The Twilight Zone: The After Hours

"Just how normal are we? 

Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask, particularly in The Twilight Zone."

Ask someone what The Twilight Zone's most iconic episode is, and the first ones you'll likely hear are "To Serve Man" or "Time Enough At Last." (Maybe not by name but by "The cookbook one" or "the one with the broken glasses.") But "The After Hours," season one's thirty-fourth episode ("the one about the mannequin. No, not that one, the old Twilight Zone one")  is probably somewhere close after those. 

The Plot: Marsha (Anne Francis) is shopping for a gold thimble in a department store. 

While waiting for an elevator, she's called into a private one ("an express to the ninth floor"), with this Bing-Crosby-looking fellow as the attendant.

The ninth floor is practically deserted except one mysterious, somewhat snappish, saleslady.

The only item she has for sale is the gold thimble Marsha's looking for.

When Marsha calls attention to how weird all of this is, the saleslady addresses by her name, despite Marsha's not having introduced herself, and asks her if she's "happy." This does little to alleviate Marsha's sense of weirdness.  

"All right, Miss White, suit yourself - it's none of my business." 

The elevator re-appears almost on cue.

Marsha notices the thimble is scratched and tries to return it, but when she tells the floor and store managers where she got it, she's informed they have no ninth floor. She sees the saleslady across the floor and hails her. 

But achtung.

She faints and is put in the backroom to rest. Everyone becomes busy, though, and she is forgotten and left there after the store closes. When she wakes up she discovers she's locked inside, and, like some Hans Richter film run amok, the mannequins admonish her in whispers and rapidly erode her sanity. 

She falls (somewhat conveniently) back into the elevator, whereupon she's taken to the ninth floor again.

Marsha is slowly coaxed back to the truth: she is a mannequin who has exceeded her thirty day furlough into the outside world.

"When you're on the outside, everything seems so normal. As if..."
"As if what, Marsha?"
"As if we were like the others. Like the outsiders. Like the real people."

It's the saleswoman's turn, hence her irritation with Marsha, and off she goes.

The Bing Crosby guy comes over and asks Marsha if she enjoyed herself. She says she did, then adds, sorrowfully, "ever so much fun." 

She re-assumes her mannequin-posture, and the episode ends with the floor manager almost recognizing her as the lady who'd been complaining about the ninth floor thimble the day before.

"The After Hours" has two moments that mildly strain credibility: 1) Marsha accepts the Bing Crosby guy's explanation that the elevator is an "express" to the ninth floor, but  neither she nor he knew that that was the floor she needed to get to when he called her over. This makes sense from his point of view - he's trying to deceive her, after all - but not necessarily from hers. And 2) after the floor manager produces the store manager so Marsha can re-tell her tale of paying cash for the thimble on the ninth floor, he asks for her receipt. It's an efficient way of moving the script along to its next beat (seeing the saleslady-mannequin), but it seems silly that the management's interaction with Marsha would have progressed to this point without the receipt coming up already.

The Twilight Zone must adhere only to its own inner logic, of course, and neither of these things unravel proceedings to any meaningful degree.

The Cast: Anne Francis plays the lead. In addition to roles in Bad Day at Black Rock and Forbidden Planet, she was in two other episodes of The Twilight Zone (both of which I'll likely cover sooner or later) and played the title character in Honey West. She was in way more than that, of course; here's her wiki.

It's possible at least one person reading this knows the name "Anne Francis" only from that one line in Reservoir Dogs.

Elizabeth Allen plays the saleslady with something of a regal bearing. According to her wiki, she was briefly married to German royalty (Baron Karl von Vietinghoff-Scheel), so perhaps observations of her former in-laws informed her take on the character.

Bing Crosby guy was played by TZ semi-regular (18 episodes) John Conwell.

And John Milhollin (well-employed character actor of the era) plays the floor manager, whose breaking the fourth wall ends the pisode.

"The After Hours" is likely just a story about mannequins who take one-month vacations in the so-called "real world." But like so much of the media of its era, it sure is tempting and even makes a certain degree of sense to read into it more deeply. As readers of some of my Star Trek posts (like "The Man Trap") know, I'm not averse to such readings and interpretations, so long as they a) make sense, and b) rely on what's in the episode itself.

One such reading can be found here: "Many of the themes that Serling and his collaborators examine through ("The After Hours" and some other early episodes) - the increasing mobility and independence of women in post-war America; women seeing their own, anxious images in mirrors, doppelgangers, and filmed selves; a pervasive sense of loneliness - many of these themes are wrapped up here in the image of the Barbie-mannequin come to life." 

"They are accompanied by other themes that we now think of as integral to an understanding of the 1950s: consumerism, the understanding of Americans primarily as customers, purchasers, consumers, and the blossoming of advertising and marketing to encourage such an understanding."

Serling was a new father in 1960, and it's possible that as he was buying Barbies and attending to other accoutrements of raising daughters in immediate-post-Eisenhower America, he began to critically examine certain aspects of the above. It's more likely a contemporary mindset projecting itself unto media of another age, but that's not to say it's not an intelligent read on the material. (And it also makes the alternate opening credits of the first season somewhat more ominous.)

Some of these suggestions are somewhat over-cultivated nowadays - 

"Marsha White, in this episode, is the desirable image, the advertisement, brought to life.  She is, in a way, her own doppelganger, her own uncanny second self. This episode is ahead of its time in the way in which it points out how often such images encourage women to pursue an impossible body, an impossible image of perfection."

Who do you think you're fooling, Marsha?

You know who you are.
Climb off it.

Come on, dear.

 

"The smearing and blurring of the perfect image through this bubbled glass is powerful (...)  It’s a view through a non-window of one who begins to realize, or believe, or remember, that she is a non-person."

- but I do kind of like the idea. Sometimes things achieve a meaning they weren't intended to, simply due to larger context(s). 

Serling was accused of plagiarizing a script by Frank Gruber that had been sent to Cayuga Productions. Serling denied doing it, but Gruber repeated the story at one too many parties or to one too many mutual friend, and eventually Serling had to fight back against the charge. It was an easy accusation to make back then - perhaps even easier than plagiarizing unpublished work sent in confidence. (Serling was almost-certainly innocent; from what I understand, Gruber's story and "The After Hours" have dozens of points of departure.) But the ease at which these sorts of accusations could spread and the actionable position in which it put the studios led to the rules in place now which forbid unsolicited scripts from even being opened by a production company. 

A TV classic. The 80s remake with Jadzia Dax is pretty good, as well. 

Until next time.

~