[HN Gopher] An Early Run-In with Censors Led Rod Serling to 'The...
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An Early Run-In with Censors Led Rod Serling to 'The Twilight Zone'
Author : drdee
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-06-20 16:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| "The writer's role is to be a menacer of the public's
| conscience," Serling later said. "He must have a position, a
| point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social
| criticism and he must focus the issues of his time."
|
| Good quote. It's been weird to see the belief growing the last
| few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an
| artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs.
|
| Such an art doesn't exist of course, and I'm thankful to see a
| classic acknowledge that not as a necessary deviation from an
| ideal, but as an ideal in its own right.
| leephillips wrote:
| The point of view to which you object is not by any means
| recent, and it has always been prominent, if not predominant. I
| find most art with a political message as its purpose
| intolerably dull. I know where to go if I want to wallow in
| politics. Art should deal in the sublime.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Art whose political message overrides its art tends to be
| dull. Art that intertwines itself with its message is far
| more interesting.
|
| If you want a fun experiment, compare the video games
| Cyberpunk 20777 and Umurangi Generation: both released in
| 2020, and both make political statements. In one, the
| political statement is steeped throughout the game, but it
| gives the player enough space to draw their own conclusions;
| in the other, the political message is forced onto the player
| in a fairly haphazard way.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What did you make of Disco Elysium?
| Miraste wrote:
| Often, the best satire exists in a state of cognitive
| dissonance, with absurd characters acting in obviously
| ridiculous ways that nevertheless feel like the product
| of the exact same systems that govern our lives, with the
| obfuscation swept away.
|
| Dr Strangelove and Catch-22 are my favorite examples. The
| 60s US nuclear policy wasn't really set by generals named
| Jack Ripper who want to inflict atomic hellfire because
| of baseless conspiracy theories... except that's the
| chain of order the bureaucracy produced, with a longer
| timeframe and more words. Catch-22 is a comedy because
| the betrayals, idiocy, and soulless power moves all occur
| in one squadron with one or two links between people,
| instead of over the breadth of the theater and spread
| over many people so every step looks reasonable.
|
| It's very hard to make this kind of satire because
| condensing and heightening narratives like that makes it
| so, so easy to tilt things a little more in favor of your
| ideas, which immediately loses that ephemeral sense of
| reality and turns your satire into a sermon with clown
| makeup. This is why there are so many attempts and so few
| successes. I'd say Disco Elysium is one of those
| successes.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| This will be unpopular ... as a long-time horror fan, I found
| Serling's episodes to tend toward the heavy-handed, the
| obvious, often schmaltzy. I favored the Beaumont and Matheson
| far more, even decades later.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd have to look up who wrote what episodes although it looks
| like Beaumont wrote some classic ones.
|
| The Twilight Zone was always something of a mixed bag but,
| because it was episodic, from the distance of time we can
| easily pick and choose and skim the cream.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are a few videos on YouTube where Serling talks with
| groups of aspiring writers. He is quite passionate about
| writing and storytelling. He also smokes incessantly, which
| lead to his untimely death at the age of 50.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume there are video interviews with Serling where he
| isn't smoking but you probably have to search a bit.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Growing belief?
|
| It's hard to square that with the enormous amount of censorship
| Serling faced.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Such an art doesn't exist of course...
|
| ... what? Art absolutely can be apolitical. A piece of music
| can exist without political meaning; a beautiful oil painting
| of a garden likely doesn't have politics attached to it. I
| could go on and on. Some art has something to say while other
| art exists simply for the sake of existing.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Only if you have a narrow modern definition of politics based
| on eg political parties and elections.
|
| Just as a very simple explanation with this example: a
| painting of a garden has politics embedded within it if not
| everyone has recreational access to that garden. A painting
| of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a
| painting, "apolitical", where a painting of it by someone who
| shouldn't be in it could be transgressive, or even
| threatening.
|
| These things are small and may seem like a stretch but this
| is politics. It's kind of like that joke "gamers think there
| are two genders: male and political." What we think of as
| political or not is itself an embedding of politics, not a
| neutral external fact derived from the universe.
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| My definition of politics extends beyond governments,
| political parties, yadda yadda. I also think that your
| response supports my assertion that your absolute - that
| apolitical art does not exist - is false.
|
| >... a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it
| _IF_ not everyone has recreational access to that garden.
|
| And if everyone _does_ have recreational access to the
| garden?
|
| >A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns
| it is just a painting, "apolitical"...
|
| I am unsure how to take this sentence as anything but you
| agreeing that that piece of art is, in point of fact,
| apolitical. Please point me in the right direction if I'm
| off base here.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I put apolitical in quotes there for a reason. Likely to
| be perceived as neutral, not politically active or making
| any particular statement. But that perception isn't from
| nowhere and doesn't mean it's _not_ political.
|
| You can refute any specific thing I say about a garden or
| whatever. But there will always be things. Everyone has
| recreational access, but does everyone have recreational
| time? Can everyone get the paints needed to recreate it?
| etc.
|
| Something is apolitical from a person's perspective when
| it embeds their political assumptions, basically. It's
| not necessarily wrong to describe something that way, but
| that assertion needs to carry with it a context within
| which it is neutral. Whether a specific viewer will
| receive it as political is a fact about the observer, not
| the piece of art.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > And if everyone does have recreational access to the
| garden?
|
| There is an artist's intent, and then there is
| interpretation of the work. You can't prevent someone
| from applying a political lens for interpretation -- oh,
| look, those people are out of place, etc. Sometimes this
| can shed light on the work, other times obscures it.
|
| Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony was explicitly political
| and changed the dedication as political events unfolded.
| Later, Beethoven wrote the "Harp" quartet in a cellar in
| Vienna while it was being bombarded by Napoleon's army.
| The quartet is the last thing you'd imagine it to be
| under the circumstances of its composition, and maybe
| that was the point, in which case you can say there is
| perhaps an inverted political intent at play here, too.
| The political context adds a dimension to how I think of
| that quartet.
|
| (I can't resist mentioning Beethoven's "Wellington's
| Victory" -- not highly regarded and very corny and
| probably more on the order of what you expect from
| "political" art).
|
| Now give me a political interpretation of Beethoven's C#
| minor quartet. I'd maybe have to take Taruskin's approach
| of considering it the work of not a single individual,
| but _what was required_ from the whole society for such a
| work to have been produced. Everything from fiddle makers
| to music instruction to how arts were funded. At that
| point, I don 't think the mode of analysis any longer has
| anything to do with the C# minor quartet.
|
| I strongly endorse the idea of autonomous expression in
| art; when there is reason to believe the artist's intent
| was political, I'll follow along; when not, a political
| interpretation is useful only insofar as it sheds light
| on the work.
| nescioquid wrote:
| There's more to life than the political, so why should there be
| only political art?
|
| I see the pressure for art to be political to be somewhat
| unusual, precipitated by the times. In the 30s, there was a
| strain of artists who condemned any art that wasn't overtly
| political. This really seems the exception, probably a
| cyclically so.
|
| There is a lot of religious art, and probably more normative in
| the West is art based on the artist's personal expression.
| Nevertheless, every artifact of culture can be placed within
| its context and declared political in some way.
|
| Probably we can use the politicization of art as an indicator
| of a society's health, i.e. is this a culture that no longer
| believes in itself?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > There's more to life than the political
|
| Everything is political. If you think a subject isn't
| political, it's because that subject isn't controversial to
| you personally.
| function_seven wrote:
| To write "everything is political" is to water down the
| term "political" so much that it loses meaning.
|
| If I paint a picture of a sailing ship cresting a wave, is
| my art political? I see beauty in the sprays of water, the
| upward cant of the ship, the sails full of wind, the gulls
| in the background, etc.
|
| How about a bowl of fruit? Or a blacksmith forging
| horseshoes?
|
| No, not everything is "political". Yes, politics affects
| most aspects of life, but that does not mean everything is
| political any more than "everything is sexual" or
| "everything is financial". Money and sex also permeate our
| lives in small and large ways. My painting of the fruit
| bowl is not a commentary on sex, nor is my blacksmith
| painting making any sort of statement on money.
| anjel wrote:
| For TZ fans, Serling's Daughter Ann discusses the fundaments of
| her fathers writing voice and style along with add'l TZ
| production ephemera in this podcast observing Twilight Zone's
| 60th Anniversay. https://www.gilbertpodcast.com/twilight-
| zone-60th-anniversar...
| dogleash wrote:
| Despite the unfortunate reason for the limitation, as long as the
| author intends to present a fictional story I think allegorical
| stories about injustice actually do more to convey the message.
| There's a lot of fiction that just feels like the writer had
| tunnel vision on a contemporary issue and forgot to flesh out
| enough of a story to make it feel like more than a thinly-veiled
| lecture. Even when I agree wholeheartedly with the message, it
| can be agonizing to watch.
|
| Just a general thought though, Peele is a good enough creator
| that I don't expect him to fall into that trap.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> There's a lot of fiction that just feels like the writer had
| tunnel vision on a contemporary issue and forgot to flesh out
| enough of a story to make it feel like more than a thinly-
| veiled lecture. Even when I agree wholeheartedly with the
| message, it can be agonizing to watch.
|
| The classic example of that for me is a Star Trek episode:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefi...
| digisign wrote:
| At least they bothered to "thinly veil" it, unlike a lot of
| things today.
| __init wrote:
| This is one of my favorite episodes. I always thought the
| thin veiling helped to demonstrate the absurdity of both
| situations -- perhaps it was even done intentionally for that
| reason.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I remember seeing that as a small child and thinking that
| most of my fairy tales were more subtle.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Note that this article is from 2019. Looks like the Peele
| version lasted two seasons. I guess it didn't set the world on
| fire.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I saw it. It was pretty hit and miss, like the original but
| it's far less timeless. If you liked the original, this is
| better than nothing but it's not going to sate one's desire
| for more Twilight Zone.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Obviously, Serling was creative enough to work within the
| constraints to make something that still resonates decades
| later. One might even wonder if he'd been allowed to be more
| directly topical if that would still be true.
|
| [Haven't seen the Peele version yet, since no access to P+]
| cgriswald wrote:
| For those looking for a legal way to view episodes of the
| original series, they are currently on Paramount+ (as well as
| being available for purchase in the usual ways).
|
| Paramount+ contains every episode except season 5, episode 22 _An
| Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bri...
|
| > An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (French: La Riviere du hibou,
| lit. 'The Owl River') is a 1961 French short film, almost without
| dialogue. It was based on the 1891 American short story of the
| same name by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose
| Bierce. It was directed by Robert Enrico and produced by Marcel
| Ichac and Paul de Roubaix with music by Henri Lanoe. It won
| awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards. The
| film was later screened on American television as episode 22 of
| the fifth season of The Twilight Zone on 28 February 1964.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Those looking for the BEST way should get the Blu-Rays, which
| were scanned from film.
|
| So many shows were shot on film; I wish they'd scan and re-
| release more of them.
| worik wrote:
| It is out of copyright where I live.
|
| For now
| jjulius wrote:
| It (the film, not the Twilight Zone episode) appears to be
| available on Vimeo. It was uploaded 12 years ago, so I'm
| assuming it's OK to share here.
|
| https://vimeo.com/15147706
| digisign wrote:
| Legal? For an over sixty-year-old show, where all the
| participants are long dead? Plainly an area where the law is in
| the wrong, and public domain stolen from.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and
| generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95
| years after publication. In the United States, works
| published before January 1, 1927, are in the public domain.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St.
| ..
|
| It's a bit more complicated for pre-1978 works, but that's
| the gist. It's been this way for a long time; if you want to
| shorten the copyright period, you must change the law.
| ghayes wrote:
| If the time period keeps getting extended, then it's just a
| more complicated way of saying "indefinitely."
| vkou wrote:
| It stopped getting extended a few years ago, and old
| works have once again started entering the public domain.
| aftbit wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the last extension (sometimes
| called the Mickey Mouse protection act) was in 1998[1].
| Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse film) will enter
| public domain in 2024 if nothing changes before then.[2]
| I guess we still have to wait 2 more years to see if
| Disney is able to extend copyright again, or if they plan
| to take a softer approach to protect the Empire this
| time.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension
| _Act
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyrig
| ht_sta...
|
| bonus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_gr
| aph_showin...
| gumby wrote:
| Any idea why it's not included?
| kfarr wrote:
| IANAL but from the brief info you shared it sounds like the
| show had rights to include the film on broadcast x times but
| not the rights for later distribution.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Possibly they just got the rights to air the film, but didn't
| actually get ownership. I'd imagine when the language was
| written up, the assumption was made that Twilight Zone would
| only take the form of over-the-air TV broadcast.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| This is incredibly common with TV shows produced before the
| rise of DVD box-sets (early/mid-00s). Shows had a defined
| lifecycle: they'd premiere (and make back most of the
| production cost), re-run the following summer (assuming the
| show was popular enough to not get cancelled), and then if
| the show reached ~100 episodes, it would be picked up for
| syndication. All but the most popular shows would
| essentially cease to exist 10-15 years after their initial
| run ended, so it was cheaper to license third-party
| elements (music, this French film) on a time-limited basis
| to keep costs down.
| ghaff wrote:
| I had forgotten about summer reruns. That's a blast from
| the past.
|
| I daresay a good part of the readership here would have
| trouble imaging that to watch non-live TV shows you had
| to be sitting in front of a TV at a particular time and
| if you missed it, that might be it.
|
| Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized
| TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted
| miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large,
| shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just
| wouldn't fly in general.
| irrational wrote:
| Not just TV shows, but movies too. I saw Star Wars in the
| theater. I didn't see it again (there was no way to see
| it again) until years later when it was shown on TV.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or second-run/revival theaters. I used to be very
| involved with a film group undergrad. We could get
| weekend audiences for a thousand people or more for
| relatively recent (but no longer still in theaters)
| movies and hundreds for older films.
|
| These days, whatever preferences some people may have for
| seeing films in a theater with an audience, attendance
| has dwindled to very few.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I feel like TiVo actually opened up a lot of this and the
| nascent streaming available at the time (hulu/youtube?)
| is what kicked off the rise of actually serialized and
| episodic TV.
|
| It is very funny having to explain to people why shows
| like "star trek: the next generation" basically had to
| reset everything by the end of the episode back into it's
| original state in order for syndication to work (episodes
| are basically played in any order aside from the few
| 2-parter episodes).
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, I assume that Lost--for whatever its problems--was
| essentially a child of Internet discussions plus
| TiVo/DVRs. Babylon 5 was even earlier but it was pretty
| niche and many fans (like myself) were content to
| timeshift on VCRs by then.
|
| And, yes, syndication was a significant revenue stream
| that basically didn't work unless you could randomly drop
| into a Law and Order episode or pretty much any sitcom.
| ghaff wrote:
| And to a related point, there are TV series like Northern
| Exposure where the music was pretty integral to the show
| but don't have the rights to, so apparently the DVD
| releases are pretty compromised.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That's a good example. Another is Beavis and Butthead. My
| understanding is that when the shows originally aired
| they were relying on MTV's rights to air the videos
| featured in the episodes. So now any episodes (streaming
| or disc) only show the fully animated segments, and not
| the interludes where the two are sitting on the couch.
| Sadly, those are some of the best moments of the show...
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much. And, in fact, most of the value presumably
| came from (as far as they knew at the time) the initial
| airing of the episode. So why pay more for all the rights?
|
| Per Wikipedia:
|
| Three years after its production, the film was screened on
| American TV as part of the fantasy/science fiction show The
| Twilight Zone. Producer William Froug had seen the film and
| decided to buy the rights to broadcast it on American
| television. The transaction cost The Twilight Zone $25,000,
| significantly less than the average of $65,000 they
| expended on producing their own episodes; however, Froug's
| purchase allowed for the film to be aired only twice (the
| first airing was on February 28, 1964). Consequently, it is
| not included on The Twilight Zone's syndication package,
| though it is included with the series on home video
| releases.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Br
| i...
| mkovach wrote:
| Serling was TV's first angry young man.
|
| But he really thought that TV was an important medium and there
| were things he wanted to say. He just found out that science
| fiction allowed him to get around censorship.
|
| There are plenty of running themes he includes, but interestingly
| enough, baseball (he was a huge fan of the Dodgers) and religion
| have an existence in the Twilight Zone, which always fascinated
| me.
| Hellbanevil wrote:
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