You know what you do when you’re lost in the woods? You go
back to the beginning. This theme is in keeping with today’s intumescent examination
of television stories, but from a writing standpoint, I’ve lost my way. I
mean…I’ve been writing, but I haven’t been writing writing. Movie reviews and cheap copy for my Bulgarian taskmasters
make for no kind of life. So here we are, back at the beginning, twisting some
arbitrary bit of pop culture until it fits a narrative I decided on far in advance.
It feels good. Like home.
So, I’ve got this friend and he recently got me plugged back
into the old school Twilight Zone
series. Alongside In the Heat of the
Night and Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
no shows signaled the end cartoons quite like this triumvirate. In the Heat of the Night was basic
cable’s way of saying to go out Saturday afternoon. Twilight Zone and Alfred
Hitchcock Presents both jockeyed for position as the spoiler set to open “Nick
at Night.” This negative association took years to unlearn (up until these last
few days truth be told). You’re going to take my magic stereoscope of animated
misanthropes and replace it with brooding adults? And in black and white no
less? It makes me wish I could go back in time to teach my young self how to
properly deploy, “fuck that noise.”
But younger selves
and looking back and even more irrationally going back are the conceptual
bedrock of “Walking Distance,” an episode from the first season of the Twilight
Zone. The foremost thing I’ve learned from my Twilight Zone reeducation, the
show is beautiful. Not only lovely to look at, but composed. The show dared to
broach some pretty outlandish shit, and they do it with a mix of grim dignity
and intelligence. Twilight Zone isn’t perfect by any means. Nor does it avoid
the hokey trappings of its era, this notable age of SciFi-as-satire meeting
television and film. Twilight Zone offers seriousness and tonal consistency. It seems like a modest accomplishment, but if you survey the current landscape, the show is like a master's thesis on genre televisions most hated enemy, restraint.
With this sort of simplicity intact, “Walking Distance,” plays out nice and tidy. You’ve got
your dude and your lesson and your fantasy-ish twist. It’s all there, but this
installment is unique in that it’s more melancholy than shocking. In a very
proto-Mad Men 1959 premise, Martin
Sloan, media exec at a huge New York ad firm, hits a wall, and in turn, hits the road.
We meet him, disheveled, as he pulls into a rickety gas
station. All mussed hair and square jawed asshole popping out of a roadster
coupe, you can tell his struggle is real. He also honks his horn a lot, so you
know he’s just generally a jerk. I forget why he has to leave his car at the
gas station, I’ll watch it here again in a beat, but that’s what happens [ah, oil
change and lube job]. Does he coincidentally see a sign for his long forgotten
hometown, Homewood (unnngghhh), posted nearby? He sure does. The gas station
attendant even lets him know it’s only a mile and a half away. Walking
distance. Boom. Rod Serling blowing your punk ass up already.
The short version: he reenters his past life and tries to
reinsert himself into a world where he has no place. The shorter version:
nostalgia is poison.
There are few talking points I lean on with such constancy.
In a more infamous incident, while arguing about the 2006 Oscars, I pounded a table
and howled again and again. Nostalgia is poison. Nostalgia is poison. Nostalgia
is poison. Nostalgia as an industry, nostalgia as irony, nostalgia as a
mindset. It’s all bad, but just like whiskey, religion, or nationalism, we all
need a bit of poison to stay afloat.
You know the broader lessons on this topic, and
“Walking Distance,” isn’t inclined to drub so much as intrigue. Sure, nostalgia
creates a toxic myopia blah blah blah… But “Walking Distance” offers a tasty,
compelling facet I hadn’t considered before.
Cut to Martin Sloan, harried, rejected, turned away by his
own beloved mother and father. He has become a stranger in his own past. Martin
races to confront his younger self, a human being he’s already frightened. A chase
sequence on a merry-go-round ensues. Several Dutch angle close-ups of carousel
horses later, Old Martin frightens Young Martin to the point where Young Martin
jumps off the ride and injures himself. Theirselves? Anyway, they both start
limping, and this is where shit gets awesome.
The merry-go-round stops, children begin to stoically file
off, the lights go dim, and shadows take hold of everything save Old Martin. He
begins to shout frantically as his wounded self is carried away. He pleads with
young Martin to cherish these moments. To understand this is a wonderful time
for him.
No one listens, because past selves are terrible at heeding
the lessons you’ll later learn. Old Martin Sloan, dejected, is soon met by his past father. Martin is tired, he wants to go back, but since it’s 1959 (or 1935? doesn't matter...),
Dad still knows best:
“That little boy, the
one I know, the one who belongs here, this is his summer. Just as it was yours
once, don’t make him share it.”
Nostalgia reframed by Martin Sloan as a vehicle of regret.
Not only looking back for comfort, but clutching hold of a memory so tight
perhaps you can make it real. A chance to tell your young self to make more of
your shared past life. Nostalgia reframed by Father as theft. An obsession with
moments so consumed by memory’s distortion, reality ceases to exist. A child
robbed of the truth about his life by the person we can least trust with our
past, ourselves. Lest I read straight from Rod Serling’s script, we’ll let Dad
finish with advice cliché enough to be fatherly, and just fatherly enough to ignore in all its truth.
“Maybe when you go back, Martin, you’ll find that there are
merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are… Maybe you just haven’t been
looking in the right place. You’ve been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking
ahead.”
