Those Conformist Fifties: The Twilight Zone

I know, I know, I'm a blogging laggard but yesterday a post dropped in my lap: I heard on the radio it was the fiftieth anniversary of The Twilight Zone. I have appointed myself as a kind of scourge against credulous academics who say the 1950s were a time of great conformity based pretty much on having seen a couple of reruns of Father Knows Best and the father had a cardigan on all the time so there must have been Conformity Police going up and down the suburban streets making everyone conform, or something. My own contention is that all through human history, and not just in one particular decadae, about one percent of humanity creates innovations, about another nine percent is smart and objective enough to realize that the innovation has some worth, and the other ninety are unimaginative dullards who greet innovations with simian hoots of derision. My favorite example of this is probably Billy Mitchell, who realized during World War I that air power would give you a decisive advantage in the next war. Mitchell tried to persuade the other military folks of this and they told him to shut up and he kept talking and being a pest so they court-martialed him. By the time of the next big war they realized that Mitchell had been right, and the President gave him a medal and all sorts of other honors that he would probably have really enjoyed had he been alive, which, by that time, he wasn't. The European wars of religion come to mind as another instance of people wanting other people to conform. I just don't think the Fifties in the States were a time of greater conformity than any other time or place, all that much.

So. Anyway. The Fifties had all kinds of cool stuff going on. Rod Serling had written acclaimed dramas that were done on live TV all during them. Corporate executives did mess with his work, always toning down his more polemical stuff and at one point taking the Chrysler Building out of a script for a show that was sponsored by Ford. (Both of those were car companies, back in the day.) So he decided to do a science fiction and fantasy show, figuring he could put all sorts of barely hidden messages in them about justice and so forth. There were also all kinds of things about the subjective nature of our perceptions and stories told by unreliable narrators and wild plot twists and all kinds of things that directors congratulate themselves for putting in serious films. Serling cranked that kind of thing out every week and he did it during the Fifties, or at least started then, and I just think that between the jazz and art and film and literature and, yes, even some pretty cool stuff happening in TV, I think that the Fifties were a time of great artistic ferment and I wish we had stuff like that going on now. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it.