Certain eras of television and movies make various uses of visual signifiers to indicate to the audience that they're supposed to believe something that isn't actually happening. The one that annoys me the most in our current times is gagging a person. To indicate a person can't speak or yell or make any noise whatsoever, a character will simply put a piece of cloth around somebody's head so that it is clenched in their teeth like a horse's bit. Obviously that won't stop a person from screaming at the top of their lungs. But I don't think non-horse-bit gags work as well as television and movies want us to believe they do for conveniences of plot anyway, so who really cares, right? I'm sure actors were tired of having duct tape wrapped around their faces to at least seem somewhat believable which led to some really uptight actor saying, "Can't I just hold this in my teeth and pretend that I can't yell? Acting!" And some director was all, "Fuck. Fine. Whatever. Just get the fucking scene shot already!" And then everybody saw it and was all, "Wait. Audiences will buy that that person can't make a sound now? Fuck yeah! No more duct tape, baby!"
In the fifties, one of the worst visual signifiers was saved for two people kissing. Instead of actually kissing, they just pursed their lips and smashed their faces together, with little to no movement, for an amount of time depending on how passionate the kiss was supposed to be. I've kissed my own grandmother more erotically than a 50s era television kiss. I bring this up because there's a kissing scene in The Twilight Zone episode, "The Four of Us are Dying," that looks like a child took two dolls and mashed their faces together for an awkwardly long amount of time. Actually, a child with two dolls would have been more dramatic. Maybe I shouldn't blame the 50s entirely. I'm pretty sure Ward and June Cleaver shared kisses that sometimes made me think, "Hugh Beaumont is enjoying that a little too much."
This episode also contains the signifier of loads of neon signs floating about the protagonist's head to indicate he's in a big city. I have no idea who first came up with that one but it's actually pretty good. I'm sure it was first done in some stage production of whatever early to mid-century play sees the protagonist go from a rural area to New York. Does that happen in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? What about Poor Little Ritz Girl? Or maybe it was first done in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I thought that by the time I was done discussing the terrible kiss that I'd accidentally find a way to talk about this episode but it didn't happen. I don't know what George Clayton Johnson's original story, "All of Us are Dying," was actually like because I'd have to find a collection of his short stories to learn but I can't imagine it was lacking in as much substance as Serling's teleplay seemed to be. I was hoping that my brain would figure out the point of this episode so that I don't expose my own ignorance when somebody on the Internet decides to "actually" me and make me look stupid. And since I never received an "A-ha!" moment from on high that truly satisfied me for the reason this episode had to be filmed by Serling, I guess I'll just try to flesh out the only thought that came to me.
I'm sure people have made categories for all the different kinds of The Twilight Zone. Some are about the existential terror of loneliness, some are about nostalgia, some are about terrible disasters, some are about Kojak taking the piss out of his step-daughter's stupid doll, some are about a terrible person getting their comeuppance, and so on. I haven't figured out all the categories myself! But this one seems to be one of the comeuppance ones which introduces the audience to an unlikable guy and then kills him at the end so the audience learns not to be unlikable.
Serling's introduction to Arch Hammer is thus: "His name is Arch Hammer. He's thirty-six years old. He's been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickle and dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him." I haven't heard a string of petty insults so beautifully rendered since Thurl Ravenscroft took The Grinch to task for being such a huge asshole. Sometimes when you're in the Twilight Zone, you don't have time for ambiguity! You just need to know, right from the start, if the protagonist is an asshole or a hero. Also, you always need to know that the male lead is actually thirty-six.
Hammer, a man who can change his facial features to look like whomever he wants, decides to use the power to accrue love and money. He uses his power as shortcuts to getting the things most people desire. He looks like the lover of a woman who believed he was dead (I mean, the actual lover was dead. But she readily accepts that it was all a case of mistaken identity) so that he can get some easy loving. Then he pretends to be a criminal betrayed by some other criminals so he can steal some stolen cash stolen from the guy he was pretending to be. But in the end, as he takes on the identity of a stranger he sees on a poster in an alley, he discovers that pretending to be other people comes with their terrible baggage as well. He runs into the guy he's pretending to be's father who hates him for knocking up a nice girl and ruining the reputation of the family. The father shoots him in the gut and pisses on his dying corpse. That sounds like maybe it wouldn't have aired on a 1950s television show so maybe I dreamed that bit later.
I guess the point is that there are no easy shortcuts because some shortcuts lead through bear country and you're liable to be mauled by a bear when you use one of those shortcuts even if that shortcut leads to tons of money and pussy.
Apparently in the original story (which I still haven't read but I've now read about!), Hammer couldn't control how he looked. In the end, he dies not knowing who he is, awash in the memories and lives of every person other people saw him as. There's probably a moral in that about being who we are and not who other people expect us to be lest we lose ourselves in the process. But who knows? Not me! I didn't read the original story! And Serling seems to have heard the treatment and thought, "Yeah! That'll be terrific! The man who could be anybody! Just think how much easy money and pussy you could get doing that! And how many cigarettes you could smoke!" Then he needed a way to show that maybe that wasn't the greatest life so he had to introduce the psychopathic father figure. Audiences would have nodded sagely when Hammer was shot, and probably said things like, "That creep had it coming!" and "Just goes to show you!" and "Just think how much more pussy he could have gotten if that jerko dad hadn't murdered him for practically no reason at all!" That last one would have been said by me after I time traveled to the 1950s.
The writer of the original story, George Clayton Johnson, also wrote the script for the first Star Trek episode, "The Man Trap." It's pretty much the same story except with an alien whose only desire is the luscious salt within the human body.
In conclusion, I am concluding this review by suggesting that perhaps this story wasn't meant to have much of a point at all. Perhaps Rod Serling was just sitting around one day and thought, "You know what I want to make? An episode that's a metaphor for jazz!" And that was this episode!
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