Classic Video Review:
Twilight Zone
Eye of the Beholder
A Queer Critique
The series “Twilight Zone” is known as a classic and definitive era in television. The original TZ series pre-dates programs such as “Star Trek” and is recognised as being one of the pioneering adult SF shows on television.
In watching this particular episode from 1960, it is easy to see why TZ is remembered as a groundbreaking series.
“Eye of the Beholder” is an episode that features character Janet Tiler, a woman who is born with a particular handicap - ugliness. She is shown in hospital on her eleventh visit to seek medical assistance for her deformity. The medical staff shows great compassion and sympathy for her despite their country’s political determination to ruthlessly eliminate non-conformity.
“Some people want to live, no matter what,” says one nurse confidentially to another, showing their personal sympathy for Janet despite her severe social handicap. Director Douglas Heyes employs a particularly striking method of captivating our attention - he keeps all the characters faceless for most of the episode, as though to add to the bleakness and oppression all around. Poor Janet Tiler is wrapped in bandages, and the doctors and nurses who care for her also have their faces hidden by shadows, as though their compassion for Janet places them in some twilight zone between their political duties and their humanity - they are faceless minions of an oppressive society.
Naturally, being Twilight Zone, the episode features a twist at the end to demonstrate the adage that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Produced a generation ago, this episode can be seen as probably fairly risky and shocking in its day. Produced shortly after the American McCarthy witch hunts, it features a political leader who preaches conformity and who pledges to destroy difference as though it were a cancer. The series “Star Trek”, which came along half a decade later, was to proclaim itself as a show which used metaphor to make social and political comment. This episode of TZ could easily make the same claim - some years earlier.
As a metaphor, the episode’s message of how we perceive and treat difference could be applied to any possible number of forms of intolerance - age, race, political beliefs, gender, etc. However, the message, as presented in this episode, can be seen to have a pointed (if probably unintentional) application to issues of queer politics.
For a start, it becomes apparent that Janet has not had plastic surgery to correct her physical features, apparently due to medical complications. Her doctor regretfully informs her that, “You have not responded to shots, medications or any of the approved techniques.” This can be seen to have a parallel with the attitudes and treatment towards homosexuality at that time, in that it was usually seen as a mental disease or disorder to be cured by lotions, potions, shock treatment or aversion therapy rather than as an actual physical affliction to be surgically corrected.
Secondly, Janet’s predicament as a woman in bandages could easily be seen as a metaphor for a gay man or lesbian trapped in the closet: “I’m just one grotesque, ugly woman with a bandage on her face, with a special darkness all her own!”
She longs to go outside (to leave the closet?): “...To make believe I am normal!”
It also becomes quickly apparent that the worst feature of Janet’s “difference” is how she will be treated by society once her bandages come off. Like a queer person tempted to come out of the closet, she is expected to conform to society’s values. Her doctor reminds her that every possible attempt has been made to “cure” her: “Each of us is afforded as much opportunity as possible to fit into society.”
He warns her of the prospects of failure - there can be no further attempt to cure her. She is warned that failure of this final treatment would result in her being condemned to live in quarantine, along with people who share her “disability” and being kept apart from “normal” people. How closely this seems to resemble the practise of institutionalising queer people along with others deemed to be “mentally ill”! She even briefly contemplates death as an alternative to being a permanent social outcast.
Janet becomes angry and questions society’s values: “Who are you people? What is this State? The State is not God! It doesn’t have the right to make ugliness a crime!”
Later, the doctor confidentially admits to a nurse that he sees the beautiful person inside Janet, hidden beneath her ugliness. He expresses the same doubts as Janet: “What is the dimensional difference between beauty and something repellent? Skin deep - or less than that? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to be different?”
His nurse immediately warns him not to speak treason or to question popular morality: “This case has upset your balance - your set of values.”
Ultimately, all of them accept the morality of their society and times.
In the end, the doctors have tried every possible remedy to no avail, and Janet is banished to live in an isolated village with “others of her kind”. Mr Walter Smith, a man who is similarly afflicted, encourages Janet to adopt the attitude that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
The narrator, writer Rod Serling, also instructs the audience: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...a lesson to be learned in the Twilight Zone”. We are left with the injunction to question what is “normal” and to accept what is different. A brave moral for television in the early 1960s! An important metaphor for queer people of those times...and for people today as well.
Postscript: The author thanks Alan for pointing out this episode. Another notable episode is “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960). At risk of giving away important plot points, the metaphor in this episode could also have queer overtones - or have an important message for modern-day Australians regarding our national attitudes towards asylum seekers.
Further information on Twilight Zone videos or DVDs is available on these web sites:
DVD Planet -- http://www.dvdplanet.com
Image Entertainment -- http://www.image-entertainment.com
Pete's Twilight Zone -- http://members.fortunecity.com/tzarchive/tz/tzvideo.html