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🌀 The Twilight Zone Double Feature Proves Why the Show Will Always Resonate

A New York screening of 1968's The Swimmer draws comparisons to The Twilight Zone, a timeless show that remains as relevant today as always.

Author

Michael Ahr
January 21, 2025

Tuesday Edition January 21, 2025

Arlen Schumer is the author/designer of two books about The Twilight Zone: the coffee table tome Visions from The Twilight Zone (Chronicle Books, 1990) and a new collection of episode essays, The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone (Bear Manor Media, 2024).

About a decade ago, Grindhouse video released a deluxe Blu-ray package of one of the most enigmatic cult films of the Sixties, 1968’s The Swimmer (starring Burt Lancaster), based on the most famous short story by the great chronicler of American suburbia’s dark underbelly, John Cheever, published four years earlier, about a middle-aged man who swims across Westchester county via his neighbors’ variable-sized swimming pools. The promo copy on the back of the Blu-ray box described the film as “a feature-length Twilight Zone episode” by way of The New Yorker.

It’s a tantalizing pop culture comparison that the Triad Theater, a cabaret-sized room on the Upper West Side, will explore on Thursday, January 30, via a double screening: first, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s favorite episode, 1960’s “A Stop at Willoughby” —about a harried Madison Avenue adman who can’t take the rat race any longer, and while on his commuter train, dreams of escaping to a 19th Century idyll, “Willoughby” — followed by The Swimmer, the film that Lancaster thought contained his greatest performance.

My name is Arlen Schumer, and I’ll be on hand to introduce and link the two films before and after the screening. As a pop culture historian who also specializes in comic book history and Bruce Springsteen (I’ll be moderating a panel on the 50th anniversary of Born to Run this spring), I will attempt to bridge the gaps between “Willoughby,” the Cheever story, and the film that, like all the best cult films in history, bombed at the box office in its original release, but not so much with the critics.

The redoubtable Roger Ebert hailed it "a strange, stylized work, a brilliant and disturbing one,” while The New York Times’ venerable Vincent Canby wrote, “The film has the shape of an open-ended hallucination. It is a grim, disturbing, and sometimes funny view of a very small, very special segment of upper-middle class American life… as do few movies, The Swimmer stays in the memory like an echo that never quite disappears.” That echo is why the film has been reconsidered decades later as a classic of its time, the zeitgeist-iest film of the Sixties. Connecting it to The Twilight Zone, the zeitgeistiest TV series of the decade, seems like an inspired pairing.

I’ll also be signing hardcover copies of my new Twilight Zone book after the screening if you’re interested. Buy tickets here!

— Arlen Schumer, guest author and Twilight Zone expert

Photo: CBS Photo Archive | Getty Images

TV
Where Is Everybody? The Twilight Zone’s First Episode Tackled Atomic Anxieties

Arlen Schumer also wrote an article for us recently about the very first words The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling uttered in the opening episode: “The place is here…the time is now…and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey…” The line not only introduced the concept of the show to an unsuspecting 1959 television audience, but it also ushered them into what would become “the Sixties,” a question of identity for America itself.

The premiere of The Twilight Zone included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with the show as it unfolded as well as what would prove to be the defining, existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th century, a time when “the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge” — the atomic bomb — first coexisted.

Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty Images

REMEMBERING DAVID LYNCH
The David Lynch Line That Reveals the Humanity of His Work

Twin Peaks was almost as transformative of its television era as The Twilight Zone was to its time, and the late creator David Lynch leaves a legacy of utterly unique films and TV shows that have undoubtedly left an impact on the industry and American culture itself. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

This line, although Lynch didn’t originate it, gets to the heart of Lynch’s outlook and creative philosophy, and it also summarizes the director as he was often publicly perceived: an eccentric creator who was fond of bewildering audiences with absurd visuals, concepts, and dialogue. Follow us down the rabbit hole of this great man’s contributions as we celebrate the life of David Lynch.

Photo: A24

MOVIES
Will A.I. Controversy Hurt The Brutalist’s Oscars 2025 Chances?

Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist is coming under controversy for using some AI in post, revealing new red lines in awards season battles to come. Ironic considering the Oscar contender relies very much on the old ways of film construction — be it with VistaVision cinematography or a roadshow-like storytelling format, complete with an intermission.

After The Brutalist’s editor Dávid Jancsó revealed AI was used to enhance certain elements of the performances of Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones during post-production, Corbet (and presumably The Brutalist’s studio A24) felt the need to release a statement clarifying how an artificial voice generator app called Respeecher was discreetly employed. But is any amount of AI too much?

EDITOR’S PICKS

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We are going through some rough times right now. Here are a few movies that might make you feel better about it.

Wolf Man’s creature design is being debated and raises an age-old question: just what should a werewolf look like?

From Spider-Man 2 to Dune: Awakening, here are some exciting new games that PC owners should look out for in 2025.

TODAY’S TRIVIA QUESTION

Which Hollywood legend was originally considered as narrator for The Twilight Zone, had CBS been able to afford him?

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