Visions from ‘The Twilight Zone’

Arlen Schumer – 1990

This is a pioneering work in pop culture studies – published the same year as Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae – as well as a unique object d’art in its own right.  Schumer, an illustrator of advertising and comics, created a book that is neither scholarly nor literary but visual and tactile.  It is not an analysis of Rod Serling’s seminal TV show that ran from 1959 to 1964 as much as it is a sensory appreciation.  Adorned with numerous frames from episodes of the show, the images are heavily pixelated, retaining the appearance of photographs taken of TV screens head on.  Interspersed with these is text made up of phrases from the show’s dialogue and arranged like poetry.  The words and images are focus on the surreal heritage behind The Twilight Zone, which fused existential European philosophy with plots and milieu usually associated with potboilers, from western landscapes to jazz-backed urban locales to claustrophobic interiors of spaceships.  The centerpiece of the book is a graphic-novel-style rendering of one of the show’s quintessential episodes, The Eye of the Beholder, masterfully directed by Douglas Heyes, in which a woman swathed in bandages struggles to accept that her physical infirmity will keep her ostracized from society unless a latest round of plastic surgery is successful.