The Twilight Zone: Ring-a-Ding Girl

Today's selection:

Season 5, Episode 13. (First aired Dec. 27, 1963)

"Bunny Blake is a public figure. What she wears, eats, thinks, says is news. But underneath the glamour, the makeup, the publicity the buildup, the costuming is a flesh-and-blood person, a beautiful girl about to take a long and bizarre journey... into the Twilight Zone."

Movie star Bunny has thirty-five minutes to make her flight from Rome, but as she gathers her things last-minute in her hotel room, her agent hands her a special delivery fan letter from her hometown, Howardville. (Which, Bunny tells her, she'll soon be able to see for herself from the plane. "We fly right over the center of town." "Well, hooray for us.")

Thus begins the pattern which plays out for the rest of the episode. When she looks into the ring, she sees faces from her hometown imploring her to come home.

And to "Help us... help us... help us."

She also sees (closer to the end) evidence of a plane in trouble, and herself and her agent aboard.

From the hotel the story cuts to Bunny's sister Hildy and her teenage son Bud engaged in traditional domestic accoutrements: chores and quips about child labor laws, etc.. Bunny surprises her sister by showing up ("you know me - glamorous, unpredictable, full of surprises - the same old nut") and claims she was inspired to drop in by the gift of the ring. Hildy tells her the entire town chipped in to buy it and send it to her, which echoes the story she told her (bored) agent on how Bunny Blake left Howardville in the first place, when they took up a collection to send her to Hollywood on account of how her talent outgrew the available opportunities. 

"I don't mean that the way it sounded, but I just knew I had a talent and had to find a place to let it grow. Otherwise, it would have died."

Awesome car.

Every time Bunny receives a vision in her ring, she's increasingly disoriented. She becomes convinced, though, that the town picnic, scheduled for the day of her visit and where years before she won its crowning event (the beauty pageant) which got her started on the road to fame, must be cancelled. No one can understand why she wants it cancelled and assume it's just one of her movie star whims. Bunny insists it's about giving back to the town. Eventually, her sister and the groundskeeper at her old school - who agrees to not interfere with her hosting a meet-and-greet-a-Hollywood-star event at the same time as the town picnic - agree not to go. 

As Bunny, her sister, and nephew are about to leave for the performance, they hear sirens and rush to look out the living-room window.

"Goodbye, Hildy."

The radio breaks the news of a horrible plane crash at the town picnic, and as Hildy and Bud absorb the news, a police officer calls to tell Hildy that he identified Bunny among the deceased passengers on the plane. As she struggles to make sense of this, the anchorman on TV relays that several townspeople claimed to have seen Bunny walking around in town that day and to have talked to her. "Until the mystery is unraveled," the newscaster adds, "Only one thing is certain: Bunny Blake is dead." 

The final scene shows Hildy finding Bunny's magic ring, which had fallen to the floor; now chipped and charred.

"We are all travelers. The trip starts in a place called birth and ends in that lonely town called death. And that's the end of the journey, unless you happen to exist for a few hours, like Bunny Blake, in the misty regions of the Twilight Zone."

Okay, so, once again here's an episode I've always really liked that never seems to make anyone else's list of great TZ eps. If it had been a Season One episode, I bet, its reputation would be better, but coming as it does in Season Five, perhaps people feel it's redundant of earlier explorations. Or perhaps this specific type of ghost story (person saves town/family from suffering her own fate) was just too familiar for audiences, then or now.

Me? I think there's a lot to like here. I like how Bunny Blake leaves Howardville with a genuine mystery to solve (how could she have been in town - and on television, to boot, actually recorded - promoting her appearance at the school if she was at the same time flying in the doomed plane in the sky above?). I like her backstory and her agent's disdain for fly-over country (always timely). I like Bunny's ambivalence about her home town even knowing she would have withered there. And I like that at no point is there any explicit explanation given for what a "Ring-a-Ding girl" is. It could be a catchphrase of Bunny's from a show, or she could be the face of a product line. It doesn't really matter, of course, it's just a nice touch. 

And this guy -  

immortalized - well, to those who remember them - on the cover of this Wombats album

who gives the most half-hearted plea for help in the world history of mystical ring pleas: 

"'Ring-a-ding girl' but she don't fool Cyrus Gentry. Miss high and mighty coming back here like she was somebody special. Well, you are special - right now... maybe the most special person Howardville will ever have. So, Bunny Blake ... help us."

Cyrus Gentry was played by Green Acres (among many other things, including two other TZs) vet Hank Paterson. The lead:

Apparently, Ms. McNamara didn't do too much of anything else. For what it's worth, I think she gives a great performance here. I care about Bunny Blake and the arc of her imaginary life and death more than I ever expect to when I hit "play" on this one.

And David Macklin as young Bud Powell.

See you next time.

~

Watchmen at 30, pt. 11: Look on My Works, Ye Mighty...

WATCHMEN AT THIRTY,

pt. 11

"Needing nothing, I burned with the 

paradoxical urge to do everything."

Issue 11 opens up with what might be the very first reference to William S. Burroughs in a mainstream comic book.

Okay, so a) I have no idea that is true, b) googling isn't much help, and c) whether it was actually the first reference to WSB nor not it went totally over my head at the time. He only got on my radar when Cronenberg's Naked Lunch was at the Avon for what seemed like months when I was a senior in high school.

The cut-up method described by Burroughs (and Brion Gysin) is the philosophical precursor to mash-up culture, something Moore explored in some depth in the years after Watchmen. Something else he mentions (via Ozymandias) that he explores in other work is this bit about JFK:

As we saw in pt. 10, Rorschach and Nite Owl have traveled to Antractica to stop Ozymandias from executing his master plan. They only find out what said plan is, though, 35 minutes after it's too late to stop it. ("I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?") And what is his plan? That one's less simple: it involves teleporting a huge alien-looking monster, cloned from a "human sensitive", constructed by a hand-picked group of engineers, parapsychologists, artists, and writers, into New York City, where imperfections of teleportation technology will cause it to explode and spread a wave of psychic fear and devastation, thus uniting the people, finally, beyond their personal and national psychodramas.

Some (such as Grant Morrison, whose review in Supergods we'll look at next time) dismiss this part of Watchmen as blatant absurdity. Here's the Tor re-read's take:  

"I see it as the most intelligent character in a comic book universe taking a very comic booky approach to solving the world's problems. Of course he retreats to a science fiction cliché in the end. For all of Watchmen's nods towards realism, it's not realistic at all, is it? It takes its characters seriously and develops a complex narrative schema around them, but Watchmen is a superhero comic to the end, with costumed vigilantes and matter-manipulating superhumans and devious villains who declare their maniacal intentions in the climax."

 
Agreed. That all of this takes place in Adrian's "Fortress of Solitude" drives the point home, as does the whole "faked alien invasion to unite humanity" thing. I think it's entirely in keeping with the deconstructive and meta-spirit of Watchmen, myself. 

It has some overtones of 9/11 conspiracy theory that were of course not applicable in 1986. I only point it out to shrug at this, that's all. The people of the Watchmen-world, conditioned as they are to an actual Doctor Manhattan and a Rockefeller Military Research Institute and all the rest, are uniquely positioned to believe the impossible. It's too bad we'll never see a sequel from the original creators, exploring that world. Would the people see through the ruse? Everyone is out of the loop, here, power structure-wise; would no one else put any of it together? Would Nixon and Kissinger truly lock arms with the USSR against the threat of an imaginary alien invasion? Would it all go according to Adrian's simulations or would it just be another thwarted supervillain plot after a year-long multi-parter?

MOORE TRANSITIONS and VISUAL IRONY

The first of the ones I made note of occurs when Adrian is telling Dan and Rorschach about his experiments with teleportation.

Well-played. I often think of Alan Moore's days working at the tannery and the gravedigger's humor it engendered in him. We're all reaping the benefits of this unfortunate stint of employment.

Alexander the Great's solution to the Gordian Knot plays no small role in his origin story, and it's recalled with no fanfare in the background of this panel:

Considering it's the violence between this couple that works to bring together the various strangers we've seen around the newsstand, directly before the Big Finish, it's another cruel moment of irony.

As is this last-page-obliteration recall (l) of the image from the cover (r).

"I want to be straight... I want to be dead" (said by Josephine before the break-up turns violent) juxtaposed against the Black Freighter story, too:

The longing for oblivion is strong in a world so perpetually koyanisqaatsi.

OZYMANDIAS ORIGIN STORY

Again from Tor:

"This is Adrian Veidt’s spotlight issue. The smartest man in the world. A self-proclaimed, self-made modern Alexander the Great. And Moore and Gibbons hammer that point home here, with half a dozen explicit references to the ancient Macedonian."

I like the Citizen Kane effect of having flashback-Adrian always in shadow or turned away in-frame.

I love this subtle landing of the butterfly on his servants' face. Uh-oh.

COLOR COMPARISONS

Once again, John Higgins does an exemplary job subtly remastering and remixing his colors from the original issues. Here are just a few examples.

Original.

Remastered. That blue on the right is probably the most dramatic change of all of them.

Original (l) Remastered (r)

Original (l) Remastered (r)

Original (l) Remastered (r)

Before I began this series of posts, I'd seen a few variations of the opinion that Watchmen might be ground-breaking, sure, and it's one of the best things ever, but objectively, it loses steam towards the end. I've come across that a lot out there. I'm finding that to not at all be the case for me personally. More on this next time, though.

One last thing, though: the certainty with which Watchmen and much apocalyptic fiction of the 70s and 80s speak to nuclear annihilation is striking in retrospect. Everyone was so damn convinced the future was nuclear winter. Kind of funny in retrospect, isn't it?

Let's hope it stays that way. (Funny, I mean.)

~