The Twilight Zone - What's in the Box

I can’t possibly imagine how audiences of the time (or even today) could watch What’s in the Box? and derive enjoyment from it unless they enjoyed seeing a married couple coming apart at the seams. This wholly unpleasant domestic deterioration where husband and wife literally come to blows and destroy their domicile before a carefully furious punch sends a body going through a window is a surefire indication that The Twilight Zone, towards the end of its run, was out of exciting ideas and running through stories and characters that few would truly care about. This has plenty of yelling, nastiness, and domestic violence. Physical pushing and shoving, sweaty anxiety and bug-eyed rage, nagging mockery, lamps thrown at a wife’s head and chairs broken across a wife’s back, a living room ransacked during a melee, and only a television that tells a tired, hostilely opinionated cabbie his past, present, and future thanks to the mystical touch of a peculiar television repair man offers a supernatural component to the entire ugly experience. I will probably never watch this episode again unless it is on rotation (and I can’t imagine it will be too often considering domestic violence playing out on screen is exactly considered pleasant television these days) playing as noise in the background while I’m doing something else…and even then I’ll probably turn the channel until it’s over. Horrible episode wastes good actors playing characters having spent way too much time with each other instead of separating before the finale.

Blondell was a starlet in the 30s – 40s Hollywood, very pretty and glowed on screen. I want to try and remember that Blondell, not the shuttering-eyelash, pop-eyed hag antagonizing a clearly-troubled William Demarest who is trying to calm the stormy waters of a marriage that needed to be dissolved ten years previous. Demarest grouching on television repairman, Sterling Holloway (I will be seeing him again during my annual revisit of a new Christmas favorite for me, Remember the Night (1940)), about how his “kind” can’t be trusted and the retaliation, while perhaps deserved, certainly comes back to haunt him big-time. Demarest seeing lovers wanting commitment from him on the screen, and his declaration of love to Blondell after watching a fight eventually lead to him punching her out a window should perhaps halt the results of the television’s clairvoyance but it all goes according to predictable plan. Nothing the television does alters how Demarest behaves and everything goes as proposed by it…instead of Demarest making sure he takes what the television offers and tries to go a different route (even seeing his sentencing to death by a judge!), he instead just does exactly what it says he would.

Blondell does provoke Demarest to anger, but she clearly had been getting a bellyful of his ridicule and dismissive attitude for maybe a decade or even longer. His periods away, obviously due to his affairs while operating his taxi, seem to have impacted the marriage clearly. Blondell, we see, is at the end of her rope and pushed too far, so the marriage goes off the deep end. The episode carries us into that deep end and its volatile outcome. Not fun.

Seeing Demarest punch Blondell, who in turn falls through a window to her death is enough to leave a bad taste. How this made it on the air startles me considering the time, much less seeing Demarest using objects and his hands to try and kill her. It looks disturbing and leaves a distaste QT's True Romance screenplay would cherish. This might--no, does--rival Caesar and Me & Black Leather Jackets in regards to Twilight Zone at its worst. The pits.