a “personal” connection to The Twilight
Zgrg (akin to those respondents to the “open letter” of the magazine and ﬂooding Carol
Serling’s mailbox with their own experiences of the show). These binders do not open to
the future in the same way the show purports to, especially as the binders mark and
emphasize ties to the past. The front of the binders feature Rod Serling’s face and the
Twilight Zone icon from the television series. While these binders are ostensibly for the
magazine, any text that labels them as such is unintelligible from the picture of the binder
in the advertisement. In fact, the text under the command to “Preserve” states that you
can or should (as it uses the imperative) “Store TWILIGHT ZONE in style!” (71). The
magazine’s use of the ambiguous title allows readers the pleasurable confusion of the
magazine and show, again preserving both in an act of double and/or triple remembrance

(both the show and the magazine, and again, Rod’s image). Like the comic books which

38

used Serling’s image as “seal of approval” to create narrative cohesion between the show
and the stories within the comic books, the binders operate under a similar logic.

Though all of this preservation implicitly refers to a future, none of the
advertisements draws on this as heavily as one from 1986. This advertisement opens
with yet another imperative, “Save the future and preserve the past with Rod Serling’s
The Twilight Zone Mggazine binders” (“Save” 83). Because this advertisement features
cartoon drawings of an alien pointing to its TZ binder on a bookcase shaped much like
the mummy’s sarcophagus which sits beside it, the advertisement relies on the name of
the magazine to draw together its many associations. This advertisement is more ﬁlture-
oriented than the others, not only is proclamation that as an avid reader of the magazine,
you will want to “keep your issues in mint condition for years to come” but in its use of a
drawing to pull on science ﬁction’s imagining of a distant future. The binder is equated
with the historical value of the sarcophagus, and the alien is both like us and not like us
(as so many science ﬁction aliens are). Though the advertisement appears to call to a
future here, its emphasis remains on the past, or at best the present. Neither sarcophagus
nor alien, the binder might be read as a mid-point between past and present. On the other
hand, its place alongside the sarcophagus highly suggests that it represents a past that the
future calls on. Here, TZ Magazine is cultural artifact of value in the difﬁculty of
replacing it (a singularity).

The closer the magazine came to ending, the more strangely it presented its own
past and the imperative to “save the future.” These imperatives suggest that by
purchasing these binders/back issues, one not only creates a personal archive, but allows

for the magazine itself to “preserve the past and save the future.” With all of its emphasis

39

on preserving itself as it was under production and still publishing, little of the magazine
remains. Given the disappearance of these materials (both those back issues and
preservative binders), what can be made of the place and “preservation” of this print
archive? Additionally, what might the show itself make of this odd pairing of print and

televisual material?

IV. (Re)Petition: A Time and Place for/in The Twilight Zone

And now, in this age of DVD boxed sets, when everything is available, when things we
thought were stories have discovered to be content, it’s appropriate that the best way
backstage into The Twilight Zone is through words and pictures, through archival
documents and interviews and commentary. . . if you think that, possibly, one day, you’ll
be the one to bring back anthology television, then I commend this book to you. We ﬁnd
what we need, after all (xiii).

—Neil Gairnan (introduction to Dimensions Behind The Twiligh_t Zone)

Where print materials have looked to preserve The Twilight Zone. they have
implied that the televisual medium is somewhat inefﬁcient for its own preservation and
archive (hence the relative success of T2 Magazine compared to the claimed failure of
the follow-up series). But as the ﬁrst section of this paper suggests, the show’s episodes
present conﬂicts to the imagined work of these print materials, instead theorizing the
space and time of the televisual medium as nonmaterial and perhaps unlimited, also as
important for the presentation and representation of history. Serling’s success in (solely)
this medium and his insistence on the repetition of the recent past must also be
juxtaposed to his own failure in the print medium. What was Serling and The Twilight
Q1; doing that print could not?

Even decades after Williams, television studies has had a difﬁcult time deﬁning

“television” (or the work that television does), though almost everyone seems to know

40

what television is.29 Critics are largely in agreement about the need to deﬁne the
televisual text (indeed, a need that is crucial to the success of a ﬁeld that could be called
“television studies”), but “television overall seems to resist analysis”—because the
narrative worlds of television bleed onto print, because print narratives push back toward
television, and because television is broadcasting constantly on thousands of channels in
hundreds of countries (Doane 223-4). And while I have to resign to being one more critic
who points out rather than assuages the complication of the issue, I would like to suggest
an incompatibility between print and television that renders the questions of its narrative
space and “archive” more difﬁcult.

Opening her chapter “ Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” Mary Ann Doane writes,
“The major category of television is time” (222). This emphasis on time embues
television with both possibilities and limitations. Repeatedly, the medium is described as
repetitious, owing to tried-and—true sitcom formulas, the regular appearance of shows on
a viewing schedule, the same cycles of information on numerous channels (one only
needs to watch cable news for a few minutes to experience this), etc. Along with this
sense of repetition, television also offers a “continual present.” This “present” works in
two ways. On the one hand, television is imagined to be “ﬂeeting,” as each televisual

moment is constantly replaced with the next image, the next character, the next show. On

 

2’ In “Playing at Being American,” John Caughie demonstrates how the “uncertainty” of television has
troubled research on/about television. First asking, “What is the television text anyway?,” he writes that
television theory has “displaced” itself to focus on “the audience, the institutions, the market” as a way of
creating “empirically testable bodies” (55). Without much of an answer, Caughie reminds us “that the
question of television’s textuality—untestable, uncertain, repressed—will keep returning.” Charlotte
Brunsdon expresses similar concern in her article “Television: Aesthetics and Audiences,” arguing that
television studies’ turn to audience research has been an attempt to gain “anchorage” in a “sea of
signiﬁcation” (68). She, like Caughie, claims that “we have to retain a notion of the television text,” with
the important notion that this text is a text that can be judged. Brunsdon lays out the implications of such a
declaration, claiming that “the choice of what is recognized as constituting ‘a’ text, consciously or not, is a
political as well as a critical matter. It is around this issue that the contemporary struggles to dominate the
critical ﬁeld will be fought” (66).

41

the other hand, the concepts of repetition and a “continual present” allow for the
reappearance of the past, making television uniquely capable to present and represent the
past.

The concept of the “present” can be misleading in discussing television. Though
audiences often imagine television as a “live” medium, there is rarely “live” television in
any pure present”. Television represents and creates a unique temporality. Drummond
argues that television is both absent and present (16), but even this description relies on
spatiality to “place” television. Instead, television offers an “insistent ‘present-ness—a
“This is going on” (Doane 222). And while this is especially true of television news, the
same might be said of any content on television. In its ability to be replaced second-by-
second, television content arrives on the screen with a particular sense of urgency.3 ’

This urgency creates both a need to preserve and a frantic moment that is in
itself unstable. This instability suggests the difﬁculty in “trapping” the television
moment to allow for its analysis and description. It also creates the appearance of a
“transient” medium (again, another recourse to spatial metaphor) (Uricchio 165). With
these descriptors come the accusations of television’s “forgetfulness,” noted primarin in
reference to sitcoms, whose characters begin each episode without having learned the

lessons of previous episodes (Drummond 20). As Doane points out, this also leads to the

 

3° Jane F euer theorizes this in “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” She argues that
though television makes claim to its “Iiveness,” this must be read as a construction involving the
interference of directors, cameras, etc. Even shows which purport to stream a “live feed” suffer from the
effects of broadcasting delay. Though this “liveness” is constructed, it is nevertheless a construction that
television encourages and beneﬁts ﬁ'om.

3' With its relatively “corny,” black-and-white, stylized science-ﬁction tone, it would be tempting to argue
that The Twilight Zone does not arrive on screen with the same sense of urgency that a contemporary news
update would hold. I believe that because the show is broadcast (rather than viewed on DVD or VHS) it is
able to maintain a sense of urgency, particularly as it is placed in different contexts with other
programming and/or with other episodes (in syndication, the show is frequently run “out of order”).

42

conceptualization of television as “the annihilation of memory, and consequently of
history” (227).

And at this point, perhaps, print comes to “save” television, both in its
incomprehensibility and in print’s “literal” attempts to preserve television history. Print
appears to offer the spatial stability that television does not have; it can be physically
possessed and placed in a way that television cannot. TZ Magazine is an excellent
example of such an intervention, in claims to save the show through the work of
archiving its back story, Serling’s life, and even its scripts. The binders sold by the
magazine serve as an emblem of these attempts at preservation. If television will be
reckoned with, it seems that written language and the print associated with the ﬁeld of
television studies would be the place for that to happen—it has been the medium of
choice for those working with The Twilight Zone. Though print has primarily functioned
to preserve The Twilight Zone, the show itself cannot be easily dismissed as achieving its
own preservation. Though television initially seems the site of forgetfulness, the show
makes its own claims to possibilities for remembrance.

In their claims to preserve or represent, TZ Magazine and The Twilight Zone
series appear to participate in an archive of sorts (an archive of television, The Twilight
Acme, or of a generic “history”). They would seem relatively alone in this task. Because
he sees an incompleteness of theory and terminology with which to discuss television (a
problem that does not similarly plague the ﬁelds of cinema studies or literary studies),
John Hartley unsurprisingly declares the lack of a television archive to rival that of
traditional book archives or the conservation work of the cinematic archives (395).

Citing misunderstanding of television literacy (and little scholarship to support that

43

literacy), unclear or nonexistent classiﬁcation systems, control of material by broadcast
executives rather than scholars, and other factors, Hartley argues that the lack of a
television archive makes television scholarship all the more difﬁcult. What Hartley
imagines as this archive is unclear. Certainly the work of T2 Magazine, among other
print projects associated with The Twilight Zone, has crafted a narrative toward the
preservation and appreciation of the show, albeit with limitations. Implicit in Hartley’s
argument is a desire for something greater than what has already been. Along these lines,
it seems that scholarship might be more concerned with what shape or time this archive
might exist in rather than if such an archive exists at all. Might television be archive?

If one must ask “What is the televisual text?,” one must also ask “What is the
archive?” Derrida works toward this latter question in Archive Fever. where he considers
the recent scholarship on Freud’s life, work, and home, including the decision to turn his
home into a museum. Fundamental to Derrida’s own question of “What is the archive?”
is the question “Where does the outside commence?,” which is another way of asking
what the “text” of the archive is (8). Two parts of Denida’s argument offer the most to
my project—his repetitious discussion of the archive in printing and publishing terms and

temporal descriptions of the archive.32

 

’2 Doane addresses an earlier Derrida article with similar themes (“Freud and the Scene of Writing”) in her
1996 essay “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marcy, and the Cinema.” In her article, Doane notes
the relatively absent concept of time in Freud and Derrida’s focus on archive. Doane also focuses on the
predominance of writing and the spatial concept of the archive, but mainly in order to juxtapose this with
the development of cinema as a supposedly temporal archive. Doane mostly traces out the separate paths of
cinema, Freud, and Marey in relation to the same problem of storage. My purposes are different than
Doane’s in this respect, as I am interested in television, rather than cinema as the place of the archive and
believe that though Derrida’s text presents space and writing as the primary means for discussing the
archive, there is actually an undercurrent in his text which privileges the televisual. Doane’s own work on
television exposes television as a fruitful medium for the archive, namely in its unique temporality, its
tendency toward repetition, its urgency, and its complicated connection to memory.

44

From his initial implication that the document is at the heart of the archive,
Derrida knowingly refers to the process of memory and the archive as the products and

6“

process of publication, including Freud’s use of the printing’ technology of
archivization” (8). He employs the language of printing in his own thinking on the
question of memory and archive—engaging in a lengthy explanation of the importance of
“impression” as a printing term he privileges (27). While the process of writing reveals
itself unstable in these descriptions (the mystic writing pad, after all, can be reused,
writing revised), the special emphasis on the ink, paper, and publishing process suggest a
published product—a product which is more or less stable and can be physically stored.
This product also has something to offer to the process of memory in its very tangibility.
Derrida gestures toward this tangibility as a possible incentive for privileging print but
never fully articulates that argument in his text. What is desirable but necessarily
avoidable in these suggestions? A turn to Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library,” a text
that Derrida ignores but is undoubtedly familiar with (considering his previous work on
Benjamin and references to him in Archive Fever), reveals what Derrida seems to want
to, but is otherwise unwilling to, say.

Like Derrida’s archive (characterized by madness/archive fever), Benjamin’s
passion for books “borders on the chaos of memories” (60). Also like Derrida, Benjamin
struggles for order, ﬁnding it only in “disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to
such an extent that it can appear as order” (60). But, where Derrida stands back,

carefully choosing his associations to Freud’s biographers and categorizes, Benjamin

reveals strong personal investment in his role as collector and preservationist. In this

45

attachment, Benjamin makes explicit the role of touch that Derrida leaves implicit in
Archive Fever.

Benjamin opens his essay with the process of unpacking his library (stored away
in crates), but connects himself to all collectors in his discussion of the magic that can
take place at the collectors’ hands. This magic is demonstrated not only in the
collector’s ability to spew off classiﬁcations and background information (which
composes what Benjamin calls “a magic encyclopedia”——yet another book to collect) but
also in the process of physical touch (60-1). He writes, “One has only to watch a
collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to
be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired” (61). Indeed, the most
treasured books are those written by the collector, either because he cannot afford them
or he is dissatisﬁed with the books that exist, and which are imbued with even more
“personal touch.” Though Benjamin famously doubts the work of “mechanical
reproduction” there is something inexplicably wonderful about the printed book. At the
edges of the text, however, is Benjamin’s story of loss, rather than possession. A reader
can hardly take to this text without considering the failed attempts to pack up the library
again at the fringes of WWII or without being haunted by Benjamin’s claim that he
knows “time is running out” (67). He expresses the desire to “hold on to [a book]
forever,” implicitly acknowledging that this is not possible; the material possession
cannot approach death.

The scene Benjamin lays out in “Unpacking My Library” has interesting
resonance with “The Obsolete Man” episode of the Twilight Zone as well as the scene of

archiving suggested in T2 Magazine’s advertisements for the binders. Portraying the

46

alien with his binder on the shelf (reaching to touch the binder!), the magazine suggests
that print can be forever, even if humans cannot. When humanity is lost (and all that is
familiar is lost as well, including Earth, as the alien is aboard a spaceship), the show will
exist in the physically transportable form of the binder. The memories this binder
represents for the reader looking at the advertisement presumably travel where the reader
cannot, yet another example of print’s attempt to physically locate television. The binder
offers the alien the opportunity to touch “that distant past.” If one must die, these things
are potentially reassuring. Indeed, at the end of “The Obsolete Man,” Wordsworth
clutches his Bible for the permanence it represents (this time through the promise of
eternal life with God). But, the show suggests that the book fails in a way, because the
audience does not receive Wordsworth’s story through print. Instead, the audience is
called to witness and remember (and to preserve) through the very medium of television.
This is where Derrida’s text must be called back into play. If Benjamin reveals
what is tantalizing about an investment in the printed word, Derrida reveals what
endangers it (that limit of Benjamin’s text—death and the death drive). He notes a
tendency toward death in the archive itself; the archive creates and destroys
simultaneously (Derrida 10). Print seems to offer stability and a chance at touch, but
singularities are always endangered in Derrida’s description of the archive. Though
Derrida uses print as metaphor for archive (and suggestion of what the archivist holds at
his/her center), the materiality of the archive becomes elusive as Derrida continues. He
suggests that the archive “holds a problem for translation. With the irreplaceable
singularity of a docmnent to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original

uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for

47

translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction” (90). The
archive here represents the one-time, the event which cannot occur in any other place, the
untranslatable—and yet, the archive is also characterized by compulsion and repetition
(91). Derrida’s archive becomes harder to locate, especially as the limits of print appear
here. The desire of the print (and) products associated with the show to be confused with
the show itself become empty attempts to translate the show, marked by their claims to be
(an) original.

Throughout Derrida’s text, the archive, with all of its supposed connections to
print, takes on many of the classifying characteristics of television, particularly the
description of television laid out in Doane’s “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe.”33 While
Derrida’s question of the archive is generically the postmodern question of the text, it is
especially the question of television. Derrida draws early attention to the domestic nature
of the archive: “In this house arrest, archives take place. The dwelling, this place
where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the
public” (2). More than just this “domestic” classiﬁcation of the archive, Derrida’s
descriptions involve the process of institutionalization and ﬁght for control as described

by Williams’s Television. His insistence on the domestic nature of the archive also

 

’3 Some of Derrida’s descriptions and questions of the archive are descriptions and questions posed by m
Twilight Zone itself. Both texts take advantage of the trope of the door opening in on itself to suggest a
complicated temporality. One of The Twilight Zone’s opening features is a door suspended in space,
opening a door to both nowhere and everywhere (no walls surround the door—it is a gate to where you
have come from, implicitly). Additionally, the show and Derrida speculate on the system of categorization
necessary or implied in the concept of the archive. Serling’s narrations often place episodes in a “ﬁling
system” that cannot be accessed by viewers and without any regularity (this is even true of the episode in
focus here, “The Obsolete Man”).

48

resonates with repeated descriptions of television as a “window to the world” from the
home”.

As Derrida suggests the archive is laden with death, so too does Doane draw on
death in her imaginings of television. Doane’s theory of television also overlaps with
Derrida’s theory of the archive in their descriptions of “origin,” memory, and time.
Where Derrida’s archive is constantly destroyed by the death drive that partially
composes it, Doane’s television is also characterized as “self-destructing” (224).
Although Doane frames this self-destruction in television’s temporality (it must destroy
one image to make room for the next), television is heavily implicated in the process of
death. Doane writes, “For all its ideology of “liveness,” it may be death which forms the
point of televisual intrigue” (233). Representing death, television, too, presents a
contradiction necessary for the viewer. By combining the limits of technology with
death, television allows the viewer to both confront death by seeing it and simultaneously
push death away from his/her person and onto another.

In warning against the confusion of archeology and the archive, Derrida writes
that Freud had dreamed of a successful archeology, one in which “the origin then speaks
for itself” (92). The archeologist discovers this self-speaking origin and then succeeds
“in making the archive no longer serve any function” (93). The archive, in all of its

supposed access, cannot provide access to the origin or “secret” (and certainly, the

institution dependent on and challenged by that archive has its own secrets to keep). E

 

3’ Many television studies critics have discussed what this “domestic” classiﬁcation suggests about
representations of television and the gendering assumed in such descriptions. See Joyrich’s Re-viewing
Reception and Brunsdon and Modelski’s articles in Mding Television. I believe there is another
argument about the connectedness of Derrida’s description of the archive and television studies’ description
of television implicit here (in these gendered tensions), one that might provide another perspective on my
argument here.

49

Magazine and The Twilight Zone scholarship have created an archive of sorts, protective
of Serling and harboring the mythical “secret” of the success of the show (located in its
production), but these attempts have obfuscated rather than exposed Serling’s own
message that guides viewers toward the television medium. These print projects have
turned in on themselves, crafting an alternate to the show (contained within print) rather
than an archive of it.

As Derrida claims that the archive surrounds a hidden center, Doane claims that
television “strains to make visible the invisible” in Doane’s formation, offering a myriad
of perspectives to cover for that which it can never show. This is especially true of the
catastrophe, which is at the center of Doane’s analysis and characterizes television as a
whole while seeming to be its exception (236, 238). Because technological failure marks
catastrophe, cameras often cannot access that moment. Instead, television provides
access to all points around that point, featuring “live” coverage from the scene of the
crime or crash. It cannot, however, access the origin. Similarly, in “The Obsolete Man,”
The Twilight Zone cameras shy away from the moment in which Wordsworth must be
destroyed by the bomb. Rather than feature the story after his death, the show predicts it
and offers a coverage prior to. This “prior to” is an important, but overlooked part of
Doane’s description of television’s “making visible.” In the uniquely visual instances of
catastrophe she focuses on (such as the death of President Kenney and his son saluting
the casket), these moments achieve more impact because of the range of televisual
material that preceded them. Kennedy, after all, was one of the U.S.’s ﬁrst uniquely

televisual presidents.

50

In attempting to make visible that invisible, television always attempts to bring to
sight, but can never do so fully. Even Derrida’s extended metaphor of the archeologist
speaks to the misconception of television’s “liveness” and “presentness.” In looking for
the origin that speaks, the archeologist searches for that which is “[l]ive, without
mediation and without delay” (Derrida 93). But this is the archeologist’s mistake and the
reason Derrida needs to separate the archeologist from the archivist. This, too, is where
television must not be mistaken as holding possibility for the archive. As Feuer has
shown, there is no “live” television; television is always with mediation, always a
representation, and therefore always subject to interpretation. Television never provides
the “pure” moment, just as the archive never provides the “pure” origin.

The ﬁgure of memory that Derrida and Doane employ suggest the ways in which
television occupies a temporality that seems especially suited for the work of the archive.
Derrida states that the archive is not “so-called live or spontaneous memory” and he
emphasizes the work of repetition in memory (25). Because this memory is not tied to
one single moment, it is not located in any particular moment in time, hence Derrida’s
claim that the archive is without origin. Though memory implicitly suggests a movement
backward (to the past), Derrida heavily emphasizes the archive’s relationship to the
future: “As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive
should call into question the coming of the future” (33-4). The archive opens toward the
future but never assumes that future or can speak to it. The archive cannot access this
future, just as it cannot access a point of origin. In laying out the archive in this way,
Derrida helps explicate how The Twilight Zone. perhaps more than any other show,

represents the time of the archive. In The Twilight’s Zone openness to the future and its

51

acknowledgment of a multiplicity of futures, it throws into question that future and
constantly (re)presents it for consideration.

Doane both conﬁrms and denies allegations that “television operates as the
‘absence of memory’,” writing that “[c]atastrophe thrives on the momentary, the
instantaneous, that which seems destined to be forgotten” (234). But that instantaneity is
illusion; the instant is lost to both the mediation of television and its attempts to recover
the missing moment. At the same time, television offers “laborious construction and
maintenance of a memory of catastrophe” in the repetitious image. At the end of her
essay, Doane notes that the catastrophe is central to formulation of television’s
temporality, as it “corroborates television’s access to the momentary, the discontinuous,
the real” (23 8). Yet, this “illusion” merely covers “a referentially perpetually deferred.”
Television, like the archive, offers a vexed temporality, one that appears present,
constantly repeats, and can never assure the future. Any program may be interrupted or
cancelled at any moment (even this “regularity” is illusion/discontinuous); the ultimate
catastrophe (loss of signal, according to Doane) can occur at any time. The control of the
television screen is also contingent in this moment. The screen may be interrupted by
loss of signal, but it can also be taken over, as Wordsworth illustrates in “The Obsolete
Man.” As one member of many possible (or possibly no) futures, Wordsworth becomes a
memory of the future, a memory conﬁrmed in syndication but endangered by the
uncertainty of his never having been.

These connections between Derrida and Doane’s conceptions of the archive and
television present new possibilities for thinking television as a medium for the archive, as

exempliﬁed by The Twililght Zone. Derrida asks an important question in the early

52

pages of Archive Fever: “Does it change anything that Freud did not know about the
computer?” (26). And while he doesn’t return to answer this question (neither Freud nor
Derrida), Derrida’s text does unfold in a way to suggest that, yes, new technologies offer
new answers or routes of thinking questions of memory and temporality. The Twilight
@933 own presentation of the possibilities and limitations of television is an
intervention on this very subject. The show meets Derrida and Doane in presenting an
argument for television as a medium of the archive, presenting and representing history
while simultaneously questioning its own work. In using Doane to illustrate the
televisual beneath the surface of Derrida’s text, I use Derrida to articulate the claims that
The Twilight Zone has been making for almost 50 years.

In doing so, 1 shift focus away from the print medium, exploring its lirrritations
and silences on the television archive (silences, which I believe point back to the medium
of television itself). Both Denida and The Twilight Zone share similar concerns about
the use of television, but both believe in its possibilities. In Ec_hggr_aphies of Television. a
transcript of an interview between Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on the medium of
television (literally, as it was broadcast), Derrida discusses the “threat” of television to
print (in that it silences or is deaf to print) and repeatedly expresses anxiety about his
inability to clearly articulate himself on television (7, 31). While Derrida seems to
express doubt about television, he more clearly reveals doubt about the stability of print.
Derrida suggests that we are “by and large in a state of quasi-illiteracy with respect to the
image” (59). That illiteracy renders us incapable of using images intelligently or
communicating with them. Like Hartley, Derrida suggests that we will ﬁrst need to

develop a literacy of television before we can begin to understand its effectiveness as a

53

medium (for archive or other projects). But both Derrida and Hartley depend perhaps too
heavily on print as an analogy for the televisual. Where The Twilight Zone also beckons
for television literacy, it does so in order to challenge that literacy and its implications. It
asks, for example, what it means for a State to communicate to its masses primarily
through that medium. The literacy The Twilight Zone suggests does not come from print,
but from a study of television through television (or from watching cameras watch).

Through this need to reconsider the televisual, my argument wraps back to Neil
Gaiman’s claims in the epigraph. Gaiman writes that DVD is insufﬁcient for the memory
of The Twilight Zone, as the mystique of the story is lost to an “unveiling” of the work of
television. Where DVD technology has failed, print becomes again the supposed place
(physical space) of the archive. But like those print projects, DVD fails to open IE
Twilight Zone to a future, locating it solidly on the space of the disk and closing it off
from the spontaneity of the televisual. Ultimately, Gaiman’s faith in print is misplaced.
He assumes too little of the show and its ability to question its own medium (and reveals
its own purposes) or to inspire new audiences. Like TZ Magazine. he expresses interest
in a revival of both Serling and the show through the “legitimate” means established by
the stock story the print archive has created. Gaiman, too, wants to recreate Serling (as
the television man able to keep the anthology show alive) and the anthology show itself.
But rather than desire the show itself, Gaiman rather seems to yearn for the story of the
show constructed by print—a desire that has little to do with the show as it airs (or as it
would have aired).

He is not alone. Stewart Stanyard (who published his own archive of Twilight

Zone photos purchased from CBS) has been centrally involved in creating the “Rod

54

Serling Imaginarium,” a museum dedicated to Serling with the goal of “preserv[ing],
commemorat[ing], and bring[ing] to life the legacy and genius of Rod Serling” (“Rod
Serling Imaginarium” par. 10). This project corresponds to the mission of the Rod
Serling Memorial Foundation, which has been designed to “create and maintain a
permanent Archive of facts, photographs, documents and memorials” (“Foundation
Goals,” my emphasis). The Foundation’s goals include petitioning for a postage stamp in
Serling’s name, and the foundation credits itself as being responsible for petitioning for a
star on the Walk of Fame in Serling’s honor.

The attempts by these written (and physical) projects to craft a story of Rod
Serling speaks to a disjunction between televisual and print media. Where these stories
are able to cast back and create a narrative which weaves together both Serling’s life and
the failures and successes of the show, the show would seem at a relative disadvantage to
correct or control this representation. Though thousands have been involved in these
efforts since at least the 19803, what is striking about the efforts is their relative failure.
Serling’s name rests on the Walk of Fame, but millions more are exposed to his image in
and work on The Twilight Zone on any given day, thanks to extensive syndication. In
syndication, the show is able to insist (against print’s wishes) on the televisual through
its uniquely televisual moments (most likely in its popular theme song and the pop-
culture-dominating image of Serling smoking that eternally burning cigarette) and by
providing access to the temporality of its diegetic world where it realigns with the
narrative time of Serling’s image.

The print materials surrounding the show have drawn attention to the relationship

between television and death and the potential for television as an archival medium.

55

Ironically, it is also through television that Serling is most alive (a paradox illustrated by
Doane’s argument), and it is through the failure of other methods of preservation that this
success stands out. Gaiman is correct that DVD is not the place of The Twilight Zone (as
it offers neither the urgency nor unique temporality of television), but it doesn’t seem that
print is either. Television, in allowing for the possibility of catastrophe, the possibility of
interruption (which is no interruption at all!), and the possibility for resonances with other
television “content” preserves best the possibilities of that medium that make it both
positive and negative in The Twilight Zone’s formulation.

Ultimately, syndication also encourages the access that the show itself requests.
The attempts to archive the show have been attempts to open it to viewers—attempts that
have largely failed. Where these print materials presume to allow for behind-the-scenes
access, they also further distance the reader/viewer from the messages of the show itself.
The show continues to allow for new contexts and conﬁgurations in reruns, and the
supplementary materials begins to collapse the show onto itself, cross-referencing it into
oblivion. This is, perhaps, where the show gets it wrong. Where Wordsworth’s print
was messy and didn’t ﬁt the formulae of the State, the print surrounding The Twilight
_Z_ghp looks to straighten the show up. Given the show’s privileging of this “messiness,”
it is not surprising that the medium itself would provide that in its numerous reairings and
new audiences. The show asks us reconsider its work and what it has to say about its
own medium—a medium that for too long has been brushed off in favor of the printed
text. Where print does succeeds in relation to the show, it expands the narrative world
suggested by the vague setting of the twilight zone. Where it fails, it attempts to locate

that narrative world and place it on the map—no place at all for The Twilight Zone.

56

WORKS CITED

Allen, Robert C. “On Reading Soaps: A Semiotic Primer.” Kaplan 97-108.

“Announcing TZ’s $2000 Story Contest.” Rod Serlin ’s “The Twili t Zone” Ma azine
April 1981: 52.

Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed.
Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. 59-67.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera.” Kaplan 76-83.
---. “Lifestyling Britain: The 8-9 Slot on British Television.” Spigel and Olsson 75-92.

Caldwell, John. “Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content
in the Culture of Conglomeration.” Spigel and Olsson 41-74.

Caughie, John. “Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics.” Mellencamp 44-58.

“Comic Vine: Twilight Zone.” www.comicvine.com. <http://www.comicvine.com/
comic/twilight-zone/2102/> 23 July 2007.

Curtin, Michael. “Media Capitals: Cultural Geographies of Global TV.” Spigel and
Olsson 270-302.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Religion
and Postmodernism. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1998.

---, and Bernard Stiegler. Echogranhies of Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Malden:
Polity-Blackwell, 2002.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe.” Mellencamp 222-39.

---. “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema.” W
22.2 (1996): 313-43.

“Dreaming of the Past?” Rod Serlingjs “The Twilight Zone” Magazine Oct. 1981: 101.

Drummond, Phillip. “Structural and Narrative Constraints and Strategies in Ih_e
Sweeney.” Screen Educgtion 20 (1976): 15-33.

Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertaing. London: I. B. Tauris,
2000.

57

---. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1982.

F arber, Stephen, and Marc Green. Outrageous Conduct: Art. Ego, and the Twilight Zone
Case. New York: Arbor House, 1988.

F euer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” Kaplan 12-21.

“Foundation Goals” Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. 2007. <http://www.rodserling.
com/FDNgoals.htm> 6 Aug 2007.

Gaiman, Neil. Foreword. Dimensions Behind “The Twilight Zone”. By Stewart T.
Stanyard. Chicago: ECW, 2007.

Goldsmith, Martin M. “The Encounter.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 1 May 1964. DVD.
CBS, 2006.

Grand Comic Book Database. “The Twilight Zone.” <www.comics.org> 2004. 26 May
2007.

Hartley, John. “From Republic of Letters to Television Republic.” Spigel and Olsson
386-417.

Jenkins, Henry. Fans. Blggers. and Gamers: Exploring Participgtorv Culture. New
York: New York UP, 2006.

Joyrich, Lynne. Re-Viewing Reception: Television. Gender. pnd Postmodern Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.

Kaplan, Ann E, ed. Regarding Television. The American Film Institute Monograph
Series 2. Los Angeles: University Publications, 1983.

Kraszewski, Jon. “Adapting Scripts in the 19503: The Economic and Political Incentives
for Television Anthology Writers.” Journ_al of Filmgand Video 58.3 (2006): 3-21.

Labrecque, Ron. Special Effects: Disaster at Twilight Zone : The Tragedy and the Trial.
New York: Scribner, 1988.

McCarthy, Anna. “Rhythms of the Reception Area.” Spigel and Olsson 183-209.

Mellencamp, Patricia, ed. Logics of Television. Theories of Contemporary Culture 11.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Modleski, Tania. “The Rhythms of Reception.” Kaplan 67-75.

PBS. “Rod Serling.” American Masters 2003. <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/american
masters/database/serling__r.html> 28 May 2007.

58

“Preserve the Past.” 0d Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” Magazine June 1984: 71.

Presnell, Don, and Marty McGee. A Critical Histm of Television’s “The Twilight
Zone.” 1959-1964. Jefferson: McFarland, 1998.

“Rod Serling Imaginarium.” Rod Serling Imaginarium. 2006. <www.rodserling
imaginarium.com/brochure-online2.htrn> 6 Aug. 2007.

“Save the Future and Preserve the Past.” Rod Serlin ’s “The Twili t Zone” Ma azine
Dec. 1986: 83.

Sconce, Jeffrey. “What If?: Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries.” Spigel and
Olsson 93-112.

Shaw, Scott. “Oddball Comics: The Twilight Zone.” 27 January 2004.
comicboolgresourcescom. <http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/

oddball/index.cgi?date=2004-0l-27> 27 May 2007.

Serling, Carol. “A Personal Message.” Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine April
1981:3.

---. “Publisher’s Note.” Rod Serlin ’s “The Twili ht Zone” Ma azine Oct 1981: 5.

Serling, Rod. “Death’s-head Revisited.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 10 Nov. 1961. DVD.
CBS, 2006.

---.“Eye of the Beholder.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 11 Nov. 1960. DVD. CBS, 2006.
---. “He’s Alive.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 24 Jan. 1963. DVD. CBS, 2006.
---. “Judgment Night.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 4 Dec. 1959. DVD. CBS, 2006.

---. “King Nine Will Not Return.” The Twith Zone. CBS. 30 Sept. 1960. DVD. CBS,
2006.

---. “The Obsolete Man.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 2 June 1961. DVD. CBS, 2006.

---. “The Purple Testament.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 12 Feb. 1960. DVD. CBS, 2006.
---. “A Quality of Mercy.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 29 Dec. 1961. DVD. CBS, 2006.
---. “Time Enough at Last.” The Twilight Zone. CBS. 20 Nov. 1959. DVD. CBS, 2006.

Spigel, Lynn. Introduction. Television: Technology and Culturgl Form. By Raymond

59

Williams. Hanover: UP New England, 1974.
---. “Television in the Family Circle.” Mellencamp 73-97.

---, and Jan Olsson, eds. Television After TV: Essays on g Medium in Transition.
Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

Stanyard, Stewart T. Dimensions Behind “The Twilight Zone”. Chicago: ECW, 2007.

Tashiro, Charles S. “The Twilight Zone of Contemporary Hollywood Production.”
Cinema Journgl 41.3 (2002): 27-37.

Uricchio, William. “Television’s Next Generation.” Spigel and Olsson 164-82.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover: UP New
England, 1974.

---. Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings. Ed. Alan O’Connor. London:
Routledge, 1989.

Wolfe, Peter. In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling. Bowling Green:
Bowling Green UP, 1997.

Zicree, Marc Scott. “The Twili ht Zone” Com anion. 2nd ed. Los Angeles:
Silman-James, 1992.

60

   

l"Ellllljﬂlﬂlllljﬂllsljllfill]I