Writing Life

It was 34 years ago today that Rod Serling died. Since then, his “Twilight Zone” narrator persona has been parodied by so many people, that it is sometimes easy to forget that Serling was a real person and not merely a pop-cultural construct like, say, Max Headroom or Betty Crocker. Born Rodman Edward Serling on Christmas day, 1924, Serling, like the recently departed Michael Jackson, was destined to live only 50 years. But, also like Jackson, he packed a lot of creativity into that smallish envelope of years.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Serling served as a paratrooper and demolitions expert with the U.S. Army during World War II. While serving in the Pacific theater he was seriously injured in combat and awarded both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But the worst of his war-time experiences occurred when he witnessed the death of his best friend, who was crushed by a heavy shipping crate that had been dropped from an airplane during a routine re-supply operation. It was this kind of seemingly random confluence of the horrific and the mundane that inspired the bleakly ironic tone of much of his later work. After the war, Serling suffered from what would now probably be termed “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Plagued by nightmares inspired by the horrors he had seen in the war, Serling began ruminating about the darker aspects of human nature. Those dark ruminations would eventually give birth to “The Twilight Zone,” one of television’s most enduring contributions to American popular culture. Prior to the 1959 debut of “The Twilight Zone,” however, Serling was anything but idle. During the early years of network television, Serling authored dozens of scripts for shows such as “Fireside Theater,” “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” “Kraft Television Theatre,” “Suspense,” and “Studio One.” Among his works were some of the greatest dramatic presentations of the era, including “Requiem For A Heavyweight” and “Patterns,” both of which were later made into full-length feature films. But, because he was writing for television and not the so-called “legitimate theater,” Serling was never as highly regarded as contemporaries such as Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets, who wrote actual “plays,” while Serling wrote mere “teleplays.”

Oh, well. If the intellectual snobs of the era thought that the work of Clifford Odets would outlive the work of Rod Serling, the joke is on them. Serling’s face, voice, and — in particular – his style of storytelling, which blended the mundane and the fantastic in tales that were both believably down-to-earth and whimsically ironic, are still recognizable to almost anyone who pays attention to contemporary American popular culture. Describe an incident in your life as having been “like something out of the Twilight Zone,” and almost any American over the age of 15 will know what you are talking about. Odets’ stale anti-capitalist diatribes are seldom produced anymore and have generated few offspring of note.

“The Twilight Zone” turns 50 years old this year. That’s how old its creator was when he died on this date in 1975. Heavy smoking and poor heart health conspired to bring Serling’s life to a premature close. Fortunately, the prognosis for “The Twilight Zone” looks much brighter. It seems poised on the brink of cultural immortality.

REQUIEM FOR A LIGHTWEIGHT

The time: late night. The scene: a typical suburban home. Inside, a lone man watches ancient reruns on TV and muses on the vagaries of reputation, the inconstancy of fame. In a moment he will commit to paper one of literature’s most venerable forms, an enigmatic fourteen-line hall of mirrors ideally suited for midnight reflections. He is about to write a sonnet.

It’s true that you weren’t Miller or Odets.
Your works were not the critically exalted
Stuff that struts in playhouses high-vaulted.
Instead they flickered from our TV sets,
Slaves to vertical roll and rabbit ears,
Disrupted often for a word from Crisco,
Vitalis, Alka-Seltzer, and Nabisco,
But still you tapped into our deepest fears.
A short man, you were taut and muscular,
A hero in a war that left you shaken,
Convinced mankind by God had been forsaken
To stumble through a realm crepuscular.
Your fame endures, while these days few folks know
How Willie Loman died, did Lefty ever show.

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