Walking Distance

Gig Young is a tragic figure in the history of the small and silver screens--the duo-headed hydra of entertainment and infotainment was just gearing up to stand astride the world like an unbeatable colossus, a vast neaural landscape wherein the New Flesh spoken of in Cronenberg's Videodrome was and is realized every moment of every hour, every day, with nary a hint of a borderland anywhere.

We'll relate why Mr. Young was a tragic figure, but first, we must perforce cease our perambulations and focus our attention on the spinning carousel, so central an image to the denouement of this particular episode. The viewer is vaguely reminded of Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which the carousel, the wooden horses pegged into place on polls forever circling, like some allegorical image of the solar system, the bright, mirrored center wherein dreamsd and visions are seen to reflect the bright, harsh light of Divine Revelation. This is the Wheel of Fortune, the Tarot card that relates the shifting, suddenly of the prospects of the Querent, whether for good or ill. If the card is inverse, it may be interpreted as meaning the opposite. But a wheel can never be turned rightside up, or upisde down--and the coarousel is the Roulette Wheel, or the spinning loom, or perhaps the wheel upon which the Inquisitor breaks the heretic or witch.

Perhaps it is all of these things. The calliope music, the wooden horses merrily flying by--the signs of forced, strained gaiety; childhood wonder and boyhood grief, giving way to manhood.

Gig Young plays Martin Sloan, who breaks down at a service station, a borderland or waystation between states of being, and asks the attendant about the town "just up the road." A place that is within walking distance.

It's Homewood. Quaint.

He grew up there.

Going back, he enters a soda fountain, amazed to find that the books are all out of date (1934), and that sodas are still only ten cents. It was 1959. Now it is the image of the time and place he grew up; time is circular. The snake devours itself.

On the community green, he sees a young boy carving his name on the bandstand.

It is himself meeting himself.

The boy, frightened, runs form him. He chases the image, the illusion of himself to the home of his father.

The father thinks that the grown Mr. Sloan is A crazy man, refusing to entertain the notion that his son has somehow time-traveled a futre version of himself backward. Fleeing, Sloan next encounters himself on the carousel, where he seems himself fall from the horse--as brutal, and poignant a metaphor as any for the derailment of our childhood hopes and dreams.

His father confronts him then--the past speaking to the future encourages the assimilation of his hopes and fears, his buried dreams and his clinging to a past that no longer has any meaning; the self-actualization of an adult who can move easily to the next stage of being. His father now believes him; he'll acknowledge the man were, before, he only saw the boy.

Sloan returns to the soda fountain--it is now 1959 again, a curious year more far removed in time from our own than from 1934. Kids are dancing to 1959 pop tunes at the soda fountain; the paperbacks are the correct price for the era.

He returns for his car. He is no longer The Hanged Man of the Tarot Trumps: stalled on the trail, unable to commit himself to the future. Nor is he The Hermit, gone in search of deeper meaning (also the Eight of Cups), He is not looking at the two naive children of the Six of Cups, viewing the past through the rose-tinted lens of yesterdays visions of an idyllic childhood that was, in reality less than beautiful.

Now he is a man.

Now he can move on.

Now he drives into the sunset.

Rod's Closing Narration:

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too, because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.

October 17th, 1978, Young's body was discovered, along with that of his 31-year-old wife Kim Shmidt, whom Young had married three weeks earlier in Berlin. Young, who had roles in films such as They Shoot Horses Don't They? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garci, and had been slated to star in Mel Brooks' cult classic comedy Blazing Saddles when Brooks fired him for drunkenness, was 61 at the time. He had killed his wife, then turned the gun on himself. No motive was ever discerned for the murder-suicide.

Long shadows...

The Twilight Zone - Walking Distance (1959)

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