“Twilight Zone” Helped Me Cope with the News of the Hideous Trump Election
By Luis Torres
I needed some sort of mental escape.
The shock of the election results on November 4 began reverberating in my head and in my very being immediately. Pendejo Trump elected? Again? There was a moment of denial. Then a jolt of anger, then a slowly engulfing but gradually persistent shroud of sadness. Not only sadness, but a disquieting sense of potentially perpetual doom. For a nanosecond I felt—what can I say?—nearly suicidal.
I’m guessing some eighty million people in this country who voted the way I did may have felt some of those same emotions. After a couple of days, I was able to function, más o menos. Still, I needed to find a way to get out of that depressing funk. I needed diversion. I needed some sort of mental escape. I settled on watching “Twilight Zone” episodes as a way of taking my mind off of the doom and gloom emanating from Washington, D.C.
What provide a better diversion than grabbing some popcorn and binge-watching Rod Serling’s indelible series about what is and what isn’t and what’s seemingly in-between? “You are entering a realm of imagination, there’s a signpost up ahead: the next stop is the Twilight Zone.” Here on the screen was the black-and-white footage of the slightly mysterious but somehow endearing Serling as narrator, cigarette in hand, introducing a given night’s TV episode. We were entering not a realm “of sight and sound, but of mind,” he intoned. We, the audience, were willing to buy the premise and buy the bit.
Rod Serling as narrator, cigarette in hand, introducing a given night’s TV episode.
I’ve been around a long time. I remember watching “Twilight Zone” when it first aired in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I was a mocoso of nine years old when the show first went on the air. Many years later, I’d catch episodes again during the “Twilight Zone” marathons that local TV stations presented during three-day holiday weekends.
So, lately I’ve been watching dozens and dozens of Zone episodes, as the disorientation of the election results begins to subside. As a kind of escape valve from the demoralizing election results, it’s been working.
Watching old TV shows is to me a sort of plunge into a kind of cultural anthropology investigation. What were people wearing? How did they speak? What were the ideological and political issues touched on, if at all? And how did people behave toward one another? For the most part, women were often subservient. And check it out: it seemed that everybody in every episode was smoking cigarettes! And I watch for pure entertainment too. But I can’t help but find myself looking at things through a Chicano political/cultural lens. So, I watched Zone episodes with all these things cruising through my mind. Where are all the Mexicans?
It’s cool to watch those old episodes, for a lot of reasons. You sit up on the edge of the couch and practically shout, “Hey, that’s Robert Redford,” hell, he must be twenty years old. And there are lots of actors you identify. Hey, that’s Charles Bronson, teamed up with the “Bewitched” lady (Elizabeth Montgomery.) Oh, and there’s an episode with Darren from “Bewitched” – the first Darren. Hey, that pretty blonde in the episode where she is beautiful but the entire world of ugly batos in a hospital thinks she’s hideous (“the beauty is in the eye of the beholder”): the young actress is Donna Douglas, who played Ellie May in the “Beverly Hillbillies” And you can go on and on spotting actors who appeared in “Twilight Zone” episodes. It’s a kick.
Everybody in the “Twilight Zone” world is white!
What’s also a trip is looking broadly at the world – the universe – presented on the screen. It hit me when I was a kid and it hit me much more profoundly today. What I’m talking about is that everybody in the “Twilight Zone” world is white! With very, very, very few exceptions.
Whether the episode deals with time travel, ghosts, outer space adventures, emotional breakdowns or freaky superstitions or similar memes, all the people on the screen are gringos. These shows were produced sixty years ago. Latinos were invisible on the screen then and, with some notable exceptions, we still are today.
Binge-watching the old “Twilight Zone” episodes was a welcome relief from the election results. But it was also a cool and satisfying adventure. The shows were well-written and engaging. Rod Serling wrote most of the episodes himself. Great entertainment. And for me, it was an experience that jogged a lot of memories of my wacky childhood. I remember what I was doing about the time those episodes first aired. I was in elementary school. Glad to have “Twilight Zone” serve as, among other things, a memory jogger.
So, memories and recollections. The mighty Gabriel Garcia Márquez tells us that, “Ultimamente la única cosa que temenos son las memorias” Well, my memories of “Twilight Zone” and my recent re-acquaintance with the show helped me come down off the ledge in the aftermath of the presidential election.
Serling recording an episode.
We’re going to need diversion to get us through the early stages of the incoming chaos, before we man (person?) the barricades. So, grab onto your TV show or novel, or collection of poetry to help you get through this transition. Then we can do what has to be done to fight fascism.
Thank you, Rod Serling.
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Copyright 2024 by Luis Torres. Luis Torres is a veteran journalist and author. To write to Luis go to:Luisrtorres50@gmail.com