The Twilight Zone was one of my favorite shows growing up. It questions what people, whether living in the 1960s or the early 2000s, take for granted, for instance, the earth’s favorable orbit around the sun. The Twilight Zone, a show that began in the late 1950s and continued into the 1960s, like other forms of art in that decade, challenged the previous decades, and the world that they created. The show is filled with people trapped by circumstance: apocalypse, or conformity. Midnight Sun questions the faith people have in the normal in continuity, as they did in the 1950s, and highlights easily everything can fall apart. The 1960s was the decade of the Vietnam War, of assassinations and change, of the unprecedented, and the Twilight Zone took care to depict this through art. Even the Dick Van Dyke show reflected changing times, though much was still left to be done in the name of gender equality. There was an admittance of the necessity to share household duties, rather than gender them, though I could have done without the implication that this should be done so that women could look better.
It is worth reflecting, however, only the lack of minorities on screen, and the effort to keep them out. Hollywood would prefer an actor with a painted face to one who was really black or Asian. Chapter 9 of Malcolm X’s biography describes a kind of –behind-the-scenes- existence that black people in the United States were put in to. They were the waiters and the sandwich sellers for white people, and then they retreated to their segregated neighborhoods. Many were excluded from service in World War II, and so were kept out of that world as well. And at home, it seems, black people were not often brought into the living rooms of America. There may be genies, witches, and an apocalypse, but not a black person.
It is worth considering what the implications were for minority children in this generation whose idea of what a family was, or what their future could be, involved being white.
-Rachel Smalle
Jerome Krase
March 22, 2017 — 12:27 pm
with your interest, I think you should read about the late Kenneth B. Clark (CCNY Professor) and Alvin Poussaint whose work provided, among other good things, the foundational ideas for Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop. Lots of recent work by others as well. In our readings, “The Moynihan Report” is also instructive although not progressively oriented.