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so_disarming_darling) wrote2011-02-20 10:38 pm
so_disarming_darling) wrote2011-02-20 10:38 pm
Entry tags:
"It's a cook book!" or Influences: Rod Serling
I figured it might be interesting to go into some of the writers who've influenced me, directly or not. This is a sort of essay, so I'll hide it behind a cut.
I guess I should come out with it: I'm a sci fi geek. I grew up watching Star Trek: TNG and the original Star Wars trilogy; my senior quote was from a Star Trek movie; I can explain the fannon connotations for a browncoat, x-phile, or red shirt; I understand most of the movie references in "Science Fiction Double Feature" without looking them up. Yes, I'm nerdy.
That being said, none of those have influenced me quite as much as Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.
I didn't start watching the series until I was twelve or thirteen, a fact for which, in retrospect, I'm glad. My dad had seen the series on television as a kid, and had only ever told me how creepy they were. This was compounded by my only personal experience with the series being the waiting area and gift shop in Tower of Terror in Disney World. While the creepy basement mockup of the hotel fascinated me, it also left me more than a little unnerved. Wandering around the gift shop, the unsettling faces of the figurines for sale did nothing to help.
It would take books, Burgess Meredith (who was, in real life, a creeper), and the bomb to get me to fall head over heels for this little package of darkness. I'm talking about "Time Enough At Last," which was my first episode of the series. It's probably the series' most iconic episodes, and definitely one of Burgess Meredith's most easily thought of roles. If you don't know the story, the short of it is (spoilers) that a bank clerk loves to read, but never has time. His boss harangues him, his wife rips up his books, etc etc etc. One day, he goes down to his usual reading spot (the bank vault) during lunch to read and ends up surviving the detonation of an H-Bomb (oh, Cold War fears <3). Eventually stumbling across the library, he realizes he has time enough at last to read, free from other people. Then, his glasses break and he can't see. THE END.
You know, typing it all out makes my love for the episode sound so much stranger than it is.
In any case, I was hooked. Since then, I've seen almost every episode of the series (save for a few where the premise freaks me out too much to watch), the bulk of which were penned by Rod Serling. What I'm constantly struck by is Serling's ability to, in a very short period of time, create a world that is just off enough to create a pit in the viewer's stomach and to convey truly disturbing ideas without necessarily employing disturbing images. While people do get shot/killed/almost drowned/turned into giant jack-in-the-boxes and sent out to cornfields, there's no gore. It's a bloodless affair. There's no image, per se, in the show's five seasons that haunts me. There are, however, many ideas, all very subtly conveyed.
Episodes like "The Obsolete Man," "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You," "He's Alive," "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," and "Deathshead Revisited" all shake their audience up and then stick them looking into the void of an issue. However, with the exception of "He's Alive" and "Deathshead" (which I'll get to later, as they're important), none of them come and out moralize. And, more importantly, they all stick. Serling was able to take issues that mattered to him, coat them in fiction, and make them memorable; it's a difficult task. If you're too heavy handed, you end up like John Irving in A Prayer For Owen Meany. (Apologies if anyone reading this is a fan. As a recovering Catholic, slogging through the 600 pages of that book was, to put it mildly, torturous. Were it not for some serious guilt about burning books, I'd light my copy on fire.)
"Deathshead Revisited" and "He's Alive" are the exceptions to the rule, though they're by no means preachy. Writing less than twenty years after the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg trials, (and in the midst of the Eichman trial) when Nazi scientists had been welcomed into the country, tailed by SS offciers while Josef Mengele ran off to Argentina, Serling, a reform Jew, twice confronted the issue of hatred, anti-semitism, and Hitler head-on. This was a risky move, as anti-semitism was still somewhat common in US, and Hitler did nothing to help the ratings, still the driving force in television today. Throw in his on-going battle with the networks over censorship, and other views considered "radical" for the day, and the true danger of these two episodes came out. Despite the horrific events they draw from, they are two of the most powerful episodes in the show's history, and two of the most eloquent. At the close of "Deathshead," Serling delivers the following monologue on why the camps must remain:
There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.
While the idea of tackling what you care about, coated in fiction, applies to my writing, it's the idea of being able to unsettle your audience with ideas rather than straight images that's come into play with Poli Sci. Within the context of the story, there's the issue of werewolves and silver. In the process of kicking around ideas and drafts, I came up with five or six scenarios for how it worked and what it did. They were detailed and had many steps and my notes for them looked not unlike a medical textbook; they were good, but not particularly affecting. However, it wasn't until I was actually writing the current draft, and threw in a detail about a character being prone to bleeding from the littlest thing, that I realized I had to then sit down and figure out why the heck that would logically happen, something my scenarios hadn't touched. Though technically urban fantasy, I wanted the logic behind what was going on to at least come off as sound. While there is no graphic description of what silver does, the idea behind it unsettled me enough to need to talk to several people about what I was actually writing. I don't know that it will carry, but, to an extent, I hope it does.
I guess I should come out with it: I'm a sci fi geek. I grew up watching Star Trek: TNG and the original Star Wars trilogy; my senior quote was from a Star Trek movie; I can explain the fannon connotations for a browncoat, x-phile, or red shirt; I understand most of the movie references in "Science Fiction Double Feature" without looking them up. Yes, I'm nerdy.
That being said, none of those have influenced me quite as much as Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.
I didn't start watching the series until I was twelve or thirteen, a fact for which, in retrospect, I'm glad. My dad had seen the series on television as a kid, and had only ever told me how creepy they were. This was compounded by my only personal experience with the series being the waiting area and gift shop in Tower of Terror in Disney World. While the creepy basement mockup of the hotel fascinated me, it also left me more than a little unnerved. Wandering around the gift shop, the unsettling faces of the figurines for sale did nothing to help.
It would take books, Burgess Meredith (who was, in real life, a creeper), and the bomb to get me to fall head over heels for this little package of darkness. I'm talking about "Time Enough At Last," which was my first episode of the series. It's probably the series' most iconic episodes, and definitely one of Burgess Meredith's most easily thought of roles. If you don't know the story, the short of it is (spoilers) that a bank clerk loves to read, but never has time. His boss harangues him, his wife rips up his books, etc etc etc. One day, he goes down to his usual reading spot (the bank vault) during lunch to read and ends up surviving the detonation of an H-Bomb (oh, Cold War fears <3). Eventually stumbling across the library, he realizes he has time enough at last to read, free from other people. Then, his glasses break and he can't see. THE END.
You know, typing it all out makes my love for the episode sound so much stranger than it is.
In any case, I was hooked. Since then, I've seen almost every episode of the series (save for a few where the premise freaks me out too much to watch), the bulk of which were penned by Rod Serling. What I'm constantly struck by is Serling's ability to, in a very short period of time, create a world that is just off enough to create a pit in the viewer's stomach and to convey truly disturbing ideas without necessarily employing disturbing images. While people do get shot/killed/almost drowned/turned into giant jack-in-the-boxes and sent out to cornfields, there's no gore. It's a bloodless affair. There's no image, per se, in the show's five seasons that haunts me. There are, however, many ideas, all very subtly conveyed.
Episodes like "The Obsolete Man," "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You," "He's Alive," "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," and "Deathshead Revisited" all shake their audience up and then stick them looking into the void of an issue. However, with the exception of "He's Alive" and "Deathshead" (which I'll get to later, as they're important), none of them come and out moralize. And, more importantly, they all stick. Serling was able to take issues that mattered to him, coat them in fiction, and make them memorable; it's a difficult task. If you're too heavy handed, you end up like John Irving in A Prayer For Owen Meany. (Apologies if anyone reading this is a fan. As a recovering Catholic, slogging through the 600 pages of that book was, to put it mildly, torturous. Were it not for some serious guilt about burning books, I'd light my copy on fire.)
"Deathshead Revisited" and "He's Alive" are the exceptions to the rule, though they're by no means preachy. Writing less than twenty years after the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg trials, (and in the midst of the Eichman trial) when Nazi scientists had been welcomed into the country, tailed by SS offciers while Josef Mengele ran off to Argentina, Serling, a reform Jew, twice confronted the issue of hatred, anti-semitism, and Hitler head-on. This was a risky move, as anti-semitism was still somewhat common in US, and Hitler did nothing to help the ratings, still the driving force in television today. Throw in his on-going battle with the networks over censorship, and other views considered "radical" for the day, and the true danger of these two episodes came out. Despite the horrific events they draw from, they are two of the most powerful episodes in the show's history, and two of the most eloquent. At the close of "Deathshead," Serling delivers the following monologue on why the camps must remain:
While the idea of tackling what you care about, coated in fiction, applies to my writing, it's the idea of being able to unsettle your audience with ideas rather than straight images that's come into play with Poli Sci. Within the context of the story, there's the issue of werewolves and silver. In the process of kicking around ideas and drafts, I came up with five or six scenarios for how it worked and what it did. They were detailed and had many steps and my notes for them looked not unlike a medical textbook; they were good, but not particularly affecting. However, it wasn't until I was actually writing the current draft, and threw in a detail about a character being prone to bleeding from the littlest thing, that I realized I had to then sit down and figure out why the heck that would logically happen, something my scenarios hadn't touched. Though technically urban fantasy, I wanted the logic behind what was going on to at least come off as sound. While there is no graphic description of what silver does, the idea behind it unsettled me enough to need to talk to several people about what I was actually writing. I don't know that it will carry, but, to an extent, I hope it does.