How 'The Twilight Zone' Unmasked The Polite Banality Of Fascism
A closer look at ‘The Eye Of The Beholder'
Just before Christmas, Donald Trump previewed the lumps of coals transgender Americans can expect to receive during his second administration.
“We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools and we’re going to get it out of our schools very fast,” Trump said at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona, where the receptive crowd cheered the promised misery of people who’ve done nothing to them. “I will defend religious liberty. I will restore free speech and I will defend the right to keep and bear arms.”
It’s especially alarming that he reassures his bigoted supporters that they’ll maintain their right to form an armed lynch mob. He starts with “who” he wishes to exterminate and ends with “how.”
Many prominent liberals insisted during the campaign that Trump’s anti-trans rhetoric was just a “distraction” from his lack of actual policies. This was a willfully naive position. Trump promoted anti-trans positions because he intended to impose anti-trans policies. Whenever you hear him speak about trans people, he sounds like the fascist Leader from The Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder.”
‘A Private World Of Darkness’
Even people who’ve never seen a Twilight Zone episode can recall the overall plot to “The Eye of the Beholder”: Janet Tyler has undergone medical treatment — her eleventh! — in a desperate attempt to look normal. Janet’s face is fully covered in bandages throughout the episode — what Serling describes as her “private world of darkness.” She’s consistently described as hideous underneath her shroud — a “pitiful twisted lump of flesh.” When the bandages are removed, the attending physician and nurses declare the results a failure, but the audience sees that Janet is beautiful, by our standards. Even her blonde hair is perfectly styled! (Donna Douglas plays Janet for her cover girl reveal, but a bandaged Maxine Stuart delivers a truly gut-wrenching performance.)
The classic twist is that everyone else looks monstrous, again by our standards — sunken eyes, twisted lips, and pig-like snouts. It’s like that first glimpse in the mirror on New Year’s Day. You see, beauty is in “the eye of the beholder,” but Serling’s message is much deeper and more provocative than this simple truism.
“The Eye of the Beholder” isn’t an early version of Nip/Tuck, which satirized our culture’s unhealthy obsession with an imagined physical ideal. Janet doesn’t suffer from body dysmorphic disorder. The “flaws” in her appearance aren’t imagined. She is objectively different and that difference makes it almost impossible for her to live a normal life. Janet says, “The very first thing I can remember is a little child screaming when she looked at me. I never wanted to be beautiful. I never wanted to look like a painting. I never even wanted to be loved.I just wanted ... I just wanted people not to scream when they looked at me.”
It was a child who reacted in genuine horror to Janet’s face, not a bully shouting cruel insults at her. Yet, Janet doesn’t want to leave this society. She’s still a person who needs to live among other people. “I could try,” she tells her doctor. “I could wear a mask or this bandage. I wouldn’t bother anyone. I’d just go my own way. I’d take a job. Any job.”
Janet would willingly condemn herself to her “private world of darkness,”permanently, but that’s not good enough for the state, which considers her very existence offensive. Janet must conform or society will remove her entirely.
We learn that the state has “generously” provided free medical intervention for Janet, but 11 treatments are the limit. This is not due to any actual concern for Janet’ well-being. That’s just how this society’s health care system works. I can imagine it having come up for a vote, with the 11 treatment maximum a necessary concession to gain the deciding vote from this society’s Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.
Vanity doesn’t drive Janet. She wants to look “normal” because that’s the only way she can literally survive. People with anti-trans views might compare this to gender-affirming care. They claim that vulnerable children are manipulated into seeking needless surgery. However, there is no “mandatory transgender” legislation, and the doctors aren’t enabling a “delusional” Janet for their own profit.
No, the more apt comparison is to conversion therapy, which is intended to “repair” someone’s sexual or gender identity. The metaphor works even better than plastic surgery when the doctor cries out, “No change at all!”
“Up to now you haven’t responded to the medication or to the shots or any of the proven techniques,” the doctor explains to Janet prior to removing her bandages. “Frankly, you've stumped us, Miss Tyler. Nothing we've done so far has made any difference at all.”
Janet still looks like Marilyn Monroe (no offense to Donna Douglas but that’s probably what they were going for in 1960) because this was never really about giving someone a new nose and more flattering cheekbones. You can’t forcibly change someone’s identity.
And it’s clear that deep down, Janet doesn’t want to change.
“Who are you people anyway?” she angrily demands. “What is this State? Who makes up all the rules and the statutes and the traditions? The people who are different have to stay away from other people who are normal. The State isn’t God, doctor. The State is not God. It hasn’t the right to penalize people for an accident of birth. It hasn't the right to make ugliness a crime.”
‘A single morality! A single frame of reference! A single philosophy of government!’
Serling, in 1960, uses “ugliness” as the metaphor for any difference a tyrannical society deemed unacceptable. In his closing narration, he says:
Now the questions that come to mind: “Where is this place and when is it?” “What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm?" You want an answer? The answer is it doesn't make any difference, because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence. On this planet or wherever there is human life – perhaps out amongst the stars — beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned in the Twilight Zone.”
Yet, Serling’s script contains extensive world building. This is a society that once embraced freedom and diversity but has now willingly rejected it. Janet’s doctor believes in the state’s bigoted policies, even if he rationalizes them in a soothing tone.
“You realize, of course, Miss Tyler, why these rules are in effect?” he says. “Each of us is afforded as much opportunity as possible to fit in with society. In your case, think of the time and money and effort expended to make you look …. normal….. the way you’d like to look.”
The gaslighting is insidious: Janet wants to look “normal” because society won’t permit her the dignity to look like anything else.
“The State is not unsympathetic,” the doctor insists. “Your presence here in this hospital attests to this. It’s doing all it can for you. But you’re not being rational, Miss Tyler. You can’t expect to live any kind of life amongst normal people.”
The so-called “normal” people don’t recognize Janet’s humanity. Even her attending nurse, who calls her “honey” and holds her hand, drops her veneer of kindness like a mask once she leaves the room. “If it were [my face], I'd bury myself in a grave someplace,” she tells another nurse. “Poor thing. Some people want to live no matter what!” She doesn’t find Janet’s perseverance admirable, just pathetic.
The Leader’s televised broadcast was probably intended to recall George Orwell’s 1984, but now you can hear words very much like his own on Fox News primetime or the Republican National Convention:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight I shall talk to you about glorious conformity ... about the delight and the ultimate pleasure of our unified society.
The Leader’s full speech in Serling’s original script is especially prescient.
You recall, of course, that directionless, unproductive, over-sentimentalized era of man's history when it was assumed that dissent was some kind of natural and healthy adjunct to society. We also recall that during this period of time there was a strange oversentimentalized concept that it mattered not that people were different, that ideas were at variance with one another, that a world could exist in some kind of crazy, patchwork kind of makeup, with foreign elements glued together in a crazy quilt.
Last weekend, author JK Rowling said, “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’” She sounds like this society’s Leader, who in Serling’s original script denounces the “permissiveness” of a past age that respected difference rather than exterminating it:
They will scream at you and rant and rave and conjure up some dead and decadent picture of an ancient time when they said that all men are created equal! But to them equality was an equality of opportunity, an equality of status, an equality of aspiration! And then, in what must surely be the pinnacle of insanity, the absolute in inconsistency, they would have had us believe that this equality did not apply to form, to creed. They permitted a polyglot, accidentbred, mongrellike mass of diversification to blanket the earth, to infiltrate and weaken.
There’s no evidence that the Leader is a dictator or that a free society didn’t willingly put him into power. When the doctor briefly wonders why Janet can’t live freely as herself, the nurse warns him that he’s talking “treason.”
“This case has upset your balance, your sense of values!” she says.
It’s very much like Jim Crow America, and while Janet responds violently to the Leader’s MAGA rally rant, the “normal” people don’t seem bothered or even surprised. They don’t act as if they’re personally living under the boot of a fascist regime. No, it’s quite possible the Leader fully represents them in body and soul. He’s harsher, more overtly cruel, than the otherwise gentle doctor, but the doctor might’ve still voted for him to lower his taxes or impose the type of society he prefers.
Janet leaves the hospital with someone who shares her “disability,” and many viewers in 1960 and even today might’ve considered this a “happy ending.” Earlier, Janet’s doctor tells her that if her final surgery doesn’t achieve the “desired result,” she’d be sent to live with her own “kind,” and she immediately rejects the inherent lie behind “separate but equal.”
“Congregated, doctor? You don’t mean congregated, you mean segregated. You mean imprisoned. You’re talking about a ghetto now. A ghetto designed for freaks!”
We can only imagine how this society would treat people who live in this “special area.” Serling, a World War II veteran, knew firsthand where such marginalization eventually led.
And it wouldn’t stop with Janet and others of her “kind.” This is a state, after all, that exterminates “undesirables.” The doctor claims this occurs only in extreme cases, but the Leader revels in his extremism:
Well, we know now that there must be a single purpose! A single norm! A single approach! A single entity of peoples! A single virtue! A single morality! A single frame of reference! A single philosophy of government!
Although the overwhelmingly majority might’ve once agreed that “pig snouts good, Marilyn Monroe face bad,” there are still minute differences among them and the Leader has vowed to “cut out all that is different like a cancerous growth!” Soon, perhaps even Janet’s nurse or doctor will find themselves imprisoned in bandages or shipped away.
It is essential in this society that we not only have a norm, but that we conform to that norm. Differences weaken us. Variations destroy us. An incredible permissiveness to deviation from this norm is what has ended nations and brought them to their knees. Conformity we must worship and hold sacred. Conformity is the key to survival.
It’s easy to dehumanize a small group — say, just 1.1 percent of the population, but it doesn’t end there. The “out” group only grows, while the oppressor class might shrink but steadily grows in force so that numbers no longer matter. What was once a democracy has become a single state of tyranny.
You know, it is absolutely dispiriting to see lessons we even learned in the 1960s from pop culture discarded. So many people, allergic to learning as long as their bigotries are catered to.
SER with yet another incisive analysis of media that even in the “Good ol' days” gave us important lessons.
𝑰𝒕’𝒔 𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒆𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒛𝒆 𝒂 𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒑 — 𝒔𝒂𝒚, 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 1.1 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒐𝒑𝒖𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒊𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 “𝒐𝒖𝒕” 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒑 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒔, 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒑𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒐𝒓 𝒄𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒔 𝒎𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒔𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒌 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒍𝒚 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒄𝒆 𝒔𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒏𝒖𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒏𝒐 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓 𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒂 𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒚 𝒉𝒂𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒂 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒚𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒚.
This is what some people never seem to understand. They may be included in the "in" group at first, but then find themselves part of the "out" group. Some trump voters are discovering that right now, and he hasn't even been inaugurated yet. If those folks could just let go of the endless culture war issues, they might just start to realize that the repubs have lied to them, and that Dems have good things to offer them and the nation. Yeah, I am probably too optimistic.