“Eye of the Beholder”: First aired: November 11th, 1960 Written by: Rod Serling Directed by: Douglas Heyes Starring: Maxine Stuart (Janet Tyler under the bandages), Donna Douglas (Janet Tyler revealed), and William D. Gordon (Doctor Bernardi) “Eye of the Beholder” is likely the most popular episode of The Twilight Zone, and is commonly remembered for its shocking twist. But even if the viewer knows what’s to come, the moment of revelation in this episode penetrates deeper than the surface—deeper than, shall we say, “skin-deep.” This is one you feel in your heart, as well as your head. This is an episode that leaves you thinking long after Serling’s voice has faded into the classic Twilight Zone guitar riff.
In the next scene we are dropped into a conversation between two nurses, as one informs the Doctor that patient 307 (Miss Tyler) is resting comfortably. These two nurses go on to gossip about Miss Tyler, saying she is a poor thing for having such a face as she does. Serling then walks into the picture and gives his opening narration. When we return to Miss Tyler’s room, we are now introduced to the body of Dr. Bernardi, more commonly referred to in the episode simply as "Doctor." They proceed to have a conversation about Miss Tyler’s situation, in which the Doctor expresses that he is not sure how this final treatment will result, but, should it not have worked, "there are alternatives." Miss Tyler throws a fit and pleads that the Doctor remove the bandages from her face, whereby the hospital staff must hold her down to calm her. The next scene depicts the Doctor sitting alone in a room, looking distraught. The nurse comes in and they begin to talk about “Patient 307,” whereby we discover that Dr. Bernardi has a sense of empathy for her, asking the nurse why it’s required that everybody be the same. As he pleads for answers, the nurse tells him to watch what he’s saying, as it is treasonous to the state they are governed by. Following is a very short scene in which an orderly declares that “the leader” will be speaking shortly, and a future-predicting flat-screen television drops from the ceiling, revealing “the leader” preaching about conformity. The scene then cuts to a close-up of Miss Tyler who is about to have her bandages removed, whereupon Dr. Bernardi reminds her of the consequences of both outcomes of the procedure. He then begins to unwrap the bandages from her face, layer by suspenseful layer. Before removing the last layer, Miss Tyler asks the Doctor if it might be possible that she be exterminated if the procedure has not worked. He tells her it’s unlikely given her conditions, but that she will be sent somewhere to live with people of her kind.
Miss Tyler begins to run away, causing the Doctor to yell for the lights to be turned on. What the lights reveal is that the doctors and the nurses all have what has been termed most commonly as “pig-faces.” Miss Tyler escapes their hold and breaks into a run down the hallway while “the leader,” whose face is now revealed, rants aggressively about norms and diversity. She finally runs into a man bearing her resemblance, and Dr. Bernardi explains that this man, Mr. Smith, is a representative from the village she is going to live with. Smith comforts Miss Tyler before taking her away to the village. They pass Dr. Bernardi on their way out, whereupon he utters his final words to the distraught castaway, “goodbye, Miss Tyler.” Serling closes with his final narration as the camera cuts from one nurse to one doctor to the next. Analysis: From the very beginning of this episode, you get the feel that something eerie is going on. The film noir mood was a great stylistic choice for this episode, because a lot of the shots where the faces of characters are being hidden can pass for being artsy, for fitting a theme, instead of what the real intention was—to hide the plot twist. All episodes of The Twilight Zone were filmed in black and white, which proved to be convenient for this episode as the shading and contrast over character’s faces in certain scenes is one of the reasons the twist ultimately surprises us. Director Douglas Heyes does a fantastic job of manipulating camera angles and stage directions in order to hide the fact that we never see any character’s face until the reveal. What’s more is that this manipulation is so subtle that it’s seldom realized by the viewer. I first had the privilege of viewing this episode as a seventh grader when my language arts teacher showed it in class. I don’t remember thinking to myself, why can’t we see their faces? Most viewers of this episode who are unaware of the final twist don’t realize this is being done, especially since there are moments where the audience gets little glimpses of side-profiles and long shots, and nothing out of the ordinary can be detected. The “plot twist” is a device that many young writers are warned to stay away from. But Rod Serling cracked his knuckles, stepped up to a typewriter, and proved that he was one of the few writers of all time who could make it work. Over and over and over again. Speaking of the script, this is where things get interesting. In preparation for writing this blog post, I decided to print off a transcribed version of the original script of the episode and use it as an outline while I analyzed the episode for the god-knows-how-manyth time. When I did so, I discovered that the scene which I would argue most important to the episode was non-existent: the scene in which the nurse and the Doctor discuss the treason of backlashing against norms. The scene that replaces it in the script is one in which two nurses shallowly discuss why the state even tries to fix patients like Miss Tyler. It goes like this: NURSE TWO Of course, it’s not for me to say, but I think they spend an awful lot of time and trouble on some of these face cases—these throwbacks: why not ship them out in the beginning? JANET’S NURSE Is that what you’d want? If it were you? I’m not altogether sure how the switch from that scene to the scene that we actually see happened, but it’s for the better. A major thing to direct your attention to is the way that Dr. Bernardi seems to have sympathy for Miss Tyler in a way that none of the nurses can parallel. Eventually, he’s asking the questions that advocate for Miss Tyler. In the first scene of her and the Doctor together, Miss Tyler pleads, “Who are you people anyway? What is this state? Who makes all these rules and traditions? The people who are different have to stay away from the 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—” Similarly, Dr. Bernardi pleads to the nurse, “Why shouldn’t people be allowed to be different? Why?” And I think this is where the crux of Serling’s moral as well as political point lies. In the book Philosophy in The Twilight Zone, a collection of essays by various authors, Mary Surridge addresses the episode “Eye of the Beholder” in her essay “The Treachery of Commonplace.” She says, “the episode is most centrally aimed, not at cosmetic homogeneity, but at enforced conformity of a much more important kind, enforced orthodoxy with respect to thought and ideas.” It’s fairly clear that the regime being imitated by the state in this episode was that of Hilter’s Germany. The ideas of “glorious conformity,” which is the first thing we hear the leader address—a “single norm,” a “single approach,” a “single entity of peoples!”—all these ideas draw parallel to Hitler’s goal: uniformity. Another inconsistency from script to screen lies in the speech of the leader. In the script, his speech is significantly longer. The episode ends up leaving out whole lines of dialogue that come from the mouth of the dictator. I think it might benefit us to know more of what Serling was going for. This was cut from the scene in which the leader is introduced: LEADER’S VOICE 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 over-sentimentalized 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. And in a later scene where Miss Tyler is running to and fro in the hallways: LEADER’S VOICE I say to you now… I say to you now that there is no such thing as a permissive society, because such a society cannot exist! 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, accident-bred, mongrel-like mass of diversification to… At which point the script that follows this section is the part we actually hear when Miss Tyler is running down the halls of the hospital.
It’s possible that Serling wrote too much for the allotted screen-time, so these lines ended up being cut. However, they give us an incredible insight into Serling’s exact idea of how this society functioned: they acted in omnipotence and rid the society of anyone seen as undesirable. As the leader shouts from the screen, “we must cut out all that is different like a cancerous growth!” Serling wasn’t the only writer to make a powerful statement about the regime of a totalitarian government. In his novel 1984, George Orwell highlights the repercussions of uniformity of a society. At the novel’s heartbreaking end, Winston has forcibly conformed to the beliefs and the mindset of the state he so adamantly revolted from. Orwell writes, “perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” Eleven years later “Eye of the Beholder” hit the screen, with Miss Tyler pleading, “I never even wanted to be loved. I just wanted people not to scream when they looked at me.” Though she doesn’t necessarily conform in the end, Miss Tyler and Winston have one thing in common: their humanity was stripped from them by an oppressive, totalitarian, dictative regime—one Serling loathed. When it comes down to it, there is much to take away from “Eye of the Beholder.” But the main parable lies in the words of Rod Serling himself in his closing narration: “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.”
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About the AuthorMichelle Lori has been obsessed with The Twilight Zone since binge-watching it her sophomore year of high school. Since then, Rod Serling has become one of her greatest influences as a writer, and also as a human being (she even has some tattoos inspired by his work, which you can view at the link below).
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