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First, a public service announcement: this entry is not about The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. Just so you know.
Since around the time PJ was born I have been working my way through the original Twilight Zone on DVD. I've been doing it on my own, because my partner is not a fan. I talk to her about it anyway, though, and the other day, when we were discussing an episode called I Shot An Arrow into The Air, she came up with a very interesting interpretation of it. In order to tell you what it was, I will have to totally ruin the plot for you, so if you someday plan to see this episode, read no further.
Here's the summary: the very first manned rocketship blasts off from Earth into space, then disappears from radio contact. It crashes in a barren desert, which the captain's log identifies for us as an "uncharted asteroid" millions of miles from Earth. Half the crew dies in the crash; of the four survivors, one is mortally wounded. As summed up by the captain, the situation is dire: they have five gallons of water, it's 120 degrees in the shade, they're in an uninhabited desert which stretches for miles in every direction, they can't call for help, and even if they could, they've just crashed the only spaceship capable of getting help from Earth to them. Basically, the captain figures there's no way they're ever going to get home, and if they can't find water and food they'll last maybe two weeks in this joint.
From that point on the episode becomes a psychological study of three characters responding to a desperate situation. The captain, Donnelly, acts exactly as he would on Earth, giving orders and enforcing discipline and trying to ensure the survival of his crew for as long as possible. The blond crewman--I think his name is Parsons--responds well to this; his crewmate Corey doesn't. Corey takes the view that ensuring his own survival is job #1, and that he has to do that at the expense of his crewmates. His first action is to try to stop Parsons from 'wasting' water on their dying crewmate, and it gets uglier from there. Donnelly sends Corey and Parsons off to try to find food/water/shelter/a way out; Corey comes back alone and with a suspiciously full canteen of water. Donnelly, shrewdly guessing that Corey killed Parsons and took his water, makes Corey take him to find Parsons's body. In fact, when they get to the spot, Parsons is still alive, but has only the strength left to draw a cryptic symbol in the sand before dying for real. Corey then shoots Donnelly dead, takes his water, and heads up the hill, all the while delivering a speech about how Donnelly "brought the rule book to the wrong place." After climbing for quite a while, Corey crests a ridge and discovers that the symbol Parsons was trying to draw was in fact a telephone pole. Yes, kids, the spaceship actually crashed on Earth, in the American southwest, and maybe 25 miles from an interstate.
My partner's initial reaction to this summary was contempt. She refused to accept the idea that three trained astronauts could possibly fail to realize that they were still on earth. (I admit that Serling seems to have had an extraordinarily weak grasp of basic science. In the episode Midnight Sun, for instance, the earth is jolted out of its proper orbit and this causes the sun to shine 24 hours a day, so Serling evidently didn't realize that day and night are caused by the earth's rotation and not its orbit.) I said, well, look, it's experiential. You're watching the show, and you accept the premise because the characters accept it, and also because by now you've seen so many TV shows and movies that use the deserts of the American southwest to represent barren alien landscapes. (Although I did not predict the "twist," I did spend the first part of the episode wondering where in Arizona they shot the thing. I thought it was neat that the "twist" reveals that in fact the episode was not just shot in the American desert, it was also set there.) What matters is how the characters deal with the predicament that they believe they are in.
The "twist" ending, apart from being a signature Twilight Zone move, is Serling's way of forcing Corey to recognize the monstrosity of his selfishness. (The audience has no choice but to recognize it, as Serling's voiceover has already excoriated Corey at length during his long climb to the top of the ridge.) What Corey justified to himself when he thought he was millions of miles from Earth suddenly seems unconscionable when he's looking down at the highway that's going to lead him straight back to human civilization. And you as the viewer are left wondering why that should be.
This made my partner somewhat more interested in the story, but she still couldn't get past the idea that they should have been able to figure out that they were still on earth. While she chewed on that, I explained that my reading of the ethics of the situation was a little different from what the episode seemed to be pushing. From my point of view, had Corey actually been on that asteroid, his actions would have been even less justifiable. At best, his ruthlessness could only buy him a few more days of life. Given that there's no hope of long-term survival, why be ruthless? Why not do the right thing, since doing the wrong thing wins you nothing but a few more days of agony? And you could apply this existentially: since none of us do actually "survive"--no matter how long you live, you will die--why should survival be the goal that motivates all of our actions? Why not be kind to each other intsead of killing each other as we try to live just a tiny bit longer?
By this point my partner had decided that the question was not "How could the astronauts be so stupid?" but rather, "Why would Serling set up the episode so that any reasonable viewer could see that they should have been able to figure out that they were still on Earth and thus could still be rescued?" And the answer is that it shows you how hard Corey has to work to rationalize what he's doing. If he wanted to, she said, he'd be able to figure out that they could all survive long enough to be rescued. But he refused to let himself figure this out because he wanted to justify doing what he was going to do.
"It's like those excercises they used to give you where you have six people in a lifeboat big enough for five and you have to figure out who to throw overboard," she said. I knew exactly what she was talking about, because I too had been given 'problems' like that in school. Indeed, it must still be going on, because I remember a very long, very outraged thread here in the DU forums that began with a DU parent posting about her child having been given an exercise just like that in grade school. Now that I'm older I can see what's sinister about asking children to rank people with different demographic features and skill sets in terms of who most deserves to live; at the time I just got frustrated and unhappy trying to solve the equation the way I tried to solve all the other ones they presented me with. The connection is that in these exercises, you're presented with a premise which you are not allowed to challenge, which then forces you to sanction behavior normally considered unethical. Corey essentially does this to himself by failing to critically examine his assumption that the desert they've landed in is an "asteroid" which mysteriously has Earth-quality gravity and atmosphere--and that therefore there is no hope of rescue.
And then my partner says, "Maybe the real moral is that when you're caught in a moral dilemma you should always question the premise. Like with the ticking time bomb scenario. If torturing someone were the ONLY way to find the bomb and save all the people, would you do it? You're not allowed to challenge the premise, and that's because the whole point of the exercise is to force you to endorse torture."
For a long time I've been very frustrated about how effective this "ticking time bomb" crap seems to have been in softening up people's attitude toward torture. But I had never looked at it precisely that way before. Most critiques of the "ticking time bomb" hypothetical point out the extreme unlikeliness of such a scenario ever occurring. But they don't point out that even if one of the conspirators in a bomb plot did happen to be apprehended while the bomb was still in its hiding place counting down to doomsday, and you were faced with the choice, "Do I torture him, or let all those innocent people die?", it would still be a false choice. Because in a hypothetical, the premise--the condition that torturing this informant is the ONLY way to save all thos epeople from the bomb--is a given. But in real life, it could not possibly be a given. How could any mortal being ever know that the ONLY way to save those lives would be to torture this individual? You're not omniscient; you can't imagine all the possibilities. It could easily be that torturing this person does not save any of those lives. Perhaps your victim doesn't know where the bomb is, or refuses to talk, or gives you the wrong information either deliberately or accidentally. And even if you had some kidn of guarantee that torture would extract the right information, how could you know that was the ONLY way to save the potential victims? It could be there's an entire team of British secret service guys already working the problem and poised to swoop in and defuse the bomb and they just never told you about it. It could be that the bomb is defective and will not go off at all. It could be that if you go back to your office and get on the phone and talk to your colleague Frank over in Homeland Security he'd tell you hey, you know what, suspicious activity was reported today in these 50 locations, let's evacuate them all, and then the bomb goes off in an empty building. In the land of hypothetical moral dilemmas, it is possible to know that torture is the only way to solve the problem posed to you. In the land of actual situations, you can never know that.
If you can successfully challenge the premise, then you can choose not to torture and not to let all those people die. Just the way Corey, had he been willing to look up and see the jetstreams, might have figured out that he could stay loyal to his crewmates and live.
I thought this connection was fascinating, partly because it dovetails with another major Twilight Zone precept, which is the necessity of accepting death. There are many, many TZ episodes featuring protagonists who are dead but don't realize it, and who have to be persuaded, usually by either a supernatural figure or another dead person, to relinquish the fantasy of being alive and escape from the nightmarish borderland in which their refusal to move on has trapped them. Many of these characters are aware of the event that killed them but wrongly believe that they have survived it. Fear of death generates the fantasy of permanent survival--the belief that if you work hard enough at it you might actually live forever. In this episode, we see one of the implications of that fantasy: Corey's willingness to kill in order to "survive" is based on the premise that he actually can survive in any meaningful sense. The premise that this episode, and many of the "they don't know they're dead" episodes, calls into question is one that has motivated a great deal of our post-9/11 insanity: that survival is always the highest good, and that any patently immoral action becomes justifiable if it might prolong your life. TZ challenges this premise by constructing so many plots in which embracing the fact of your own death offers the only way out of your nightmare and into the happy resolution. Maybe, the suggestion seems to be, it'd be better if, instead of assuming that if we are ruthless enough we can survive, we really came to terms with the fact that nobody is getting out of this alive.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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