7/22/2023 0 Comments Twilight zone the hitchhiker![]() The new movie takes off like a breeze, with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks-hitchhiker and driver-in a car at night on a dark country road, passing the time by playing trivia games, quizzing each other about the theme music for old TV series, and inevitably getting to “The Twilight Zone.” Written and directed by John Landis, this prologue is a beauty, but the happy rush of fright we get from it has to sustain us for a long stretch, because the first two episodes are embarrassments. ![]() There are probably millions of people who as kids learned the cliches from “The Twilight Zone.” The shows-there are a hundred and fifty-six of them-packaged an endearingly corny mixture of supernaturalism and civics. Serling was always trying to make a statement about the human condition it generally turned into a lesson in how to be a good neighbor. was so democratic that demons visited even the common man. Sometimes it might seem as if Rod Serling’s message were that the U.S.A. (The budget sometimes got so tight that for a while the directors weren’t allowed to use film they had to use videotape-which in its early years was a miserable medium-and stage the shows the way live television plays were staged.) By necessity, the mysterious was made homey, almost comforting. For the first two seasons, the half-hour shows were budgeted at sixty thousand dollars each that meant one day for rehearsal and three days for shooting. This was cottage-industry sci-fi fantasy. They were ordinary people-little guys, anonymous Americans-and the meagrely furnished shows had a sort of cardboard realism. There were few characters-sometimes no more than two, or even one, and rarely more than eight or nine. The original shows, which ran from late 1959 to 1964, and have been in rerun ever since, were ingenious partly because of how economically they got their effects. It’s a naïve (and dubious) sort of tribute that sets out to do essentially the same thing with the implicit expectation of doing it better what they’ve given us is simply a remake. ![]() I didn’t expect (or want) Twilight Zone-The Movie to be Borgesian, but I did rather hope that John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller-the four young directors who are paying homage to the TV series-would tease us with more artful macabre games than the ones of the old shows. When stories like the ones that were told on the Rod Serling TV show “The Twilight Zone” grow up, they become Borges fables-metaphysical hoodwinks.
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