Weighing in on Syfy’s clueless decision to replace the traditional July 4th Twilight Zone marathon with The Greatest American Hero, Matt Clark asks which is better shown on Independence Day, The Twilight Zone or The Greatest American Hero? Unfortunately, Clark gets it totally wrong when he makes his argument about which show is more relevant to the holiday.
I thought the correct answer would be obvious. I guess not.
Let’s see. One show bills a clueless doofus as “The Greatest American Hero.” Wow! Greater than Abraham Lincoln? Greater than Martin Luther King? Greater than George Washington or all our veterans, explorers, pioneers, firefighters, policeman, and scientists? Calling the bumbling, incompetent clod played by William Katt America’s greatest hero is a joke, and it’s obvious that the show’s creators meant it as a joke. More than that, it’s an insult to all the real heroes out there whether they risked their lives for something they believed in or they devoted their lives to making the world a better place. This is the show Matt Clark prefers to see on the 4th?
In the other corner, you have The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was a real American hero who fought in World War II as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division. Many Twilight Zone episodes incorporate American history into their plots. There are episodes like “The Passersby,” “Still Valley,” and “Back There” set around The Civil War. There’s “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” which shows us the struggles of the pioneers. “The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms” involves Custer’s Last Stand. “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Purple Testament” feature American soldiers fighting in World War II. Other episodes promote American ideals like freedom, equality, individualism, and dissent.
Consider these:
In “The Obsolete Man” Burgess Meredith plays Romney Wordsworth, a Bible reading librarian who defies a dictatorship that bans books and religion. “The Eye of the Beholder” and “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” promote individualism and dissent against societies that demand rigid conformity. Next time you watch those episodes listen to what’s happening, and what beliefs the characters espouse. The societies in “Eye” and “Twelve” not only demand that everyone look alike, they also demand conformity in thought and belief. In those two tales, the viewers are meant to identify with the women who stand up against those societies. In “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” (adapted from Charles Beaumont’s short story “The Beautiful People”) Marilyn not only resists physical transformation, she expresses non-conformist ideas and reads books banned by the government. In “The Eye of the Beholder” Janet Tyler does desperately wants to look acceptable to everyone else. She doesn’t want to end up being forced into a ghetto, but eventually she reaches a breaking point where she rants against the government which is forcing her to look like everyone else. She shouts, “The state is not God! The state is not God!” For part of the episode, “The Leader” gives a speech extolling “glorious conformity” and demands a single society and a single norm and that we cut out all that is different. Much of this speech plays on after Tyler tries to escape.
Especially important is the Twilight Zone’s style of patriotism. It’s a patriotism of promoting what’s best about America. It’s about striving to live up to ideals like freedom, equality, individuality, dissent, and tolerance, and challenging us to do better in areas where we hadn’t lived up to those ideals. It pits this style of patriotism squarely against the Nazi or “Know Nothing” style of jingoistic patriotism which wishes to stamp out all that is different. See episodes like “He’s Alive.” TZ also pits this style of patriotism against the McCarthyist style of patriotism in episodes like “The Eye of the Beholder.” Or look at the rebuke of jingoism in “No Time Like the Past.,” an episode written by Rod Serling. After time traveller Paul Driscoll fails in attempts to assassinate Hitler, stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, and effect the evacuation of Hiroshima, he goes to the 1880s, deciding to stay in that time and live in Homewood, Indiana. Like Serling, Driscoll served in World War II and experienced the horrors of combat. Once in Homewood, he’s subjected to a lecture by a middle aged banker who’s never fought in a war. The man is prone to lectures about how the country should aggressively start wars from Oregon to Australia and back to South America and “plant the flag, deep, high, and proud.” Echoing sentiments expressed by Hitler decades later, the man claims that a nation’s virility is measured by it’s fighting qualities. When the subject of Indians comes up, the man sneers at allowing Indians to have any land at all. He says that the country needed “twenty George Custers” and a hundred thousand men and they should have destroyed every “redskin” that faced them. Noting Driscoll’s lack of approval, the banker contemptuously asks Driscoll if he’s some kind of pacifist. Driscoll responds, “No, I’m some kind of sick idiot who’s seen too many young men die because of too many old men like you who fight their battles at dining room tables.” When the banker says he takes offense to that remark, Driscoll continues, “And I take offense at armchair warriors who don’t know what a shrapnel wound feels like or what death smells like after three days in the sun, or the look in a man’s eyes when he realizes he’s minus a leg and his blood is seeping out.” After fighting in one, Serling grew to hate war. His attitude toward war wasn’t of total pacifism. It was that people should seek to avoid it, but they should fight when they have to. That’s the attitude we see throughout The Twilight Zone. For example, we see it from the American soldiers in “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Purple Testament” to the moral of “The Passersby.”
The Twilight Zone often delves into American history. It honors the sacrifices of veterans without portraying war as a game to stand up and cheer about. It promotes some of America’s best ideals including freedom, tolerance, and individuality. So, yes, The Twilight Zone is more relevant to The Fourth than The Greatest American Hero is.
Cheer up, Mr. Clark. You’ve got potential. From what I’ve read, you’ve got what it takes to be a Syfy executive.
