The Eye of the Beholder
|
|
- This page is about the Twilight Zone episode. For other uses of this title, see Eye of the Beholder.
Template:Infobox TTW season two "The Eye of the Beholder" is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
| Contents |
Details
Episode number: 42
Season: 2
Production code: 3640
Original airdate: November 11, 1960
Writer : Rod Serling
Director: Douglas Heyes
Makeup: William Tuttle
Music: original score by Bernard Herrmann
Cast
Janet Tyler: Maxine Stuart (under bandages), Donna Douglas (unmasked)
Doctor:William D. Gordon,
Synopsis
Janet Tyler is undergoing her eleventh state-sponsored surgery in an attempt to get her to look like everybody else. The operation turns out to be a failure. Even though Janet is considered beautiful by most Western standards, in that society she is not. Because of her looks, she is forced to live in a village with the others.
Trivia
- Douglas Heyes casted this episode with his back facing the performers, in order to pick the actors who had the most sympathetic voices.
- The original title for this episode was "A Private World of Darkness." For reasons unknown the version of this episode which is in syndication bears the original title rather than the correct title, "Eye of the Beholder." In The Twilight Zone's original DVD release the syndicate version was marketed as an "alternate version."
Themes
The meaning of this episode is rather transparent: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and herd mind conformation. These themes are revisited in "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You."
Critical Response
- "'The Eye of the Beholder' (November 11, 1960) is peculiarly evocative in that it serves as a blueprint for his later script adaptation of Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin Shaffner. In 'Beholder', the trick is to keep the audience in the dark as long as possible on what the 'normal' people actually look like. Ultimately, we discover that the normal people look like very close relatives of Miss Piggy, whereas the 'freaks' all look like beautiful movie stars. Our first impulse is to laugh at this nervy, simplistic gimmickry, but gradually an after-effect of terror sweeps across the screen as we realize that the pig-faced 'normals' actually consider themselves compassionate in even tolerating the existence of the 'freaks'. We begin to enter their world, their consciousness, their perverted sense of aesthetics. The 'joke' is thus not so much on racist bigots, as it is on 'tolerant' liberals."
- —Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Rod Serling: Viewed from Beyond the Twilight Zone
References
- Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition).
Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 2