Twists and THE TWILIGHT ZONE: "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and "Nightmare As A Child"

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"Ring-a-Ding Girl" (1963), written by Earl Hamner, Jr. Directed by Alan Crosland, Jr.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE was always inconsistent. Its great episodes remain powerful and beautifully-crafted to this day, but the quality of the rest veered from mediocre to downright painful.

A primary strength and weakness of the series is Rod Serling. Many of his episodes become sermons on the hatefulness of human beings; others depend on a final moment twist that undermines any point the story might have made. This is why, for me, his best episodes avoid any twist. "And When The Sky Was Opened," for example, relies on nothing more, and nothing less, than a relentless march towards doom.

Elsewhere, in stories by Serling and his other TWILIGHT ZONE writers, the twist does no damage because it changes nothing about the fate of its people ("The Midnight Sun"), or because the twist appears halfway through the story, which then explores the implications of that twist ("In His Image"). But one story that seems at first to rely on a twist, employs, instead, a delayed revelation of context -- a context that cannot be explained.

This episode, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" by Earl Hamner, Jr, caught me off guard when I first watched it decades ago, and works even more for me today.

Many commenters online have complained that the story makes no sense. I disagree; I would argue that if the supernatural existed, we should not expect it to follow our expectations of causality, nor should we expect the supernatural to conform to our notions of time. What makes "Ring-A-Ding Girl" so haunting for me is that it relies not on causality, not on the consistent passage of time, but on consistency of character.

The protagonist of the story is an actress who, like so many people who perform to crowds, has a public and a private face. Here we see both: the false bravado of the public face, the confusion, the anxiety of the private face. Apparently baffled by what is going on, this actress begins to improvise, and the results of her decision become clear only at the story's end.

In the wrong hands, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" could have become a sentimental, consolatory script. Instead, I find the story honest and sad, and its final shot of the protagonist both eerie and heart-breaking.

Even if we could never understand the supernatural, we might still have the freedom to respond to it in our own fashion, for evil, for good, as ourselves. This would seem to be the point of "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and for me, it makes perfect sense.

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"Nightmare As A Child" (1960), written by Rod Serling. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.

Very few TWILIGHT ZONE episodes actually scare me. "And When The Sky Was Opened" never fails to scrape a nerve, but another episode that unsettles me is "Nightmare As A Child." As a ghost story that deals less with the supernatural than with the psychological, it uncovers a sense of dread in its down-to-Earth aspects of lost memory and life-long stalking.

It also veers away from the disappointment of a final twist. Most viewers will understand what is going on within five minutes; I suspect that Serling knew this, and so he relied not on a twist, but on a mid-story confirmation of what the viewer has already grasped. This confirmation allows the story to move beyond its ghost elements into a more disturbing tale of psychopathology, with no lapse of tension.

One of the biggest challenges of this approach is to find an effective ending. While I do feel that Serling could have dreamed up a stronger finale, I can accept the one offered here as appropriate to the story and to its implications. Elsewhere, the episode benefits from its acting, its blocking of action, its direction, and especially from a quiet score by Jerry Goldsmith, whose music oscillates between deceptive gentleness and sinister evocation of a threat that lurks in the background while waiting to strike: a description that applies well to the whole episode.

Jason E. Rolfe reviews DOORWAYS UNFORESEEN

A book's first review is always a welcomed event, especially when that review comes from a writer of distinctive short stories like Jason E. Rolfe.

"It’s my opinion that at any one time there are countless writers writing countless versions of the exact same story. Regardless the reason, this sameness often comes at the cost of a writer’s true creativity. Said another way, writers often sacrifice what they really want to say and how they truly want to say it to the false god Sameness. I think that is why the writers I most admire stand out. They dare to be different, to be unique. They write exactly what they want to write, how they want to write it and sameness be damned! They experiment and in doing so they become closer to who they are meant to be as writers. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because they are writing for themselves rather than for the expectations of genre or the average reader. It’s been my experience that the writers who write for themselves are the ones who ought to be read most by us. Mark Fuller Dillon is no exception.

"Mark wrote Doorways Unforeseen because it was in him to write. He wrote it the way he did, in iambic pentameter, because that is exactly what he wanted to do. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. It’s actually difficult and quite gutsy. Of course, as is Mark’s habit, he wrote each word, each poetic phrase with the careful precision of a master craftsman. Like an Oulipian working within the confines of constraint he has managed to tell us truly terrifying tales. "They Collect," and "A Flimsy Vinyl Door" in particular left me (and leave me still) both genuinely unsettled as a reader, and envious as a writer for whom poetry has remained an ever elusive talent. Rest assured that poetry has not eluded Mark Fuller Dillon."

Dear Fiction Writers of Today: Revise!

Dear fiction writers of today,

I love to read, and I would love to read your stories, but I need your help.

When you revise your manuscripts, when you cut out all material that is needlessly repetitive, wastefully superfluous, when you reduce five hundred words to one hundred, please pay a similar attention to grammar and usage, to the sound and meaning of your sentences, and to the unblocked, immersive flow of your narratives.

In too many stories of today, I find ambiguous modifiers, ambiguous antecdents, and even, within multiple clauses, ambiguous subjects.

I see the misapplication of too many present participles, when what you need is the simple past tense. You might also be tempted to support a weak verb with a present participle afterthought, but what you actually need is a lively main verb.

If you choose your nouns and verbs for precision and for vivid clarity, you will find less need for adjectives and adverbs, for subordinate clauses that prop up the main clause in the ways that flying buttresses prop up cathedrals.

Explain when you must, but only when you must. Readers are smart enough to understand implication. They know that when you say 2+2, what you actually mean is four. You can also rely on a reader's empathy. Set up conditions for an emotional response, for epiphany, and a reader will feel it. You have no need to spell out the obvious.

When you place a reader inside your story as a participant guided by a consistently-maintained viewpoint character, when you allow this reader to follow events without interruption, just as your viewpoint character would, when you allow the reader to be disturbed or surprised by the same discoveries made by this character at the same time, then you have a strong chance of hooking this reader's attention. A reader grabbed is a reader who keeps on reading.

Revise with a reader's ear. Revise aloud. This allows you to catch unwanted alliteration, unwanted assonance, end rhymes in clauses or sentences, repetitive rhythms, and ugly, clashing consonants. Always assume that your readers will hear this noise, and run away from it as they would from a mistuned marching band.

Sir Thomas Browne. Line engraving by P. Vanderbank, 1683. Click for a better jpeg.

Please note that these recommendations can apply to any style. You might cut without mercy for a style as naked as the writing of H. E. Bates, Edith Wharton, or Sarah Orne Jewett; you might construct and paint a style as ornate as Clark Ashton Smith's, Elizabeth Bowen's, or William Sansom's. Either way is fine, as long as you control the result. For a non-fiction example, think of Thomas Browne. You might raise an eyebrow at his latinate vocabulary, but notice how he relies on verbs to propel the sentences. Notice how his clauses remain clear despite their boxes-within-boxes complexity. No matter how complicated his prose might become, Browne maintains control.

The means of control are the basic principles mentioned here, and these controls will help you to find and to keep readers.

You will also keep me, with my gratitude.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT: Serial Versus Film

Cover by Bryan Kneale, 1960. Click for a better jpeg.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967) is by no means a bad film, and if accepted on its own terms, it could easily be considered good. Yet despite its virtues, for me, it cannot match the scope and unsettling mood of its television source.

Broadcast in six episodes by the BBC from 1958 to 1959, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT remains one of the best TV serials I have watched; only I, CLAUDIUS and CHERNOBYL have rivalled it.

The Hammer Film adaptation does what it can to honour the source, and at certain points, it compares favourably. Roy Ward Baker directs crowd and panic sequences with all of the skill he had displayed in 1958's A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (by far the best Titanic film I have seen). Lead actors Andrew Keir and James Donald are as good as Andre Morell and Cec Linder, their counterparts in the TV serial, and I would hardly be surprised if many viewers preferred the film leads.

Andrew Keir. Click for a better jpeg.

Yet even with its lower budget and limited technical resources, the TV serial comes across as the "bigger" production, with a huge cast, and with visual effects often better than those used in the film. In particular, the design and construction of the TV aliens go far beyond anything seen in the film, and they come to life more convincingly in the serial's "optic-encephalograph" sequence.

Above all, the TV serial gains from its extended running time of three-and-a-half hours. Nigel Kneale was always at his best when he had room to explore the implications of his ideas. That was true in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT serial, but even more so in the TV version of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. In six episodes, Kneale took a small event and then built upon it, built upon it, built upon it, until it involved nothing less than the fate of humanity. The film version does what it can with Kneale's ideas, but seems rushed and cramped in comparison, with less time to linger on the sinister details. The film is also forced to toss away much of the serial's nuance, those elegant moments when Kneale played with ideas for unexpected results. (A case in point: what Quatermass finds in the serial's pit is intriguingly more elaborate, more strange, than what he finds in the film.)

Andre Morell and Cec Linder. Click for a better jpeg.

The serial brought other advantages. Kneale's Quatermass plays were novels for television, with varied characters from different walks of life squabbling, cooperating, and horribly dying; the film cannot match the scope of Kneale's original. The music of Trevor Duncan works more effectively in the serial than does the music of Tristram Carey in the film. The coda of the serial, which provides a haunting final statement of the story's point, was cut from the film, and the result feels like a missing tooth to a questing tongue.

In the end, viewers who come to the film without knowledge of the TV serial (or of Kneale's published teleplay), will most likely find a lot to appreciate, but I love the scale and sinister details of the TV serial too much to accept the film on its own terms. That is my limitation; it might not be yours.

Chant Of The PMC Media

Under the dripping upas tree,
I scapegoat you, you scapegoat me.
Mired from sea to boiling sea,
We kiss the feet of the DNC.