PULP CATHOLICISM #166

PULP CATHOLICISM #165

THE TWILIGHT BINGE #011: AND WHEN THE SKY WAS OPENED

S01E11 – And When The Sky Was Open

“During man's first flight into space, the X-20 disappears from radar then crashes in the desert. Major Gart is laid up with a broken leg, but Colonels Harrington and Forbes go out for a night of revelry. Suddenly getting a strange feeling, Harrington calls his parents—and finds they have no son! Abruptly, he disappears, and no one but Forbes remembers him. Forbes is desperate to find out what's going on—for whatever yanked Harrington away may not be satisfied with just one.”

We’ve finally come to  that inevitable point in our Twilight Zone binge which I have been dreading. Much to my shame, I must confess there are episodes of the show (this one at the very least) which I either have no memory of or just plain old haven’t seen at all. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

What assures me that I haven’t seen And When The Sky Was Open before is that I would definitely remember an episode this strange. Very, very loosely based on a short story by Richard Matheson, the narrative follows a pair of astronauts as they try to figure out what force is slowly erasing them from existence. Not killing them, mind you, but rather altering reality so it’s as if they never existed in the first place. Is it the result of some freak accident of nature they encountered while in orbit? Is it aliens who mean to keep humans from venturing into space? Is it God punishing mankind for the hubris of reaching for the stars in their rocket propelled Tower of Babel? No explanation is ever given, and the episode comes to an end with just as many questions as when it began.

“The worst fear of all is the fear of the unknown working on you, which you cannot share with others.” claimed Rod Serling, “To me, that’s the most nightmarish of stimuli.” In a way, you can kind of see where Serling is coming from. After all, at every mass we profess a belief not only in the visible, but in the invisible as well. And in the Catechism, we’re told that some of the less than benign inhabitants of the invisible have been allowed by God “to exercise a limited influence in the world, pursuing evil intentions and seeking to induce human beings to make a choice against God similar to their own.” So the “unknown” really is out to get us. But does that mean we should necessarily walk around in fear of it?

St Anthony of Egypt didn’t seem to think so. One tale has it that after being accosted by a vison of numerous demons seeking to do him no good, the Saint scoffed and said something along the lines of, "If you were capable of harming me, it would require only one of you". What St Anthony likely understood was that, in the end, the only real fear we need to cultivate is that of God himself. In his book on the Catechism, Fr. John Hardon wrote that the fear of God is a gift because it “confirms the virtue of hope and impels a man to a profound respect for the majesty of God. It’s correlative effects are protection from sin through dread of offending the Lord, and a strong confidence in the power of his help… Consequently, the gift of fear gives us the power to sublimate all lesser fears, including the salutary and much-needed dread of God’s justice.” Based on that, it would seem the best way to overcome Serling’s worst kind of fear is to develop the best kind of fear instead. That’s a twist worthy of the Twilight Zone itself.

Twilight Tidbits: This was the first of nine episodes helmed by prolific television director Douglas Heyes, whom many consider to be the Alfred Hitchcock of the series. Sadly, Heyes was not quite as successful on the big screen, though many MSTies out there will forever treasure his work on the Ann Margaret opus, Kitten With A Whip.

PULP CATHOLICISM #164

PULP CATHOLICISM #163

THE JUKEBOX HERO HYMNAL: Hymn 028: Without A Map by Marketa Irglova

Sure, I’m partial to movies full of rubber monster suits and flying saucers hanging from fishing line, but that doesn’t mean I can’t branch out every so often. It just so happens one of my favorite low budget indie films is a quiet little drama about two lonely souls who cross each others paths in Dublin and decide to make some music together. So when I heard that one of the stars from Once had put out an album based on her “very strong connection to certain figures that come from the Christian tradition and the energy that those figures hold,” I was all in.

Marketa Irglova was not raised in a religious household, nor does she currently practice any religion, but as of late she has found herself drawn to certain aspects of Christianity. In an interview with Media Mikes, Irglova noted…

“I was reading a trilogy of books called Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. It happened by accident really, I was visiting a friend of mine and while she was making me some tea, I was going through her books and I just came across these books. I didn’t understand how someone could be having a conversation with God. Was he actually having talks with God or did he make it all up? I didn’t know the answer but I liked what I was reading and ended up getting stuck into these books. At the same time, I was allowing myself to ask all these questions as well. So that was one of the main influences for me. There is also a musical called Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, which is something that I saw when I was four years old. It really inspired my entire musical journey through my life and even now it still resonates with me with the songs and performances. It is a musical, so the story is told with song and there is this sort of call and answer between them. I think my approach to song writing is very similar. I have these conversations within these songs, I ask questions and answer them through the music.”

Yeah, yeah, we all know Conversations with God is full of new age nonsense, but hey, I remember seeing a priest on EWTN who said he first came to Christianity by reading a Chick tract. Everybody has to start somewhere. And Irglova is getting starting, as evidenced by songs such as Without A Map. Just take a listen to some of the lyrics…

Well come on then, God, show me,
Which way you would like me to go, and
I won’t resume to question,
How I was ever supposed to know.
There have been signs along the way, but
They’ve been so very obscure.
At times I thought I knew their meaning, but
How could I’ve ever been sure?

God, I was sent here deaf to learn to hear,
To have faith in you and never fear.
Life is an ocean, you its every wave,
Your arms would cradle me, and keep me safe.
You’re right, all this, and more I need to learn,
All this unease just makes my stomach churn.
It was I not you who set this trap, but
You did leave me here without a map.
All this time I’ve had to guess the way,
To keep moving when I wished to stay.
I’ve been right as much as I’ve been wrong, so
All I hear from you is: ‘You are strong enough,
For all you’ll ever have to face,
The only map you need is Love,
To guide you through this illusion of a maze.’

Sure, you can hear the new age influences seeping through some of the lines, but overall, it’s a song sung by someone who is seeking the truth, and you know what the Bible has to say about people who do that. Besides, it’s hard not to look kindly on a tune that finishes with a full recitation of the Our Father. And the entire album is like this, so if the style of the music catches your fancy, the whole thing is worth a listen.

THE TWILIGHT BINGE #010: JUDGEMENT NIGHT

“An unseen, unfriendly periscope keeps a steely watch over the S.S. Queen of Glasgow as fog and sea whip across the freighter's docks. On board the Glasgow a German passenger, Carl Lanser, wanders about in confusion as the boat rocks to and fro in the black night. He doesn't know how he got aboard or what he's doing there, but strangely all the passengers are familiar. The only thing Carl Lanser knows for certain is that at 1:15 a.m., something horrible is going to happen. Suddenly, a Nazi U-boat surfaces. Lanser zooms in on the sub with his binoculars and begins to understand a horrible truth about himself...the S.S. Queen of Glasgow...and the terrible reality that lies ahead on this raw, ugly night.”

S01E10 – Judgement Night

From January 1943 to January 1945, Rod Serling served as a paratrooper and demolitions expert in the U. S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division. While wounds in his wrist and knee would earn Serling both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, other wartime memories, such as seeing his best friend crushed to death by a supply crate parachuted onto the battlefield, would provide Serling with a lifetime’s worth of nightmares and flashbacks. He dealt with these the way many a writer has, by channeling them into his work. Judgement Night would be just the first of many Twilight Zones episodes informed by Serling’s wartime experiences.

While the story is a bit slow moving, Serling tries to keep the tension up by using Hitchcock’s ticking bomb trick. We know from the outset that something awful is going to happen at a specified time, we just don’t know exactly what or to whom. Serling also switches things up a bit by having Lanser, the eventual villain of the piece, be the audience’s surrogate for most of the story, a neat trick considering the guy turns out to be a mass murdering Nazi. And veteran director John Brahm (who coincidently fled Germany when Hitler came to power) does his best to keep things interesting visually. The scene in the hallway where Lanser’s victims stare mutely at their killer is particularly effective.

The central theme of the episode, that the experience of Hell will be personalized to the individual, goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. Their concept of the afterlife included Tartarus, an abyss in which the wicked suffered punishments which reflected their crimes. King Tantalus, for example, was forced to forever try and snatch fruit from a tree which pulled its branches away just as his fingers neared it. This eternal hunger was his fate for daring to chop up his own son and feed the boy to his dinner guests.

Obviously, the most common image of Hell among Christians has been that of a lake of fire, but over the centuries, personalized tortures have also contemplated. Dante’s Inferno included sinners being stung by wasps and frozen in ice, while the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch depicted punishments so bizarre that they’re best seen rather than described (what’s up with all those flowers shoved up butts?). For Lanser, Hell is to forever experience the terror that his victims did. As his lieutenant envisions it, “Perhaps there is a special kind of hell for people like us. Perhaps to be damned is to have a fate like the people on that ship, to suffer as they suffer and to die as they die… We'll ride the ghost of that ship every night. Every night, Kapitan, for eternity. They could die only once, just once, but we could die a hundred million times.”

And so they do, all because of the decision to push a button. And in the end, that’s what really matters. Whatever the experience of Hell may turn out to be, the most important thing to keep in mind is that God doesn’t choose for us to go there. We do.

Twilight Tidbits: Even the Twilight Zone had to pay the bills, so when General Foods balked at all the tea drinking in the script, quick changes were made to ensure that all the British aboard the S.S. Queen of Glasgow looked forward to a nice coffee break instead.

PULP CATHOLICISM #162

THE TWILIGHT BINGE #009: PERCHANCE TO DREAM

S01E09 – Perchance To Dream

“Edward Hall has a bad heart —and a [terrible] problem. Desperate, he barges into the office of Dr. Rathmann, a psychiatrist, and explains that each night, he’s been dreaming in chapters, as in a movie serial. The setting is always the same: an amusement park, in which Maya, an alluring carnival dancer, entices him into a funhouse and onto a rollercoaster…with the intention of scaring him to death. He knows if he goes to sleep again, he’ll suffer a fatal heart attack - and yet, if he stays awake much longer, he feels sure his heart won’t stand the strain. Whatever choice Hall makes… he’s brought a one-way ticket into the Twilight Zone.”

When CBS agreed to produce the Twilight Zone, it was under the condition that Rod Serling script a minimum of eighty percent of the episodes. That was a mostly unheard of practice back in those days, but it served as a testament to Serling’s status as a writer. According to The Twilight Zone Companion, to fill in the remaining twenty percent, an open call for submissions was issued. However, after fourteen thousand(!) manuscripts proved unusable, Serling invited a number of established authors to a screening of the pilot to see if any would be a good fit. Out of all those who attended Serling chose only two; Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson. Apparently the man had an eye for legendary talent.

Perchance To Dream became the first of Beaumont’s twenty-two contributions as a screenwriter to air and it’s a heckuva start to his Twilight Zone career. Everything in this episode clicks, from Richard Conte’s harried characterization of the doomed Edward Hall to director Robert Florey’s imaginative use of expressionistic set design. And the story of a man who visits a psychiatrist because he’s afraid he’ll die if he goes to sleep, only for the audience to discover at the end that the whole visit had been the dying man’s dream all along… that’s pure Twilight Zone.

In addition to all that, Beaumont’s story also has a number of Easter eggs, most notably the title’s reference to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. One of the more obscure shout outs, though, is found in the name of the predatory woman from Edward’s dreams, Maya. Though its meaning has been fluid throughout the history of Eastern philosophy, the modern understanding of the word Maya typically refers to the delusional state people fall into when they confuse the illusory physical world created from their own perceptions with what is actually real. Edward himself seems to reference this state of mind when he relates to the psychiatrist how he envisioned Maya in the back seat of his car. “I knew intellectually that I was alone,” he explained, “but I also knew that my imagination could make me see something if I thought about it long enough.”

Basically, Beaumont was using a Buddhist concept to drop a clue as to what was really happening in the story. So, while on the surface Beaumont’s first script for the Twilight Zone doesn’t appear to be quite as moralistic as Serling’s episodes had been so far, there are still some metaphysical musings in it if you dig deep enough. And as the series would progress, Beaumont’s Christian existentialism (as one of his biographers coined it) would come more and more to the forefront. A good fit for the Twilight Zone indeed.

Twilight Tidbits: According to Beaumont’s pal William F. Nolan (no slouch in the writing department himself), the author often drew inspiration from his own fears. Nolan recounts a trip the two took through an amusement park fun house during which Beaumont became convinced the ride attendant had entered the ride and planned to kill them both.

STILL VOICES #030: THE SUPER TUESDAY EDITION