Review of The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 12: "Slippery Shoes"

Once upon a time, people who were told stories listened carefully, sat in rapt attention at the twists and turns of the plot, and felt empathy for the protagonists. In this way, audiences generally became wiser and more compassionate. They heard stories about people different from them and their scope of the world grew. By journeying, even metaphorically, with another person on their trials and tribulations against a harsh and uncaring world full of people ready to manipulate and take advantage of whomever they could, we grew stronger in our ties. We built up the muscles of empathy and compassion. We were taught to root for those standing up against injustice and to boo and mock those who would cynically destroy other people for their own advantage. Once upon a time, stories could weave beneficent magic. But now in this all too current time, when hearing stories of goodness and justice and equality and underdogs against those who would use their selfishness and greed to advance their own cynical and dangerous desires, people simply see a critique of their own terrible flaws of character and they erupt in anger at the storyteller. We learn nothing. And we're proud of our defensiveness and our ignorance.

If you'll listen — listen in the old ways — I would like to tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who claimed he loved ambiguity and subtlety in storytelling. "Why must the writer tell me right up front which character I should cheer and which character I should boo and hiss? Can I not be allowed to make up my own mind?" he would say to anybody who would listen (which was apparently about two dozen total strangers and not one family member (which was probably a good thing because how could he be honest about his life if he knew the people whom he was venting about were listening to his stories that didn't exactly portray them in a decent light?)). He believed a story that presented itself as a puzzle was the greatest kind of story a storyteller could tell. "If the story is intriguing enough, people will put in the effort to understand it!" he once claimed to a friend he knew was smart but who absolutely missed the entire point of John Barth's story "Night-sea Journey" from Lost in the Funhouse. That friend insisted that authors had a duty to their audience to make their message plain and simple. And yet he claimed to love "Night-sea Journey" while never realizing that the narrator of the story was a spermatozoa. But without that knowledge, without making the mental "A-ha!" leap of understanding while reading it, the story cannot be understood as it was meant to be understood. When the boy saw his friend do an existential double-take over learning the truth of "Night-sea Journey" not two minutes after declaring David Lynch failed his audience with Lost Highway, the boy nearly traded philosophical positions with his friend. Maybe his friend was right. Maybe subtlety and ambiguity were too much for even intelligent people to discern. Perhaps truth was too important to risk being misunderstood by the audience.

The boy did not change his opinion of complicated and not easily decoded stories. He continued to read Barth and Pynchon, Danielweski and Dick, Stein and DeLillo and Nabokov and Heller. And yet he also read comic books — so many comic books! Something in him demanded stories that were easily digestible. Stories so obviously about right and wrong that they took no brain power at all. Unambiguous stories not meant to say anything too deep or disturbing or existentially terrifying. Stories simply meant to inspire and to say, "Hey! Look, kids! We can defeat the bad guys if we just give it the old college try! Not the new college try because is beating evil worth the debt incurred? No, wait, never mind! That's getting too ambiguous!" Stories so simple that the boy could not help but mock them ceaselessly at every opportunity.

But one day, even comic books began to believe that ambiguity was more important than truth and inspiration. Writers began to ask, "What would happen if the good guys weren't as good as we thought they were?" And suddenly comic books themselves had changed their nature so much as to be unrecognizable. Where once the stories were about how we, as humans, could aspire to be like these flawless heroes who would sacrifice their own lives to make the world a better place, they were now stories about how they, as superheroes, were actually entirely too human and no better than the rest of humanity. And the boy thought, "Wait. What the hell is happening?"

But the boy could not change his nature. He might have noticed how comic book heroes were changing but he also loved stories full of ambiguity and subtlety. He liked stories about characters who couldn't claim to be either good or evil but were just people trying to navigate the maze of artificial social constructs on which civilization is based. Surely the audience, being intrigued by the high level of effort put into these stories, would ferret out the message and learn a little something about truth or maybe courage or possibly even the American Way (not the real American Way but the ideal American Way that has never really actually existed). Obviously a large portion of storytelling's audience would not have the patience or intelligence or will to read Somebody the Sailor or Gravity's Rainbow or House of Leaves or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or "Melanctha" or White Noise or Pale Fire or Catch-22. But they would absolutely be able to read Watchmen or Sandman or Animal Man, being that their ideas and ambiguities and questions were somewhat camouflaged by all of the pretty pictures. So the boy was pleased with this turn of events where lots and lots of people were learning that stories could convey important ideas through complex and hard-to-navigate narratives. At least for awhile.

Eventually, perhaps even too late, the boy realized that the heart within a story so well hidden by intellectual contortions of storytelling might as well not even exist. If the audience can't find their way to the heart, the story has failed the audience. The boy realized his friend Soy Rakelson may have had an accidental point. Audiences would not be intrigued by a complex story. Audiences could not be trusted to put any work into their role. If the heart were too well hidden, the audience would never find it. They would barely even try to look. Instead, the audience would simply be angry and feel mocked. The audience would grow defensive. The audience would not just turn against the particular storyteller but against all storytellers. They would call the storytellers to task and demand stories that were not complex. They would demand stories that didn't point fingers at their flaws. They would demand stories about nothing at all. If the stories being told were important but the importance couldn't be ferreted out, well, why not just tell unimportant stories that simply state, "This person is good. This person is bad. By the end, the bad guy will be punched in the nose. And, don't worry, nobody will be upset by what makes the bad guy bad. He's just bad, okay? He's not a reflection of you, the audience! You're the good guy! Now calm down already and go read more garbage."

The boy thought, "How did we come to this? If important stories are too complex for their audience, that doesn't mean stories shouldn't still be important. Perhaps there was something to stories being simple and still important." Thinking to himself, he clarified his position: "Don't get me wrong! Don't take me halfway up to heaven without letting me swing down on my birch or whatever this allusion to a Frost poem was meant to say while also letting the audience know I'm well read! I still want complex, ambiguous, subtle stories about existential dilemmas without any real answers! But I could probably do with a lot more simple morality tales as well!" And it was with that statement, that the boy decided to discuss The Twilight Zone episode, "What You Need."

"What You Need" is a story of two men. One man is the protagonist. One man is the antagonist. One man, you are supposed to root for. One man, you are supposed to boo and hiss. Rod Serling tells you right up front which guy you should boo and hiss. After being introduced to Fred Renard barking at the bartender, Rod Serling interrupts the scene with his opening narration: "You're looking at a Mister Fred Renard who carries on his shoulder a chip the size of the national debt. This is a sour man, a friendless man, a lonely man, a grasping, compulsive, nervous man. This is a man who has lived thirty-six undistinguished, meaningless, pointless, failure-laden years and who at this moment looks for an escape, any escape, any way, anything, anybody, to get out of the rut." Basically, Serling calls the guy a loser. In a more complicated, late-twentieth century story, I would forgive the audience for thinking that maybe Serling's narration was describing the type of person who might wind up being the underdog hero. But this was the fifties and the audience knew that a statement declaring that a thirty-six year old was a directionless, lost failure of a human being meant that person was the antagonist. That person was lower than fleas on amoebas. That person was practically a rebellious youth except worse because that person was thirty-six and hadn't matured. This Fred Renard is the bad guy.

What happens in the story is that Fred meets a man with psychic gifts and decides to manipulate that man so that Fred can get whatever he desires. His greed and selfishness are writ big to be mocked by the storyteller. The audience cannot mistake that his attributes are not attributes to be admired. And the audience of the time would not have scoffed and been upset and made stupid statements about virtue signaling and social justice. They would watch the story and think, "That guy's a dick. Why would anybody want to be like that guy? What a jerk."

By the end of the story, the old man uses his psychic gifts to kill Fred Renard. He does so in self defense because he foresaw that Renard was going to kill him. In a modern story, that might be played ambiguously. Who is the real hero if the psychic killed the down-on-his-luck man just trying to turn his life around? The subtleties of the story would be ignored for a quick hot take where the person making the hot take, wanting to be thought of as intelligent and critical, simply thinks, "What's the opposite conclusion that any normal, sane, intelligent person would reach after watching this story? I'll pretend I believe that and everybody will be amazed by my insight and ability to deconstruct the story, even if I'm completely misunderstanding deconstruction in the same way New Age misfits misunderstand Quantum Physics!" And, yes, a story simply told can include subtleties. Because the beauty of this story lies within the subtleties.

Upon watching "What You Need," an audience would need not be forgiven for asking this question ("need not be forgiven" for it's the first and most important question to be asked by an audience trying to understand the character of Pidott, the old psychic man): "Why does the old man give Renard the scissors that save his life? If the old man saw that Renard was going to kill him, why not just let Renard die in the elevator accident?" And here is the heart of this story, not entirely hidden, but maybe needing some minor archaeology to uncover the entire thing (archaeology? That probably should have been a medical analogy!). The old man is the protagonist because he is a decent person. He doesn't want to be the architect of harm to any person, even Renard. He only wants to help people. If he doesn't give Renard the scissors, he is the cause of Renard's death. He saw it and could have prevented it. But even more subtle, he's giving Renard a chance to become a better person. He's Jesus allowing Renard the chance at redemption. The scissors are Pidott's way of saying, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Perhaps if he saves Renard's life, Renard will see his life in a new light and change his ways. But he doesn't. So Pidott gives Renard another chance: he gives Renard the opportunity to win money gambling. But that's not enough either. Finally, Renard becomes the architect of his own destruction by jumping to the conclusion that a pair of slippery shoes are what he needs next. The big twist is that the slippery shoes are what Pidott needs. Renard's inability to change or to see past his own selfish desires become his undoing and he's comically hit by a car. I don't think it was meant to be comical. Maybe that was just the juxtaposition of my love of terrible old special effects and my love of people being hit by cars.

Renard isn't even portrayed as an evil or terribly bad person which is another slight subtlety that I love about the story. In its simple way, it's obvious who the audience should cheer and who they should boo. But it isn't simply because Pidott is preternaturally good and Renard is preternaturally evil. At one point, Pidott tells Renard exactly what he needs and they're things Pidott can't give him: serenity, peace of mind, humor, the ability to laugh at oneself, and patience. I don't know if this moment is in the original short story by Lewis Padgett or it was added by Serling in the teleplay but it's a tactical nuclear strike against terrible people in any decade. It's saying, "Renard, you aren't evil because Evil with a capital 'E' exists and some people are just bad and we need to destroy them." It's saying, "Renard, you've got some serious flaws that cause you to act horribly. They are things you can work on, if you choose to. You can be redeemed." To an audience that is willing to listen to a story, and consider the story, and reflect on its message, the story would have easily accessible heart and value and meaning.

Once upon a time today, the audience would simply see their flaws reflected back at them, and they would be angry. Because the audience today has no patience. It has no ability to laugh at itself. It has no serenity and no peace of mind. And while they all think they have humor because they still laugh at racist jokes, they are sorely lacking in truly understanding comedy. They can't even properly parse tragedy. Why should they? It might lead to a terrible bout of self-reflection.