An Early Run-In with Censors Led Rod Serling to ‘The Twilight Zone’
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Paramount+ contains every episode except season 5, episode 22 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bri...
> An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (French: La Rivière du hibou, lit. 'The Owl River') is a 1961 French short film, almost without dialogue. It was based on the 1891 American short story of the same name by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. It was directed by Robert Enrico and produced by Marcel Ichac and Paul de Roubaix with music by Henri Lanoë. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards. The film was later screened on American television as episode 22 of the fifth season of The Twilight Zone on 28 February 1964.
I daresay a good part of the readership here would have trouble imaging that to watch non-live TV shows you had to be sitting in front of a TV at a particular time and if you missed it, that might be it.
Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large, shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just wouldn't fly in general.
It is very funny having to explain to people why shows like "star trek: the next generation" basically had to reset everything by the end of the episode back into it's original state in order for syndication to work (episodes are basically played in any order aside from the few 2-parter episodes).
And, yes, syndication was a significant revenue stream that basically didn't work unless you could randomly drop into a Law and Order episode or pretty much any sitcom.
These days, whatever preferences some people may have for seeing films in a theater with an audience, attendance has dwindled to very few.
Movie buffs, especially in big cities, will still have repertory/revival showings of old films. But that's a different market -- they're not looking to see an old movie, they're looking to see that movie in a communal environment, and sometimes with additional features like a discussion panel afterwards.
Soap Operas had been managing to do this for decades before B5 showed up (although yeah, B5 did it a lot better)
Per Wikipedia:
Three years after its production, the film was screened on American TV as part of the fantasy/science fiction show The Twilight Zone. Producer William Froug had seen the film and decided to buy the rights to broadcast it on American television. The transaction cost The Twilight Zone $25,000, significantly less than the average of $65,000 they expended on producing their own episodes; however, Froug's purchase allowed for the film to be aired only twice (the first airing was on February 28, 1964). Consequently, it is not included on The Twilight Zone's syndication package, though it is included with the series on home video releases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
It's a bit more complicated for pre-1978 works, but that's the gist. It's been this way for a long time; if you want to shorten the copyright period, you must change the law.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_sta...
bonus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showin...
https://news.yahoo.com/disney-stock-drops-florida-republican...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-disney-ceo-oppo...
(not that I am endorsing Faux News, but you can rely on them to transcribe the party's agenda faithfully).
So many shows were shot on film; I wish they'd scan and re-release more of them.
Of course streaming is always worse than a BR because when you don't have a copy of the data, the content masters will always prefer to send you the cheapest and lowest-rate encoding that they can get away with... "How should we meet our 10% cost reduction KPI this quarter? I know, let's dump streaming quality again."
For now
Just a general thought though, Peele is a good enough creator that I don't expect him to fall into that trap.
[Haven't seen the Peele version yet, since no access to P+]
The classic example of that for me is a Star Trek episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefi...
But... he might turn out to be sort of "one-flavor," if not quite one-note.
But he really thought that TV was an important medium and there were things he wanted to say. He just found out that science fiction allowed him to get around censorship.
There are plenty of running themes he includes, but interestingly enough, baseball (he was a huge fan of the Dodgers) and religion have an existence in the Twilight Zone, which always fascinated me.
Good quote. It's been weird to see the belief growing the last few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs.
Such an art doesn't exist of course, and I'm thankful to see a classic acknowledge that not as a necessary deviation from an ideal, but as an ideal in its own right.
The Twilight Zone was always something of a mixed bag but, because it was episodic, from the distance of time we can easily pick and choose and skim the cream.
If you want a fun experiment, compare the video games Cyberpunk 20777 and Umurangi Generation: both released in 2020, and both make political statements. In one, the political statement is steeped throughout the game, but it gives the player enough space to draw their own conclusions; in the other, the political message is forced onto the player in a fairly haphazard way.
Dr Strangelove and Catch-22 are my favorite examples. The 60s US nuclear policy wasn’t really set by generals named Jack Ripper who want to inflict atomic hellfire because of baseless conspiracy theories… except that’s the chain of order the bureaucracy produced, with a longer timeframe and more words. Catch-22 is a comedy because the betrayals, idiocy, and soulless power moves all occur in one squadron with one or two links between people, instead of over the breadth of the theater and spread over many people so every step looks reasonable.
It’s very hard to make this kind of satire because condensing and heightening narratives like that makes it so, so easy to tilt things a little more in favor of your ideas, which immediately loses that ephemeral sense of reality and turns your satire into a sermon with clown makeup. This is why there are so many attempts and so few successes. I’d say Disco Elysium is one of those successes.
I see the pressure for art to be political to be somewhat unusual, precipitated by the times. In the 30s, there was a strain of artists who condemned any art that wasn't overtly political. This really seems the exception, probably a cyclically so.
There is a lot of religious art, and probably more normative in the West is art based on the artist's personal expression. Nevertheless, every artifact of culture can be placed within its context and declared political in some way.
Probably we can use the politicization of art as an indicator of a society's health, i.e. is this a culture that no longer believes in itself?
Everything is political. If you think a subject isn't political, it's because that subject isn't controversial to you personally.
If I paint a picture of a sailing ship cresting a wave, is my art political? I see beauty in the sprays of water, the upward cant of the ship, the sails full of wind, the gulls in the background, etc.
How about a bowl of fruit? Or a blacksmith forging horseshoes?
No, not everything is "political". Yes, politics affects most aspects of life, but that does not mean everything is political any more than "everything is sexual" or "everything is financial". Money and sex also permeate our lives in small and large ways. My painting of the fruit bowl is not a commentary on sex, nor is my blacksmith painting making any sort of statement on money.
Yes. Modern sailing ships are a symbol of wealth inequality, and historical ones have plenty of other controversial associations, depending on time period.
> How about a bowl of fruit?
Also yes. Access to fresh fruit is a political subject. Just look at maps of food deserts.
> Or a blacksmith forging horseshoes?
Stick around here for long enough and you'll find plenty of people arguing over the idealization of rural life, the roles of domesticated animals, etc.
Yes, a painting of fruit can be discussed within a political context.
But when we say a piece of art is political, we don't mean it can be seen within a political context. We mean that the piece of art is intended to be seen within a political context, or that the political context is blatantly apparent. Yes, this means whether or not something is political is subjective. That's how people use the word, just as they might describe something as angry or meaningful.
When people say "everything is political", just as they say "racism is prejudice plus power", they are discarding the in-practice meaning of these words and replacing them with meanings that were invented to support a particular cause.
So what statement am I making about any of these? My painting is of a ship, cresting a wave.
> Also yes. Access to fresh fruit is a political subject. Just look at maps of food deserts.
I didn't paint a food desert, or of anyone having or not-having access to the bowl in my painting. My painting is of fruit. In a bowl. What political statement am I making?
> Stick around here for long enough and you'll find plenty of people arguing over the idealization of rural life, the roles of domesticated animals, etc.
So what political statement is my painting making here?
If the viewer of any of these paintings is interpreting them through their own political lens, it does not mean the art itself is political. It means the viewer is.
Obviously if I paint a group of infantrymen menacing poor villagers who cower in fear, I'm making a statement. A lot of effort is required to present the menace, the fear, the looming and the cowering, the sneers and the pleas, etc. An apple sitting in a bowl presents none of those attributes.
Unless you want to make appreciation of natural beauty a political issue. I won't go there.
There is no such thing as 'food desert' that's a made up term.
Everywhere in supposed 'food deserts' there is access to 'fresh fruit'.
I think you've probably proven the point a bit, there really isn't anything political about a bowl of fruit, at least not in 2022 (maybe 1700 ...).
When you really mean to say is: "Radical ideologues can turn any issue into something".
That does not equate to material controversy.
That does say something about our twisted world, in which I think we have the ability to completely decontextualize any subject, point at some bit of 'fact' and make some kind of statement about it.
So by this mundane standard, most 'art' is not political. Much of it is, and that's fine.
For example, it would be incredibly hard to argue that the work of HP Lovecraft wasn't intensely political. Much of his work was strongly informed by his racist beliefs (even for the era), which waned as he grew older. Few people would argue that showing the horror of what happened to Emmett Till is political nowadays, but at the time it was a heavily politicized thing as the article mentions.
If you think something isn't political, then you might be lacking the context that makes it political. Some people believe including any sort of gay relationships in a tv series is political, others don't. How do you separate who is right, other than by your own judgment based on your own personal political compass?
I'd have to re-read Lovecraft's works, but I never got this impression myself when reading it. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, just underscoring that the context of the reader also matters as you say.
This also applies in the other direction: you might read "meaning" into some piece of literature or art that the original creator(s) never intended.
I think your linkage of the political with the controversial is telling and makes me think this is not the idea of "political" you have in mind. In which case, I hope I'm making the non-controversial statement that an artist's intent is distinct from the interpretation of the artist's work. Sometimes an artist's intent is political, sometimes it is not. Sometimes a political interpretation sheds light on a work, and sometimes it doesn't.
A long time ago, I recall one of my classmates telling me about a lecture he attended in which an analysis of Ancient Voices of Children was given with George Crumb in the audience. Afterwards, Crumb said he found the analysis fascinating and that he was unaware of the set of relationships discussed in the analysis until they had been pointed out, but none of those things were salient to him while he was composing the work.
So I think the artist's intent is privileged, while any mode of analysis or interpretation has the burden of proving its value in each particular case.
function_seven's observation that "To write "everything is political" is to water down the term "political" so much that it loses meaning." is the most insightful, but does not answer the question.
But the answer is simple. Those who write "art should be political", do so because they think art will advance their brand of politics. Anything that advances politics counter to theirs is, of course, not art, but propaganda.
... what? Art absolutely can be apolitical. A piece of music can exist without political meaning; a beautiful oil painting of a garden likely doesn't have politics attached to it. I could go on and on. Some art has something to say while other art exists simply for the sake of existing.
Just as a very simple explanation with this example: a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it if not everyone has recreational access to that garden. A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical", where a painting of it by someone who shouldn't be in it could be transgressive, or even threatening.
These things are small and may seem like a stretch but this is politics. It's kind of like that joke "gamers think there are two genders: male and political." What we think of as political or not is itself an embedding of politics, not a neutral external fact derived from the universe.
>... a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it IF not everyone has recreational access to that garden.
And if everyone does have recreational access to the garden?
>A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical"...
I am unsure how to take this sentence as anything but you agreeing that that piece of art is, in point of fact, apolitical. Please point me in the right direction if I'm off base here.
You can refute any specific thing I say about a garden or whatever. But there will always be things. Everyone has recreational access, but does everyone have recreational time? Can everyone get the paints needed to recreate it? etc.
Something is apolitical from a person's perspective when it embeds their political assumptions, basically. It's not necessarily wrong to describe something that way, but that assertion needs to carry with it a context within which it is neutral. Whether a specific viewer will receive it as political is a fact about the observer, not the piece of art.
That’s your key point. If someone wants to see politics in a work of art for which the artist imbued no politics of his own, they will find it. If someone wants to take offense to a statement, they will, regardless of speakers intent.
And so this really is a pointless discussion when you are saying that an elephant can be interpreted as a mouse, if the observer perceives it as such.
There is an artist's intent, and then there is interpretation of the work. You can't prevent someone from applying a political lens for interpretation -- oh, look, those people are out of place, etc. Sometimes this can shed light on the work, other times obscures it.
Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony was explicitly political and changed the dedication as political events unfolded. Later, Beethoven wrote the "Harp" quartet in a cellar in Vienna while it was being bombarded by Napoleon's army. The quartet is the last thing you'd imagine it to be under the circumstances of its composition, and maybe that was the point, in which case you can say there is perhaps an inverted political intent at play here, too. The political context adds a dimension to how I think of that quartet.
(I can't resist mentioning Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" -- not highly regarded and very corny and probably more on the order of what you expect from "political" art).
Now give me a political interpretation of Beethoven's C# minor quartet. I'd maybe have to take Taruskin's approach of considering it the work of not a single individual, but what was required from the whole society for such a work to have been produced. Everything from fiddle makers to music instruction to how arts were funded. At that point, I don't think the mode of analysis any longer has anything to do with the C# minor quartet.
I strongly endorse the idea of autonomous expression in art; when there is reason to believe the artist's intent was political, I'll follow along; when not, a political interpretation is useful only insofar as it sheds light on the work.
It's hard to square that with the enormous amount of censorship Serling faced.
To claim no art can be apolitical indicates either your field of view of art is massively limited in scope or that you just haven’t experienced enough art.
I'm not claiming that all art has an explicit political position. Just that all art exists in a context that is impossible to perfectly separate from politics.
You could say the same thing about anything. Every single piece of art is about oxygen. The artist had to breathe while creating the art; it's impossible to separate the art from the oxygen that enabled it. All art is oxygenated.
It's a pointless and un-insightful comment to make. Just because you can draw a tenuous connection between a peice of art and politics doesn't make the art about politics, and more than the art is about oxygen.
'Run the Jewels' is objectively political music. 'Pussy Riot' is political music.
The tunes on the LoFi girl channel are as apolitical as it can be. Lounge Jazz? Like...there are so, so many examples.
I seriously got a chuckle from your comment, though - made my day tbh. :)
Interestingly, this is a somewhat old belief. When you read about art history, a lot of these ideas about an artist being apolitical were associated with the classicist tradition and the French Academy, I believe. Later on, when the Impressionists and others challenged these views, they courted controversy for introducing political topics into their artwork in very subtle ways, from the way a woman posed, to what she wore, to even the colors that the painter used. So this is really an old debate that’s been around for a long time.
It later became more of an issue in the 20th century as the old ways of doing art began to be replaced with modern art. I recall reading about it in terms of censorship and the red scare in the 1950s. Remember, before the free speech movement in the early 1960s, artists and writers were frequently attacked by the establishment for addressing political issues, and artists and writers who steered clear of these things were often rewarded and elevated by the then status quo. Those who didn’t stop and challenged the establishment could be blackballed as we saw in Hollywood in the film industry at that time. This also famously applied to artists who tried to address LGBT issues, which were pretty much forbidden and met with punishment.
These people were frequently derided as "agitators" in the popular media of the time, a term that is rarely heard these days. Years before this, musicians like Billie Holiday had tried to address racism in the US, and the FBI went after her and other musicians who tried to raise awareness about the hardships they faced and they destroyed their careers. In many ways, just like today, elements of the US government acted like morality police, and their litmus test was politics. If you were a political artist of any kind, you were put on a watchlist and monitored. My understanding is that this is still true in many countries today.
There’s also the popular and somewhat established conspiracy theory about abstract expressionism. On the one hand, some experts argue that it was a form of soft power to fight communism and to promote the American value of freedom of expression. But I have an altogether different take.
In an earlier period of my life, I spent a lot of time investigating abstract expressionism and immersing myself in it. And I came to the conclusion that it could have been viewed as apolitical in one sense (and psychological in another), which would also work as a propaganda/disinformation tool to disengage the audience from current events and political concerns, in effect fulfilling the goals of its proponents, such as mitigating social and political dissent during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the various cultural issues at the time.
Perhaps this is one reason why, during the height of the post-9/11 period, during two wars, a Great Recession, a housing crisis, an opioid epidemic, and the loss of personal privacy, there was a resurgence of apolitical abstract expressionism in the US. Maybe people were attracted it to because it took their minds off of real issues.
When you spend a lot of time around abstract expressionism, you realize that it acts as a mental palette cleanser of sorts, and diverts your cognitive attention away from political controversy and social concerns. If this truly was a soft weapon as the conspiracy theorists claim, that it could possibly act to pacify people and keep them silent. My take only, of course.
Given Depp/Heard, Smith/Rock, etc., does anyone really think that artists are morally superior?
To suggest that art cannot be 'apolitical' is ridiculous.
Most art is fairly apolitical.
A lot of art doesn't even make a statement.
And FYI much of the criticism over 'politicization' of art, generally has to do with 'which politics' the artists has chosen, which medium, and which corporate giant etc..
Political beliefs when parroted as a clear cut, right/wrong for every situation is what makes people's stomach churn to projectile levels.
Political beliefs when presented as a complex flaw of the human condition that makes us all realize we're better off burning it all to the ground and sleeping on grass again... then enacting a system to severely punish anyone who tries to bring it all back, which would require a group to enact said system with then another group to oversight that group... oh shit wait...