Twilight Zone - Monsters Are Due on Maple Street/A World of Difference (Long Haul)

 The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

This episode sure talks to me nowadays. With mobs out from their representative tribes just looking to attack each other. You are the enemy and we must stop you. They aren't from flying saucers from outer space looking to colonize so they mess with lights and the power of machines. It is in the algorithm. It is on Twitter. It's on Facebook. It doesn't matter if they are folks written by Serling back in 1960 to provoke a response from us *not* to become the very neighborhood folks on Maple Street on The Twilight Zone. I imagine if Serling could see his country now the alarm bells would ring. This is exactly what he probably hoped we evolved out of. But here we are. Mobs ready to kill each other at any given moment. By the end of the episode, Akins' Steve, the voice within the anger that tries to keep the mob calm and from using violence against each other, couldn't stop the eventual breakdown. I think as Charlie warns Steve not to talk to Les and watch his behavior, this episode has never terrified me more than it does today. Steve speaks of firing squads when he must explain why he just talks on a ham radio or why Les just looks at the stars at night because of insomnia. Voices lifted and faces snarling in anger, accusations flying and fingers pointing. Aggression builds, friends and neighbors "start to eat each other alive", and by the end rocks are thrown and guns go off as they leave their places inside of garages and off walls. And the entire neighborhood becomes a war zone. This was 1960. 60 years ago and here we are...folks in this country never hate each other more than today and even think about either splitting apart or killing one another.

I really wish I could pinch myself and wake up from this. But my eyes are open and "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" isn't some relic of another time I can look back on, take a deep breath and have a sigh of relief. The neighbors on Maple Street weren't prime and ready to club each other or chase after a kid for bringing up aliens from his comic book...it happened with a push. We're there. Tribes are ready to push each other off a cliff, shoot each other in cold blood, burn each other alive.

Serling is called a genius for a reason. Sadly, he thought about what could happen, and he's been dead since 1975...and it is 2021, and those words that close this episode speak of today, the very future Serling hoped would not come to pass.

A World of Difference

I think a lot of folks understand Gerry Reagan's condition. A lot of folks would love to exist in a different role, some different character than the actual life they have. Arthur Curtis, the businessman with the wife and kid, a successful career and a planned vacation. He wants that other life so bad, it becomes very real...until the director yells, "Cut!" and the hands start to leave their posts with the office sets about to be torn down due to a halted, shut-down production. But what if we could lose ourselves into a totally different life, find our way into this fiction that becomes as real as we so badly want it to be. I like that Gerry had the chance to fade into the story of Arthur Curtis, his mind so dead set against the reality that his passion for the fiction manifests into what he truly wants by the end of the episode. How many of us want the fiction? How many of us would love to fade into the fiction when that story seems so much better than what we currently have? Sometimes I think I'd take that route...to the Twilight Zone.