Having helped run a congressional campaign, I would never have allowed this Twilight Zone commercial to run but it did and boy did it kick up some controversy. It is so bigoted its almost funny as Vernon Robinson is “unabashedly and unalterably opposed to racial quotas, special rights for homosexuals, the United Nations, the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, women in combat, pork barrel spending, useless government programs and agencies, onerous regulations, and all tax hikes.” He’s a Republican. Couldn’t you guess?
Speaking of “The Twilight Zone,” after the jump read an interesting article about its creator, Mr. Rod Serling, and Binghamton, a city I hold near and dear to my heart.
Via Moeller
Our Towns; Submitted for Your Approval, a Homecoming
By PETER APPLEBOME (NYT) 921 words
Published: February 26, 2006
Binghamton, N.Y. – CONSIDER, if you will, one Rodman Edward Serling, a fortunate boy from a fortunate town, who grew up in a rambling stucco house a short walk from Recreation Park, where the music from the carousel wafted through the air every summer evening. It all seemed so perfect, as if it would last forever. Only, somehow, things took an odd detour, and then another — until he ended up instead in a place of shadows and smoke, a place we know as the Twilight Zone.
Or so might the opener go if Rod Serling ever did a ”Twilight Zone” episode on Rod Serling. But, then, as people in Binghamton know, he often did, returning time and again to the sights and sounds of his childhood as if coming back for something he had left behind.
So it’s not surprising that 31 years after his death, there’s a movement afoot to build a Rod Serling Museum in an old Victorian house on Main Street. It’s also not surprising that on April 21 and 22, Ithaca College, where he once taught, will offer what’s billed as the first academic conference on Serling’s work.
What is surprising is that it feels not so much like a memorial to a man whose work is long done but like a coda to an episode still playing out.
You don’t have to be someone who grew up with ”The Twilight Zone,” which was on the air from 1959 to 1964, to have been touched by Serling’s work. Thanks to endless ”Twilight Zone” reruns and voluminous Web and print scholarship, Serling seems more alive now than at the time of his death, at age 50. His surreal vision of the dread beneath everyday life — a critic once likened him to ”a living-room Bertolt Brecht” — has long since become a part of the American subconscious. To be reminded how contemporary he remains, check out ”Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” in which every girl is rendered perfect through mandatory plastic surgery in the impossibly distant year 2000.
Serling, whose writing credits also include scripts like ”Requiem for a Heavyweight” and the original ”Planet of the Apes,” has long been revered in his hometown. But only in the past few months has a local entrepreneur, Michael Weinstein, come up with the plan for a museum (www.rodserlingmuseum.com), which he hopes to open in fall 2007. The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, in town, is on board, and his widow and others have expressed support, he said.
The plan is to house the museum in a Victorian building next to Mr. Weinstein’s eccentric Bundy Museum, dedicated to the workplace time clocks invented by Willard L. Bundy and to African art. Mr. Weinstein hopes to have exhibits on Serling’s radio and television work and his teaching, and would like eventually to recreate ”Twilight Zone” sets at a third Victorian he owns.
Mr. Weinstein has a long way to go to make this work, but it’s a safe bet that Serling would have approved.
For all his professional success, Serling had a difficult life. He was increasingly alienated from politics and culture and often caught up in a Hollywood life that probably didn’t deliver what it seemed to promise. But he loved Binghamton the way expatriates cling to the old country.
”Everybody has to have a hometown,” he once said. ”Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive makeup of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up.”
His most famous homage to Binghamton was an episode called ”Walking Distance.” In it, a man returns to his hometown, where everything, even the carousel, is the same, and he sees himself as a little boy. He’s desperate to rejoin his family and childhood self, but his father, telling him there’s only ”one summer to every customer,” banishes him to the dreary adult present.
AND, in truth, Binghamton would be a hard place for him to return to. It was once so prosperous that even the Great Depression passed by like a glancing gust of foul weather. But most of the factory jobs, lumber and shoe making, defense and cigars are long gone, and the population has dwindled from a high of 85,000 in the mid-1950’s to about 47,000 now.
But then Serling, as ”Walking Distance” shows, probably already knew that. So he tells us at the end that his protagonist is successful at most things, ”but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives: trying to go home again.” He may be seduced some night by the distant music of a calliope and sounds of laughter in the dark and think he can recapture the parks and merry-go-rounds of his youth.
But alas: ”He’ll smile then, too, because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory, not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind — that are part of the Twilight Zone.”