Musings on The Twilight Zone Episode "He’s Alive”...

 

I really didn’t watch that much television when I was growing up until we moved to Dallas. For some of you out there this might seem a bit paradoxical since my father worked for Philips, a maker of televisions and other electronic equipment (not to mention a great and, now that it is gone, a much lamented classical music label).

The television we had in those days was one of those typical big and heavy black and white TV’s of the era. Me and my sister would sit as close to it as we could get. We did eventually get a colour television, though I don’t remember exactly when. It was probably sometime in the seventies.

The main reason I watched TV in those halcyon days was for the movies. As I have mentioned before in these blogs there were movies galore on Dallas’s five TV stations: CBS, NBC, ABC, and, in particular, on the two independents that broadcast in the city.

I did not like most of the shows on the network prime time schedules of CBS, NBC, and ABC during the 1960s and 1970s. I would watch Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, which my sister kind of liked,  but they weren’t my cup of tea. I watched The Ed Sullivan Show and other shows of that ilk for the music. I was there, for example, when the Beatles appeared on Sullivan. I watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for the same reason, for the music. I simply put up with what came before and after on these in order to see the week’s musical guests because I was a hard core pop and rock musicoaphile at the time. 

What I really liked on Dallas TV, beyond the movies, were the older shows on the independents and the local schedules of Dallas’s network stations. I loved and still love The Dick van Dyke Show. And I loved and still love The Twilight Zone. To me The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone were and are amongst the few shows on American over the air commercial television that can be spoken of in the same breath as the great British and English television shows. 

I was reminded of just how good and just how prophetic The Twilight Zone was and is recently during the Heroes and Icon (H&I) network's Rod, White, and Blue Twilight Zone marathon. There are, of course, many episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone that I have found memorable over the years. there was the episode centring on a operation on a woman’s face because she thought she was ugly (“Eye of the Beholder, 1960). There was the episode in which Billy Mumy thinks people into the corn field ("It’s a Good Life", 1961). There was the episode in which aliens use that good old time human fear of the other amongst those living on the all-American Maple Street ("The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", 1960). There was the episode about a concentration camp commander (Death’s Head Revisited”, 1961). And there was the episode about an American Adolf Hitler (He’s Alive”, 1963).

Like so any episodes in The Twilight Zone “He’s Alive” is deeply allegorical. In "He’s Alive” Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, who, as a boy, had a difficult childhood abused as he was by his father and neglected by his mother. He finds comfort in a Jewish neighbour who had survived the Dachau concentration camp and meaning in Naziism. With the aid of an unseen figure Vollmer becomes the head of the local Nazi movement thanks to the rhetorical and strategic skills (creating martyrs) he learns from his unseen mentor. Under his leadership Vollmer’s fascist movement goes from being a joke to being a serious movement. The twist—one always finds a wonderful twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episodes—is that the unseen figure is the real Adolf Hitler (listed as Adolph in the credits).

The allegory that is at the heart of this episode, of course, changes with the changing times. Today, thanks to changing history, the allegory in “He’s Alive” has taken on a different interpretive life. What does not change with the changing times, however, one Rod Serling, who wrote the episode notes, is that Hitler, the allegorical Hitler, the metaphorical Hitler, is always with us. 

And he, of course, is always with us in some way, shape, and form. Today in the United States we have yet another, to quote Serling’s introduction to “He’s Alive”, “little man who feeds off his self-delusions and who finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.” Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man was abused as a child. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man imagines himself as a man of steel. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man feeds off the adoration of the masses. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man uses fear of devilish others including immigrants, to spread his gospel of hate, sometimes unsubtly subtly). Unlike Vollmer but like Hitler this little man is a bully boy of the seventh grade order. Unlike Vollmer and like Hitler this bully boy little man has achieved power and is increasing his power as the countervailing power of courts, the legislative branch, the universities, the corporations and the media either aid and abet him or step aside allowing him, by doing this or remaining silent, to do his will. As Sterling predicted in 1963, in other words, what Hitler represented is always with us in the real world not just in the twilight zone.

On the isn’t it ironic side of the ledger, the actor who played a Nazi in “He’s Alive” and who was Jewish would go on to play a gestapo officer in Hogan’s Heroes. Additionally, Paramount, which owns CBS now, recently settled a legal suit with the litigious and blackailing Trump over the editing of an interview with Democrat presidential candiate Kamela Harris on its 60 Minutes series despite the fact that the suit has little in the way of merit. Paramount, you see, has a mega-dollar merger deal they want the President-King's assent to. This means that Paramount, like  Columbia University, Indiana University, and several legal firms, has become a Vichy like collaborator. History ever repeats?