“Walking Distance” Vs. Nostalgia

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.”